One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.

This blog is retired. Please visit me at 6roucho.blogspot.com.au for the latest Amphetamine news.

6roucho

Amphetamine is on Facebook

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If you read and enjoyed the play, then please like its Facebook fan page.

As Mark Coker of Smashwords says: the greatest danger to any author is obscurity.

Amphetamine is on Amazon

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My Smashwords author interview

Tell us about your play, Amphetamine.

It's a twisted little story about damaged people. Damaged how? That's the question.

Would you describe it as a ghost story?

Absolutely. There's a very good chance that one or more of the characters is a ghost. What more can you ask for?

Why the title?

Party drugs unhinge the doors of perception. My experience is that they make all things possible. Reality is the gorilla in the room, waiting for you to come back down.

Why the pseudonym?

Groucho has been my online name since the early days of the Internet - I'm that old. Once I was banned from a forum and I changed it to 6roucho, so I could sneak back in, and it stuck. I added Jones to make it more ordinary.

What were you banned for?

For calling someone a racist after they made Islamophobic comments.

Do you care about social justice?

Yes, it's my main thing. There's not enough kindness in the world.

Can you explain some of the philosophical references in your play?

I'd like to be able to explain them to myself! I'm a Taoist, so I embrace the mystery of things. But I didn't set out to write a Taoist play. My favorite philosopher is Wittgenstein, because he has such a turbocharged quality, and I had the Tractatus in mind when I wrote Amphetamine, hence all the cryptic aphorisms. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein says that 'Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.' That knocks my authorial and philosophical socks off. My artistic purpose was to try to portray that kind of self-referential strangeness. Philosophy's a great source of strangeness.

Do you believe in the supernatural?

I'm a scientific rationalist. I don't believe 'in' ghosts, but I'm neutral about whether they might exist. They certainly exist in art. The supernatural is unknowable by definition.

What are your hopes and wishes for the play?

I hope people will read it! If someone performs it then I'll be overjoyed. I think it could make a great short film, with the right kind of direction.

What was it like, being a club promoter in London in the 90s?

It was like being in a story about being a club promoter in the 90s. The drugs, the women, the ebb and flow of poverty and wealth. But it was tremendously exciting. For a while, we felt like we were in the centre of world culture, and we were. I wish I could do it again.

What are you working on now?

Apart from my day job, which is writing cryptographic software, I'm working on a novel called the Spiral Tribe, which was the name of a radical dance faction from the 90s. The book has nothing to do with clubbing or drugs. I promise it'll be less dense and self-obsessed than Amphetamine. I'm also working on a 10-minute play called Attention Span.

Can we expect to hear more from 6roucho Jones in the future?

Yes. My goal is to retire from business and write full-time, and I'm getting there.

Finally, is Amphetamine a pro- or anti-drugs story?

Drugs are dangerous. You only get one mind. Stay safe.

Amphetamine is FREE on Smashwords

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Notes

The music, and the sound of the weather, should be mixed with the dialogue like a DJ mixes tracks in a club.

Producers might consider using a live DJ as part of the performance.

I’ve hinted at the language of 90s London street culture but actors should feel free to be creative.

The orgasm of a pig does indeed last thirty minutes, but none of the other numbers claimed by the GHOST in the opening scene are true.

  

Credits

Spouts reams of that shit every day is from John Cale's Brotherman.

All that we are is the result of what we've thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become is by the Gautama Buddha.

Banquo is from the Scottish play.

The stanza beginning The shepherd's brow... is from The Shepherd’s Brow, Fronting Forked Lightning, Owns by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Who you gonna call, Ghostbusters? is from the Ivan Reitman film, by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis.

There is no spoon and Agent Smith are both from The Matrix, by Larry and Andy Wachowski.

The idea of unexplained events occurring outside a window is gratefully borrowed from If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, by Jon McGregor.

The story of burned out meat lockers is from the oral history of Fabric, the London club.

Meatpacking glitterati is from The Fletcher Memorial Home, by Pink Floyd.

The passage beginning The story I have to tell... is by Friedrich Nietzsche, as quoted in Nietzsche, God And Doomsday: The Consequences Of Atheism by Henry Bayman.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate is from Blade Runner, by Ridley Scott.

The stanza beginning A thousand years ago... is from Iron Horse, by Alan Ginsberg.

The expression He blasts his way into the spiritual world, expecting to find bliss, but finds nothing is adapted from Jung and the New Age: A Study in Contrasts by David Tacey. The actual quote is The New Age man blasts his way into the spiritual realm, expecting to find bliss, but because he is so narcissistically wedded to the ego his experiences always meet with disappointment.

Thanks to my old clubbing friends: if you think you see yourselves in the play, don't worry: it's only an hallucination.