First smoke in five months!

Friday 11.23 p.m.
                           Whilst boozing. As well!
                            Just been watching The Story of Mathematics on BBC 4. I could do maths at school, but I didn't see the point of it. Then I read Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. Loved it. Great book! Also, his autobiography in three volumes, dictated or written in his 90s. Maybe I'll start reading again.  Anyway, The Story of Mathematics is how the subject should be introduced. Loved it. I'll watch the second part after this.
                           Bumped into my brother Popeye today at the auld maw's. He's my wee brother. I love him. I don't see him so much these days, but that's the way it is when you get older. Babies grow towards independence and then everyone scatters and it's like the universe getting bigger and bigger and colder and colder, but somehow when you cross paths again it's like there was no time in between.
                           The auld maw wants the case with my stuff in it taken out of the attic. It's a bug in her heid. So me and Popeye goes up and gets the case down from the attic. Always a weird one going up there. The deid brother fell out of the attic towards his grave injuries. So we got the case down, us old, fat brothers.
                            The auld maw says it's just auld paper with writing on them, and why don't I chuck it out. I says that I'm supposed to be a writer (I'd just been talking to Popeye about Kindle) and that I used to write stuff on bits of paper .... I found the first copy of Alma Mater with a carbon copy. A carbon copy. Remember them?
                             Fung huge! I then found .... the case is now in the auld maw's hut. This is a much better hut than mine and I could live in that hut, but maybe somehow I am now.
                             Skinny McDuck arrived. Skinny might end up being the best of us all. Once I thought it would be good to be like Sammy Davis Junior. Like a black jew. Once I wanted to be a black, catholic jew. This is maybe what happens when you have been given some confidence. Celtic won the European Cup when I was about sixteen. I thought it was the result of the oppression. Excellence through stress. Anyway, the Skinny had a much worse time than me, but he is a very nice person indeed. We were upwardly mobile working class, given an even break by the Butler Education Act, but with Skinny we'd sunk back into the drink and who gives a fung. Froggy McDuck once told me that you had to overcome your background. I'd told him I was worried about the male centred world he'd lived in without a mammy. He's right. If you can survive Bellshill these days ....
                             I stayed sober for four or five days this week. The meditations have progressed. The wonderful Thrangu Rinpoche (I do hope he's getting better!) says that the boons - the bliss, non-thought, etc - are like a husk, and sometimes they will fall away and leave the seed. Things were happening in the meditations at the start of the week ... you are such a fool for not meditating that I can't really go into this, but I couldn't describe it anyway ... and I shouldn't have started drinking last night in Newmains. But sometimes you just have to admit that it's happening. It's happening. I don't know what it is and I don't know where it's going, but it is working. Falling down, stumblebumming, it doesn't matter. I have been blessed. When things progress like that, what else could you feel? It's bugger all to do with me!