ECHO 19/3/06

It is close on 5am on a Sunday morning – the boiler is chugging and rattling away downstairs and it is this noise that wakes me – it makes me angry – so I stumble out onto the landing and realize that the hall lights are on and the security door is unlocked – another light is on in the smoking den but there is no noise coming from within – I check the boiler, and discover the heating has been left on all night – I pull open the double doors to the den to see if anyone is still awake – on the sofa, still in his clothes but with a blanket pulled some way over him is A fast asleep; the detritus of a night’s marijuana smoking laid out before him on the coffee table and the TV plays the Austin Powers DVD menu screen over and over, repeating jingles of jaunty music that I am assuming have accompanied this thirty year old man into the land of hash nod – I switch the lights off and turn off the boiler –

Everything is about burning, using up, consuming without a thought for the planet - and it is people like this young man, selfish, inebriate, blinkered, without a care, that are sealing its ecological fate –

Once upon a time dope smoking went hand in hand with an alternative way of life, cranks who empowered themselves in the name of Mother Earth, motivators against war, poets who marched on Washington or started movements of change in the name of the future – now they are just wasted, lonely individuals whose eyes are turning redder by the day and whose faces look like joy is an ancestral commodity, and who feel the need to womb themselves in the unnecessary consumption of power and natural resources without thought, as if someone else will do the right thing and that will excuse them – its bullshit, it’s the typical human trait of passing on responsibility, its spoilt children messing up the garden and not clearing up after themselves – it is fashion – it is hip to care less – and we have no excuse with all the information to hand, all the evidence we would rather hide beneath the blanket, pull it right up over our heads and sleep on through, tranquilised until it is too late -