HAMSTERS & HEROIN: Not all junkies are purse-snatching grandmother-killing psychos. I'm keeping this blog to bear witness to that fact.

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DIARY OF A SLOWLY RECOVERING HEROIN ADDICT

I used to take heroin at every opportunity, for over 10 years, now I just take methadone which supposedly "stabilizes" me though I feel more destabilized than ever before despite having been relatively well behaved since late November/early December 2010... and VERY ANGRY about this when I let it get to me so I try not to.

I was told by a mental health nurse that my heroin addiction was "self medication" for a mood disorder that has recently become severe enough to cause psychotic episodes. As well as methadone I take antipsychotics daily. Despite my problems I consider myself a very sane person. My priority is to attain stability. I go to Narcotics Anonymous because I "want what they have" ~ Serenity.

My old blog used to say "candid confessions of a heroin and crack cocaine addict" how come that one comes up when I google "heroin blog" and not this one. THIS IS MY BLOG. I don't flatter myself that every reader knows everything about me and follows closely every single word every day which is why I repeat myself. Most of that is for your benefit not mine.

This is my own private diary, my journal. It is aimed at impressing no-one. It is kept for my own benefit to show where I have been and hopefully to put off somebody somewhere from ever getting into the awful mess I did and still cannot crawl out of. Despite no drugs. I still drink, I'm currently working on reducing my alcohol intake to zero.

If you have something to say you are welcome to comment. Frankness I can handle. Timewasters should try their own suggestions on themselves before wasting time thinking of ME.

PS After years of waxing and waning "mental" symptoms that made me think I had depression and possibly mild bipolar I now have found out I'm schizoaffective. My mood has been constantly "cycling" since December 2010. Mostly towards mania (an excited non-druggy "high"). For me, schizoaffective means bipolar with (sometimes severe)
mania and flashes of depression (occasionally severe) with bits of schizophrenia chucked on top. You could see it as bipolar manic-depression with sparkly knobs on ... I'm on antipsychotic pills but currently no mood stabilizer. I quite enjoy being a bit manic it gives the feelings of confidence and excitement people say they use cocaine for. But this is natural and it's free, so I don't see my "illness" as a downer. It does, however, make life exceedingly hard to engage with...

PPS The "elevated mood" is long gone. Now I'm depressed. Forget any ideas of "happiness" I have given up heroin and want OFF methadone as quick as humanly possible. I'm fed up of being a drug addict. Sick to death of it. I wanna be CLEAN!!!

Attack of the Furry Entertainers!

Attack of the Furry Entertainers!

Monday, July 02, 2007

Books. Mafia. Rainy Day. My Baby Blue Blog ...

DAMP AND RAINY AFTERNOON. Puddles all up the high road. Pedestrians dodging trucks and buses that periodically spray the sludgy water high. Blue and white sky. No thunder. No mizzle or drizzle now. When it does rain it will be London rain. Intermittent. Not light, not heavy. We benefit from the trans-Atlantic Gulf Stream. Hence our clement climate. British weather is seldom beautiful, but very seldom very ugly, either.

MATRAN AND LAUNDRETTA have been shouting. She has taken to reading American romances and thrillers on our doorstep, beside the heavy door with the closet-lock that they've both bashed in too many times for anyone to recall.

IT'S A NO-SMOKING NATION NOW. No smoking anywhere. The Indian man in the post office (which also has a front newsagents selling tobacco products) warned me to be careful where I light up my Richmond Superkings now. I told him about the phone box warnings. He laughed, disbelieving I was for real. Truly, I told him. It says "No smoking in these premises ~ plural. As if there's room for another person passively to get lung cancer as you insert your 40p minimum charge (80 US cents for a phone call! What is the world coming to?!?) and gabble for the thirty seconds or so for which this buys connexion to a mobile telephone. Ruth was right. The UK's blanket smoking ban does not technically cover the Members of Parliament who voted it in with such ignorant alacrity. This is because the Palace of Westminster (the photogenic building housing the Commons, the Lords and Big Ben) is technically a Royal Palace on a par with Buckingham Palace and banning smoking in their bar would, under present law, be like banning smoking in the late Princess Margaret's bedroom ...

MARIA PUZO is still keeping me nightly enraptured in his tale of 1960s gangsterism and vice. Considering he's chosen the genre of "popular fiction" to tell his tale ~ what many in the literary world consider to be literary trash ~ he writes fantastically well. And what lifts his novel above the morass of average crime novels and thrillers is his uncommon psychological insights into the hearts and actions of his characters. A feat uncommon in writers even of romantic of popular fiction, let alone crime novels. Crime though, as we all know, is all about motives and motivation. You cannot tell the story of a crime without getting into the minds of victim and criminal. Mario Puzo does this excellently. My only reservations come when he stoops to telling his characters' sex lives. He devotes an entire chapter, for example, to one woman's gynaecological troubles and what they would call nowadays a "pelvic floor operation" ~ as if we're all so fascinated in that! I cannot tell whether he is being pervy and creepy, or is inserting scenes he considered expected of him, or whether such details flow naturally from his pen (I sense that they do not) ... then I realize this was published in 1969 when explicit talk of sex was still a novelty in the popular novel. But I feel he has sexualized the book in the interests of commercialization, not because of art. And this is one of the book's few failings. ...and that's my intellectual summary of Mario Puzo's The Godfather: so there!

IRONIC, REALLY, that when the book was written and when the film was shot, the Italian mafia were the reigning barons of crime in the USA. Nowadays their power is so incredibly weakened over there ... I believe they still reign pretty supreme in Sicily ... but the old power they once weilded is now smashed due to multiple arrests and convictions, show trials that went ahead with all defendents in glass boxes despite the threats and posturings of the "families" concerned ... and new gangsters from other parts of the world have taken over ... e.g. the South Americans who control (at the top levels, at least) the international trade in cocaine ... "Narcotics," as the novel repeatedly makes clear, were, in the early 1960s, "the way forward" ... opium, imported from Turkey, was refined in Sicily into high-grade heroin and exported (often via France, hence that expression "the French Connexion") to the United States. Now the Italians have lost control of this trade to the far more powerful South American gangs and seem to be back to controlling the meat-packing districts of New York and garbage disposal services in towns across America. (Did anyone hear about the man who single-handedly faced out the mafia-controlled garbage near-monopoly in his home city (somewhere in America; I don't recall where) only to be barraged with almost cartoonish Italian-accented threat phone calls ... his business was barricaded by garbage trucks so nobody could drive in or out ... et cetera ... though threats of violence were made nobody (if I remember rightly) was ever hurt ... eventually the police were brought in and the hoodlums captured because you can't say, do or even think of doing anything today without your thoughts and actions being captured somewhere on mobile phone records or CCTV!) ...

LAST NIGHT I DREAMED of celebrities. I don't normally do this ...

DID YOU NOTICE MY £77,777 daydream post? I hardly daydream any more and when I last did, caught myself actually fantasizing about getting clean. This is such a forward step for me. A sign that I do see a future without these drugs. Not too long ago my only fantasy of fluent-flowing money was as a means to binge out, not to fly away half-way across the road newly clean, to stay clean, to start life anew clean and finally to sit down and do the only thing I've ever really wanted to do in life, which is to write for a living ... and such a convoluted, twisted, writhing, raging way of getting to that point. I'm determined to get there even if doing so half kills me. I have always had the requisite talent. Only now I have bitter experience behind me as well as a unique point of view. To write compellingly one must not only have a tale worth the telling, one must be able to tell it in a fresh, inimitable way. Then the reader feels his or her eyes have been opened. Life is experienced from a perspective all new. That's how I perceive the writer's role in life. Am I right? Keeping a blog has been good practice, but successful blogging is actually a more difficult task than writing a great book. Because a great book, devoured in a matter of days, must only hold the readers' attention for that long. A highly successful blog, on the other hand, going on and on for months and years on end, as it does, like a soap opera is quite a different achievement. A more difficult thing to achieve. I feel my energies, in the long term, would be more profitably poured into the writing of a great book.

But what? Why? Who? Where to start? These are the questions plaguing my mind.

When I've an answer to these my book will already be written. Then I'll just tell yous the isbn number and you'll be able to follow my thoughts on old-fashioned butter coloured acid-free paper between gorgeous hard covers. And you won't have to log on to my baby-blue blog any more!

***

Don't worry I won't give up blogging yet... The Godfather, I think, is a much better book than the film of it... my friends are just getting bored of me rattling on about the doings of the Corleones' arch rivals the Vermicellis and the Tagliatelli families ...

***

Quote of the day:

"When you are going through hell; keep going!"


~~ Winston Churchill

Found at http://workingatlanl.blogspot.com/

16 comments:

RUTH said...

Thanks for confirming that MP's can smoke...glad it wasn't just that I just misheard. Seems unfair though! I see on Akelamulas blog you've won an award. Congrats!!!!
Rx

tomshideaway said...

Smokers are now second class citizens...I quit 8 days ago, but I still think the anti smoking laws are ridiculous...If a business states they allow smoking in their establishment then you enter at your own risk...but when governments mandate you cannot enjoy a legal addiction whilst drinking a beer at your local pub it's time for a revolution!! Keep writing Gled

Anonymous said...

Tom ~~ you are right it is time indeed for revolution!!

yes, Ruth you're spot on... I know this from Radio 4!!

Liz Hinds said...

You are a brilliant writer and it's fantastic that your daydreams are leading in the clean direction. You do indeed have a unique voice. I look forward to buying your book. But don't give up blogging yet!

Very impressed also with your review of The Godfather. I haven't read it and I'm not going to but I still like your review!

Sorry but I'm glad about the smoking ban.

Liz Hinds said...

P.S. I'm adding to you to my blogroll. Hope that's all right.

Akelamalu said...

One rule for them and another for us eh? The smoking ban is good for me as a reformed smoker (10 years) but I feel for you smokers it must be hell!

Call over to my blog and collect your award Gleds, just follow the instructions in my post today. :)

Anonymous said...

Love the chat box, Gledwood ... Blogdrive gives you one automaticalls so I haven't had the need to go looking for one.

That was me, Chipper ... it didn't let me put my name in

Gledwood said...

chipper it was me who transferred your comment into here... the gabbly isn't really for comments as it doesn't keep things longterm... it's just meant to be a live chatroom
strangely however people usually only use it to talk to me
not to each other
..except very occasionally ...

ho-hum...

Gledwood said...

Liz: thanks very much for the compliments!! No I won't give up blogging yet... the Godfather, I think, is a much better book than the film of it... my friends are just getting bored of me rattling on about the doings of the Corleones' arch rivals the Vermicellis and the Tagliatelli families ...

Gledwood said...

Thanks for the sympathy Akelamalu I think the ban was imposed for all the wrong reasons. I'm not actually so against it in theory but ... as I say... it FEELS like all the wrong reasons are behind it

Evil Spock said...

I've been gone for a week, and it looks like a lot has happened for you.

Good luck man.

Crazed Nitwit said...

Hi!

Thanks for visiting and complimenting my blog today! I'm glad when people can enjoy what I write.

Your blog is quite interesting as well. I love trying to figure out the different slang from England!

No smoking has been here(The West Coast) in American for awhile. I love it because I don't smoke but I can see where it infringes on one's personal liberties.

Have a great evening and keep visiting.

Daniel Thompson said...

Thanks for visiting my blog today. I wanted to answer your question about microtonal music. Microtonal music uses tunings that are different than the standard 12 equally spaced notes to the octave that nearly all modern music uses.

It's a pretty big subject because it includes historical, ethnic and some very strange experimental tunings. Most of what I do involves using more notes like 13, 15 or 26 notes per octave. I have a few audio examples in the right sidebar of my blog.
http://danielthompson.blogspot.com/

I have been enjoying your blogs, especially the video blog. Keep up the good work!

Mermaid Melanie said...

I quit smoking. Saving that money for a new camera. I always have dreams about celebrities, and it kind of freaks me out. And why the heck don't you have a cell phone?

you responded to my photo blog, that is how I found you. good day!

Gledwood said...

Evil Spock~~I know it's all change chez the Gledwood. Thanks for visiting... I meant to drop by yours a couple of days ago and got distracted so I'm sorry I've not been by for a while. Hope everything's OK at Evil Land

Janice NW~~ my bro lives on the West Coast (LA) and doesn't complain bc he's a nonsmoker too... this trend seems to have kindled and taken off there ... seems we, the Rest of the World, have Los Angeles to thank for our smoke-free predicament!!

Did you know they're even banning cigarettes in open-air cemetaries and hospital car parks now... I mean..! + what are the patients going to do, sneaking out for a crafty ciggie! Psychiatric admissions, I tell you, are going to sore bc of this!

Daniel ThompsonDo you mean like some Indian and Chinese music? Seems to use a different scale? I was one trying to tap out an Eastern tune on a standard western synthesizer keyboard ... it just would not do it... I managed to key out quite a lot using the black notes, but soon came to a dead end::~~at least one of the notes just was not there! Glad you like my video blog. Thanks so much for commenting. You are a legend of the Random Blog Button, I hope you realize that!

Melanie thanks for telling me how we "met" .. I have such a bad memory for these things ... I do have a cellphone but it is broken... needs a new battery and even though it's Nokia (but it looks like an army surplus mobile... it's kinda waterproof completely on the outside except for the charging flap that has now fallen off... thanks to me... duh! ... yeah I need a new battery as the bloody thing just doesn't work properly... how did you know I needed a phone? I must've mentioned it somewhere of course... bc I was bemoaning the price of kiosk calls? Yeah man, they're fantastically peepee-taking, seriously.

Welshcakes Limoncello said...

Gleds, loved your tale of the notice in the phone box and the analogy about banning smoking in Princess M's bedroom! Well, the mafia still reigns supreme in certain cities here, like Gela and Palermo. Mostly they are into property deals and, of course, drug trafficking. But I don't think their power will ever be what it was because of the pentiti - the equivalent of supergrasses. And the fatalistic attitude people had about them is changing. OF course, it was the Americans who consolidated their power at the end of WW2, as I'm sure you know. I can't get on withPuzo myself - much too scary for me! I think writing this blog is the best thing you could do, Gleds, because it must give you daily self-discipline and if you can do it in one area of your life you can do it in another. I think you will get that book deal! Don't give up.

I WANT OFF METHADONE AS QUICK AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE!

METHADONE ~ A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH







Heroin Shortage: News

If you are looking for the British Heroin Drought post, click here; the latest word is in the comments.







Christiane F

"Wir, Kinder vom Bahnhoff Zoo" by "Christiane F", memoir of a teenage heroin addict and prostitute, was a massive bestseller in Europe and is now a set text in German schools. Bahnhoff Zoo was, until recently, Berlin's central railway station. A kind of equivalent (in more ways than one) to London's King's Cross... Of course my local library doesn't have it. So I'm going to have to order it through a bookshop and plough through the text in German. I asked my druggieworker Maple Syrup, who is Italiana how she learned English and she said reading books is the best way. CHRISTIANE F: TRAILER You can watch the entire 120-min movie in 12 parts at my Random blog. Every section EXCEPT part one is subtitled in English (sorry: but if you skip past you still get the gist) ~ to watch it all click HERE.

To See Gledwood's Entire Blog...

DID you find my blog via a Google or other search? Are you stuck on a post dated some time ago? Do you want to read Gledwood Volume 2 right from "the top" ~ ie from today?
If so click here and you'll get to the most recent post immediately!

Drugs Videos

Most of these come from my Random blog, which is an electronic scrapbook of stuff I thought I might like to view at some time or other. For those who want to view stuff on drugs I've collected the very best links here. Unless otherwise stated these are full-length features, usually an hour or more.

If you have a slow connexion and are unused to viewing multiscreen films on Youtube here's what to do: click the first one and play on mute, stopping and starting as it does. Then, when it's done, click on Repeat Play and you get the full entertainment without interruption. While you watch screen one, do the same to screens 2, 3 and so on. So as each bit finishes, the next part's ready and waiting.

Mexican Black Tar Heroin: "Dark End"

Khun Sa, whose name meant Prince Prosperous, had been, before his death in the mid 2000s, the world's biggest dealer in China White Heroin: "Lord of the Golden Triangle"

In-depth portrait of the Afghan heroin trade at its very height. Includes heroin-lab bust. "Afghanistan's Fateful Harvest"

Classic miniseries whose title became a catchphrase for the misery of life in East Asian prison. Nicole Kidman plays a privileged middle-class girl set up to mule heroin through Thai customs with the inevitable consequences. This is so long it had to be posted in two parts. "Bangkok Hilton 1" (first 2 hours or so); "Bangkok Hilton 2" (last couple of hours).

Short film: from tapwater-clear H4 in the USA to murky black Afghan brown in Norway: "Heroin Addicts Speak"

Before his untimely death this guy kept a video diary. Here's the hour-long highlights as broadcast on BBC TV: "Ben: Diary of a Heroin Addict". Thanks to Noah for the original link.

Some of the most entertaining scenes from Britain's top soap (as much for the poor research as anything else). Not even Phil Mitchell would go from nought to multi-hundred pound binges this fast: "Phil Mitchell on Crack" (just over 5 minutes).

Scientist lady shows us how to cook up gear: "How Much Citric?" Lucky cow: her brown is 70% purity! Oddly we never see her actually do her hit... maybe she got camera shy...

And lastly:

German documentary following a life from teenage addiction to untimely death before the age of 30. The decline in this girl's appearance is truly shocking. "Süchtig: Protokoll einer Hilflosigkeit". Sorry no subtitles; this is here for anyone learning German who's after practice material a little more gripping than Lindenstraße!































Nosey Quiz! Have you ever heard voices when you weren't high on drugs?

Manic Magic

Manic Magic

Gledwood Volume 2: A Heroin Addict's Blog

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