New Socks etc

WHY are socks so expensive? I bought just three pairs today ~ as nearly all my other pairs have holes in them ~ and they cost £5. When I got them home I realized why. Because they're knee length and woolen. But the others they had on display were just too thin. Would get holed straight away...

I keep getting these ill feelings I don't know why. There's no point going to a GP, the GP won't be able to help me. I need a psychiatrist. I feel really wooly headed. I keep waking up what feels too early. I don't want to go into it any further than this. I'm just really glad I'm taking the pills and am trying to remember to take them like clockwork every night.

Did the news about that Italian cruise ship go worldwide? It's lying there off the coast of Italy like a sunken city. Even from beyond the clouds it looks huge...



Lion "attacks" child through glass at Wellington Zoo...



Deepside: Shudder (1992)



Have a nice day/evening everyone...

Midwinter Feeling

IT IS ICE COLD here in London. The weather forecast said "normal weather for January". It feels a lot colder than normal. I sleep under four layers, I'm so cold. You can see passers by's breath as they go past.

I had a bad reaction to some tea I drank the other day. Four cups over the course of an afternoon was enough to put me on a high then a down. The up and the down turbulently mixed together and I felt very paranoid and weird. I think I'm hypersensitive to caffeine. Two cups of strong tea in the morning seems to be OK. I've had one today to see if I feel any better than on two. I might have to cut out tea and caffeine altogether. It never made me feel "high" until I got a manic "high" last year. But it did used to make me anxious, which made me give it up for a few years, and the anxiety flew away.

I have been feeling mentally wobbly for a while and had a really crap day yesterday. Paranoia and depression with anxiety: but paranoid, depressed and anxious about nothing at all and everything simultaneously.

If I wasn't on antipsychotics I think I'd be having a really bad time.

I was going to talk about tiny tits in the trees but I haven't seen any. Blue tits that is. When we had a birdfeeder when I was a child, our garden seemed to be full of them and great tits, which are slightly bigger.

I hope you all are feeling OK.

I finally get paid tomorrow which is a relief as I got the current non-lot of money early because of the new year. Which means it's gone quicker. I've had to borrow £15 just to survive. I must have spent it carefully as I still had £5 yesterday...

My foot is slowly healing. Maybe the vitamins from the salads help with it..? Who knows. I know that eating salad is meant to be better than not eating it. I know it's not very wintery but it's the only veg I can stomach at the moment (apart from baked beans which allegedly count towards the 5 portions a day recommended by The Government.

And last but not least my methadone has finally gone down to 55mg and is going down to 35mg over the next ten weeks. It's all planned out so no need for doctors' appointments between now and then. I can't wait to get OFF the stuff completely. Really can't wait! If all it's going to do is make me feel "normal" why not feel normal on nothing? I'm taking the last bit slowly though. Don't want to be one of those people who goes running back screaming on to it again. I know a LOT of people are said to do that. I can think of two off the top of my head. Well time's ticking must go... see ya next week.



Illustrated: a blue tit in the snow

Food!

I BORROWED a load of money yesterday. It was only £15 but enough to buy DIFFERENT FOOD. Y'know: mixed salad, sardines, bread, cheese. Stuff you can make deli sandwiches out of.

And a big break from endless curly fries and baked beans on toast. Ukh. I was literally starting to feel physically ill from the bad diet (even though I used to eat a diet like that pretty much all the time).

My foot is still weeping slightly. It must be sad. But it's way way better than it was when it was a pussing mountain. It's just very gradually healing. The itching is a good sign. That's always been a sign things are on the mend in my experience.

Black leopard attacks little girl at zoo:
I was looking for the lion clip where it really goes for it but couldn't find it.



Lion hug:






Illustrated: my salad isn't quite this posh...

No more gunk

MY ABSCESS is going down. The skin has all peeled off and it looks more like a pinkish crater than a very rounded purple hill. Also it's going itchy, always a sign of healing. So the time for the doctor has gone. And as I'm NOT injecting heroin there is no reason for any recurrence.

The knife I used, by the way, had one sharp spike on the end, not two blunt ones like the one illustrated. I just couldn't get a picture of tomatoes any other way.

I'm set to borrow money tomorrow as I'm so broke I'm down to beans on toast every day interspersed with oven chips on their own. I'm really hungry even though I've had FOUR small slices of toast and one ENTIRE can of beans this morning. That must surely add up to 700 calories and the risperidone (antipsychotic) I'm on makes you fat. It does this by altering the way your body processes sugar so you need fewer calories. SO I SHOULDN'T FEEL HUNGRY AT ALL. Bloody pills!

I'm due a small plate of American style curly oven chips soon (not yet broke enough to go for straight English ones) plus I have over two litres of 50p cloudy lemonade (more calories) that I use as a substitute for cyder when not drinking. Ie every day. Hasn't stopped me having the occasional one, but the constant hand-to-mouth cigarettes and alcohol is now reduced to just cigarettes.

Speaking of which. I probably shouldn't have tried to give up smoking while I was reducing a methadone dose. And I have an appointment with the DOCTOR at the clinic tomorrow morning, which I'm dreading so please wish me luck. I have to go else I'll get terminated by this public machine. Be lucky everyone!


Illustrated: curly fries and beans on toast ~ what my diet has been reduced to. But only for the next week....


SOLAR QUEST: ACID AIR RAID
This tune doesn't properly get going till nearly 4 mins into it. It's still good though...

I stuck a knife in my foot

THERE WAS an abscess on my right foot. It was only about the size of a large coin but stood out hemispherical and purple and it hurt a lot. Especially putting shoes on. So I burnt off the end of my tomato-cutting knife, wiped it on my jumper then stuck the end right in, a good quarter of a centimetre and squeezed ~ oh and the bright red bloody pus that came out was gorgeous. Just when you thought it had all gone more huge globs oozed to freedom. Eventually I'd squeezed it so vigorously my abscess was flat. Unfortunately it's started filling up again, so I repeated the action yesterday and pus-water literally fountained at the ceiling. My two other abscesses are nearly healed.

I feel ill all the time in a run-down type of way that is probably called "depression". I've given up taking drugs every day as I can't afford it. I have £15 or £20 to last until the Monday after next, so I'm stocking up on baked beans and mini Hovis bread. I've also been feasting on sardine and mixed American salad sandwiches.

I don't know how to cure the depression. I wake every morning feeling like I want to pee and even when I do I still want to pee some more. So I get up and the uncomfortable feeling goes. Then I force myself in the shower. Many days I can only persuade myself to wash the bottom half. I get in there literally semi-clothed. But at least I've had half a shower. Then I wash my armpits in the sink. I know this is all terribly sad but when did I ever claim not to be a sad person?

I have a business idea that I reckon could really take off. Finally ~ my passport off benefits. But I will absolutely have to hire staff once this thing gets going. Purely because the running of the entire business will be down to me and I simply will not be allowed to be sick. Not even for one day. I worked out I will probably have to work 12-hour days in the beginning. But it's better than being on state benefits. If I don't get off benefits I will die on them. Probably by suicide. My single biggest regret in life is that my suicide attempts, which were serious, did not work. When I'm angry and down that's what I dwell on sometimes, because I had the drawer full of tricyclic antidepressants; I had the wherewithall to take them all. And I stopped at 70 pills. Pathetic. Truly pathetic. And when I woke up I felt more sick than I've ever felt in my life. Truly poisoned to my core.

Well I have to go. My foot is still hurting a bit. I'm looking forward to another session with the tomato knife. Maybe tomorrow during This Morning ~ as long as Holly and Phil are presenting.

Must go; hope you're all well. And HAPPY NEW YEAR.

Hey wasn't I stupid, thinking it was New Year's Eve when it was December 30? Just shows how much the ceremony means to me these days. I haven't been to a New Year's Eve party in a decade.

TAKE CARE EVERYONE.


WHY WE'RE BIPOLAR: NORMAL LIFE SUCKS
Thanks Buggerlugs THIS is real...

Terrible Sleep

MY SLEEP HAS GONE SO BAD I didn't bother sleeping at all last night. We have a new girl in the next room with rough friends who are too stupid to ring the correct bell so I found myself yelling at some faceless person over the intercom at 2am. I did get a little bit of sleep around six but then Everybody Loves Raymond and Frasier came on. I feel a bit hypomanic but it probably won't last. I'll crash and sleep for hours and hours and wake up feeling run down and sad. That's scenario one. Or scenario 2 is my sleep still won't come back and I'll possibly go into proper mania. I've been having symptoms like people seeming to talk to me on the street (from the other side of the road) and my head racing fast fast fast. But not too fast. And then when I close my eyes to sleep sometimes my head is lit up with the most amazing vivid dream-imagery, even though I'm wide awake and when that happens I know sleep is going to be hard to come by. By the time the images (which are random, like golden ants circling round and round on a tree stump, or dogs wearing dinner jackets like in the Michael Jackson Leave Me Alone Video.... by the time these are more vivid than the reality with my eyes open I'm in full mania and sleep is just an impossibility. I don't think I'm manic by the way. I think I am going to sleep because I feel kind of speedy and tired at the same time. I just thought I would have gone back to bed by now. It's 11:09 and I had to get to the chemist at some time between 9 and 7 to drink one day's methadone under patronizing Supervised Consumption and to pick up another three days' to keep me going over the new year "break" (which has no good associations for me ~ at the millennium I was so stressed by the pressure of it all I found myself crying before I went out and of course you have to take your Es or other drugs early so you're flying by midnight when usually I only dropped my first one-and-a-half AT midnight ~ this was so I could dose again at 2am (a single pill, making my intake for the night 2.5 pills) and my E would be coasting down pleasantly by 6am when all major dance parties ended. After that if you were in Brixton you could go to the Fridge Bar which was full of nutters; if you were elsewhere in town there was often an official after party for pillheads who want to continue taking E and speed and whatever else they fancied right into the afternoon. Then you'd end up in someone's house you barely knew kind of stuck there not wanting to be there yet not wanting to go home. Whenever I was "having an affair" I'd ALWAYS go back to their place and rarely if ever invite them over to mine (something to do with other people in my room feeling like an invasion; I never was truly comfortable with anyone in my room even when they were just coming in to see Pandable the hamster who did a teapot trick where you flipped the lid up and he appeared hands together all faye looking surprised. The Australian girl I went out with briefly used to say "Pandable's just like a cartoon character". Hamsters are banned in Australia so the poor Aussies are deprived of the joys of tubby tail-less poppy-eyed rodents. Though I'm sure isolated enthusiasts keep them illicitly. My online friend Buggerlugz has TWENTY-SEVEN teenytiny pinging roborovski hamsters ~ the tiniest and quickest (and hardest to tame) of all hammies. And she has twenty-seven. I asked whether she ever puts a whole bunch of them in the bath to run around like furry Scalectrix. I used to let Bashful, Itchy and Spherical go for pings in the bath and they loved it. I had to put the plug in as Itchy was so tiny she could, if she'd really wanted, have squeezed her head and thus possibly her body, no matter how tubby it looked, down the drain!

Well I'm off to do some research about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome being the product of an over-active rather than an underactive brain. This makes perfect sense to me. When you have M.E. as it always used to be called over here, you feel like a phone with a knackered battery. You can rest and feel fully charged but that charge just drains to nothing so incredibly quickly the only thing you can do on a truly bad day is rest up for hours on end in bed. If it hadn't been for Talk Radio UK I think I would have lost my mind because I felt too ill even to watch television (the "photophobia" made my eyesight incredibly glary. I have this theory that all my problems are down to misplacement of energy. Depression where energy is very low. Anxiety where energy is misused, clenching itself round your heart. And mania where at the truly full-on stage the energy literally shines out of you like sunbeams. I used to have a manic headgame where I played tennis with my excess energy. Batting this ball back and forth as I paced frantically along the streets. I'm so glad to have experienced mania, it's one of the most amazing experiences of my life. To go so high I actually got higher than any drug had ever taken me ~ and I've tried everything. I felt like I was turning from physicality into pure energy and spiritual form. As the mania wore off I suddenly had a feeling one day of my feet literally and physically being on the ground, whereas before I had felt like I was flying. This manic episode went on for weeks and weeks. The very most intense part was the first week of it (following weeks of stormy moods). Within 5 days I was so hyped up I was screaming incoherently and roaring like a wild animal in the middle of my room. People in my house avoided me for weeks afterwards and people in shops visibly backed away. I have never been in such an intense state in my life and like I say, it took weeks for it to fully die down, with a couple of intense resurgences. I was medicated during most of those weeks and the antipsychotic meds actually made me feel better, because it seemed to do little to dampen my euphoria, but it did quell a lot of the agitation I felt and so respiradone was very helpful in that respect. I just wish I'd known the stuff could actually CAUSE anxiety as I started having panic attacks or near-panic-attacks in the weeks following.

What am I talking about? Oh yeah ME or CFS. Which I definitely used to have and still ahve traces of (it hardly ever goes away entirely)... being a displacement of energy and my life's illnesses being obvious displacements of energy. Chinese doctors believe all illness is an imbalance in "qi" or "chi" ~ the lifeforce. But I think in my case the imbalance was more plain for all to see. My university years were ruined by an attack of anxious depression that took over three years to fade. After that I got ME (CFS) after that I started getting mildly bipolar symptoms, after that I went on heavy drugs and the heroin levelled out my mood incredibly well. And after that (thanks to methadone) the bipolar came back with avengeance and now here I am on the cusp of New Year's Eve with my resolution and goal being to get my magazine off the ground. I am absolutely determined to produce this magazine. There's none quite like it. Ever since I was at school and co-edited the UN-official school magazine I've had an eye for publishing opportunities. I never got into any industry that truly suited me because I was so painfully lacking in confidence I'd never have got the job. Nothing to do with any lack of talent. Everything to do with lack of bullshitting skills. One thing I learned during my years on drugs was some self esteem. I hit lows so bad that I absolutely had to believe in myself ~ even in some tiny way ~ against everything. Because nothing meant anything, there was a highspeed railway line at the top of my road and all I really wanted to do was to stand in front of an express train, arms held out like a cross, and get blasted into infinity. Then I realized, because I believe in Jesus Christ, that I'd not get even one single moment's rest before I woke up again to have to live over again when all I wanted was to die die die, to never think, feel, be thought or felt about, never to remember and never to be remembered. That's what I wanted. And if it would have hurt my family that bad to see me go I'd happily have killed them too. What business anybody had actually wanting to live, I simply could not comprehend. I thought all belief in life was a delusion and I only regretted having been born to see the sheer evil in the world. A world that criticized me and called me wrong for taking a drug that took the evils of the world away, if only for a few hours. Heroin fed my nihilism in a big way for a long time. But nothing in my drug addiction was ever sraightforward or easy to explain.

I'll leave it there. I didn't mean to launch into a rant about my miseries but my point, I suppose, is that I DO WANT TO LIVE NOW, that I HAVE A REASON FOR LIVING. AND I WANT TO TURN MY MAGAZINE INTO A REALITY. I'M UTTERLY DETERMINED TO DO THIS.

Now I'll take this opportunity to WISH YOU ALL A VERY NICE NEW YEAR'S EVE AND AN EFFORTLESSLY SUPERIOR 2012 ~ MAY IT BE WAY BETTER THAN THAT MIXED BAG THEY LABELLED 2011!

HAPPY NEW YEAR FOLKS: 12 HOURS 10 MINUTES TO GO!


Illustrated: I'm a Little Pandable Short and Stout Here's my PANDABLE! HERE'S MY SPOUT!




HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 1 (TIËSTO)




HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 2

A Late Wakening

I LAID IN BED ALL DAY TILL 5PM then defrosted for an hour (ie smoked cigarettes in front of the television) then HAD to go out to the bloody methadone chemist. Strangely the methadone made me feel much better. Yesterday I was manic in the morning, depressed in the afternoon. So depressed I had to go to bed I felt lousy. Couldn't even eat, so I had to buy a shish kebab. I get the couscous version in the box with salad. A full meal of smoky lamb chunks for £6. The shop that does the less salty salad is shut over Xmas. Lazy bastards!

I nearly had a big row in the library just now for phoning a friend. Some Asian guy kept coming up to me asking me to keep it down. Then he told me to stop talking when I was trying to LISTEN to a very involved story so I yelled I'M NOT TALKING then the rude woman who tells the homeless man not to sleep in the library said "well I can hear you" so I deliberately spoke as loud as possible as I gathered my things and left. Amazingly I didn't feel the biting cold that had me in sweats of misery walking down. That's because my methadone is finally working.

The poor girl in the room next to me has bought an LCD TV and expected to get Freeview channels out here in the twee suburbs where we get the worst TV reception I've ever experienced. I said you'll be lucky. Then she asked me how to tune it in I said highlight analogue tuning and she got 4 channels of snow, just like I get. The other night Gladiator came on ITV. I slammed in the DVD and compared scenes. The DVD was normality. On ITV it was snowing in Rome!

I'm feeling ill. I don't know why. Is it just manic depression again? I don't know. I feel like I want to puke. I have an abscess on my right foot. The abscesses on my legs have gone down after I stuck surgical blue needles in each one and drained them but this one on my foot is too painful to mess around like that so I might have to go to casualty (that's the ER to you Americans) to get flucloxacillin, which is the normal antibiotic for drug abscesses. Yes I'm afraid I was using every day over the Xmas break (and what sane person wouldn't?) but now I'm back in the routine of knocking back methadone like a 40 year old baby in under the chemist's "supervision" I somehow find it easier to keep the old nose clean.

I'm fretting about what I'm going to eat tonight or should I just get drugs instead? I don't really want to do anything. I wish I could have general anaesthesia. I wish I could have £10,000 to put my magazine together. I worked out start up costs would be a mere £1000 for computers and phones but several grand to pay the printers to knock out the things. In this country WH Smith are the main distributors of periodicals but I need more information about how you persuade shops to order more copies. Can you do offers like buy 20 get 20 free? Please if anyone knows anything about the magazine industry please help me. I really need a detailed book on the subject that goes into the mathematics of print run costs and advertising revenue. Websites and links please. BTW I have looked into the idea of publishing online and for various reasons it's a non-starter. The entire point of this magazine is that you take it home and read real words on a real page. Even Dickens published a magazine "Household Words". Not a website. Did you know when American newspapers went online they garnered a mere TENTH of the advertising income from the internet as from paper. Please someone who has edited or better still been advertising or circulation manager on a magazine get in touch and tell me how it's done.

Well I've got to go else I'll get terminated. Happy New Year to one and all. (Just in case I'm not in the mood to post between now and then....)


Illustrated: the standard of technology in my house (except you can't even have a set-top box in my house) ~ the landlord who takes in over £200 PER ROOM per week ie SIXTY THOUSAND POUNDS A YEAR income from this house cannot even be bothered to fit an operational high gain television aerial to our chimney!



HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 4



HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 3