Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

by Russell Brand

Okay, my turn now. Zoë W has said something about seeing a Coke can whilst in the deepest backwaters of Rangoon and Ian is analysing deftly the clever use of African American stars and models and the odd, jarring proximity to sugarcane and slavery. Real me wants to say some dumb stuff now – silly, glib, naughty stuff about race and consumerism – but he mustn’t. So instead I make some pretty good points about how a hundred years ago seeing a Coke can anywhere would’ve been weird and that we are all tribal people waking from the womb into a world of ersatz ad agencies and used-to-be schools (is that a Madonna song? No that’s ‘Playground’, close enough) and that Osho says, ‘Society is just a clearing in the forest’, and I like that. A clearing in the forest. Nature, both inner and outer awaits a cessation and she will flood us anew with thorny green wonder. And my mind too, just a clearing in the forest, language structures and philosophical structures all heaped up high but built from nothing, like that clear plastic scaffold the Doozers in Fraggle Rock used to build.