It came to my attention, while listening to the radio the other night, that the great David Suzuki has recently addressed issues surrounding the dangers of THC in relation to mental health on his award winning program, "The Nature of Things". I used to love sitting down with my folks in the evening - I'd insist on watching, and becoming frightened/enraged by listening to Dr. Suzuki's dire warnings to clean up our act or else!
Then, last night, one of the local radio station's personalities, Leslie Primo, was nattering on about the connection between schizophrenia and pot use with, I think, a "mental health specialist", i.e. designer drug pusher? There was a young man attesting to the improvement in his life since giving up the herb, but interestingly, also said that it was soon after abandoning his alleged three joint per day habit, wherein his life began taking a turn for the worse.
One might assume this would be considered a normal result, the seeming imbalance of everything when you are suddenly faced with the pain of having to contend with the physical and mental pangs of withdrawal from a substance that has entrenched its way as yet another routine behavior in your day to day affairs.
But is it really, truly, necessarily, or beyond a shadow of a doubt, better that this lad, once a "chronic" pot head, is now on dependent upon some experimental cocktail medley of powerful synthetic pill-form "medicine" with relatively little known of it's long term potential side effects, in order to deal with the tribulations of life? I don't know. I'm not an expert, but I do intimately understand the perils of addiction... I don't want to admit how much money I spend on coffee and the occasional cigar / cigarette.
And David Suzuki? Since I was a mere "crayon", I've always found David to be engaging, brilliant, and rational if not too sensational, but I imagine he would probably be disgusted with the level of air-born impurities or pathogenic atomic whatever in my little man-cave of an apartment - the stale smoke, the incense, the seal meat pie baking in the oven...
Anyway, I started out not really intending to write about Suzuki, Primo, or pot-heads, but more so to discuss my participation in Boy Scouts, the significance of numbers, and what some "mental health expert" might label, a hallucination - which would be my assessment of what I "heard" blowing in the wind, while camping with some of my fellow subjects in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta on summer in the mid to late 90's.
My adVENTURES in the wilderness are not what I wanted to really discuss here either. As for hallucinations, think of an (example I heard from a researcher interviewed by George Noory on Coast to Coast AM the other night) interior decorator who makes a living by essentially hallucinating about how a room will look after his imagined layout is conjured into the real physical space. I immediately thought of a songwriter who sings and / or plays musical instruments and how a tune-smith will "hear" a song in their mind before performing, recording it, writing it down.
Music and dance/movement, are ethereal concepts. A painting in progress is ethereal. Needless to say more at this time, on that!
Time for a video. I've know this song for a long time now, and was inspired after hearing Ronnie Spector's voice on her version of the song, to make an attempt to sing it myself, and dedicate it to the one and only fleeting marvel that is Brian Wilson:
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