January 17, 2026. A Tinker's Cuss.

I have been in touch with the Assisted Dying Group, and they will send a doctor to assess me for a quick and durable death. I saw a cardiologist last week and she confirmed - once again - that my situation is terminal. She was from Manchester in the UK, and the previous week, she had taken her son to see Oasis in Melbourne.

I am not afraid of dying, but I am afraid of living this way for much longer.

A few days ago, Razor was fired from his position as the All Blacks' head coach; so there are people, as well as me, who are in a really bad way. It's a tragic thing to be fired from your lifetime dream.

I have thoroughly enjoyed most of my life, but I was badly ripped off by a business partner around 25 years ago. Were I not to die, I would have to live with ruminating thoughts about this situation for the rest of my days. I gave him his start in business and everything I had, and he turned around and stole everything he could. Some people believe their own press kits, which they wrote themselves. These days, he promotes himself as some sort of crown prince, as if he hung the moon himself.

I have found that the best thing to do with an impending death is to dream a lot. This helps press the bad thoughts out. Poetry also helps; it is a beautiful thing.

I read about Jorge Luis Borges, the famed South American literary giant - blind, I believe, and a writing genius. He says that when he was a kid, his father would pace up and down while reading poetry. Young Jorge couldn't understand the words, but he felt that something was happening to his whole body, mind, and spirit. It wasn't happening at an intellectual level. Maybe this is what the Aborigines call Dreamtime. Any state that takes you out of your own thoughts has got to be a good thing, right?

I have always believed in the power of poetry. Composing a poem is sometimes all that one can do when one is in an untenable situation.

It's not that I am throwing in the towel with this death trip. The whole process will obviously take months, and I will be hosed down with morphine throughout. I will be kissing God. God loves me.

The only regrets I have about an impending death are that I can't take Kelly with me, nor my dogs, nor my Volkswagens.

As a child, I spent many long weeks in the hospital. This was a terrifying existence. Each night, a blonde-headed nurse would come by and kiss me goodnight on the forehead; I still remember her scent. Her kiss elevated me into a very pleasant dream. It was a stolen thing. Now Kelly does that, and it's a magic thing.

"What I do is me: for that I came." (From As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins)

September 21, 2025. A Tinker's Cuss – Fixing to Die.

I rasp rather than breathe these days. I can feel death closing in on me.

Last night, a quadriplegic fell out of bed here in the Respite Centre. He screamed in pain for what must have been a half hour before anyone noticed. His howling had gone unheard above the crying of the inmates who were deeply disturbed at a rugby game on the TV. There was a lot of crying.

The inmates here are pretty good. They've done their fighting, and now most of them are fixing to die. To me, dying is a simple proposition and not half as scary as it once may have seemed.

I've had a good life. I have very few regrets, none that keep me awake at night.

I've met Johnny Winter and read him a James K. Baxter poem from a poster. It's as if these two dudes met in the middle. "Man, that cat can write," is what Johnny Winter said of James K. Baxter.

I've met the woman who wrote Eat, Pray, Love and introduced her to the writings of Janet Frame.

I saw The Who live in concert in Atlantic City about eight years ago. Zak Starkey was the drummer at that time, and in my opinion, he is the best drummer in the world.

I saw the band Yes live in concert in Melbourne in 1972 or '73.

I wore Levi jeans before anyone else wore them in Christchurch. In April 1974, I got my first pair of Lee jeans at Surf, Dive & Ski in Gloucester Street in Christchurch. Their fit was abnormal. Not long after, I was wearing a Schott Perfecto leather jacket.

In 1973, I cut open a safe from a chemist's shop in the South Brighton Plantation. My reward was dirty jeans and a top-level blow job. As I was cutting open the safe, Sharon's mother was trying to drag her away from me, but Sharon knew what was best for her.

When I was 16, I owned a 1939 Ford V8.

The best thing about it all is that I've had some mighty good friends, and we have laughed a lot, knowing full well that life is but a joke.

I have had many great dogs. At the time of writing, I have a Bichon Frise called Robert Johnson and a Doberman called Annie. Each of them knows more about love than Carly Simon.

Should I go to Heaven, I won't be lonely, and should I go to Hell, I'll be even less lonely.

I have met some of the greatest liars on the planet. One of them was an actual business partner. I don't hate him, I don't dislike him; he is simply what he is. He can spin a magnificent yarn, and there is nothing that the world likes better than a tall tale.

Making your way out of the sludge pit is the most difficult thing in life. Just when you think you are doing really well, something extraordinary may happen, and you will slide back down to the beginning again.

Going to jail has been the most educational thing I have ever been through. Seeing men cry like that has opened a canister of love within me. I couldn't hate you if I tried.

Thank you to everyone who has read my blogs. Thank you to everyone who has loved Phantom Billstickers.

And especially, thank you to everyone who gets up out of bed every morning and decides to walk a straight line.

February 23, 2025. A Tinker's Cuss – Not Today.

I've not been well in a while. I can scarcely breathe to walk across the room and it seems like every day I have a brand new symptom. I've had lots of tests and nothing uncovers the problem. I've been hauled off to hospital in an ambulance countless times.

A couple of nights ago the doctor came up to the house and suggested we make an initial contact with a palliative care centre.

At the same time he looked deep into my eyes and asked me if I thought I was going to die.

"Yes."

This doesn't concern me because I feel like I've had a good and interesting life and been a lot of interesting places.

There have been a lot of people I have never stopped loving, my Mother, my daughter, my wife, my grandkids, five or six genuine human beings, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Richie McCaw.

I've owned thirty or forty splendid Volkswagens and three or four magnificent Rovers built when England could build cars. I've gone 130mph+ down the motorway in a Porsche and I've laughed like hell when I was a passenger in a mate's Dodge Super Bee going at about the same speed. I trusted him implicitly. He was a shy sort of guy and never got laid much. He made it up in speed. Speed was his lover.

I've had some really beautiful doggies. They were all warm, affectionate and a whole lot of fun. They knew when to lick me and when not to lick me.

I've helped build a spectacular business (Phantom Billstickers) and I've worked hard for the Arts in New Zealand. I've also helped get some of our best bands off the ground. I booked New Zealand's finest venue, the Gladstone Hotel in Christchurch. I also booked the Hillsborough in Christchurch, probably the second best.

I gave hugely of myself. Because I was a promotor I ended up hated by a large number of bands and second-rate people. Many people in bands cannot accept the fact that they have little appeal, they would rather blame the promotor or the radio station advertisements, or that poster run. People are idiots. There are some humble people in bands, but not many.

I knew Graham Brazier and Dave McCartney very well. I laughed with them. They had huge talents.

I had trouble with my father but I am thankful for his quiet manner and his intelligence. He said I looked like a little moron, but I think that helped me rather than hindered me. His honesty was passed on to me. He lost many opportunities in life because he withheld his intelligence, he was shy, but you could not fault his manners.

In a lifetime of meeting many crooks, my father was not one.

I collected stamps. I am an absurdly good chess player. The best in Paparua Prison in my time.

So, you see, I've played with knights and thieves.

I was either wheeling around oxyacetylene cutting gear or getting stoned and reading Jean Genet.

I was hurt and abandoned from a very early age. I had to build my relationship with human warmth as I grew up. I was terrified for the first 50 years of my life.

I've been ripped off by some terrible scoundrels because they wanted what I have got. More fool to them, what I have is not transferrable.

I can free-associate at will.

I've been to jail and I've seen how people behave when they are allowed to.

I've tossed Molotov Cocktails at brick walls. Out of jail I owned an AK47. I slept beside it with the safety catch off. You cannot buy insurance like that.

I got off the junk.

When I say, "I'm gonna die," to my wife she says, "Not today."

I'm not going to die today. I'm here. Life is good. I've seen some stuff. I've been in the middle of the real experience. I kiss you.

"Not today."

December 16, 2024. A Tinker's Cuss – Murray.

Murray was one of my very best friends for such a long time.

He died around five years ago. He had some kind of aneurysm at a traffic light in Melbourne. He was working delivering Heroin for one of the gangs. They didn't offer health insurance as part of the plan.

I called Murray up in the hospital. He was semi-conscious but recognised me straight away even though we hadn't talked for more than a decade.

He spoke in the soothing way he always did: James…

He asked me if I knew when the nurses would be bringing him his Methadone.

His wife arrived from the middle east where she had been nursing within a couple of days. Murray pointed her in the direction of the Heroin in his flat. She overdosed and died.

Murray died too.

Sadness, grief and loss is part of the daily diet of a drug addict, as is ecstasy and joy. No one really knows what particular bundle will arrive and at what time. Nothing is secure.

Last week in the papers it was reported that a 61 year old psychiatrist was seeking to have a driving conviction pardoned after 40 years or so. He was a notable sort of bloke and had spent time motivating the All Blacks. But the gig was that every time he travelled to the USA he had to have a waiver of ineligibility to enter and when he travelled to Australia he had to declare his conviction which no doubt held him up in the line.

When I do right no one remembers, when I do wrong no one forgets. Paparua Prison Tattoo.

When you have been painted black by part of the government apparatus then you stay black and life becomes difficult at the oddest of times.

The psychiatrist's appeal for a pardon was not allowed.

We are living in the time of the Orange Jesus where if you have political clout you can get away with anything. The old saying is true, it's not what you know, it's who you know.

I don't expect to be pardoned for my sins. I have a waiver of ineligibility to enter the USA but every time I go there I am referred to Secondary and I must wait sometimes hours to face a grim faced officer who is usually in a sour mood and who watches Clint Eastwood movies over and over in his downtime.

I always get the feeling that what the officer really wants is for me to lose my temper. I feel prodded and pushed and spoken down to. I feel taunted and harassed. It doesn't matter how old my convictions are or how kind I've been, nor how successful I have been in business.

I am a bad guy. I don't know Joe Biden nor Donald Trump. I am just a bad guy.

But I have people who love me even if the bureaucrats don't. Junkies often love each other in a very deep way. They face common enemies. Sometimes they laugh and they cry together. Murray and I did that. We loved each other.

Merry Xmas!

November 20, 2024. A Tinker's Cuss – Coldplay.

Kelly and I have just been downtown in the '52 Bug. It's pouring with rain, and ordinarily we don't take any of my Volkswagens out in wet weather.

The bug ran out of gas, and we had to crawl to a gas station to fill it up. With a 6-volt ignition, it doesn't pay to have the lights and wipers on as well as the fog lights. The '52 bug doesn't have a fuel gauge, which can be difficult at times.

I had to go to my pharmacy and pick up some Prednisone and antibiotics. I've not been breathing well. In fact, I have some kind of shadow on my lung, the same as I did when I was eight years old.

When I was eight, my mother told me the doctors were going to try to keep me alive until I was ten years old and then take a lung out. No one seems to know what this meant. My mother was very much in awe of doctors, so it's possible she misinterpreted everything.

When I was ten, they put me into hospital and the shadow had gone. I never got sick again for years.

Nowadays, we often talk about Healthy Homes. I was brought up in a house that had rotten floorboards and a room dedicated to coal for the coal range. We lived right by the bush in Dunedin, and it was always damp.

But I've always been good at overcoming obstacles in my way. I've always gone against the tide.

I often ask Kelly what I should write about in my next blog. This time she said Coldplay.

My chemist is a 45-year-old Mormon, and he took his daughter to see Coldplay over the weekend. This was the very first concert he had ever been to in his whole life, and he loved it. That's good enough for me. Coldplay brings happiness to millions of people, and I can't criticize that.

I've never seen a Mormon dance.

I often write about freedom and the importance of having one's own views. Bob Dylan once said that no one was free and that even the birds were chained to the sky.

Mao Tse-tung, when he sent Chinese troops to help North Korea in the Korean War, said: Without the lips the teeth are cold.

There is nothing worse in this life than to be alone. Solitude has no friends. That is my view.

Yet it is easy enough to feel that one is on one's own. My mother went to work when I was a kid. There I was all day, lonesome and unable to breathe properly. That is being alone.

My friend Mad Dog was alone. He died of a morphine overdose on Christmas Day many years ago. I have not yet stopped crying for him, for his solitude and what he could have been.

In my terror, I surround myself with people. We help each other.

Yesterday a very good friend got in touch with me after several years.

I glowed all day. That's what friendship does. It warms the heart.

October 7, 2024. A Tinker's Cuss – My Life in the Bush of Volkswagens.

I passed my driver's license in April 1968, the day after the Wahine disaster.

There were cracks in the road up on Murray Aynsley Hill in Christchurch and that's where the traffic cop started screaming and yanked on the hand brake. He drove the rest of the way back to town and gave me a pass because he never wanted to see me again.

My first car was a Vauxhall J and it never went at all. The second was a 1939 Ford V8 Sedan which was a beautiful car. I sold it, then I bought it back. I put it off Dyers Pass Road because I was spooning and kissing my girlfriend at the same time as driving.

I remember running down the bank to the car (I had jumped out) and past my girlfriend to get to the vehicle. That's young love for you. She was some kind of lover lady let me tell you.

But, it is best not to spoon and drive.

Two years after this I bought my first Volkswagen, a 1960 Beetle in a beautiful turquoise colour. It had arrived in a CKD (Complete Knocked Down) state and was assembled somewhere up near Auckland. It had only semaphores for indicating turns on the road. It was 6-volt and so the headlights were dull and starting it was sometimes a dubious proposition. But to hear it sputtering up was pure heaven.

I have owned Volkswagens where the rust has been fixed up using cardboard, newspaper, silver paper, gaffa tape and old tin cans ironed out flat and then affixed to the car using pop rivets. This is all part of the adventure.

The other common issue with Volkswagens is their vulnerability to catching fire in the engine compartment. There is a fuel line that goes to the carburettor that often becomes corroded and leaks gas on to the hot motor. Check it often and always travel with a fire extinguisher.

Currently, I own four vintage VWs and I'm on the lookout for a nice VW Notchback from the mid 1980s. In my lifetime I have owned probably thirty Volkswagens and I loved every single one of them whether or not one could see the road through the floorboards.

My 1952 Bug won Best in Show and Best in Class at the 2024 VW Nationals held in Kaikoura. This one I found in California and had it converted to right hand drive in NZ by my masterful VW restorer Mr Dave Hermans at Revive'm near New Plymouth.

I have a 1958 Volkswagen Transporter which is being converted to a Samba by Dave Hermans. It's been eight years now. The rego plate was Furtha. It has never failed to start.

Then I have a 1963 21-window VW Samba that I bought in Australia. It was a prize winning car and has a 2.3 litre motor. It had been owned by Michael Ryan who was Hugh Jackman's personal trainer. Apparently, the Wolverine himself was often seen driving around Bondi Beach in it. It goes like a cut cat and you could easily cruise around all day at 80mph in it. It is a thing of Beauty, a work of art.

My 1956 Beetle I have owned for about six or seven years. A woman owned it and restored it in Australia before that. A local mechanic whilst servicing it had it on a hoist and proclaimed that the underside was perfect. You could turn this car upside down and eat your dinner off it.

I have had a mighty good life with lots of spooning in it. I'm here for the enjoyment of it all.

Spoon on Brothers and Sisters!

May 1, 2024. A Tinker's Cuss – Paparua

In April 1974 I was found guilty of various narcotics offenses and driven out to Her Majesty's Prison at Paparua.

The Meat-wagon as it was known was an old 1948 International truck with an enormous cab on the back which housed approximately twenty prisoners and three guards. Each of them had an alcoholic look with ruddy cheeks and big ears. Funny the things one remembers.

The truck bounced up and down having no suspension to speak of. Everything inside it that could be destroyed was. It was a truck built for angry men. It swayed from side to side. In the streets of the city people stopped and stared and it was like we were being sent to Devil's Island.

I still thought they'd gotten the wrong man. I was completely at the mercy of my addiction and had very little experience of the criminal justice system. I was moderately withdrawing from opiates and I climbed inside my Swandri wool jacket just as much as I could. I was wearing John Lennon sunglasses, Levi jeans and a pair of workingman's boots.

After all, I had been working very hard busting open chemists and opening safes.

At Pap I was put in an association cell with about a dozen sick alcoholics for the night. Down the wing were some cracked windows behind the bars which gave one a view of the old capital punishment hanging yard. People can be mean.

The alcoholics cried and sweated all night, some of them hallucinating.

My uncle was an alcoholic and saw service in the 23rd Battalion in WW2. He was the oldest man in the unit at 36 years old and put his age back by a dozen years in order to serve. He lived with us when I was growing up. He was shell shocked and could not hardly string a sentence together, but he still worked as a boilerman at Kempthorne Prossers. Every Saturday afternoon, having been to the pub after working in the morning, he'd crawl up Russell Street in Dunedin on his hands and knees.

He was in the merchant navy before the war and my mother said that he'd been in every jail in the world for drunkenness including the infamous Tombs in Brooklyn. He was a man who knew how to enjoy himself.

My uncle had been at the battle of El Alamein where 3000 Kiwis were killed. The only story he ever told us about the war was when the Battalion was in Greece and some soldiers were gathered together brewing up a pot of tea and some Stukas came screaming out of the sky directly above them. On that day they were lucky.

After the war he was sent a letter from some German Paratroopers association inviting him to join and complementing the New Zealanders on their fighting ability. He was a very, very kind man.

In jail, after the association cell, two months later, I was sent to the minimum security jail at Rolleston. A general all round nightmare. Like Homer's Odyssey but with more snakes.

It housed the notorious child molester Alf Vincent. He went on to do more than 30 years inside. I remember waiting in the food line one day and Alf was running up and down imploring: It was little girls, not little boys. I'm not queer.

We are all flawed in one way or another, and Alf just happened to get the short straw. The kids got even shorter straws.

We all clamour around looking for love and in the end it might just kill us.

October 2, 2023. A Tinker's Cuss – US Consulate

It has been a big week.

I attended an interview at the US Consulate in Auckland. I am applying for a Waiver of Ineligibility to enter the USA. What stops me from getting an ordinary Visa is a raft of drug convictions in the 1970s. I am married to an American and have been for fourteen years. I am not eligible for a Green Card owing to a Heroin conviction from 1974. When I do right no one remembers, when I do wrong no one forgets (Paparua Prison tattoo).

The woman who interviewed me was incredibly warm and this has been on my mind since the interview. She made a recommendation that a Visa be granted and now all the paperwork has gone to Homeland Security in the USA for a lookover. I have been granted waivers before so there shouldn't be a problem.

It was worth going to the interview in order to get just a little bit of humanity. I have been depressed for a while, my beautiful daughter, Hope, died a few short months ago and I myself went through chemotherapy a year back. Franz Kafka said that when one is disturbed one should move one's finger along one's eyebrows.

I have regrets about being a junkie. I treated people wrong and I wasn't able to maintain stable relationships. I was angry all the time. But I did have the very best friends in the world and we laughed at all the absurdities of this life. I'm thinking all of us just wanted the little piece of humanity, to feel warm about people and in return have them feel warm about you.

When I was a kid my mother would sometimes tell me she should never have had me. My father would tell me that I looked like a little mongoloid and that the trouble with me was that I didn't want to be as miserable as the rest of them.

So I grew up with a lot of self-loathing and often, even these days, my brain tells me bad stories. Friendships have been what has kept me going. People at their best keep me going, it's not the meds, it's not the money, it's having genuine friends and doing good work for others. Love is the most cleansing feeling.

I believe if it wasn't for drugs giving me the release they did, that I wouldn't have lived past my twenties. My friends and I were all half-angel and half-pirate.

I love you.
Jim Wilson

August 25, 2021. A Tinker's Cuss – National Poetry Day.

It is National Poetry Day in New Zealand on Friday this week. It is a bleak and lonely week to have National Poetry Day even though poetry helps us reach to the very bottom of our souls. We look around the world and there is nothing but trouble, but poetry is mostly sweet in one way or another.

For me, it highlights friends who are no longer with me and the yearning for the time we spent together in better days gone past.

Friendships are mostly what has gotten me through life, good mates that I could clear the slate with, to tell them about every single time I wronged and every single time I felt wronged in return. My life has been up and down and that feeling firstly came from my mother who was the tempestuous type, when she loved you she really loved you and when she took you into the coal room with a leather belt she did damage. The worst kind of damage she did me was when I really needed her and she didn't respond at all.

I was doubled up with Black Pete Raponi in Her Majesty's Prison at Paparua over the winter of 1975. Peter was one of the most beautiful men one could ever meet. He was from up north and I believe he was adopted as a child by Pakeha parents. They had given him the world, but something was missing within Peter that nothing or no one could ever make up for. Peter was left to yearn his whole life through. He was a very good chemist burglar and he and I would often set off in my big black Rover 100 with gas cutting gear in the back so as to cut open the safes in chemist shops. This kind of behavior made us really good friends. I could count on him and he could count on me. He liked to overdose and he did it regularly. When you went to revive him he'd sometimes say: No, leave me alone to enjoy it. It's mine. I want to enjoy it. Usually he'd be revived in just the nick of time.

He would often repay the same favour to me.

These chemist shops almost always had Pharmaceutical grade Cocaine, and then Morphine powder and cans, and Omnopon, Palfium, Pethidine, Opium Tincture and so on and so forth. It was like a holiday in the South of France and in that state one couldn't be annoyed by anything.

A famous writer (Anita Brookner) once said that time misspent in youth was often the only freedom one ever had in one's life and I agree with that. No one in our group raised an eyebrow at the behaviour of another. There was no moralising and no one judged anyone else. Abnormal behaviour was tolerated. New Zealand, back then, was a place that one had to bust out of, one way or another.

Poetry, among its hundreds of very fine features, also helps us escape. In life, are we not here to help each other?

I have just bought a beautiful 1963 Volkswagen Kombi Samba. On National Poetry Day I'm going to load up my Bubble and drive them the long way to the supermarket whilst someone reads poetry until another takes turn at doing the same.

No doubt I'll be glowing from ear to ear. I call this Freedom.

Keep the Faith,
Jim Wilson

August 4, 2017. A Tinker's Cuss – The Who in Atlantic City

Me and Kelly entered the USA at the end of May. I always get a second interview at Homeland Security. I've come to accept this. In the interview room, a beautiful Peruvian woman of about twenty-nine years of age was trying to explain to an officer why she had overstayed her visa by nine months last year. And how come she drove through the desert with a guy and stayed with him for six weeks in a dusty old motel room and didn't know his name or even the name of the desert. She said that the motel had a refrigerator, but that was about all she could remember. She called the Homeland Security officer "Senor."

I think I know where that motel is.

Me and Kelly attended the Berkeley Book Festival and gave out about 100 copies of the Phantom Billstickers Cafe Reader and talked to dozens of people about Kiwi poetry and music. People here love New Zealand. They often see it as an escape.

At the book festival, I met quite a few of the old 60s and 70s radicals who now own publishing houses. They have been bashing their heads against a merciless system for decades now and are mostly punch drunk from the effort.

Me and Kelly went to a franchise coffee house and there was a black guy of about 75 years of age sitting at a table with his girlfriend. They looked to be homeless, but they obviously cared deeply for each other. She wore a giant fur coat in temperatures approaching boiling point and carried herself with a modicum of decorum and the utmost of style.

The black guy was about three fourths blind. What this guy did was amazing. He sang a tune in a talking blues style and whilst doing this he drummed the table top with fingers bigger than drumsticks. The vocals were in perfect synchronicity with the drums and his knees went up and down. He had a huge smile on his face and his girlfriend's face lit up with pleasure. The entire song consisted of just the one line:

"That Lucy's a bad girl."

He repeated it over and over like he knew. She also smiled in a knowing way.

That song has stayed with me for two months now.

Every day more than 90 Americans die of overdoses of either Heroin, Fentanyl or prescription opioids. In New Jersey alone more than 2000 died of either Heroin or Fentanyl overdoses in 2016. This is more than those who died in car accidents, gun deaths and suicide combined.

When you're around this unhappy kind of environment for any period of time, I believe you have to keep doing things that make you feel happy and satisfied even if you have to force yourself to do it. Then, you have to consistently turn your back on The Bad of everyday life. You are at war.

So, keeping in mind my theory about the need for satisfaction, me and Kelly went to a concert by The Who in ramshackle Atlantic City. This was the key to satisfaction.

I enjoyed The Who to the full. I walked on air when Pete Townshend windmilled and Roger Daltrey threw that microphone cord around. The songs sounded as perfect as they always did. The band opened with what seemed to be a 45 second version of Can't Explain which was beautifully succinct and most precise.

But what I really liked the most was studying Zak Starkey on the drums. This kid born in 1965 was, to me, the real star. I thought about his mum, Maureen, and about how Zak was given his first drum kit by his Uncle Keith when he was eight years old. I thought about his dad and all this whilst watching a very confident drummer, never too much, never too little, and perfectly in tune and right on time.

At Peets, the old guy at the table banging out That Lucy's a bad girl was very sensuous. He obviously had a huge heart and here he was banging this song out for a very beautiful woman. I think they are still there and lucky them. They may be homeless, but they are so obviously in Love.

Whether you make a million dollars a year or whether you are on the very bones of your rectum, if you are in Love then you are a millionaire. This is True Dinks.

May 30, 2017. A Tinker's Cuss – Raymond the Bulldog

The photo above is of Raymond, our bulldog. Raymond is on his way to a doggie farm where he'll stay whilst Kelly and I visit the USA in order to work on my writing. I've been planning a book for about twenty years now. There has always been something or other in my way and usually it has been me. I am my own hangman. Many of us are I guess. I usually don't think I have anything worthwhile to say. That's what depressives do. That's where they live.

This blog will be posted after I have safely entered the USA. I always get a second interview at Homeland Security because of narcotics convictions (the last one being in 1979) and a conviction from 1992 for assault with intent to injure. Hell, I was really beginning to like jail at one point. In prison you know who your mates are and things are very simple: You bash me; I will bash you. You look after me; I will look after you.

I always get sprung by computers at borders. Those computers remind me of the past and they make me feel dirty. But, I done the crime and so I must do the time. This time is measured out in shame and disgust.

I've been clean for a good number of years now and I have tried hard to mend my ways, but I'm thin skinned and that makes many things difficult. I have to think a lot (rather than simply react) and often I've gotten things wrong. I've said "No" too many times to the ice-creams that have come my way in this life as I've sometimes thought they were shit sandwiches.

I think this second part of my life has been about making amends and I think reflection is good for people. But I'm just as likely as anyone else to go off the rails.

So, today I'm packing up my Paul Butterfield compact discs and we should be in Illinois by the weekend. I aim to be putting up a few poem posters around Abraham Lincoln's house in Springfield, Illinois.

I've read a lot about Abe lately and it seems to me he was able to live under considerable duress without acting out. He was a depressive anyway and so he probably had more of an internal dialogue going on than a need to lacerate others. There are people out there who disembowel others first, and then they ask questions.

In the age of the internet, laceration has become a full time job for many. They might disguise themselves as critics because that term might seem less harmless than being a prick.

Lincoln did not generally lose his temper and there is only one recorded incident where he hurled his stovepipe hat to the floor and uttered a swear word. On that occasion one of his generals was heading away from the Battle of Signal Mountain rather than towards it.

There was a television show on Sunday night here in New Zealand where a young bloke had committed suicide. It was heartbreaking to watch. He was probably 22 and had some problems and ended up in Hillmorton Hospital in Christchurch. A shrink had described him as a narcissist. The word narcissist is almost a new swear word which people hurl at each other these days. I think the 22 year old read the report and that night he committed suicide.

When I was in Cherry Farm mental hospital in 1975 waiting for a court report, a shrink had described me as being unable to express negative feelings. This has stayed with me for over forty years now and I've proved him wrong millions of times. But it was a dangerous label.

Six or eight months ago one of my best mates died. He was with me in Sunnyside Mental Hospital in 1973 or 1974. Me and my mate would climb into the same bed and read Hammond Innes novels together. Seeing this, the shrinks would send the nurses back to give us more drugs. There are some very positive things to be said about Hammond Innes novels.

My friend had about three major things happen to him at once before he died – a heart attack, a stroke, and a cancerous growth in his liver. We hadn't talked for at least twenty years and so we connected together over the phone. I was in the USA, he was in Melbourne. In 1972 we lived together in View Street in Dunedin and we had the time of our lives.

I called my mate and on the phone everything slipped away and we touched each other again. The rubbish and the airs and graces of our lives slipped away and we were whispering the truth into each other's ears once again. This was the most incredible experience and we repeated it three or four times before he died. His wife arrived from a distant land to look after him and she died of a Heroin overdose before she could. He knew this and then he died.

There were no airs or graces, no lacerations and no disembowelments, just the vital chemical stuff of closeness and intimacy which people need if they are going to have a satisfying life.

We all die for it.

March 27, 2017. A Tinker's Cuss – Bob Dylan in Chattanooga

I did this thing when I woke up this morning, I picked up a magazine and the headline was 'Perceive your utilities provider as a partner.' I'll never do that again. There has to be more to life.

I then switched on the internet and everyone seemed to be clamouring and screaming to be noticed. People were sharing and trading likes. I don't think any of the photos were true and most of the comments were obtuse or left-handed at best. The news certainly wasn't true, but then everyone knows that now.

We are most probably alone and our lives belong solely to us and not to some politician or news outlet. If we were to be lucky, then we would merely play a bad hand very well. And, as they say, expectations are pre-meditated resentments.

On the internet there is a brutal poet and he posts brutish posts and usually about twenty-five a day. He threatens to unfriend people all the time if they don't notice him. I unfriended him. He makes no one's life easier.

It's been a while since I wrote a blog because I just never knew what to say. I tried to watch everything go past me and to not get hooked up in it. I concentrated on loving the people and the doggies that were important to me. After all, that's the only game worth playing.

I went to see Bob Dylan in Chattanooga, Tennessee last November. The show was in a beautiful old and ornate theater, the Tivoli, capacity 1750. During that week Donald Trump had been elected president and both Leon Russell and Leonard Cohen had died. There was a big earthquake in the South Island of New Zealand. It was a very meaningful period of time.

Bob Dylan played the Tivoli without a backdrop and without stage lighting apart from the very basic theater lights. There were no giant videos beside the stage. There were no guitar changeovers and no roadies running across the stage wearing sunglasses. None of the band spoke. No one smiled. No short cuts to success, just the beautiful essence of the songs and the musicians themselves.

At this time, people all over the world were debating whether Bob Dylan was a poet since he'd just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. People were fighting with words. Bob kept his own counsel. This was a matter of dignity.

At this time, Chattanooga was ringed by bush fires that people were deliberately lighting. The city authorities suggested that people wear surgical masks in the streets.

My sister is still alive if anyone remembers my last blog. She has terminal cancer and is on heavy-duty opiates. She can take visitors for about a half hour at a time and then she needs to sleep.

I'm pretty sure I know the voice she hears the most when she falls into a slumber. She hears my mother yelling to her from the bottom of the stairs at our old house on Russell Street in Dunedin in the 1950s.

My dad never yelled, never raised his voice, so I think my sister just waits quietly for him. Some day soon she might hear a lot of his voice. I do, every day. He is my guiding light.

My father never went to high school and yet he quoted Shakespeare all the time. He said that the quality of mercy is ne'er strained or whatever he said. Often, for weeks, the only things he spoke were Shakespearean quotes. I think he knew that it was best to not offer up any thoughts of your own because life was baffling and Shakespeare had already said all that needed saying.

A smile from my father (once or twice a year) was worth a million dollars.

Bob Dylan never comments much either. He hardly ever remarks on that which surrounds him. He doesn't waste words on stuff that will never change. People say what they want to believe.

In Chattanooga, Bob Dylan wore black and he led the band out to the stage after the show was finished. They didn't take a bow, they just looked off into the far roving distance in a yearning and deep way. They stood still for several minutes.

Recently, I got some really nice messages from a woman who knew my mother. This woman was a child when my mother was the housekeeper who looked after her and her family in their home on London Street in Dunedin. My mother was described as a glowing, warm and enthusiastic person who lit up the house as soon as she walked in in the mornings. These messages have buoyed me for a month now.

The older I get, the more I want to be close to my parents. Both of them are dead now of course, but each day I just get to see more of the genuine sense that they made. They didn't see any point in crying over spilt milk, they worked hard and they were as good as they possibly could be to each other and to the world. Nothing about them was a pose and they were simple and unaffected people.

That's worth a million likes.

April 11, 2016. A Tinker's Cuss – ANZAC Day

My dad never went to WW2. He was a tractor driver on a farm up the Pig Root in Otago and he was either excluded because New Zealand needed to keep the farms going or his broken lungs stopped him. My dad was an asthmatic and he gasped for breath his whole life through and more so when he felt lonely or misunderstood.

I remember being vaguely embarrassed about my dad not going to war when I was a kid in Dunedin in the 1950s.

My uncle went. He was with the 23rd Battalion. His records show that he went to Scotland in 1940 and then in early March 1941 he arrived in Egypt. My uncle served 14 days field punishment in late April that year for drunkenness. I am quite proud of this because if there's one thing you want to do when you are young it's that you want to flare up with your mates.

My uncle came home in 1943 after being medically discharged and he could never put a sentence together again for his whole life. His discharge address was the Clarendon Hotel in McLaggan Street, Dunedin. I'd say that's mighty staunch.

My family moved into Dunedin from the country in around 1950. My Uncle Les loaned my parents the money to put a deposit on a house in Russell Street. My uncle's records show that he was given a gratuity of 144 pounds, 16 shillings and sixpence. I think this is how much El Alamein was worth.

I was the late-comer to the family. I was born in Dunedin and I will always be born in Dunedin.

My closest sister was twelve years old when I was born and now she is dying.

I was Sweet Baby James and my two oldest sisters who were 16 and 17 when I was born loved me to bits. My brother who was fourteen when I was born was the best mate I ever had. He showed me how to love people and he once stood up on a table at a pub in South Dunedin and led the whole bar in We Shall Overcome. This was in about 1963 or 1964 during the American Civil Rights era.

When I was a kid, my mother would sometimes say that I was a mistake and my father would sometimes say that I was nobody's bastard. This was because they were unhappy. People are sometimes cruel to other people when they are unhappy. I've never seen a happy person be cruel to anyone else in my whole life.

My brother died in a tractor accident in a road gang out near Ravensbourne when I was fourteen. My two eldest sisters died of cancer within a month of each other in 1989. In 1990 I sweated out the methadone working on a farm about seventy miles out of Nashville, Tennessee. I cried every day for my sisters and gradually got back on my feet.

My old man worked in the store at Fletcher Steel in Dunedin when I was a kid and every single day of his life he got up and went to work.

I love my mum and my dad.

My dad never went to high school but he quoted Shakespeare all the time. He'd say, over and over, that the quality of mercy is not strained. I think he basically missed working on the farm by himself and to this day I still feel like a country boy myself. I love Nashville like you can't believe. I miss the Nashville piano sound every single day of my life but I can never tell what I'm yearning for, whether it is Nashville itself or my mum and my dad or my brother or my sister who is currently dying.

My sister who is dying now is probably the one I loved the most. She didn't like me when I came along because she was twelve and I got all the limelight. She gave me War and Peace to read when I was six and she used to play piano in our lounge. She got her photo on the front page of the Otago Daily Times when Dunedin got its first big mainframe computer.

I am going to miss my sister. She's a fiery one and I have always been attracted to women like that. I want to go home to Russell Street and start the whole goddamn thing over again and have us all sing a Hank Williams song and for my dad to look at me and smile and for my sister to hit them keys Nashville style.

But I've learned that life is a long hard song and most things are a long way easier than being in the front line at El Alamein.

It's ANZAC Day on April 25th. Buy a poppy because the quality of mercy is not strained. Whatever you are going through in your poor forsaken life someone else is going through worse or the same.

January 26, 2016. A Tinker's Cuss – Bella

Around two weeks ago I lost my favourite doggie, Bella. The veterinary surgeons put her to sleep here in New Zealand whilst I was trawling around in the USA. There were cellphone calls backwards and forwards and then Bella was gone. That's how these things happen in the big wide world and I never got to hold Bella for the very last time.

Friends will tell you to let go in these circumstances and then you feel like fire-bombing their house, but instead you say something like "Thanks very much" and hope they go away and never come back.

About a week after Bella died my brother-in-law popped his clogs as well. My brother-in-law was about the epitome of good social skills. He always knew what good and soothing word to insert into a conversation and just when to do it. What you saw was what you got and what he said was what he meant.

I've had a lot of people die around me during these last fifteen years or so. Mostly it comes as a big shock and then it's gone again but for their presence which I feel at the strangest of times.

There is nothing in life that is bigger than loss.

David Bowie died the next week and I did what I could to steel myself against the news.

If it wasn't for David Bowie I just would never have worn half the clothes I ever wore in my life and nor would I have applied woman's makeup to my face in the early 1970s. I was an ugly woman let me tell you that.

We all did make-up stuff and coloured our hair and some of us even had a go at women's high heel shoes and pretended we were gay. We had the earrings and the hand gestures too. At the same time, we had dreadful acne. We'd squeeze each other's pimples.

David Bowie's biggest thing to me was that he had the capability of changing everything about himself in a very quick manner. He never appeared to have acne.

Me and my mates bonded over a very few key recording artists at the end of the 1960s and going through the early 1970s. Probably the two main ones were Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie.

But I try not to look back and I just keep careering into the future and oftentimes that's against the odds.

Bella was a good little girl. She had a remarkably gentle nature and I truly loved her. Animals have taught me a lot about people and oftentimes to just steer away from people.

Bella didn't live in make-up.

December 16, 2015. A Tinker's Cuss – Christmas 2015

Another Xmas is upon us.

At this time of year, we are meant to be with our families and to be all joyous and giving and everything else that goes around under that dear old mulberry tree where life is confusing at best.

At Xmas I always think of my friends who may be stuck on Methadone or may be in rehab or jail and they may even be dead because they couldn't hack the pace. The pace quickens in our electrified and digital age. It's love one day and a landslide the next.

In America in 2013 almost 25,000 people died of prescription drug overdoses and about 16,000 of the deaths were from prescription opiates. Heroin overdoses are not included in these figures. That makes the data all the more frightening. It's not terrorism, it's merely junkies.

Opiate overdose is a very lonely way to die and I've had a lot of mates who went way out west from far too many opiates or the ramifications of using those self-same drugs.

I've overdosed on opiates a few times and spent time in Intensive Care. I'm bound to say they were good drugs. I didn't wake up thinking about politics, I woke up wanting to get loaded again with my mates.

My mates who died were all lonely people and in the end they didn't connect with anyone. They had no possibilities that excited them.

I also have friends who will pick up their methadone a day or two before Xmas and then consume it all at once. They'll end up hanging out on Xmas day and feeling a cold that goes right through to their very marrow. If they had twenty-five heaters in the house it won't make a damn bit of difference. They will have Antarctica within them until they get another dose.

I am speaking as someone who once spent a Xmas Day or two in jail whilst hanging out and that taught me a lot about life. No one is going to come and rescue you because no one can save you from yourself.

Drug addiction… Self-inflicted? I really don't think so. I merely think that a lot of people in the world today do not know what to do with their emotions and feelings.

My year went reasonably well. I have something like 22 completed chapters of my memoir finished and Phantom Billstickers has done well and prevailed over the odds.

I feel loved and that's different for me. I've never really felt loved before. I now like sunshine better than a black jersey and a pair of sunglasses in a dark room.

Thanks to those who stuck to me like glue this year and all the others.

I am a work in progress.

Much Love,
Jim Wilson

November 20, 2015. A Tinker's Cuss – November 2015

It could be I'm just peeved from restless dreams last night. I was dreaming about Levon Helm again. Levon was a truth teller and we all know that. You get them every so often in the music industry and then everyone grows a beard, gets glasses and boots like they were a graphic designer and follows in behind. The ones who follow make all the cash. The guy in the front gets cancer and a weight on his shoulders.

Yesterday afternoon a young couple checked into this old Victorian-style boarding house where I am staying in New Jersey. He bore a close resemblance to Steve McQueen, must have been 28, and drove a '78 Corvette Stingray with plenty of rust and deeply sensuous headlights. Dirty blond hair and Peter Fonda sunglasses. His co-offender was a Guatemalan woman, about 19, sultry, beautiful and obviously difficult to please. Jet-black hair tumbled across her face and down her back.

In the middle of the night I was woken by sounds like a Panzer division moving into the forests around Stalingrad. There was a rhythm, a climb and a crescendo. I began to hear Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, but also recognised that Levon Helm was driving one of them tanks.

I slowly came to realise there was also a film crew in the hallway. I had a spiritual awakening when I grasped this was all about a remaking of Debbie Does Dallas. Yes, all synthetic, none of it real.

I felt very disappointed.

Here are some of the things that slut me to the very bottom of my ball bag and some that I love as well:

Critics who are merely wrecking balls. They are not Lester Bangs and they ain't Kenneth Tynan. "A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are keeping." – K. Tynan.

Political Correctness. This is just one more way of stopping people from expressing themselves. The silent majority don't like being screamed at by internet bullies so they just make sure they vote.

I don't like a lot about social welfare because I believe it creates dependency. But I Love social welfare where it is truly needed. My mum and dad died with mere pennies to their name.

I detest the fact that many of our elderly go without because some bike gang is selling amphetamine and is on the dole at the same time.

Jail and imprisonment: There are some people who need to be locked up forever. Norman Mailer campaigned to get Jack Henry Abbott out of jail and then Abbott stabbed a waiter a month later. I've been to jail. I enjoyed it. We all laughed a lot.

If you are going to be a doctor, do it for Love and not a Maserati in the driveway.

I abhor commercial radio and commercial media because I believe it is helping to create an ever more unreal environment.

Methadone Clinics? I don't like them though I have met some very good souls within them.

I can't say I like people who take three or four pieces of hand luggage on commercial airlines.

It annoys me that one has to pay to visit Karl Marx's grave in London. But I've also read he was a spendthrift who put his missus through hell.

I despise liberals who promise to help and then just never return your telephone calls.

Punk Rock Music changed my life. The night I saw The Vauxhalls in the Mt Pleasant Community Centre Hall in Christchurch I was uplifted.

I don't see how anyone could write a book after Don Quixote but I'm glad a few people did: Thomas Pynchon, Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, W. Faulkner, F. Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy, Michel Houellebecq and Janet Frame.

I wish my dad had stood up. He's been dead for 35 years or more and I'm still waiting. I use his voice in the meantime.

Graham Brazier was a True Legend as was Daniel Keighley. Both men had huge hearts. They died for it.

It's hard to write from the heart. They kill people like that.

Lastly, I saw someone using a squeegee on car windows in the mist here in New Jersey the other morning. This guy was cleaning other peoples' windscreens and no one else would have known. I saw this as an act of Love and Faith. Try it, it works.

As John Adams said: "The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born."

That's wisdom whereas I am just a fool.

October 22, 2015. A Tinker's Cuss – New Jersey, October 2015

I am living in New Jersey and it is a very pleasant time of year with the leaves changing colours. The autumn colours of New Jersey are every bit as delightful as those in Central Otago. I love waking up to the sounds of V8 engines outside the window.

I've just spent five weeks travelling through Europe putting up poetry posters and mine is a privileged position for which I have a lot of gratitude. My life has never been easy but sometimes it has been very sweet.

I began putting up poetry posters wherever I could about six or seven years ago. The act of merely doing this expresses most everything that I believe about this life. When life has handed me a lemon I have always steered towards that which is beautiful.

Some people, places and things exist only to drag other people down. There is so much bitterness, violence, sarcasm and irony floating around the world these days. A bloke who has never worked in a manager's position knows how to manage everything better and so on. A guy screws a chicken, ends up in jail, and is never forgiven. People like to hold on to things like an old-timer at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting who is still talking about that slice of toast and butter he had on that bad night 35 years ago.

I believe people can change.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Paris and then flew into Philadelphia. I have to have a waiver of ineligibility to enter the USA. I tried for more than twenty years before I was granted one. I am not eligible because of a Heroin conviction from 1974.

At Customs in Philly the first officer looked at my computer profile and asked what the hell I had done, had I smoked something weird in the 1970s? I said no, worse than that. It was Heroin and Cocaine and I took it the man's way and I was a chemist burglar. He became a human soul and a kind and caring one. It's remarkable where you can meet these people.

The officer walked like John Wayne and was quite a cowboy. He told me he'd just worked security during the Pope's visit.

At Secondary, three officers sat at an elevated bench above me. I said that not even an 85-year-old big time Jewish lawyer with nose hairs from downtown Philadelphia could fix my Green Card situation and they howled with laughter. That's a damn good dose of humanity to be carrying on with.

The woman who interviewed me said her brother was currently going through a Heroin relapse. That touched me to the bottom of my soul.

Later, at Five Guys in Wayne, Pennsylvania, an old man of about 95 arrived in a Volvo station wagon with a fine old doggie. He wasn't an inch over five feet tall and almost completely doubled over. He hunched all the way out the door in small kind steps and slowly fed his dog peanuts. I need to see kindness to survive. I'm sure we all do.

I also visited a shoe store owned by two Italian brothers in their 60s. Their grandfather started the store in 1932. Their father was at Anzio beach in 1944. The brothers showed me two pairs of shoes their grandfather had made in the 1930s for a woman who died before she got to wear them.

The new album by Keith Richards is superb. He has become easily the bluesman his heroes were in their day.

I hope love and peace live within you.

Jim Wilson

September 14, 2015. A Tinker's Cuss – Graham Brazier

I think a true thing about life is to find something you love and then to stick to it like glue. Love, after all, is more like oxygen than oxygen itself.

It has been a week since Graham Brazier left us and I have been thinking about what to write since then. The day after he died my back gave out. Then I felt the huge black scraping arm of death above me as well and got just a little bit morbid.

Graham meant a lot to many of us here in the Shaky Isles. The very idea of Graham was huge in local music.

Many years ago, being a New Zealand rock and roll promoter and needing a break from the sadness of it all, I would travel to Penang for Heroin Holidays. I would stay at the glorious old decadent New China Hotel. My mates and I would go there and read Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. We'd recite poetry and sing songs to each other. Then, spent, we'd fall asleep in each other's arms like men can do if they try. Sometimes we'd play cricket out the front of the hotel and laugh a lot.

In the foyer there were ten heavy-duty Chinese guys with sunglasses playing poker and grimacing at each other. In the rooms there were no carpets or blankets, but there was a giant old ceiling fan you could study for hours. We didn't watch television or read newspapers. The internet wasn't around and life was more peaceful on that account.

At that stage Pink Rock Heroin was keeping the economy of Penang afloat. Now it's shoes all around the world. We are all trading shoes with each other, man.

If a dealer really wanted your attention he'd say: I know the Chinaman. My man was called Alphonse and he really did know the Chinaman.

The first time Hello Sailor came to my attention was when they played the Gladstone Hotel in Christchurch around 1976 or 1977. The pub was owned by John McCarthy and the gig room was booked by Robin 'Oz' Armstrong. Two unsung heroes of New Zealand music. Oz told me later he'd be racing around town on Sunday morning trying to sell a thousand Buddha Sticks to pay the band. That makes it a genuine gig. That's what music used to be like.

Graham and Dave always seemed to have a smile for everyone. The band came back from Los Angeles after exhausting themselves trying to go to another level. They didn't crack America and yet they were truly top shelf quality. Someone got a bad hand. This was one of the very best bands I have ever seen.

Graham was a good bloke and that is the highest realm in New Zealand. He felt for the music he played. He felt for the man or woman on the street just trying to cobble together a living. He was in the very same position. He never put himself above anyone.

He said to a mate of mine one day that there were now more musicians than plumbers. He meant it in the way you might think he did. He stayed true until the day he died.

Keep the Faith,
Jim Wilson

June 5, 2015. A Tinker's Cuss – Russell Pirie

I met Russell Pirie in about 1973 in Christchurch. We shot a lot of speed together. My overwhelming memory of him is that soon after we met we were in Cashel Street on his Suzuki 500 on a bright sunny Christchurch day. The speed had made us paranoid and Russell thought he saw a cop – Jim Marshall, head of the drug squad – and so he gunned the bike through town. We ended up crouched behind a rock out in Ferrymead shooting speed again. I think Jim Marshall was in Queenstown at the time.

Russell was an adopted kid of part Maori descent raised by Pakeha parents. Adopted kids sometimes have a harder time of it. They often have no sense of attachment.

Russell did a detention centre leg and one or two borstals in Invercargill. He was dead proud of all this. He was a real good looking bloke with a heart of gold but looking desperately for something his whole life through.

At one point we were all having a hard time getting opiates and speed so Russell became hooked on barbiturates – Tuinal, Seconal, Nembutal. Doctors used to throw these in the streets like a lollie scramble. They kept inventing drugs that supposedly cured drug addiction and each one was worse than the last.

Russell stepped out the whole public bar in Warners Hotel one day and woke up on the South Brighton bus stop several hours later. One time, high on barbiturates, he dove into an empty swimming pool. He suffered quite severe injuries and climbed out and dived in again. Broken collarbones were his forte.

In 1975 I burgled a chemist shop and found pure Heroin. My co-offender and I ended up dividing it at Russell's flat in England Street. Russell overdosed on what he was scratching up off the Formica counter. He turned blue on the floor. At the time he was going out with the Prime Minister Bill Rowling's daughter. She was on the floor trying to force a fish tank hose down his throat. My co-offender and I beat the feet. My co-offender died of a Heroin overdose at Warner's Hotel the next night. The cops came and got me to identify the body.

But Russell lived. He went on to shoot a man dead in a drug deal and ended up doing life in Paremoremo, a lot of it in D Block. I visited him from time to time. He never stopped laughing.

He got out and received an ACC payment. He bought a Harley Davidson and came off it in South Brighton and died. I miss him.

Addiction is a savage disease. People often hurt themselves and laugh. The devil makes smash and grab attempts at taking them back. But the quality of mercy is never strained.

Here's to you, Russell Pirie. Dude.

March 19, 2015. A Tinker's Cuss – French Tourists and Christchurch

The French tourists in Koh Samui walk around with a sense of superiority and socialist fumes, two selfie sticks in their back pockets.

My French teacher at Otago Boys' High School was Monsieur Evans. He had hairy nostrils and used a cane and thought France was superior to Britain and New Zealand. But the Flying Nun explosion started in his classroom. I think about that.

Peter Sharp taught at Linwood High in Christchurch. He was blonde and athletic and played Canterbury cricket and fast-bowled chalk at inattentive students.

I moved to Christchurch at thirteen or fourteen after my brother died. I met Mike Jones there, who became my best mate, like a brother. His mum owned a dairy on Wilson's Road. My dad worked at Stainless Castings in Woolston. My mum worked at Melhuish's pickle factory.

In 1968, when I was sixteen, I hired the Mount Pleasant Community Centre and ran dances. We'd get 600 to 800 people and ten bouncers. The Epitaph Riders bike gang provided security. We ate late-night steaks at the Silver Grille.

'Dr Death' the bouncer later became a screw at Paparua Prison when I was incarcerated for drug offences. Dougal Johnson from the Epitaph Riders was my best mate in jail.

Mike Jones became a junkie and went to jail for manufacturing heroin in the 1980s. A man called Griff tried to cut Mike's finger off with scissors to get his Morphine. Mike said go ahead. He kept his fingers and his Morphine.

Mike died about six years ago of liver cancer after Interferon treatment for Hepatitis C. I hear his voice and his bass playing every day.

Keep the Faith,
Jim Wilson