chanel (not really)

love www.cococozy.com

the other side

The following is the introduction from Scar Tissue, Anthony Kiedis' biography.  It is beautiful.  The last two paragraphs are my absolute favorite.  Enjoy.

I’m sitting on the couch in the living room of my house in the Hollywood Hills. It’s a clear,crisp January day, and from my vantage point, I can see the beautiful expanse known as the San Fernando Valley. When I was younger, I subscribed to the conventional wisdom, shared by everyone who lived on the Hollywood side of the hills, that the Valley was a place where the losers who couldn’t make it in Hollywood went to disappear. But the longer I’ve lived here, the more I’ve come to appreciate the Valley as a soulful and quieter side of the Los Angeles experience. Now I can’t wait to wake up and look out on those majestic mountain ranges topped with snow.

But the doorbell interrupts my reverie. A few minutes later, a beautiful young woman enters the living room, carrying an exquisite leather case. She opens it and begins to set up her equipment. Her preparations complete, she dons sterile rubber gloves and then sits next to me on the couch.

Her elegant large glass syringe is handcrafted in Italy. It’s attached to a spaghetti-shaped piece of plastic that contains a small micro-filter so no impurities will pass into my bloodstream. The needle is a brand-new, completely sterilized microfine butterfly variant.

Today my friend has misplaced her normal medical tourniquet, so she pulls off her fishnet stocking and uses it to tie off my right arm. She dabs at my exposed vein with an alcohol swab, then hits the vein with the needle. My blood comes oozing up into the spaghetti-shaped tube, and then she slowly pushes the contents of the syringe into my bloodstream.

I immediately feel the familiar weight in the center of my chest, so I just lie back and relax. I used to let her inject me four times in one sitting, but now I’m down to two syringes full. After she’s refilled the syringe and given me my second shot, she withdraws the needle, opens a sterile cotton swab, and applies pressure to my puncture wound for at least a minute to avoid bruising or marking on my arms. I’ve never had any tracks from her ministrations. Finally, she takes a little piece of medical tape and attaches the cotton to my arm.

Then we sit and talk about sobriety.
 
Three years ago, there might have been China White heroin in that syringe. For years and years, I filled syringes and injected myself with cocaine, speed, Black Tar heroin, Persian heroin,and once even LSD. But today I get my injections from my beautiful nurse, whose name is Sat Hari And the substance that she injects into my bloodstream is ozone, a wonderful-smelling gas that has been used legally in Europe for years to treat everything from strokes to cancer.

I’m raking ozone intravenously because somewhere along the line, I contracted hepatitis C from my drug experimentation. When I found out that I had it, sometime in the early ‘90s, I immediately researched the topic and found a herbal regimen that would cleanse my liver and eradicate the hepatitis. And it worked. My doctor was shocked when my second blood test came up negative. So the ozone is a preventative step to make sure that pesky hep C virus stays away.

It took years and years of experience and introspection and insight to get to the point where I could stick a needle into my arm to remove toxins from my system as opposed to introducing them. But I don’t regret any of my youthful indiscretions. I spent most of my life looking for the quick fix and the deep kick. I shot drugs under freeway off-ramps with Mexican gang bangers and in thousand-dollar-a-day hotel suites. Now I sip vitamin-infused water and seek out wild, as opposed to farm raised salmon.

For twenty years now, I’ve been able to channel my love for music and writing, and tap into the universal slipstream of creativity and spirituality, while writing and performing our own unique sonic stew with my brothers, both present and departed, in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. This is my account of those times, as well as the story of how a kid who was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan,migrated to Hollywood and found more than he could handle at the end of the rainbow. This is my story, scar tissue and all.

grey matter

my head is blank except for statistical information about incarceration rates and "get tough" policies... don't ask.  i swear, though, it's not because i'm doing research for my upcoming murder trial.

breezy

where should i jaunt away to for a short vacation?

i'm open to any & all ideas.