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Champix, Day 4

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Miscellany

Published: 05 November 2010

Hits: 2010

Still spacey, but I've stopped noticing it.

Now it's the taste of things - or lack of taste. Coffee is bitter. Juice, sweet treacle of sugar, barely registers on the palate, I know it's cold, I know the brand, know that I should be grossed out by the sweetness of it, but I can't taste it.

Salty and savory, on the other hand, taste fine. Taste like more in fact.

And the cigarettes, sometimes I don't even know that I'm smoking them. But I notice the little anxieties, the moments of inexplicable panic when I don't know what's wrong (something's wrong...I just can't put my finger on it...), quitting smoking without cigarettes it was easy to ascribe a cause, now that I still can smoke it's harder - there's no reason for these attacks, but they pass and I get back to what I was doing.

Whatever it was I was doing.

What was I doing again?

I need a list. I have a list, it's upstairs, I'll just go upstairs and get it. In a minute. I should pet the cat. Where was I?

I'm almost out of cigarettes. Tomorrow's quit day. Friends tell me to wait, no need for the quit day, I'll stop without it, I'm not sure, don't want the anxiety of being lost in the suburbs with a craving for a smoke, but I'm trying to quit (when I remember..). And so maybe I'll just try and forget that I'm out, it seems to be easy enough, I'm forgetting everything else...

Champix Dreams

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Dreams

Published: 03 November 2010

Hits: 2030

Lots of dreams with the Champix, a longer one I had last night...

I'm with the family, Dad and the kids, somewhere in the mountains of Africa/Canada. We're at a viewpoint, having a picnic, we're here to look at some fossils, trilobites in the shale or something....there are loads of other people. And It's cloudy and getting dark and we run into one group that has some giant quartz crystals they've collected, about an inch thick, perfectly clear, there's a quarry of them right beneath the layer of shale that holds the fossils and I think that it's illegal to collect specimens here, but then I realize that the quartz isn't a fossil and so that's all right and I take my daughter and we head down the trail to collect some quartz for ourselves.

We're cutting through the tourist village (Bavarian style, why not, it's Canada/Africa after all...) and suddenly the sky grows dark. Completely, pitch dark, dark as night, and I look at some of the other tourists beside me and note that "That was sudden, wasn't it?" and they laugh and agree that it was so the daughter and I, we head back to the picnic table.

Now it's night and I'm at at a winebar, Italian, Italy has stuck her boot down here into Canada/Africa, and there's a girl behind the bar that's trying to persuade me to marry her so she can immigrate to Canada and I'm half considering it, I can't see her face and her friends are urging me on....

But they're not getting me a glass of wine and so I protest and she pulls a basket full of glasses forward and pours the wine into it, the wine miraculously doesn't pour through the straws of the basket but bulges through like crystal.

"Surface Tension" they explain, and hand me a straw and I slurp down the wine. 

Netsuke

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Link of the day

Published: 03 November 2010

Hits: 1496

Netsuke: Elaborate miniature carvings made (usually in Japan) to secure purses to Kimonos or Kosodes. Materials vary, Ivory and boxwood were once common, now it's mammoth ivory if you're lucky, otherwise cheap resin or plastic. There are an almost limitless variety of them (the handmade ones at least), here are a few searches to get you started:

On Flickr, and again here. On google images here: skull netsuke, or for the more adventurous try erotic netsuke.