Ra Full On Bliss!

Saturday 12:26 p.m.
What wonderful, wonderful bliss there was this morning! I knew it would be special since I was getting full on bliss while lying on my side. Oh, ra bliss! This life has not been wasted. Well, most of it has! I can't remember hardly any of my life. It's just gone by. But the bits when I was sitting quietly doing nothing... well, we got something for that! We certainly did! And we got a huge dividend this morning. So amazing and wonderful to be sitting there whitied out in ra bliss!

If you still don't meditate, Jack, you are indeed an unfortunate creature!

Rem Thingymajiggers again!

Friday 9:30 p.m.
Speculating about stuff you don't understand is quite good fun in certain states. If you drink, there's just the footie and the anatomical arrangements of members of the opposite sex. But in other states, you can talk about angels and Big Bangs and whatnot.

The photon is massless,[6] has no electric charge. So let there be light! It's in the wave particle duality, this light business. I don't get how you can be a ... something and not have any mass. So let's leave that to the Einsteins!

My auld maw said three of her friends from the neighbourhood house thing had died since last week. Two of them were over ninety. Quite a rate of attrition! She also said when she went down to Watford to get married, she got taken to see the first teevee. The Logie Baird show. This was before the war, maybe seventy years ago.

I'm trying to be, conventionally, as boring as possible these days. Sit in the hut. Keep away from flatheids. Don't socialise. Maybe I need to ease up a little. Hmmm? Maybe not!

There are some people who do not sing. They do not dance. They do not laugh. These are certain kinds of Scottishy people. I think it started with the bad weather and then the calvinism kicked in. You get these kinds of Scottishy people predominating among the evil bourgeois you meet in Edinburgh and all the way up the east coast. They're worse than the Germans. They're even worse than the Swedes. It's bad enough being a flatheid without having that kind of burden as well. Don't sing; don't laugh; don't dance.

Lecture 3 from William James in the Varieties of Religious Experience. He was from the Northern Irish/ Scottish Protestants and he probably didn't laugh out loud, or sing, or dance, but he certainly was smart. He probably got by with nervous breakdowns as they do. Anyway, fair play to the boy! He talks in Lecture 3 about believing in things you can't conventionally touch, feel or see. Reads out various accounts of joes and josephines who were enraptured and whatnot in the feeling of being in the presence of something other worldly, and sometimes god. This is a very nice feeling, apparently.

The people who don't sing, laugh or dance probably never get these feelings...like, being in the presence of something which makes them feel joyous. What a shame! Most of my deep dear friends, whom I met at Edinburgh University where these lectures were given, are like that. Except much worse. Dearie me! They don't even know they're just clinging to their miserableness. If it's just a bunch of photons, existence and non-existence arising simultaneously, surely even the happy clappy stupid Christiany folk are better off than them!

No doubt you can get pretty joyous feelings if you thought you were in the presence of ra divine, but you can do ra bliss, ra rapture and ra ecstasy if you just teach yourself to meditate like moi! This is not really as controllable as I'd like, but it's more in your control than getting visitations of god knows what. Are you going to get into ra bliss, Jack? Even just a little good hearted cheerfulness, and a bit of kindness, would go a long way! Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

Ra Way, Ra Truth and Ra Light!

Thursday 10:07 p.m.
Light is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength that is visible to the eye. Well, there is it. Hope we've cleared that one up. The boy who found out all this stuff about light used to live about five minutes from here. James Maxwell Clark. Einstein thought he was the bees knees. But what is it? I still don't get it.

I once wrote a radio play called The Real McCoy. The novel was written around the radio play. If you want to read a really good radio play (it got the best review in the Scotsman), read it on my webpage. Just miss out all the prose. A radio play imbedded in a novel! Nobody ever thought of that one! Anyway, there was all this stuff about light in it.

I'm still on emptiness here, sort of.

Everything in this room; the telly, me, the carpet, etc., is supposed to have started from a point without a circumference. It didn't have a circumference because there was no space, length, breadth, etc., before Ra Big Bang. So why is that not nothing. Something from nothing. This explanation appears to be stupid.

Before you get that far, it seems the maths requires more dimensions ... I can't remember if it's ten or sixteen... to work. I like that bit. That's where the heavens, hells, ghosts, may hang around. But no!

In the multi-universe system, you've got branes, or membranes .... like, universes sit like slices of loaves alongside one another and when they collide, you get a Big Bang and, voila, another universe. Really?

Say this loaf is sitting in a whole shelf of loaves in a bakery in a street in another universe and where did that come from? Oh yes! From a point without a circumference!

Glad we've sorted that one out.

The juju joes say mind is like space, except with the quality of knowing, I think. Like space, it doesn't obstruct any thing. It's hard to put your finger on it and say what it is, but it allows anything ... well, anything you can think of must have something to do with mind ... because it allows you to think.

The mind game is the only game in town!

Is there any objectivity? Say, there were two of you and you were looking at the big Alabama moon. I'm looking away and Lee Ann says: Hotboy, you're missing the moon! At that moment the moon is in my mind, or an image of the moon enters my mind. The moon is in my mind or my mind is in the moon. I don't see how you can get away from me, or my mind, or mind when you're discussing such a huge, big, wonderful Alabama moon.

How can nothing exist outside your own mind?

You've got consciousness and un-consciousness.

If you think you're mind is between your ears and you believe in the afterlife, which a lot of folk who don't understand the false sense of self are into, say you get your head chopped off. Can you still think? You've got to think: I'm in heaven. Or hell. So you're mind can't be between your ears.

William James. Lecture 2. He's into emotions and such. Happy joes are into religion. He's using a wide definition. "This sort of happiness in the absolute and everlasting is what we find nowhere but in religion."

Today I was in the secret garden in the Botanic Gardens. I took off my tee shirt and jumper and sun bathed. I was doing this partly to keep folk away and partly because the sun was hot today when there weren't any clouds. At the end of September?! I don't sun bathe, but I did today!

Spoke to a kid yesterday. He'd got up at five a.m. to eat his toast and coco-pops. He was hungry when I spoke to him. Ramadan. What a wonderful discipline! When the holy months are over, I do not expect him to want to capture me, or beseige me, or ambush me. It's these folk who suffer from the jihadi nutters, not me. Allah Akbar!

Rem Fings!

Wednesday 6:30 p.m.
Partly due to the earth not being flat, I fell asleep on the couch for two hours this afternoon.Went down in ra blss and came up in ra blss!

I'm supposed to be trying to combine bliss with emptiness, or voidness.

Like images seen in a dream, thus must we regard all things! Nagarjuna. The Wall.

I was speaking to Poisonous once about talking to folk on the phone from New York. Of course, when you pick up the phone you're engaging with zillions of pounds of technology, which is a bit of a miracle in itself. Anyway, Poisonous knew stuff about how your get to speak to folk in New York even although he's been blootering his brains for God knows how long. This was in landline days before the Star Trek stuff came in. When he got to the bit about how your voice got beamed down from some satellite to New York along with a lot of other voices, and then you got to put it into somebody's ear, well, you've just got to laugh, haven't you? The whole idea is completely ridiculous. But it does happen.

What's beaming down from the satellite again? Is it radio waves? What the hell are radio waves made of? What is light anyway? Is it a particle or a wave? If you start with a land line, you've got to be dealing with electricity. Well, what's electricity?

I don't know what ra bliss is, or ra heat. But I don't know what electricity is either!

In the philosophical side of the juju, you acknowledge things with regard to labels and functions. You call them things.They do stuff. That's it!

We embrace our ignorance.
We don't believe in any things,
Especially thoughts.

That'll be ten percent of the top please!

I've got a better chance of making money out of The Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid than I have out of selling this book. I'm going to send it to the editor of this Instant magazine tomorrow, and I've offered the boy 20% off the top if he can sell it under the name of Karma Dorje and I get left alone to sit in my hut.

It's getting a bit dusky. Good time to go and meditate!

Rem Technamalogicals!

Monday 8:33 p.m.
Just read an email from the sensei and reverend. The Robert Dudley agent didn't want his book after all. Dearie me. But that was a close call. I'll see if I can harass someone else to read it when I finish working and get paid on Wednesday.

Funnily enough, I wasn't wanting to look at the emails tonight in case I got a knock back from someone. Just had a feeling that I'm starting to hope again. Of course, nobody's reading my book at the moment, so there's nothing to get knocked back. But I did send an email to my uncle Peter on Sunday morning. My uncle Peter owns Mainstream Publishing with Bill Campbell and they published my first book. I know it's not the kind of book Mainstream publish, so why should he want to read it? I was feeling knackered when I got in from work and lay on the couch and slept for an hour instead of looking at my emails. I ask myself why I should care. I shouldn't.

Before I came to the computer, I meditated for an hour. I knew when I wakened up this morning that things had progressed yet again. Amazing bliss while lying flat doing yoga nidra about half four this morning. The week of solitude last week was well spent! And I was thinking how extraordinary the abbot of the Samye Ling is. And what a crap chela I've been! But I'm getting there, even although I know I'm only at the beginning of something.
And I feel that I should just drop all the stuff about writing and trying to get an agent. At least, for now. It's just as source of them old afflictive emotions. Well, the writing isn't! Maybe I should just lay off that for a wee bit and focus on the juju!

It's fifty years ago today that some joe made the first transatlantic telephone call which didn't rely on radio. Radio calls were apparently not very good. It's only a hundred years since the telegraph worked across the ocean. That just blew my mind! It's fifty years since they laid the cable from Oban. Well, one of us invented the bloody telephone, so it was fair enough that they started from Oban. But it's only fifty years ago. I was alive then.

So I spoke to the kiddo on a mobile phone tonight. I've only used a mobile phone about three times. You don't have to speak into a mouthpiece. How weird is that? I blame all this on Star Trek! How come folk believe in telecommunications and they don't believe you can sit quietly doing nothing and fill your mind with bliss and ecstasy? Three million years ago we were monkeys. How long ago was Copernicus? Five hundred years? But the earth's not flat. You can't fool me! If it was flat, I wouln't be crashing out on the couch after cycling home from work!

Rat Vase Breathing Again!

Saturday 1:10 p.m.
Hello, Jack the Spam Robot, the Masai Warriors, aliens and unfortunate Arabian people looking for hotboys! Two people came to the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid yesterday looking for information on vase breathing, or the vase breath. These fortunate creatures must meditate.

You can read about how to do this pranayama in The Bliss of Inner Fire by Lama Thebten Yeshe. From my own experience I must say that once you have made a connection between breath and bliss, you can hit indescribable levels of wonderful bliss, the seventh heaven of sensation, with vase breathing so long as you've got your discipline in order and have a calmed enough mind.

But everyone tells you it's dangerous and you shouldn't do it unless you are under the guidance of someone who has at least realised mahamudra, or emptiness.

Some times this morning I was doing the three turnings of the wheel of dharma. Apparently, this will get you where you have to go.

You negate the false sense of self in yourself, and then negate it in the outside world. Appearance and emptiness arising at the one time.

What's coming first here? It has to be your mind. You are the one who is perceiving, so it takes a bit for the information to reach you. The third turning of the wheel is the hard bit, I think. You have to be arising with the object you are perceiving simultaneously, so that you are arising, abiding and declining with everything else, including thoughts, in the great big ocean of consciousness. Sorry if you're not interested in this stuff, Jack!

The radio is tuned into Celtic Park. The Fields of Athenry is being played over the loudspeaker system.

So much bliss this morning! Started about eight. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

If I was disciplined enough I wouldn't have been watching the news over the past few days. The Alamo is on the telly this afternoon. The roadshow is being played out in Afghanistan right now. The flies are conquering the flypaper. It's Dien Bien Phu all over again. Our government's foreign policy is so incredibly stupid it's almost beyond belief! And it's getting a lot of people killed for nothing. Dearie me!

6:30 p.m.
Whilst dropping sweat from the Beer Monster Reduction Vehicle onto the keyboard. ..

Lovely day again! What's going on? I spent some of it in the Botanical Gardens and managed to read the first chapter of The Varieties of Religion Experience. The James boy seems to be saying that even if some of the religious giants could be described as pathological nutters, that doesn't really matter. What matters is the validity of the results of the juju. Don't look at the roots; look at the fruits. How reassuring!

Ranother Bliss Day!

Friday 10:57 p.m.
I went down to Peckhams about twenty minutes ago and bought four bottles of Baltika Lager Beer (4 for the price of 3! ) and two rolls. It's a Russian beer and weighs in at 5.1%. This cost £5:62. I asked the serving person how much a packet of fags cost (i.e. cigarettes) and she said £5:42. You've got to get things in proportion! Thank God I gave up fags!

Was up today before dawn and did the yoga nidra before sitting up and getting into ra big blisses. I thought I might doze off later in the morning, so I went to Bellshill a wee bit earlier than usual.

Feeling very cool out the back garden of the council house today. My auld maw has no memories of bad times. She was telling me about being in the wash house in the back garden of the tenement during the war at six in the morning and my elder brother Silvest throwing plates out the window, and shouting: Aye, you'll come up the noo!

It must have been really hard work being a woman in those days. They're using scrubbing boards and mechanical wringers, and, I think the expression is, elbow grease!

My auld maw is happy in her old age. You can look at life in two ways maybe. The moment by moment stuff ... when you die you've just missed the next moment..., or the lifetime shape. She cool both ways. No resentments or bitterness as she looks back.

As we sat out the back, her on a bench and me sitting on my jumper on the ground since it was unseasonally hot, I kept sometimes closing my eyes and falling into ra bliss. I was going to ask her to sing something, but I did not want to recreate those wonderful moments of a couple of weeks ago when she started singing The Fields of Athenry. But if she's started singing, I would have sunk more into ra bliss listening to her.

I know meditating is not easy, but if you don't meditate, you will never get ra bliss!

When I got home, I sent the killer email to Simon Trewin of PFD. I doubt if he'll reply. Then I found an email from Brian Wilson who'd forwarded something from the Instant Magazine. Brian and I met the Ian Sclater boy, who edits this magazine ... well, you don't want to know about that. Anyway, he published a bit of the Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf. No one else did, so I sent him the killer email as well!

It's very important not to take things too seriously especially since it is difficult to tell the difference between good and bad fortune! You shouldn't want things. Except a go at primordial awareness and immediate acces to ra bliss!

Before I got the beers, I did some handstands, and crabs, and headstands. Oh, what a fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

Ra Bliss Day!

Thursday 1:10 p.m.
What a great day for ra bliss so far! Great oddles of ra bliss occasionally interupted by thoughts of how to get Adolf a literary agent. So I thought I'd try out a first draft attempt at a killer email to succeed in this quest.

Remember Adolf all you have to do is change your name to Karma Dorje since that's the name of the narrator. Also, answer all questions in German or just scream Spraken de Deutsch! And achtung a lot! But grow the beard and wear a floral print dress. That would help. Here we go. First draft of a killer email to a literary agent!

Dear Friendly Person,

Before he set sail for the Antarctic Ocean to meditate in the caves of the Unheard of and McDonald Islands, Karma Dorje left in my safe keeping MY NEW BOOk. This is essentially an autobiographical memoir in the form of a novel set in a bog standard comprehensive school in Edinburgh, detailing the till recently secret methods for attaining magical powers as practised by buddhist initiates in hermitages and caves in the lonely vastnesses of Tibet.

This book is bound to become a classic in experiential mysticism to compare with The Interior Castle by St Teresa of Avila, which has never been out of print since it was written in the 16th century, and has been, indeed, a nice little earner. So you are a fortunate creature to have been chosen at random from the website Everyone Who Is Anyone ... to receive this opportunity to represent this beautifully written work of art and make pots of money!

I do not wish to set off a feeding frenzy among various literary agencies, so I will not contact any other persons with this offer until you get back to me, or until three working days have passed. Yours, HotboyMadyamikaSurfingTheOceansOfBLiss P.S. You can find out more about me by looking at the website at www.geocities.com/madyamika2000/index.html

What do you think? Got to be a winner!

9:00 p.m.
It was hot today as I walked to the allotment at circa 3:30 p.m. Hot in Scotland on September 21st. Surely shum mishtake!

Rat Sense of Freedom!

Wednesday 12:50 p.m.
What joy to be cycling away from work today, knowing I've got all this free time in front of me with hardly any flatheids in it at all! The Domestic Bliss is not due back from the Mediterranean rat town till Sunday. I'll go to see the aged parent one day. That's it. The rest is all mine. And I've just poured what was left in the home brew barrel down the sink! Oh, what a fortunate creature I am!

Meditation and Buddhism have always been about happiness to me. People who meditate smile more. After a while, you can't help it. Buddhism goes on about suffering because you don't need to suffer so much. If you persue realizations of emptiness, you cannot fail to become happier.

I've been a bad boy over the last couple of evening, but now I'm going to try and be good. Oh, what joy there will be! And what bliss! Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

7:40 p.m.
It was very windy up at the allotment. When I first came to Edinburgh, I used to think of it as a windy city. Whatever happened to that? Anyway, I brought home a marrow. The Domestic Bliss grew a marrow. What for? What's a marrow for? What do you do with it?

Rejections don't make me happy. A bit immature that, to say the least! Anyway, I was thinking of just giving up trying to get anything published. But I remembered that when I'm meditating on images of my list of gurus, when I get to the 17th Karmapa, I often say: See you in Rumtek!

I should try to make some money! From next week, I'll try to get a package of something sent out every week. A three chapter message in a bottle. The only problem with this is that I should really read Bomber and Ancient Futures again to reassure myself that this is not a complete waste of time. Dearie me! Even the thought. Bugger it! I'm going to read The Varieties of Religious Experience.

10:00 p.m.
I got Are You Boys Cyclists accepted by Serpent's Tail. I told them I was called Alison Main. How different life would have been had I gotten this dirty book about boxing and writing published as Alison Main! You've got to lose yourself. Now I think Let's Kill Fatboy! should be authored by Adolf Shicklegruber The Second. He's got a much better back story than me and is at this moment living with Rosa Luxemburg The Second (how things change!) in Berlin and brushing up on his goosestepping. As long as he refuses to leave the Unheard of Island when the book gets accepted and agrees to only speak in German, we'll clean up!

Getting him an agent will be far easier than getting one for moi! Heard some good news yesterday that Robert Dudley, the agent from the Elizabethan era, had asked to see more than the usual three chapters from the sensei and reverend. God knows who Robert Dudley is, but that's very encouraging. If he decides to take it on and can sell it, less fat Tennesseans will disappear into the cooking pot and the sensei might get out of Chattanooga before the cops shooty shooty him and bury him in the woods. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

Ra pre-holiday day!

Tuesday 10:55 p.m.
There is a time of mild despair. You may think that you cannot make anyone happy. The happiness has to somehow come from them. Some cats are maybe going to be happy and some cats aint,

This is not true. This is bad news from the advocates of separateness.

When y0u start meditating, it is very hard. You're surrounded by flatheids and they are cheerful, or not. Probably quite cheerful because they are young and the children of the evil bourgeois. When they start to cry and you would like them to be happy instead, you may despair. And think there is nothing you can do about this. It's the afflictive emotions.

Say you spent some time doing the cushion. Say you thought you could improve your mood by maybe two percent a year. What a great thing this is for the flatheids surrounding you with their grief, sorrow, lamentations ... suffering in this life! Just two percent a year. Even one percent. Compound interest it.

You can light up the world of the moronic flatheids if you are prepared for the long haul. And that's what we are in. The long haul. We live and die within groups of other people.

I fell in love with the Domestic Bliss when I was nineteen. And I thought I could never make her happy. You have to make yourself happy, I thought. But understanding emptiness and trying to realise it, and getting ra bliss which the flatheids will never get because they are too dumb to meditate ... well, being at least cheerful is a light in this world. Little bits are good. Just doing little bits. Little improvements. At least, trying to improve your mood, attitude, or whatever.

I 've been drinking ra beer and watching A Life Less Ordinary, with Cameron Diaz and Ewan McGregor. I need some kinds of drugs to cope with the two hours or so of recreation at the end of the day. Loved the movie. The boy is one of us! The babes is gorgeous and can act her socks off as well. Made me remember what it was like to fall in love. A romantic comedy. Aw, shucks!

I searched the room and found The Varieties of Religious Experience. Interesting Chrismas dinners. You're sitting there with Henry James and his much smarter brother William. They are protestants from Northern Ireland really. Well, so am I! Also, a tim. Also, a buddhist. Also, a humanist. Unfortunately, not quite as smart. Thick joes like me can do ra bliss though. Anybody can do ra bliss!

Some monks might tell you that falling in love is terrible. You lose it, a bit. It turns to hate and you want to kill people, etc. Well, what do they know? This is RaBlissBog! Falling in love is fabulooso! It is a sensation like ra bliss though maybe not quite so under control.

I've punctured the barrel and drank all ra beer. Teetotal tomorrow. Face first into ra bliss!

Ra last day!

Monday 12:57 p.m.
I've only meditated for forty odd minutes today due to being a bit pivo-ed last night. So I'm sitting there at noon, and feeling a wee bit fashed and bashed, and thinking that I don't want to live on my own, when .... this great globule of ra bliss arose. Despite delving into the home brew yesterday, I did meditate quite a lot .... I don't know why it happens when it happens like that. Oh, ra bliss!

It's a public holiday today. I should really just stick with it and stay in all afternoon, doing ra bliss and interspersing it with some hatha yoga and tai chi. For it is a wonderful world. And how fortunate to be a human being! Because the human beings can get ra bliss. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

It's a shame you don't meditate, Jack. It really is. You don't know what you're missing. There's more to being a human being than you realise, so there is!

8:30 p.m.
I got this email from Pat Kavanagh today. Except it came onto the blog in a funny font .... anyway, it was nice of her to get back to me. I'm sure she's got plenty to do. It's cool to be cool!

I like reading William Rees-Mogg in the Times. We'd have nothing in common at all. He wrote about the nazi papa controversy today and quoted the Sword Verse from Chapter 9 of the Koran. I tried to read the Koran once, but I didn't get as far as this bit.

" So when the sacred months have passed away, Then slay the idolators wherever you find them. And take them captive and beseige them, and lie in wait for them in every ambush."

That doesn't look very buddhist to me! The Dalai Lama said there should be lots of different kinds of religion because there are lots of different kinds of people. Among the lots of different kinds of people there are, of course, some complete nutters!

I got an email from Adolf today. He's in Kuala Lumpa (?) and has managed to avoid plummeting into the ocean by meditating for his not very well chiropractor .... for five minutes! Five whole minutes, eh? But at the end of the day, he's on the way to ra bliss!! Doing it for someone else as well! Compassion and altruism is the basis of the path.

There's a programme on the telly just now about a kid from Glasgow with memories of a previous life on the island of Barra. Interesting! People sometimes look at reincarnation as something comforting. Dearie me! If I was still on the bus going to work, I could look at the joes and josephines sitting there. Do you want to be like that? That's what reincarnation is. Grief, sorrow, lamentations ... suffering in this life!

Tried the nazi bike out today to see if I could still go it. But it's like riding a bike. I cycled down to Portobello to see Brian Wilson. There's only two hairs left on the boy's flat heid. Because we didn't have on the viking helmets, he kept his false teeth in. The pig's face stayed unchewed in his back pocket. Dearie me! Nay bliss. That boy will never get ra bliss and he's a far nicer joe than me as well! He will never understand the voidness, and certainly never combine ra bliss with ra voidness and thus achieve happiness in this life. He's on the edge of the abyss of personal annihiliation. You want to stay a flatheid, Jack? Really? What about when you're old and lonely, Jack? Clinging to the horror! The fear! Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!

00:47 p.m.
That's it! I've had a look at why Pat Kavanagh replied to my email! So I read it. It's a heartfelt thing. And it says something truthful to me. I shouldn't hustle this new book. I emailed it to Serpent's Tail, but they've never sent an acknowledgmnt. Peter Ayrton, who owns Serpent's Tail couldn't stand up properly, and was more crabbit in the five seconds I met him than moi, and that takes a bit of effort. It's better to resign myself to the book going nowhere as usual. I'm not even going to stick it on my webpage. But thank god you are god. And thank god I am god. Thank god for god. We have to have something outside ourselves to give thanks to sometimes. Thank god for making me so cool. It was a cracking email I sent Pat Kavanagh even if I say so myself. That's it. I'm not doing anything else.

If you want to read the book, just email me from my webpage. It's called Let's Kill Fatboy. It's really a book all about ra bliss. You might as well blow your brains out, Jack.

Rem Baddies Again!

Sunday 7 p.m.
I had a very nice time in the allotment today and returned with a big cabbage, some broccoli, apples, and feasted while there on lots of raspberries. I'd just been wondering about spending the night there some time this week when this old boy asked me if I'd been broken into last Tuesday. Nope. Seems like quite a few huts were broken into, but the baddies only took .... knives. Hmmm?

How am I supposed to spend a night in the hut doing the juju when marauders might appear at any moment looking for knives? Well, have you ever seen a gin trap? My big brother had one in the house for a while. They should be illegal. They probably are. You've got a circle of steel teeth and a pad you stand on. Then the steel teeth are released and snap onto your limb. It's really a take a limb device. If you had one after the door, when the first baddie came in and started the screaming, you could push him out and emerge with the digging fork in one hand and the open shears swinging from the other, shouting: Allotmenteers, ya bass!

They only stole knives? Surely, these must have been young droogies getting tooled up for a bit of the old ultraviolence round about the tower blockos. What's the world coming to when the substratum can't even afford to buy their own chibs?

My nose is still running a wee bit, but the swamp fever is gone! Yes, it is! So I skipped for five minutes and did six two minute rounds of shadow boxing in the complete Beer Monster Reduction Vehicle. You might not have seen this kind of shadow boxing before. You don't just stand there shaped up and just punching. You're jumping about all over the shop and it's as aerobic as you want it to be. Before the swamp, I'd up the routine to six threes, but tonight I was back to six twos so I could do some hatha yoga tonight between meditations. But I love doing physical jerks. It's so reassuring somehow. It gets you high as well, sort of. I'm the only joe or josephine I know who does anything like this, but even before I could do ra bliss, I wasn't really normal!

It's a public holiday tomorrow. I managed to take some of the pressure off the
home brew barrel last night, but it may still need some attention later on!

23:11 p.m.
Basturns! The world changed when they said that Salman Rushdie should die because he wrote a book. I remember being amazed. And some people did die. Not Salman, but some translators, etc. So on the day that the Nazi Papa said he didn't really mean it, there are these joes (and it's always joes because the women aren't allowed out!) saying they think it's okay if some people kill the pope because he has disrespected the Prophet. They're standing outside a catholic church in London, doing this shite with their faces covered up!

(Monday 12: 51 p.m. Unusually, I've edited out three paragraphs of inconsequential drunken ravings from this post!)


This stuff, the after the beer stuff, was really just for Eric. Because he asked for it and they might try to disrupt his life ... and it would be alright, and it wouldn't be like this, Eric. You'd come back!

I wish I could have written even one line of this. It was in the paper today.

"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
An' go to your Gawd as a soldier. "

The janny was in special services for a long while. His best pal got shot in the head and died in his arms. His last word, before he turned away, was: Tough!

Fung sake! Jihad, ya bass! What exactly are these dimwits talking about? You should teach yourself to meditate, Eric.

Ra Billy Bunter Goes Troppo!

Saturday 6:30 p.m.
My nearest and dearest should be taking off from Glasgow airport right now. May the jihad not be with you!

Read another couple of pages of The Kite Runner. Most of it rings true, but it's the author's first book, it looks like. Anyway, the main character (flawed? Asshole! No wonder his da couldn't stand him!) is a writer and the author talks about him getting books published.

So with the advance on his first novel, the boy pays for his wife's IVF treatment in California. Oh, aye? With the advance on his second novel, he seems to buy a house!

I made £1500 for the publication of my first novel and it was in hardback and went into paperback. I got £1.000 from Serpent's Tail for the second one. Of course, the boy in The Kite Runner had an agent!

I expect to get enough of an advance for the novel I've just finished to be able to afford a couple of clones at least! Because I have got an agent, at least one in the Southern Hemisphere! From his blog, it is obvious that Adolf has not actually read the book, but I don't think that should be an impediment in any way. I think for a fifty fifty split he should take over the whole shebang, including getting his photies stuck on the cover and claiming authorship.

"The wish that it be made known that I was the author is the thought of a man not yet adult." The Dharmapada. The wall.

The book will now be known as Billy Bunter Goes Troppo.

For those not familiar with Aussie soaps, going troppo is when you start fishing for sharks off the balcony that looks onto the outback!

Billy Bunter Goes Troppo should clean up in the Northern Territories. Yippee!

It will now be authored by Adolf Shicklegrubber The Second which should make it a number one best seller in Paraquay where half the joes are called Schmitt for some reason!

The home brew barrel has started leaking a little bit. I think I put in too much sugar for the secondary fermentation and the brew is probably way too frisky. A bit like myself! I suppose for the purposes of good housekeeping, I'll have to relieve the pressure by drinking a few pints tonight. Please ignore any posts after nine!

Ra Solitude Cometh!

Friday 10:30 p.m.
It was a beautiful, beautiful day today! The sun was hot, but there was a wee nip in the air sometimes so it wasn't clammy. This is not Scottish weather! Usually, after the festival is over, it's dreich. But who's complaining?

What a great day to go to visit Little Sparta, the ornamental garden about thirty miles away from Edinburgh. Unfortunately, they charge £10 to get in, but the Domestic Bliss coughed up. At first, I thought so what, but the place really grew on me. And it was the perfect day to be there. There are various sections of this big garden and lots of stones with bits of verse, Latin, etc., on them. You've got to think of trying to grow tatties and onions in your allotment to realise what a fantastic amount of work it must have taken Ian Hamilton Finlay, the sculptor, to achieve this.

No traffic noise. This garden is really in the middle of nowhere. Once the cows stopped mooing, it was very peaceful indeed. It's hard in Edinburgh to get away from traffic sounds. Great to be in the country sometimes.

I was laughing in the motor on the way back when I heard what the nazi papa had said about Muhammed. Definitely old school! Did Muhammed really tell his followers to spread Islam by the sword? If he did, I don't think that boy was buddhist!

During the Albugensian (?) Crusade, (this was in southern France) as the catholic general was about to order everybody inside the city walls to be put to the sword, this boy asked him about the innocent people in there. The general said they could leave it to God to know the difference between the innocent and the guilty.

Here in the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid, we (the royal we!) refuse to believe in anything!

Before writing this I sent emails to Wisdom Books, Snow Lion and Shambhala asking them to point me towards literary agents who've handled buddhisty stuff. Waste of time, of course. I'm going to give up hustling my new book very quickly.

On my webpage, I tried hard to hustle The Real McCoy and The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf. I haven't really done much with Bomber or Ancient Futures. And they were written a while ago and it won't bother me if nobody wants them. I suspect I'll give up on my new book rather quickly and try to hustle these other ones. If the kiddo wasn't at college and needing some support from me (some hopes!), I don't think I'd bother!

The Domestic Bliss and the kiddo are away to some Mediterranean rat town for a week from tomorrow. I want to be aaaalone! No, I don't!

Ra Post Swamp Day!

Friday 00:10 a.m.
Been watching A Clockwork Orange. Saw it first of all because as a student ... before I got serious about just hanging out with my droogie chummies ... I went to the pictures on a Saturday night. Then I saw lots of disquieting filmos which I did not reconnoitre properwise and was much disquieted. Saw the film before I read the book.

Anthony Burgess was introduced to me by Manuel Lopez, a Texican Mexican, whom I met in third year at Edinburgh University. Amazingly, seemingly dead thick Americans arrived on my history course then and one of them was Manuel Lopez. He has a part in Alma Mater, the book I wrote about Edinburgh University. Manuel was reading his way through everything Anthony Burgess ever wrote, the way you do when you're interested in writers and reading.

I'd like to take my hat off to Anthony Burgess!

I'd like to take my hat off to Manuel Lopez!

He was the first novelist I read all the way through!

I read the book of Clockwork Orange as me and my droggie chummies were bound across the great continent of Eurovideos when we were mere whelps after the uni days. What a great book!

It's time to remember why I wanted to write. I used to like reading great books, books that were beautifully written. How long ago that was! Today, I thought I'd like to read "The Varieties of Religious Experience", the first book I read about religion. It's a reproduction, if I remember right, of twelve lectures given in the Old Quad of Edinburgh University by William James, Henry's much smarter brother. Only then did I think it was a good thing to have gone to Edinburgh University. I think it set me on the road to the juju. He says you have to admit that the freest joes are those who don't want anything. I can remember fung all else about it.

I'm afraid it's all in the beautifully constructed paragraphs. That's all there is, Hotboy! Beautifully balanced paragraphs. I might have written seven of those and they were all in the third person, and they all took a long time to write.

The great thing about meditating is that you are not moderated by anyone. After we put the trip across Europe together after I left university, I realised that I wasn't really a team player. You think you can write on your own and so you can. Then you try to sell the wonderful writings, and you need someone else. This is the problem. Trying to convince people of something. Why bother? Why should you try to convince anyone of anything if you're not hungry? I suppose it's something to do.

I haven't written a book which is a mystical classic. I am a mystical classic. Do you know anyone else who can do ra bliss? Of course, you don't.

Alaister MacLean's books are all out of print. What I'd like to do is read my new book in ten years time and find it somehow amusing because it is a kind of snapshot of my mid-fifties life. Except it doesn't explain today. Nothing explains ra bliss. Why try to sell a book about ra bliss to a bunch of flatheids? Flatheids don't get ra bliss. But you can sell them beautifully written paragraphs. Everybody gets that. I used to want to do that. Write beautifully written paragraphs. That's not about getting published. As long as you're not starving, that's what you should try to do. Find a way to write beautiful paragraphs.

Friday 10:50 a.m.
Last night I blogged after road testing my new barrel of home brew. Nice beer. After four pints I'd become a mystical classic! Anyway, the first author I read all the way through was Richard Condon. When I was back in Bellshill after university, I asked this guy I knew in the local library to recommend an author to me since I didn't really know my way around the fiction shelves, and hadn't read many novels. He recommended Richard Condon. I really liked him and he wrote a lot of good books. I think he's best remembered for his worst ones.

I couldn't get Robert Dudley to read the novel or Annette K. Green. I think I made the mistake of telling them what it was about. I really don't like hustling.

I'm not going to Bellshill today because I think I've still got the remnants of the swamp fever. But it is a sunny day!

12:47 p.m.
Just read a further installment of how to go about getting shot and buried in an unmarked grave by the Tennessee cops in the sensei and reverend's blog. Journalists, ya bass!

Ra Taliban Tam!

Wednesday 5:32 p.m.
Once a Glaswegian was in convoy with some other caravanettes, and land rovers, etc., going through the Khyber Pass. Being in convoy they were hoping to put off the bandits, but on this occasion it was to no avail. Obviously worried, the Glaswegian felt a pang of recognition when he heard one of the bandits shouting out: Pathan, ya bass!

Ya bass! is a greeting some young men in Glasgow used to use. In Maryhill, the peaceful little village where the Sensei and Reverend was born and bred, they used to shout: Maryhill Fleet, ya bass! In the Carlton area of the city, I believe they used to shout: Carlton Tongs, ya bass!

So on hearing the cry: Pathan, ya bass! our Glaswegian began to engage this Pathan in conversation. Lo! he was a Glaswegian himself, who had fallen off the hippy trail and gone native with the local Pathans, enjoying the cannabis and the robbing and plundering.

He's probably standing at unofficial roadblocks in Afghanistan to this very day, declaring: Gie's your opium, ya bass! to other unofficial entrepreneurs.

Because of this, and because the swamp fever has departed along with the bad temper, I do not now think it is such a good idea to nuke the Taliban after all.

But I have another cunning plan. Why don't we, I mean the British and American governments, buy the opium off them? Afghanistan, as I write, is supplying most of the world's illegal junk. So why don't we just offer them a better deal and buy it all off them? Up the price! Take it off the black market and give them a decent living so they don't have to make money shooty shootying each other. Only poor sad basturns are going around shouting: Jihad, ya bass! Then, we tell them we'll pay more for cannabis.

10,000 feet up a south facing slope. That's where the weed wants to be. So they end up growing cannabis instead of opium and we can sell the cannabis out of tobacconists. Cannabis doesn't give you lung cancer by the way. (It'll give you lots of other lung diseases, I'm sure, but not that one!) We could stick it outside the pubs in Scotland and give it away free to the nicotine addicts. This would cut down on the tobacco and folk would stay outside the pubs and drink far less alcohol.

Nato wants more troops in Afghanistan. Fung off! Nobody has ever won in Afghanistan! Sending ground troops to Helmand is plain dumb. If they want to run an oil pipeline through Afghanistan ... well, they're not going to, are they? Not until they start buying the opium off them and making them all bourgeois. Eric, samsaramom's man, could get sent there by the Canadian army. Don't go, Eric! You can hide out in the hut!

I sent an email to Serpent's Tail on Monday. No reply. No surprise in that. Sent another one to Robert Dudley, the literary agent from the Elizabethan age, this afternoon. No reply yet. All to no avail, of course, but if you're not on the park, no one will ever pass you the ball.

Ra Mr Hyde when not hiding!

Tuesday 3:06 p.m.
Off work for the second day. The kiddo showed up. Her nose is still running, etc., though she says she feels a lot better. That's a disease lasting from last Thursday. At least, it hasn't gone into my lungs much and the airways are clear enough at the moment. But what a bad tempered, crabbit basturn I am! I'm even getting annoyed at the teevee. Why can't we have a decent President of the United States? One like Joe Stalin or Attila the Hun, maybe with the brains of a Machiavelli. Taliban? How many nukes have they got? None! Ha, ha, ha, ha! In five minutes the problem is solved. You can see why Hitler thought the liberal democrasies were a bunch of effete, degenerate, merchant bankers!

Then I sit down to meditate....

Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss! My concentration isn't too good at the moment, but I don't really need that as much as clean airways. I've only meditated for two hours today so far, but the momentum is still there despite being a crabbit bad tempered basturn when I'm not meditating. Dichotomy? Don't talk to me about dichotomy!

Sometime when I'm having a break, I'll come back and nuke some other people.

Ra Day Off!

Monday 12: 53 p.m.
I gave up resentment and resisting this morning and just lay in bed. Surrendered. My airways were relatively clear so I could doze, sleep and try to practise yoga nidra. That's kind of lying in a corpse pose. Very good for being in bed if you can't sleep. I don't suppose I can do the practise properly, but a lot of ra bliss arose. Getting ra bliss when you're lying flat on your back is a real boon! What a fortunate creature!

Somebody called Tom Katar Kay landed on my blog and that was quite exciting. He's into Gopi Krishna who wrote Living with Kundalini and there seems to be a free video of his last interview. I'll try to download it today, but with this dial up stuff, it might not work. But there's a transcript in his comments bit. Gopi Krishna sounds like a great boon to the creative intelligence (or it is creative design?) argument, but I doubt if the flatheided creationists have ever heard of him!

One of the Sisters of Mercy sent me a photcopy of an article about a new religiousity based on Thomas Merton. That was awful nice of her! The article is big on ecumenicism. Let's talk to the Hindus. There's a slight problem with this since the nazi papa is right behind Ex Excelium Nulla Salis (?), which means that there's no salvation outside the church, or you've had it if you're not a tim.

As the sole member of the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid, I have to say that at the end of the day what it comes down to is this: Can you or can you not do ra bliss? All the rest if just a variety of methods and a lot of funny hats, otherwise known as juju. I get the impression that the Catholic hierarchy are bound to be suspicious of anything even vaguely gnostic because you don't need anything or anybody to meditate.

The kiddo was lying on the couch watching the music video channel for three or four days with this disease, so I'm not expecting much respite till Thursday or Friday. But I'm going to enjoy having this disease since the Domestic Bliss has given me something to clear my airways. So it is just another opportunity to investigate ra bliss! Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

22:54 p.m.
Still in the trenches with this disease. I was looking forward to having a look at this last interview with Gopi Krishna on the video/computery/internety thing. Of course, it didn't work. Asked for a plug-in. When that happens, I might as well switch off. An invitation to waste an hour or so of your precious human existence. Why don't these machines just work? Why do you have to learn anything, or know anything? You don't have to know much to flicky through the teevee channels. Anyway, that was a shame. I'm sure he's got something interesting to say. Oh well, I'll just go and watch the telly instead!

Rose Diseases!

Sunday 4:20 p.m.
I think I posted once that I was better with my own sufferings than I was with other peoples. This is complete crap! I've come down over the last two days with one of them stonking, streaming, coughy, sneezy, spluttering head colds, and what have I done to deserve this? Eh, God? You're sitting there on your throne surrounded by angels and I've got a fung head cold! Well, do something about it!

And lo! the head cold miraculously disappeared!

No, it didn't!

I've got things to do at work tomorrow that I actually want to do as well. I don't want to take time off. I'm enjoying my job. You can't even do ra bliss properly when you've got a head cold. The vase breathing is out!

In the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid you're allowed to commit suicide and go straight to heaven if you've got a head cold. But then there would be nobody left in the church since I'm the only member. Foiled again!

The last throw of the dice is to don the Beer Monster Reduction Vehicle and jump about in the kitchen to loud rock and roll, and try to sweat it out. I'm just going to go and do that. Then I'll be completely dehydrated with a rotten head cold, but I'll be so knackered I'll be able to soak in the bath for an hour and feel sorry for myself in there.
Once I phoned in sick and, recognising the voice on the other end, I started in with the stuff about how diseased I was. Hotboy, the voice said, you don't work here anymore. I hadn't worked in that school for about three years!

23:30 p.m.
I'm fed up with this being alive stuff! Fung God! What's God ever done for me? Three kids tomorrow will have a bad time because I cannot go to work. Well, not a bad time, but a worse time. Basturns! Basturns! Even more basturns! I cannot go to work because I cannot stand in front of kids with bog roll stuck up my nose. And all that swaying around and being dizzy and all that crap. Just give me the disease that kills you in two days, you currant. I can do that, you basturn! You currant and basturn! Tomorrow I'll have to sit and watch the history channel and read a novel. Fung off, God! Just kill me, you fungpig! You basturn! Fung off!

This is the sermon from the high pulpit of the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid! You cannot join anyway, but especially if you're a flatheid. Excuse me, but the world does not need any more flatheids!

Ra Even More Of Ra Bliss!

Saturday 2:30 p.m.
Calling all flatheids! Calling all flatheids! This is RaBlissBlog reporting further developments with ra bliss!

I used to wonder if there was a physical basis for ra bliss, as you'd assume there has to be since it is a sensation. Was there neurotransmiters, serotonin, or whatever involved. If there was, you'd imagine there must be some physical limits to ra bliss. If there are, I certainly haven't reached them yet! What an amount of ra bliss I've been getting in my meditations today!! Closing my eyes just now, I'm in great uplifts of ra bliss! It says in the books that sometimes you might feel as if every cell in your body is bursting with ra bliss. Roll on ra bliss, that's all I can say. What a great day this is going to be!

I felt very exhilerated after my first meditation of the day. I've got Pat Kavanagh's letter stuck to the wall beside the door and when I was going passed it, had a look and started to laugh. I was giggling away and took it down to the living room and read it to the kiddo. Then I sent another email to Pat Kavanagh thanking her properly for, well, wasting her time really. Then I went onto the Serpent's Tail webpage and sent an email to Peter Ayrton (I asked whoever to forward it!) . I was going to ask if they wanted to see three chapters, but just emailed the whole book as an attachment. What else have I got to do? Bugger all! Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss! I'm off to the hut!

00:52 a.m.
I lay down on the bed around noon because I was dozing off while meditating. Did the yoga nidra. What an amount of ra bliss! Ecstatic bliss. Flatheids don't get that. What a shame!

I spent four hours in the allotment today. Dug for half an hour. On my own up there for four hours and what a wonderful time I was having. Flatheids (i.e. the people who are too dumb to meditate) can never know what that wonderful time is like. I've been a flatheid. Flatheids don't even get a little bit of ra bliss. They certainly don't get to watch it developing, and developing, and turning into even more of ra bliss. And I'm only still at the beginning because I haven't foresaken this life! And I'm a bad boy! But ra bliss is ra bliss is ra bliss! Oh, what a fortunate creature I am!

Time for bed, says Sleepy Head.

Ra first rejection!

Friday 10:40 a.m.
"I like your tone of voice but, honestly, I just don't see that this is a novel or anything resembling one..." The woman is dead right there! First rejection just as I was walking out the door going for the train to Bellshill. Cheques are much better! "...written while high on adrenalin? Speed? Dope?" These days I should be so lucky! Written while straight and flat broke more like!

At least Pat Kavanagh read it quick and got the waiting over with. I'm sure if you wrote a novel that looked like a real novel, she'd be a great agent to have! Still, nothing ventured ... and it is still a lovely, sunny day! If my problem is that I'm not filthy rich and have to work for 17 hours a week, it's really not much of a problem! March on!

6:34 p.m.
My maw asked me if I remembered someone's name from a long time ago. This joe had not had his three chapters rejected by an illustrious literary agent that very day. He'd dropped dead. You have to get things into proportion.

I was a bit surprised seeing a package at the door this morning. I don't like rejections, so a while ago I stopped enclosing return postage and told the recipients just to bin the submission if they weren't interested. That way you get an email. Emails are better. I don't know why. So I cost Pat Kavanagh money. Also, time. So it's all giving from her side really.

I should stop the hustling right here and now. What I think I'll do is contact Serpent's Tail, who published a similarly bizarrely contructed novel nine years ago. When they reject it, I'll send it to one wee Scottish publisher and that's it. I don't need the aggravation. What I'd really like is another ten seconds of non-self and emptiness, not going around trying to impress folk I don't even know.

I'm getting hustled to go out tonight. After that let's hope for two straight days of investigating ra bliss!

Rem Foundations!

Thursday 1:30 p.m.
Tis a sunny day here in Edinburgh town. Now that I don't have a book to write and there are no engagements with flatheids looming over my extended weekend, I should get serious about the juju. There are some thoughts that are supposed to help you turn towards the juju, things like considering the preciousness of human existence, it's uncertainty, karma and another one I can't remember. So I've got to think of stuff today to help improve my discipline.

Someone leading a life of quiet heroism came to see me last night. So his wife is in the final stages of multiple sclerosis. This means this person is totally dependant and has difficulty in communicating at all. We talked about mental deterioration. He came in from the garden and found her very upset and kind of hysterical. There is an alert gadget round her neck and the joe was just twenty feet away, but she'd forgotten she had the gadget and thought she'd been abandoned. Fung sake!

Thank God I'm not a flatheid!!

My auld maw goes to a day centre twice a week. It's full of demented people, but she'd not demented and neither was her old friend of 93. The old friend came into the centre one day very distressed. She couldn't sleep the night before due to pains in her chest caused by her lungs filling with fluid. She knew she was starting to die. She was very distressed. Even at 93 she was very distressed at the thought of dying.

You don't want that mind, Jack. You really don't. What you get if you don't meditate, Jack, is grief, sorrow, lamentations ...suffering in this life!

I spent the morning in the lobby. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss! This afternoon I'll spend in the allotment and if the rain stays off, I'll dig up some tatties to take to my auld maw tomorrow. Two weeks ago, I told her she should meditate more after I'd sank into ra bliss while she sang The Fields of Athenry. She said she meditates all the time. My maw is pretty disabled and housebound really. "Whit dae ye think Ah dae all day?" she says. "Stare at the four walls?" How my heart sang when I heard her saying that! Just an elementary education, but not too dumb to meditate.

What can you do about flatheids? Not much. Some cats got it; some cats aint!

5:51 p.m.
Had a lovely afternoon in the allotment! Ate quite a few raspberries while I was there. There are two kinds of raspberries. Not a lot of people know that! The bushes are full of those that come into season in September. I've meditated for about five hours today so far. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

00:20 a.m.
At the end of a fabulous day! Until just before ten when Shiva rang me up, all I'd said was thank you, I will have a wee bag. To the man in the shop. I sat in the lobby this evening for a couple of hours.

In my ambit, there are no more fortunate creatures! How can you be a more fortunate creature than a Hotboy, who can surf the oceans of ra bliss? Who can sit in the hut and be happy? Who can watch a fire burn and think: How wonderful to be able to sit here and watch the fire and do ra bliss! I've started to come out the hut this summer and sit outside, and do ra bliss. Confidence increases. Or I don't care.

I think associating yourself with the impermanent and temporary is not a good thing. Associating your self with a deity must be an interesting space to put your self in. Associating your self with ra bliss, ra bliss which has blown away the perameters (?) of physicality... well, Jack, even a flatheid like you should be able to see the virtue of that.

It's night night from RaBlissBlog at the end of a truly wonderful day!

Rat Between Writings Bit!

Tuesday 9:10 p.m.
Hello, Jack the Spam Robot, you Masai Warriors, Martians and anyone from outer space fortunate enough to land on RaBlissBlog! Even flatheids are fortunate creatures since the jig is not yet up and they may one day begin to meditate and head for ra bliss! Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

I don't have the idea in my head that I have to do anything anymore like ... write a book. As long as I don't read it and decide to re-write it, I'll be okay. Emanating as a deity has to be the focus now. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

I wrote a letter to Teresa down at the Samye Ling today. I told her about developments with ra bliss ... in the great Vajrayana, the juju of jujus, you just keep getting more and more. It's just a breath away, a breath away, a breath away! And I said my motivations in writing the book were good and that I'd a big agent person who'd agreed to look at three chapters. I asked her to wish me luck. I didn't say bang the gongs, blow the horns and ring the bells to blast away the obstacles. But I think she'll get the drift!

I sent a copy to Beef McDuck, who said he'd mercilessly criticise it. That might be useful. Another copy has been sent to Adolf, but I expect to hear nothing of that since Adolf's flatheid is so far up his bottom that I'd never hear whatever it was anyway. I sent another copy to Michi Regier because she read Light in the Dark and, I think, The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf (which could be hard work!). It's maybe too weird a book for her, but I had to send it as a courtesy because I was pleased she'd read Light in the Dark.

I had a look at Pat Kavanagh's client list again. Last night I flicked across a teevee show called Ruth Rendell's mysteries. That's one of her clients. Today "As I walked out one midsummer morning" by Laurie Lee came across my desk. I read this book when I was 26 years old and travelling on my own to perhaps stay in Amsterdam for a while. How much I liked that book! Anyway, she's the agent for his estate. John Irving, etc., etcetera. With a client list like hers, she won't have time to read my three chapters! But as you read down her client list, you might ask yourself which of these wonderful writers have ever experienced ra bliss. None. None of them. Zero. Zilch. Zippo. Well, would I rather be a rich and famous writer, like a better writer than Shakespeare, or be able to do ra bliss? Don't make me laugh!

Frankly, my dears, I don't give a damn! I don't need to get a book published! I don't need the money. Probably wouldn't make more than a grand anyway. I need less money. I'd like to give some money to the kiddo, but the kiddo doesn't look hungry to me. I'd like to give some money to the Samye Ling, but the Samye Ling will be there when I'm long gone. I'd like to give some money to the Domestic Bliss, but the Domestic Bliss is an independent professional wummin, the wonderful product of the feminism I so loved in the late sixties i.e. fung aff, Ah'm no doin' that! So I can't see anything in getting this book published for moi. Well, if I became a successful writer, I'd have to take to the hut and then go to Rumtek and ...what about the kids at school? I should just keep doing what I'm doing. It's happening anyway. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

Ra Book's Been Read!

Friday 9:32 p.m.
I read this email first thing this morning after getting out of bed. It's from the sensei and reverend. It said:

"Fucking wonderful novel! Hilarious and insightful. A clear teaching of the Dharma along with an expose of the Scottish education system - what more can a reader want?! It's like a mixture of Bukowskie's Post Office and Mathieson's The Snow Leopard.

I'm not being kind - I honestly love this book."

So that was not the worst first reaction! But he might well be being kind. It's hard being the first person to read someone's new novel. But the sensei is a proper writer. Far more than I am. He makes his money writing. He does journalism. He reads a lot of novels. So that's been a good start to the day. Anyone can say what they like about it now.

The sensei says Irvine Welsh has contacted him for the first time in years. They were quite pally just before Trainspotting was published. The sensei knows so many rich writers! And some skint ones like me.

I'm going to Bellshill to see my auld maw soon. She was singing a song about the Irish potato famine last week. I dug up some fabulous looking tatties from the allotment yesterday. Had a meal of boiled tatties, fried onions and a fried egg yesterday. Though I am a fat basturn, I couldn't resist. Nothing like it!
]
6:20 p.m.
Nice visit to Bellshill. When I came back, I was trying to get onto the sensei's blog, but soemthing's weird about the url. Or me. Probably me. I thought he'd stopped blogging, possibly unable to tap the keys anymore due to running out of fat Tennesseans to eat. This begging bowl logo kept showing up ... anyway, a link from statcounter took me onto his stuff and he's fine, it seems. So I read up on August before I went to bed. Anyone who cycles should have a look!! Somebody will shoot him. I'm surprised the policeman who pulled him over for cycling in the middle of the road lane didn't. You can probably get to him by sticking Barry Graham into google. His webpage shows up first. Anyway, he was very nice about the book again on his bloggy.

"Read Hotboy's new manuscript in one sitting, and it's brilliantly funny and urgently serious at the same time. I emailed him and said it read like a cross between Bukowski's Post Office and Matthiessen's Buddhist masterpiece The Snow Leopard, but, really, Hotboy is an author who can be compared only to Hotboy. He's a novelist of ideas who's also a great entertainer, and he would probably be selling a lot of books if it weren't for the fact that he's so unique as to be unclassifiable, which scares publishers and leaves marketing people scratching their heads.

I hope the world catches up with him sooner rather than later." It's nice to have another writer who likes your stuff, at least some of it.

Sunday 5:36 p.m.
I sent an email to Pat Kavanagh of PFD this morning, and included in it the comments on the book from the sensei and reverend. I found an email from her when I put on the computer a wee while ago. She says she'll look at three chapters! She can't look at it till after the 18th, but this is a total score. She's got a brilliant client list and I've told her I won't send it to anyone else. Neither I will. She's the agent for Laurie Lee's estate. Why she even bothered to reply to the email (on a Sunday?) God alone knows!

Ra bliss and heat are getting easier and easier to access. You sit and shoot a breath and there it is! What a fortunate, fortunate creature I am!