The First Book of PRANA - update

Applications and payments for the ISBN codes now complete.

Publication via Kobo imminent.

Watch this space...

Very excited...

The First Book of PRANA - book cover draft

What do you think?

The First Book of PRANA - coming soon...

The First Book Of PRANA will be available in ebook format very soon. 

Watch this space and the Kobo e-shelves...

This chronicle of darkness, light; hard rock and blues  may be destined to become your bedside companion forever. As I've said before - Lucifer has been my co-pilot for years - isn't it your turn? 

And you won't know what that means until you download Volume 1 and explore my deep-seated psychosis first hand...

Miss it at your peril. 

PRANA – SYNOPSIS 

PRANA is partially semi-autobiographical except for some (but certainly not all) of the darker bits...  

In essence it is a story about personal despair – being trapped with no foreseeable way out. 

But there's always a way out – it's just that we may not particularly like the consequences of what's being offered especially when that solution involves Lucifer and your soul.  

PRANA isn't your usual Faustian tale of horror but it does involve demons, angels, contracts, alchemy, conspiracy and as much shapeshifting as can reasonably be managed. With a cameo appearance by Nelson Mandela! 

It is both sacred and profane and runs haphazardly to the music of Blue Öyster Cult, The Police and Pink Floyd with an unfortunate yet unavoidable performance by The Pet Shop Boys. 

It is indeed a book for all tastes...as long as those tastes run to the macabre and a deep concern for the consciousness of the human race. 

Image courtesy: Shutterstock

THE TAO OF SPILL CHAI LATTE

Spill Chai Latté is no Eastern savant shrouded in the arcane miasma of I-Ching philosophical mysticism but he might well have been, such was the impact of his influence upon my mortal being this very morn. And me all altruistic and giving - the benevolent archetype in every sense of the word.

Y'see - we (my lovely and I) have this thing where, during the week, first thing in the morning, we drink the magical elixir of honey, lemon and cinnamon (all infused with boiling water, you understand) which, although invigorating and refreshing and may reach the parts that count, is not by any stretch of the (most feverish) imagination, coffee.

But on this day it felt like a deviation from the norm was the natural order of things and it took little persuasion, none at all actually, to convince my lady that she might consider coffee in favour of the usual toddy.

And so with the the still winter twilight suffusing the sky, having wrested myself from that realm somewhere between Morpheus and the posh British narrator of Jeffery Archer's latest audible offering, Best Kept Secret where the narration convolutes in concert with my mind state gravitating between REM and the actual plot line, I tumble out of bed still wired to the iPod courtesy of my silicone cabled Sennheiser ear-set and stumble toward the kitchen avoiding the usual posse of (apparently ravenous) cats.

After completing the ancient masculine ritual of testes VULNUS urinae, commonly known as scratching your nuts while pissing, I fed the cats (read: topped up the partially depleted bowls which they refuse to consider once the inner section diminishes although 50% of the pellets nestle quite undisturbed around the perimeter of the bowls, consciously rejected until desperation drives the cats to grudgingly nibble in these regions in that everlasting psychological struggle between human and feline). The cats almost always win.

While I am heating milk in the microwave and shovelling powdered chai latté into my knee-high tubular mug, I ponder the question of adding sugar (or in our case xylitol) to the mix. Karen likes her coffee latté'd as well. I usually just have rooibos tea - black and unsweetened and yes, I like it like that. But today I am going to splash out with a super-sized measure of viscous, creamy, sugary refreshment.

However, somewhere in a shackled box in the basement storeroom of my mind lies a small, gnarled, paranoiac gremlin who insists on shouting through the cobwebby gloom all the things that I shouldn't be doing to the body that maintains his vitality. Why, I'm not exactly sure as one would've thought that given the nature of an existence in perpetual bondage he'd be keen to be free of that particular state of being which might be induced through the ingestion of sugars, preservatives and all manner of poison masquerading as contemporary food and beverages.

But no, he squeals and complains like a regular Radio 702 listener after a South African general election or Pravin Gordhan's annual budget announcement.

I ignore the little bastard (although I can still hear him) and add another heaped spoon of the composite of lactose, sugar, whey powder, skimmed milk powder, unhydrogenated coconut oil, flavouring, black tea extract, salt and sodium phosphate cunningly packaged as "sweetened instant chai latté" into my mug before bombing it with nuked low fat milk and boiling water in equal measure.

It smells tip-top and Karen's coffee also tastes pretty darn good.

I wander (lonely as a cloud or something) back widdershins toward the bedroom, deposit the mugs of steaming beverage onto the bedside tables and tumble back into bed between cats now engaged in duvet surfing (with much clinging thrown in) as my legs create perfect undulating waves for this very purpose.

And to the iPad for the early morning surfing of an altogether more ethereal nature than that of the cats, their disgruntlement at being tossed about now quelled as they nestle ever closer to the heater in the corner of the room.

I am distracted. What can I say?

I reach out, I grasp the iPad, I swing it in my general direction but hell and fiery damnation if the charging cord doesn't develop a mind of its own and sweep my steaming brew onto the bed and against my buttocks, the one of the left persuasion, eliciting from me all manner of shrieks, profanity and gymnastics which had Karen hopeful momentarily until she realised that this was not antiquated Pictish foreplay but rather an expression of extreme unhappiness as my glowing arse cheek deftly moved out of the path of the frothing cream tsunami rapidly flowing along the mattress.

It's hot, it's sticky and it's fucking messy - no not carnal interaction of the biblical kind - the poxy chai latté shite that has now migrated through the sheets and into the mattress, down the bedside table, under the glass of the bedside table, onto the floor, under the rug and, if it had its way, would be trickling toward the Amazon River such was its desire to be an uninhibitedly free-flowing waterway. 

There was a mere mouthful left which I quaffed in a single swig. Man, it was sweet.

I thought I heard an echo in my head saying: I fucking told you so! 

But I'm sure I must have been mistaken.

Karen is customarily quiet at these times until the ranting or gesticulating has abated and she offers no platitudes or judgements of the events she has just witnessed, exhibiting mercurial restraint, knowing that the bed linen was changed just two days ago. 

While I wipe with a towel, curse with a passion and stride with a purpose back to the kitchen, I can hear the gremlin laughing throatily in that echoey prison of his.

It merely remains for me to ponder the Tao of Spill Chai Latté and whether this was invoked by the universe (initiated by me) at some profound and unknowable level that has disavowed the ingestion of enlightening-inhibiting synthetics - which does seem eminently more agreeable than admitting that I am just a clumsy fucking dickwad who should pay more attention to what I'm doing.

But I relent. I make a plain cup of rooibos tea, no milk no sugar and head back to the bedroom to commence this missive. I can still discern the aftertaste of the chai latté on my palate but remarkably, the laughing and the shrieking from elsewhere within my head has mercifully ceased.

ILLEGAL HOMELESSNESS

South Carolina criminalizes homelessness

So you're not allowed to be homeless! What the fuck will they legislate next - that culpable homelessness is punishable by death?

Or when the shelter "solution" doesn't work maybe they will simply round them all up and humanely dispose of them and make food out of them for the rest of society. 

We could, of course, short circuit the process and just get together on a Friday night and barbecue a few vagrants with a nice bottle of chianti... in the interests of law and order you understand...and cleaning up the streets for the rest of us...

Aseholes!


It's quite obvious that the bulk of Earth's populace are conditioned to be well-behaved, conformist consumers and slot into the system that serves their masters rather than themselves. Disempowerment through this conditioning and forced repetition that has become the belief of contemporary man has created the societal structure to which most of us adhere. This would be why the good old US is outlawing the harvesting of rainwater, and in some cases, planting of sustenance foods and suchlike - wishing to change the gun laws, then we have the Patriot Act, Homeland Security and on and on - all geared to hand over self-empowerment to the "authorities". If they could tax our intake of air they would - maybe that is yet to come...
And I have to disagree with the claim that the Maya failed or fell flat in any respect. If we are talking about the so-called doomsday/end of the world interpretations of their long count calendar - these are modern interpretations of a device which made no such claims nor, in fact, did the Mayans themselves. There are other Mayan artefacts which speak of a time beyond the end of that specific cycle as with the Hopi who spoke of humankind emerging into the 5th world (if I'm not mistaken) at around about the same time (2012). There was a galactic centering that took place at this time and that was indeed predicted as a potential energetic and consciousness shift affecting those who had the means to sense the effect. For most of us - we bought into the hype and expected (like Y2K), the sky to fall on our heads as with Asterix the Gaul and his clan mates. Didn't happen but who's to say something else just a tad more subtle didn't take place?
But there was no prediction of a biblical type apocalyptic armageddon as far as I am aware.
As for the obvious subjectivity and interpretive nature of the Christian bible in its many forms, translations, revisions and guises, the baseline of the references in the early books to "gods" rather than a supreme deity God, certainly, in my view, gives more credence to Sitchin's interpretation of these texts aligned with the Sumerian creation "mythology" and would certainly explain why so-called gods sought power and dominion over their creations... An omnipotent creator would have to have some serious psychoses to require a kick out of smiting His/Her/Its creations just for the hell of it (pardon the pun) or because they didn't please Him/Her/It.
Bottom line, though, however much we think we may have evolved (which isn't necessarily always an advancement or a positive change), our societies are geared less and less to manage our population and the unfortunates who find themselves on the streets for many reasons.
By beginning to implement legislation as has been proposed and lauded in South Carolina, is, for me, a diluted form of passive eugenics where the elite (whatever the fuck that means) get to choose who gets to do what and why - and if we extrapolate that to the fucktards in charge (making us even more dimwitted fucktards for putting them there unwittingly and believing the bullshit they spout - so maybe we do deserve all the shit we get then...) - they would happily eliminate those seen to be genetically inferior to them to promote their own genetic lines. Hitler, Kissinger, Bill Gates and many prominent "good" guys were/are all for this ethnic cleansing and have said as much. So their godlike pronouncements are in line with those of the wrathful gods of the Old Testament only now with iPods and bio weapons at their disposal rather than the old heaven-sent chariots of fire, plagues of locusts and suchlike...
Problem with the principle of advancing the chosen, however, is that they would be perpetuating bloodlines of fucktards like the GW Bushes of this world which isn't necessarily promoting the finest of the fine and the best of the best when we talk genetics - just the privileged few who deem themselves to be superior to the great unwashed masses who have as much right to be here as anyone else.
Wayne's World personified: We're not worthy....

(BBS) BENJAMIN BUTTON SYNDROME

So there I am sitting in a funky trendy Cape Town bistro off a cultural square near "the mountain" bru... Fact is - it's hard not to see the mountain from the City Bowl - probably impossible actually. 
The Capetonian tardy timekeeping bug has already established the day's ethos with a lacklustre attitude by a local car rental concern making me run late for my first meeting. Well, they didn't actually make me late but that's not the point. It was compulsory to bitch: I have Joburg fever and that calls for Teutonic precision - Swiss clock timekeeping. For a while at least. After rooibos tea, a scout of the project site and a rude video clip, played on the state of the art audio visual equipment, to kick off the site meeting, I am all out of Jozi paranoia. We'll survive the day despite a fifteen minute delay and just maybe we'll have time to go to lunch. Wow, lunch - away from your desk?
And the only female meeting attendee was politely asked to leave the room for the screening of the quirky, strip show with a twist: this self same female now confessing a love of porn and exhibitionism coupled with an all-consuming desire to experiment sexually in any way possible with her man, a partner who clearly doesn't rise to this challenge as much as she would like.
Why is it that when men are young, spotty, stupefyingly single, raging with testosterone and available, they are numbingly oblivious to sexual signals from the opposite camp like nasally challenged moths tumbling through a pheromone storm? Dumb assholes who don't deserve a functional todger and the inevitable post-pubescent long-playing diamond-hard erections!
Yet when you mature (or in the man's case - have flashes of seriousness in between your usual puerility) and are committed to a monogamous relationship, the pheromone receptors are flipped on as if by some cosmic switch - it must be linked to a milestone in the standard male life project plan - Task 187 "Monogamy Attained" this a predecessor for Task 69 in the new micro project plan you hadn't even opened until then - "Ability to receive all and any sexual signals from opposite sex".
And by some twisted divine retribution, convincing me consumately of God's femininity, you field the signs and innuendos, the coy glances and fluttering lashes, the lingering hand on a shoulder, the unnecessary exposure of high class augmented cleavage at a business lunch and you cannot respond as you were prepared to do in scenario 1 when you were all ribs and dick with no brains or morals.
In fact, some virile adolescents are so tight skinned when they achieve a hard-on that their ribs open and close like a venetian blind as they press up and down on their manhood! Or blinking may cause their foreskins to move back and forth. Caught in a sandstorm they might wank themselves to death...
It's truly bizarre and altogether the wrong way round. And, no ladies, we don't all think with our dicks when the signals or offers are thrown our way, although some women would like to categorise all men in this manner. Some of us just sigh and say to the little crickets on our shoulders: "Typical - some asshole who has it all and doesn't know it..."

CONSPIRACY THEORY

What's theoretical about a handful of corporations which have fingers in all the pies that effectively run the planet? Media, the food industry,the medical industry (not health), arms, oil and technology. 

What's theoretical about the governments in all so-called democracies passing more and more laws under the radar that purport to enshrine public interest but in reality undermine personal liberty? 

What's theoretical about global surveillance and public eavesdropping? This is legislated in every democracy of which I'm aware. 

We don't need to talk about dictatorships - they may be what lies at the heart of all governments but at least dictatorships don't pretend to be democratic.  

The only thing that remains theoretical is the reason that the corporations who own these governments actually do these things. 

If you believe it is in the interest of public safety and that old chestnut, national security, then I posit that you are a theoretical idiot.