Evilstein. Robos. Childhood Poo Pain.

HEY THIS IS THURSDAY'S POST... I MISSED MIDNIGHT BY three seconds ... not thanks to my own dallying but thanks to Googles up-****ing. Thanxx a log Google...

EVILSTEIN, MY OBJECTIONABLE LANLORD'S AGENT came bursting in this afternoon, knocking my drink over, telling me the place is too untidy (he thinks I should dispose of all I own and subsist in an operating theatre. Even then, like the legendary military tent-inspection, I know he'd find fault enough with whatever I did to label the surgical blankness "dirty".

Evilstein's useless henchmen had to measure up in order to fit/order/install replacement windows~(??!) I cannot help but wonder what extremes they will be pushed to in the bodge-job stakes with this particular assignment ... What will go wrong?... Windows that don't fit? Ones that don't open (that's more Evilstein's style). PVCu monstrosities that go cloudy in the sun..?? Something's bound to go dramatically wrong!

I had horrible dreams all night last night. Some recurring nightmare of being under arrest in a giant hi-tech police station. Can't even remember the alleged "crime" but I've never done it. What I recall was that it was all symbolic of my giving up drugs. Seeing that no escape was possible I turned to plotting methods of suicide. Eventually settling on an undeclared hunger strike to weaken the body then to take a piece of metal, a shard of glass, plastic even or a paperclip or anything that is sharp or could be sharpened, anything that I could muster in desperation and lunge at, tear into my flesh deep enough to gash open a major blood vessel open in the dead of night and lie there quietly bleeding in rivers of my own blood wrapped in sheets trying not to sob or scream out, just to get through it right to the bitter end... and then... Sunrise.

Not to perpetrate Natural Justice upon myself for I had done nothing wrong (not, at least the major crime of which I was accused). But just to Go Home... finally. At long last. Just to Get Out of there and Go Home... Where I belong.

Woke up in a sweat and feeling sick for drugs. The methadone I'd taken had not been enough.

I've always been useless at detoxification. A big crying baby whose dummy has been taken away. (Only by my own choice!) Of course I've managed these past 33 years without a dummy but o! At the time, aged 2, I bet: the horrors! The pains I went through!!

Imagine if you can that we could all recall in detail the protracted agonies of our own babyhoods? The hot nights crying ill with childhood fevers, the horrors of teething, the constant upsets. All those hours on end we have spent lying abandoned and bawling our eyes out with curried nappies and nobody is running here fast enough (Mum is probably fast asleep and I don't blame her. Looking after me must have been so exhausting.) At 4am nobody hears your screams. And time, of course, passes ten, twenty, perhaps thirty times more slowly through the infant mind... only multiplying one's discomforts... What an agony life would be if we all grew up remembering all of that... And we'd all think we had the excuse to grow up into heroin addicts - addled by the sheer trauma of not having been coddled ...

Not much in the way of robo-news today. Last night I gave them Red Label 40 teabags box with tiny windows sniped into each of six sides. Itchy, once he got fed up of being loop-the-looped by the 2 heavier wheel-marathon-ing hammies, spent hours in there, washing his wet fur even wetter and attacking alien-fingered millet sprays...

Wow I'm knock-knack-knackered. I'm sure I've still got dregs of that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome from eleven years past. As every time I physically push myself I end up oversleeping... hours and hours on end... for days and days at a time...


2-day's vids:
Sly and the Family Stone: Family Affair
Sinead: Sacrifice
"Moonfall": Making a Record... (original link was to "take ii")

Sly Stone's Website! http://slystonemusic.com

Sly stone

Bashful Annoying; Whitney Memoirs; No Drugs Boo-Hoo-Hooo!...

ROBOROVSKI NEWS: BASHFUL IS SERIOUSLY starting to "peeve" me. To my crime of inserting an ever-so-slightly rustly (and expensive, might I add) millet spray she shot from their tube-nest exploding like a fire cracker and sending hamsters splurring in all directions like furry fireballs. The swine. They did go mental over the millet, once they realized it was not a blobberous alien's craggy reptilian fingers or whatever the hell they thought it was first time round - Roborovskis have massively overactive imaginations.

Which reminds me: I was crossing the road earlier when Celine Dion yelled at me: "Will he think I'm weak if I tremble when I speak?!"

To which Barbra Streisand replied: "Love will be the gift you give yourself!!"

I thought I was having another psychotic episode.

Fortunately not - it was merely an off-duty blonde secretary's sound system blasting from her brand-new-looking ultramarine Vauxhall Tigra.

Which makes me wonder: what on earth possessed a car company to name themselves after a run-down, seedy sector of South London that is famed for nothing more exciting than its Victorian railway arches and high levels of street robbery? Vauxhall is hardly the most salubrious setting one could evoke for the selling of automobiles... it's a bit like naming your new cars after Haarlem or the Bronx... Ukk.

Do I sound chirpy as a budgie pecking a millet spray tonight? Because I don't really feel it. By the way the hand-painted budgie on the Trill box looks hilarious - the obvious product of an artist who's never actually owned such a bird. The posture and expression are all wrong. A bit like those hilarious early paintings of Orientals and Africans the sixteenth century white colonizers took home to show honest church-going folk what genuine heathens looked like... This particular budgie has a murderous look in its eye, as if it's minded to brutally slay the humble canary with that eagle's beak the artist so thoughtfully endowed him with...

Yes I am highly (?) depressed. Deeply depressed. Because I am forcing myself into giving up drugs plus writing my memoirs all in one. I keep telling myself I'm the Whitney Houston of memoirists in order to spur myself on but it's not working.

I can hardly call it an autobiography because as my Dad pointed out I've not done anything with my life: "That's the whole point," I said. "It's a memoir of drug-induced dereliction." I'm not sure he does really get the point, which can only really be told by the completed book. Which is why I have to write it... Also I want a gargantuan advance so I can get my eight-foot bogwood aquarium brimming with diddly dwarf frogs and tetras (did you notice it gets bigger every time I mention it?!) ... This to furnish my art nouveau flat in Chelsea that I shall move into directly from B&B...

If I say I've quitted heroin for good I'll only fall slapstick straight on my face like every other time so I'd better not and say "Hoorah! I just bought an ounce!" (Except I didn't.)

Righty-ho: better go and pen those memoirs, Whitney...

By the way my left leg in particular is covered in red lumps from my injecting highly acid brown heroin into tiny thread veins... nasty business... There appear to be none left now... it can take nearly an hour to get a "hit"... And you wonder why I said I've ordered myself to stop.

Right I really have gotta go. I'm hungry and craving baked beans and halal (turkey) Frankfurters.

By the way how's this for a title: My Drug Hell by Whitney-Mariah Roborovski... already I'm hunting out my old Judy Garland fright wig again for the Stephen Meisel author photo.

(And if you believe that you really will believe anything!!)

Righty-ho folks. Till 2morro...

Nonday....

EVERYONE ELSE (in this country) goes back to work... what do I do? Conk out from sheer exhaustion all day... letting hours tick past... and more hours.... and hours more... and eventually it is dark... And now at about ten minutes to ten I tear myself up to tell you how I did nothing...!

BY THE WAY... talking of music that scares Roborovskis; I've found a tune that really does: it's Dream a Little Dream of Me as performed by Nat King Cole on CD... something about the loud whiny clonking noise they incorporated into the track has them racing to hide in bed... I'm not sure quite why...

Well I'd better go. An appropriate non-ending to a non-day...

Night-night...

Clips:
i: Pete Doherty & Co... Hang on what do they perform?? So forgettable...
Oh yeah: Dream a Little Dream of Me ... what am I saying??!
ii: Nat King Cole - Autumn Leaves
iii: Amy Winehouse & Charlotte Church perform Michael Jackson's Beat It. This was an hilarious rendition... I've no idea why Amy Winehouse's performance is so bizarre... whether she was trying to upstage Charlotte Church or whether she was just drunk... who knows... but this is a classic moment from the Charlotte Church TV Show....

***

Wednesday's traxx:
Bryan Adams + Mystery Guest II Finally Found Someone
Human Tetris from Japan
7 Roborovskis
Tiny Baby Roborovskis

Bankholiday* Heatwave

...*in response to the query I got the other day, a bank holiday is merely a British public holiday. So called because the banks take yet another opportunity to shut their doors early (what's new) ...

WHAT A SULTRY SUNDAY. "HEATWAVE" is how the forecasters phrased it. And yet again - there's me unconscious on the carpet snoozing as Amy Winehouse tinkles round and round on repeat play.

WHEN I REGURBISHED THEIR DOMAIN with Yangyang the Chinese hammy's cast-offs, the Robbies went bananas investigating it all, especially running back and forth throughout the Signal toothpaste box, poking heads through the chewed-out parts, squirming thru, pinging, ponging, do nothin' wrong-ing...

SORRY I didn't post yesterday (though it's labelled "Sunday" the last post was actually inputted late Saturday night). It got L8R & L8R, I had no messages to pass on. London had went Carnival crazy. Streets seemed full of beautiful black girls in spangling frocks. Black kids drest in West Indian cub-scouts garb. And black men tagging on possessively behind drest in nothing more special than their best baseball caps... (It's a Carribbean carnival. When white people have been; unless there's a whistle hung on Jamaican flag-themed ribbon about the neck there's usually scant clues at all that they've been. Except for an unusual level of drunkenness...)

Last night I decided to introduce Yangyang the Chinese to Baby Itchy the Robo. On neutral ground, of course: my two hands. All went fine except that in my enthusiasm I had gone and confused Itchy with Bashful - the absolute worst move I could possibly have made. No sooner had their whiskered faces said hello (in my own falsetto) safe from separate hands than Bashful went ping!! disappearing across six feet of carpet in two seconds and hiding behind a fallen laminated fire alarm notice. Yangyang merely looked on, ears poked up on high alert with a bemused expression and clung resolutely to my right hand that I suddenly needed for Robo catching duties (as Chinese hamsters do). When ten minutes later the situation was resolved, Bashful was blasting about the tank like a firework rocket panicking the other two for ages and Yangyang, who I'd not had time to return home had vanished. I later found him having burrowed down a new bedroom in the sleeve of my best jacket. Then the real Itchy showed face as if to apologize and he looked itchier than ever, wet from head to foot, like a brush from one of those drive-through automatic car-washes... except two inches long and beady-eyed and sand-colour, not blue....

... AND SO THE BANK HOLIDAY BEAT GOES ON... it's a sweltering day. Sly and the Family Stone are a-jazzin' & a-tootlin' behing the Robbies' empty-looking tank. The Robbies are all stashed away in their Maltesers tube fast asleep like mini gremlins. No wonder they're tired. Bashful and Sphericlal were running the wheel all last night while Itchy ill-advisedly attempted to go the other direction and so ended up clinging on for dear life doing constant loop-the-loops - and getting repeatedly trampled on the head as the other two passed another time over... (No wonder his behaviour's ditzy. Perhaps he's got brain-damage from all that gettin' chucked about... I don't know.)

NOW I HAVE TO GO and cook mushroom tortelloni with grated vulgarity cheddar and demoralized chopped tomatoes with French herb garnish... it's rather pleasant once you get used to it. (But some have died trying....) Hokay, till L8R...

Tunes of the day:
Bryan Adams with Mystery Guest: Everything I do
Chinese Violinist: Autumn Moon On A Placid Lake... this is the nearest I could get on youtube to my 50p charity shop CD of the same name featuring traditional Cantonese music with the traditional one and two-string South Chinese violins.... The tracks with "birdsong" are fantastic as it's all played out in alt-altissimo on violin strings... quite genius... and just the thing to have glinting in the background if you ever throw a dim-sum dinner party ....

***

ROBOROVSKI ALERT: CLICK HERE ... and scroll down to see Itchy's lookylikey ... (sorry it didn't come out properly the other day...)

Note the nervous expression on the face... that is so characteristic of the Roborovski hamster

The Robbies Are Upset...

5:38 SATURDAY A.M. THE ROBBIES ARE UPSET because I removed their maltesers tube to stop them hiding all the time. Spherical has just completed attempted excavations beneath the empty cardboard box they were meant to sleep in but for some reason avoid (they would rather sleep under it. Which as much as anything else just looks ridiculous. Stupid creatures.) At one point the three of them were lined up furiously digging in a row. Which looked so entertaining. Though they don't always scarper the second I delve my hand beside them, they do eye it with grave suspicion. And if Itchy allows the rubbing of his back with one finger which is an action Bashful would never countenance, the other two look on with baleful eyes as if to muse: "Itchy, man, you're a fool not to run like we do... can't you see where this is leading? Those humans, they win your trust. Then they'll have you turned into half a shoulder pad on a fur coat before the month is out ..."

There is a Swedish lady called Eva who is an expert on rodents, who insists no species of hamster is a truly social creature and that all hammies, including all types of dwarves (Lord of the Rings Hamsters) will always eventually fight. My Russian hamsters never fought. And these robos, who clearly do things together on purpose are the most social pets I've ever had. Like a pack of mini rotund doggies who squeak instead of bark.

CELINE DION: I was, of course, merely being provocative yesterday beginning my post with those uncompromising words. How could I ever have associated "Celine Dion" and "adventurousness" in the one sentence? In mitigation let me state it was on special offer. But nowhere near as forgivingly low as the £1 a disc Gnat King Coal cost me. I was attracted by that famous love theme from Titanic which I always thought had a haunting Scottish panpipes thing going on... though it did get played to death... Also Luciano Pavarotti appears pretending to be her 70 year old pasta-munching lover (ukk! Perish the thought!) ... Anyway, on hearing the record through I know now why, despite having seen Celine on television numerous times I had no memory of any of her songs... that is because they're all so forgettable! With one exception: track 3, titled Treat Her Like a Lady a really entertaining dancehall-influenced number in which Ms Dion affects a West Indian accent to a ragga-girls chorus... So much of this record is eminently forgettable. Which just begs the question who bought all those 15 million copies sold?

THE ROBOS ARE SAT UP FURRILY IN BED, nibbling those pink and green hamster-scones in a line. O! Now Bashful and Itchy are having a grooming fight. Spherical is eating a biscuit (no wonder she is spherical). O! Now she's gone in the corner for a poo. Either that or she's staring into space in a Zen-like moment of blank... Come morning they get their Maltesers tube back to hide in. But they are not allowed such diversions at night. Else they get too boring and never come out.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME I slept like a fallen tree earlier on... hours and hours and hours. It is very hot today (well, hot for here). I woke up parched... water more water... such raging thurst? Why?? Well I gotta go really it is too late now. All this post relates to Saturday not Sunday. Sunday is merely the technical day of posting as midnight's a near hour past...

righty-ho...

Louis Armstrong: Wonderful World (Live on TV)
Wonderful World Illustrated Video

Videos II (Sunday (there was no post on Sunday))

Thousand Hand Chinese Dance
Showing off to the Girl Next Door (parakeets and budgies) (I think it was screen II I specifically posted up...)

Bank Holiday Ugh!

I BOUGHT A CELINE DION ALBUM TODAY! But every time that love theme from Titanic, My Heart Will Go On, comes on, the Roborovskis scuttle off and hide in the Maltesers tube... has anyone got any idea why?? Also I'm sure I saw them looking green in the face and attempting to be sick earlier on when that Streisand duet, "Tell Him" came on... do you think they've got food poisoning? I wonder why they're behaving like this..??

Click here, btw, to see Itchy's life-size lookylikey... on someone's hand for scale... teeny-weeny...

Seriously though, talking about Robos, I've had to put in an urgent info request to AllExperts.Com seeking advice on what to do if Spherical actually does give birth... do I separate all the hamsters? Or just the male one, Itchy? Or what do I do..? My £4.99 picture book The Dwarf Hamster (translated from the Dutch De Dwerg Hamster is unrevealing on this point... in fact it's not much cop. Apart from some unflattering pictures of Chinese hamsters (the author had obviously never owned one) plus cute ones of winter whites, Campbells ("condensed hamsters") and robos... there's not much by way of info and they fall into stupid traps like saying "the (plastic) tunnels in some of those Hamster Paradise setups available from petshops are poorly ventilated"... what? More poorly ventilated than muddy ones dug in the cold earth? That they live in wild? I hardly think so..! They omitted even to mention that Russian Hamsters like to take dust baths... if I'd have known I'd have provided them with proper sand to roll in (sawdust made their coats horrible). I changed their cage litter to cat litter but wish I'd known they were rolling about for a reason. I just thought they were having itchy moments ...

Right: on to CDs. Yes! I did actually pay for a Celine Dion album. This is because I am rapidly becoming middle aged as my best years were misspent. (Well what else is youth for?!?) Also I got three Nat King Coles, which were called Unforgettable, Nature Boy and something like The Collection... at £1 each! All 1950s recordings. Plus a 1950s collection called simply Opera... I don't know why but the sound quality on this one is very wooly whereas Nat sounds like he's in the next room... fair enough the very top frequencies don't come out like they would on today's records but for 57 years ago I don't think it's bad... also I got an amazing 55 tracks for my money. In my opinion Nat King Cole is thee King of Crooners bar none. As for Celine it's called Let's Talk About Love and, as I say, had my hamsters running for the sick bucket...

Why all this rampant CD-collecting? I was spending money that would otherwise have gone on drugs. That's my new habit: attemptedly collecting Solid Things That Last... know what I mean?!?

Those robos do have a "complex social structure" with odd behaviours. If they were humans they would scurry away and hide behind the sofa every time the doorbell rang... when something startles them they scarper and hide in pyramid formation... always seemingly with Spherical at front (she is Mother Robbie), Itchy behind her and Bashful (of course) at the back. Only when Spherical makes a move forward do the others relax. I never saw my old Russian hamsters behaving in this way. Another odd thing they do looks like kissing. Then the more dominant hamster (it could be any one of the three at any time) kind of knocks the other one over and compulsorily washes its stomach and private parts:... I never saw the Russians doing that either! And there is nothing sexual in this... unless Bashful and Spherical are part-time lesbians (well, you never know...)

No big news. It's Bank Holiday weekend. Hmmmm. I have dreadful memories of August Bank Holiday. A few years ago I forced myself into all-night clubbing followed by the Notting Hill Carnival (which attracts a supposed 1.5 million visitors over 2 days making it one of the biggest carnivals in the world), had Jo-Rei healing and something along the lines; I don't know whether it was Jo-Rei or ecstasy or what it was, blew a gasket in my brains and I had a complete and utter breakdown of mind and body... lay in bed sweating bottles of white wine (well afterwards when I changed the sheets, that's what it appeared had been poured all over them)... and crying and unable to get up to do the slightest thing because I had an ear-labrynth infection and the room was spinning so... What a nighmare that was. Notting Hill Carnival? Never again!!

Clips of the Day:
From my favourite crooner ever, Nat King Cole - Mona Lisa ...
and
Bizarre Clip:
Japanese Man with Real Flesh TAIL!!

PS FOLLOWING YESTERDAY'S TAG... may I revise my shortlist to EVERYONE who reads this blog is HEREBY OFFICIALLY TAGGED. So unless you've done the Eight Random Things Tag there's no getting out of this one ... thank y'all and goodbye!

Eight Random Things About Me ++

JUNKY - FINALLY I ANSWERED YOUR TAGG!!

This took me ages to think up... until I walked about holding pen and paper for an hour or so earlier... (blank computer screen engenders psychic blankness in one like me. As my blog so duly testifies...)

1. I have written two books. Both are novels. One is 200,000 words and crap and about 20 MS pages are missing (thanks to an unnamed person who is not me); the other is totally handwritten, untyped and about addiction. I decided not to go ahead with editing it as will write my own memoirs instead

2. I "speak" four languages (arguably) (including English). These are French, German, Welsh and English. The Welsh is only conversational and because I did my secondary education in Welsh Wales where language classes were compulsory!

3. I used to have pet prawns in a fishtank along with fishes, a giant snail and a frog.

4. I once travelled from Carmarthen in West Wales to Marrakech in Southern Morocco and back entirely by train and boat

5. I can touch type a good 60 wpm ++(why? Because I once wanted to be a journalist and knew that whatever career path I followed, computers were the way of the future.. so why not learn to keyboard "properly"??

6. In my life I have been Christian, Hindu (Siddha Yoga), Buddhist, Pagan and back to Christian. Never have I been agnostic, apart from the early days of my heroin love affair

7. Aparently I have the same voice as Usher. (Isn't Usher a rapper? Wow. Big deal then.)

8. I am going to permanently stop using drugs ...

...AND I TAG...

Akelamalu
Audrey
Bimbimbie
Chipper
Jungle Jane
Kahshe Cottager
Merle
Peed off Patricia (Morning Martini)
Puss-in-Boots
Sadgirl
Wayward (Crystal Clean) Son...
and
Welshcakes Limoncello

Rules are: you write out eight random facts about yourself and tag eight others...

I tagged nine* because I wanted to torture Chipper* as well...

*OK I got carried away. And did more than nine...

O! And Roborovski news: I caught Itchy attemptedly raping Spherical again last night... thankfully he is getting very tame (unlike the other two) which is good as he's going to have to live in solitary if too many babies appear. Poor swine. I wonder if he would get on with Chinese? Probably not and I don't want to risk blood and hamster guts on the wood shavings ...

I'm not sure Spherical and Bashful (who is rapidly becoming spherical) are pregnant yet. But they surely will be once Itchy's balls drop (which they haven't yet.) But I know for a fact he is a boy because he has a pink dot and a pink patch. Girls never have any proof positive for being female... just two tiny holes you can bearly see...

So let's "see" what happens ...

***

Hey my Google word verification (bc I used to post too much) is "pigorsy"... what a word... Maybe I will pass that name to one of my baby robbies if and when they arrive ...

***

TUNE OF THE DAY: Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman - Somethin' Stupid

entertainment clip: Finding Amy Winehouse... short film by Leeds Uni students ... I've not seen this through myself I have to admit so I'm unsure whether they do find her ..!

Shrink Result: Spherical Error?

PSYCHIATRIC ASSESSMENT II THIS MORNING. Result. Have been depressed in past. Not depressed now (wahey!!) Had psychotic episode caused or not helped by crack over a year ago. Have strong obsessional streak to personality. Also prone to paranoia sometimes (but do not have paranoid personality). Verdict: never use cannabis or crack again. Stop heroin which is what I want anyhow. Ta-da-da-da-daaaaargh!!

Re the hamsters, I am pretty sure Spherical and Bashful are girls. Bashful is also starting to look markedly spherical too so it's difficult to tell them apart. Itchy (so called because he has been obsessively washing his back) is dead easy to tell apart.... not only the manically wet back fur he is tiny compared to the other two. And has a suspicious pink patch underneath. (I got him to stand on an empty CD case.)

So even if there's no babies on the way now... there soon may well be unless I do anything about this...

Itchy is far tamer than the other two. I was trying to train Spherical to walk on my hands. Which she does with great reluctance. (Roborovskis are extremely flighty animals and often never get as tame as ordinary dwarf hamsters. That's just what they're like and I knew this before I got them.) I want her as calm as possible in case she does have babies. It would not do to have a panicking mother dashing about threatening to eat her offspring (which is what they do under stress). Bloody cannibals. All will tolerate me putting my hand down among them without running away: they just come up and sniff it. But none of them actually seems to enjoy being handled and Itchy is so tiny. He's about 1cm shorter than the other two, who come from my fingertip to the second joint of my index finger. About 6cm long or just short of 2 inches...

Hey have a look at the ballbusting entertainment clip I posted today. This is a man hitting a note so high it is off the piano keyboard. Beneath it we have a woman "singing" in the octave above soprano top C upto "G7" in musical nomenclature. I just put this up to prove Mariah Carey is not unusually talented, and this "whistle register" to me sounds horrible and that is not merely a criticism of pitch: I've heard garden birds who sing even higher than Mr Lopez but their voices are sublimely beautiful. Far more than a hypersonic car-alarm screech..!

Contrasted at the top is Barbra Streisand: real singing!

Many thanks Kahshe for this tip: Hampster Dance Website

Today's Videos Were
Streisand: Papa Can You Hear Me
Streisand: Evergreen

Highest ever male voice: Australia's Adam Lopez
Highest human voice ever: Brazil's Georgia Brown

Pregnant?

NOW I AM CONFUSED... is the hamster preggers or not? "She" is definitely bigger and rounder than the other two. If she gets on the wheel when another one's on it, the other one is forced to loop the loop by her very weightiness... Because these animals are so very wild and flighty (it is an achievement just to get them to walk on you, let alone stand still - and even then they're only looking for a chance to jump off) it's been almost impossible to sex them and very hard to establish whether Spherical really is with children or just bigger ... or (this only struck me today) from another litter and thus older. I have no idea and only time will tell. If she really is pregnant surely she will get bigger and bigger as days pass? Then again I once caught a pregnant mouse... had no idea that she was till she actually gave birth. (This was when our house was utterly overrun with mice. I thought if I keep the babies and somehow tame them I can have free pets. (The mice they sell in pet shops, and for that matter the ones they use in labs are only domesticated wild house mice.) But it didn't work that way: all the babies (the size and colour of baked beans) died within about five hours.)

I tried to answer a tag earlier (8 random things about me) but had to stop after two. Firstly I was hungry, but to be honest I couldn't think of any random things. Surely I have posted all? I suppose I could cheat and use my wild mouse breeding thing as point three....

By the way: am I a philistine or has Mariah Carey NOT got an amazing voice? I was quite shocked to hear she had won some MTV poll as "greatest voice of all time" - please no! That horrible breathy fluttery sound... applied to "trendy" R&B "roots" that she doesn't have... plus high notes with all the magical timbre of a dog whistle. Please! No no no!!

***

Vids of the day were
1. Bryan Adams - Heaven
2. African Dwarf Aquarium-dwelling Frog

Robo Hammies

TODAY I WENT ON AN EXTREME MISSION.... my quest began with my phoning all over town ... nobody had them. Shop in Kensington wanted £35 for a pair but they're out of stock till next week... eventually found somewhere right the other side of town that says they sell Robohammies... it took me three bus rides each way... £23 for a bundle of furry entertainment. Man they are so fast! Unstoppable, uncatchable. They do make an entertaining ornament. When they get startled (which means any movement, any noise, anything at all right now, they assume this pyramid formation, each hiding behind another. And probably the same one that voluntarily ran onto my hand, up my arm and dropped onto the floor and scarpered for half an hour being always the one at the front... At the moment they're running the wheel, two in one direction, the other faces the other way and gets spun round and round (it's a wire wheel so he or she can cling on), he is biting at the wire with his nose.... Come to think of it I haven't a clue what sex(es) these critters are or whether they're a mixture. I did notice the one that's tamest towards me keeps climbing on one of the other's backs and that this one looks kind of rounder and more tubby... I wonder why THAT could be! If you want to see what robohammies look like they're on today's youtube screen. But if this is tomorrow click here for a look... film doesn't show up how tiny they are...

This fantastic docu has just been on Radio 4 where a man in a studio randomly calls payphones all over the world and records the resulting dialogues. It was absolutely entrancingly fascinating. If you want to hear it, click here for Radio 4 Listen Again and select Don't Hang Up.

STOP PRESS: when I just tried it Don't Hang Up (which was a repeat) wasn't in Listen Again's Listings... maybe if you try later they'll have got their act together enough to have added it

STOP PRESS 2: try it, click on my listen again link and find "Don't Hang Up" it's right there now. .. well worth a listen if you want something "different" to spew through your computer... you probably can change sites and go bloghopping without losing the soundtrack (usually) though this isn't guaranteed it's happened to me loads of times

These were the videos of the day
Glenn Miller: Moonlight Serenade
"My 3 Robohammies"

Swizzly Sunday

SWIZZLY SUNDAY... Sunday morning... Sunday: lost day... I don't know!... Do you? Do you think my Mum knows I'm still using? She always talks about it in past tense... I feel so ashamed... That's why things must change.

I have been working on my alcohol consumption. I've cut my drinking in half within a couple of days. Do you know what did the trick? I took up drinking tea for breakfast instead. Because (looking back) I just realized I had been drinking nothing but white cyder for breakfast, luncheon and dinner and everything in between and afterwards! Nothing but cyder. No wonder I felt under the weather some days.

Yesterday I found myself sitting with all the drinkers at the bus stand outside a local supermarket. Only two were there, these two are the nearest to friends I have among that bunch. When I did used to hang out with street people (well: at one point, I was one) it was the junkies. But there are no street junkies left anymore. Only the shoplifters, theives, rip-off artists and prostitutes. No "crustie" street junkies after the 1990s fashion (army surplus clothing, dredlocks/halfheads/shaven/punky colours, dogs on strings) seem to be left. Many are dead. Others have gone back to Scotland and Ireland (we had a huge Celtic contingent) ... one or two have cleaned up. But it is just one or two ...

Anyway this lady I struck up conversation with said I looked so much better than last time. Shame about her. In a way she did look good (nice and clean. Hair recently cut and neat. She had a touch of makeup on and nice clothes considering.) But she was vague and staring into space. I mentioned something about the time I got hit by a truck and had concussion for a week. She grabbed my hand and put it on a long stitched up cut lump on the back of her head - surely about 20 stitches were there - and told how she'd just got discharged from hospital after perhaps four days. But everything she said was a bit vague... Then an Irishman who I know quite well showed up. When people wonder which Irishman I'm talking about I tend to say "he has really blue eyes"... thing is they all have intense blue eyes no matter what the hair colour. Real blue, sometimes ringed with white. (Not like my mongrel English eyes: bluey-green with circles of what someone once poetically put as "brimstone" - yellow bits round the pupil. See now you can pick me out in an identity parade!) Anyway: thing about this guy is, I've seen him reeling all over the pavements and falling and burbling and calling out... Now he is stone cold sober and all the better for it. Quite amazing. During our encounter she ran off and reappeared with a pair of large white "England" trainers (sneakers). They fit me fine. So that's what I'm wearing now... Whoever threw them away was a trainer-snob because they're hardly worn-out. But maybe they're last season: who knows?

Music playing is Amy Winehouse Back to Black. I slept with this on constant replay. This is what made me feel upset the other morning... Sometimes music goes right under into subconscious.

Thanks, Wayward especially for your dream interpretation. My "holiday camp" prison dream. Where the "jail" seemed so easy to escape from ... to any outside observer ... but of course escape was near impossible. Every time I tried I was fished back inside by (as I recall) invisible forces. Yes of course that symbolizes my addiction. And the fact that though anyone can sympathize with addiction because we're all dependent on different things to differing degrees you cannot begin to comprehend chemical dependency unless you've witnessed it first hand ... or more to the point, lived it yourself...

Yesterday I went to the fish shop where they had a tropical fish "bowl"... I use the word bowl advisedly, since technically it was bowl-shaped but if you're thinking goldfish bowl think again. This held 45 litres of water (about 12 gallons) and came complete (in glass) with heater, filter and light. When the woman saw it was me enquiring she was so dismissive; I thought f--- you and left. I've given up on the idea of fish in my present residence anyway (though I could still have dwarf frogs: two can live in as little as 1.5 gallons (6 litres!) water; they don't need a filter and aparently, providing your home is warm enough the temperature will be high enough... Anyway... no fish for me yet. I have decided to use the tank for Robo Hamsters (Roborovskis). They are social hamsters about the size and nearly as round as pompoms on wooly hats. They ping about all over ... they don't bite, they live long... My present Chinese hammy is fine he is just so shy there's nothing to see of him! So it's robos for me... of course if I do get them this blog will never hear the end of it ....

OK I better go:
These are the vids I pasted today
Amy Winehouse: Back to Black
and
The Aurora Australis ("Southern Lights") - aren't they cool??

Early Saturday Morn...

FIVE THIRTY-EIGHT A.M. And the beat goes on... How could I ever have been so naive as to hang my hopes for improvement on my fledgling music collection? It's only flately that I realized that subconsciously perhaps I was expecting something slightly more from these silvery CDs I've been so avidly collecting than a little musical diversion. As if they were going to magically lift my spirits to soar. As if they alone were going to change my life anew... How very teenage... How very sad... How very me...!

Music does have a mood-enhancing or mood-altering effect of course. That's one of the chief reasons people listen to it. By surrounding myself with sounds that, to me, have no druggie connotations, I had assumed that my quest for clean would be somehow eased. But that's not how it's been.... It's not an unreasonable assumption to have made. I just think I set rather too much store on music's therapeutic powers. they just don't seem to be working as strongly as I'd hoped!

In my room I have a fan whirring. And when a certain substance that starts with shuh and rhymes with bit finally hits it this autumn... That is when I've scheduled clean.

There; I've told you now.

In my head I have a schedule, complete with activities. And this time (for reasons I cannot explain but have no say in) - there is no breaking it.

I've threatened myself with everything, up to and including death, for breaking former resolutions. Nothing has worked. For months and years they lay in smithereens forlornly at my feet, a testament to broken promises, and, to quote a cliche: broken dreams. Now all remnants of that past are swept away.

So to paraphrase Marianne Faithfull (again*): It's up to me. I just have to make it.

***

(* I quoted Marianne Faithfull a post or two ago.)

***

Today's vids:

Leftfield: Release The Pressure
Northern Lights Display

Marathon Prison Dream

MARATHON SLEEP after such a strenuous outing yesterday evening! Yes: I slept a good twelve hours or more, finally awakening after two pm. You know when you deliberately lie in and keep milking a few extra minutes' sleep out of it... and then waking up... and then sleeping again and sleeping again and so on.... And I had such nightmares! Starting with a giant adder (viper) with zigzagging black squares on its back. And nightmares on a sunny day ... And on to my old familiar theme of attempted escaping from prison. As per usual the prison was like a glorified holiday camp in the grounds of an ancient castle and anyone looking in from outside would have said: what's the big problem with getting out from there. But I did have massive troubles getting free with countless invisible agents tracking me down across green leisurely football fields etc and I got put in a chaingang of retarded soccer players .... Hmmm. Prison. No bars to be seen. Appears no problem at all escaping from until you try it... I wonder what that symbolizes in my life??

I kept dreaming this dream on and on until eventually when I did awake I was shivery and exhausted and perturbed and it was late.

I really don't know what else to say about it.

Except I'm off to get some value stuffed mushroom tortelloni from Sainsbury's now so wish me luck....

Cheerio!

PS Videos of the day: I put Enya up for Debs ... Enya: Exile and
American College Students' Paul McArtney and Michael Jackson Girl is Mine vid

***

Link of the Day:
News of the World (from last Sunday)
Amy Winehouse lifts lid on recent drugs overdose

Meeting Mother

JUST AFTER FOUR PM I met my Mum and her Brian just off Picadilly Circus (no clowns, elephants, trapeze artists or dwarves shooting out of canons - it's merely a glorified traffic circle with humungous video screens glinting and flashing high up the sides of otherwise elegant stucco buildings).

We went into a nearby restaurant where they had nachos and cheese and I had a Siamese green curry that smacked of some kind of lime pickle type substance. It was rather pleasant.

When Brian said, "Shall we get a re-ocka?" I said OK - not realizing he meant Rioja. Which I'd always pronounced "Ree-Oh-Jah". No wonder I used to get such funny looks down the wine merchants'.

We talked about: Amy Winehouse, Lilly Allen, tropical fishes, cigarette smoke, France (where they have a cottage) compared with Britain (it is much better, especially the health service), the French proclivity for sunbathing beside and swimming in inland freshwater lakes as an alternative to the seaside and whether or not I should pretend to be a retarded English as third language asylum seeker with a rape conviction and surname Ndebe to assist job applications at local Council. (Concencus was: if I do, I'll get job with flying colours. I'll just have to pretend to be albino.) And so on and so on.

Afterwards they vanished into the tube while I perused a giant Virgin Records store (almost as big as some provincial department stores), which was full of Chinese tourists (Japanese tourists are so passe these days) - who all seemed totally conversant with e.g. how to scan CD's barcode into a headphones dispenser which then played any track you wanted to hear from said CD... with no need to insert CD into any machine... (all tracks of all CDs were evidently on some central "system"). All this newfangledness made me feel extraordinarily elderly. When I walked into a record shop last week for the first time in about seven years I was so not with it I got confounded: "Why so many film soundtracks?" Until a member of staff helpfully pointed out that I was in fact perusing the DVDs and not CDs. "Well they're all silver discs," I retorted. But didn't dare speak this thought aloud. Feeling like a pensioner I hobbled over to the actual music section.... Anyway, today I walked out of Virgin with a £5 copy of Leftfield's Leftism - which is one of thee best albums of the 1990s. Shoplifting was such a temptation as the CDs were in the cases and half the staff looked like drug addicts anyhow. Until I glanced 'cross the floor to a burly store-D's icy gaze which prompted my quick scurry to the front tills...

Aparently I can keep fish in the Chinese hammy's tank (he would go in next door's recycling box: they never use it). The tank is designed for fish and fully waterproof but only holds a paultry 7 gallons/27 litres. I can have ten diddy fish in there. I thought the remnants of hammy's wee and pooze would kill them off but aparently not so if I soak it out in a strong brine solution for three days... All I'd need then is an airpump (£10), box filter (£5) and heater (£20) and a bit of glass to stop the frog escaping and wahey! There has to be a frog... And a giant snail ("apple snail") and a couple of shrimps... Which leaves room for ... not many fish but hey. (The shrimps are transparent but well funky. They are sold by the bagful as live goldfish food so I'd probably get two for 10p if not for free...)

Is it really boring when I babble on about pets all the time?

O by the way: thanks for all your messages re: I do not have anything wrong with me; lots of people get inertia at various times.

In her autobiography, Marianne Faithfull declares that she became almost paralysed by apathy and will-less-ness at her addiction's lowest depths. She also said that she knew to stop when the pain of living with drugs came to exceed the pain of living without. In an interview she subsequently stated: "I'd tried to kill myself and it hadn't worked," (she fixed up all the heroin she had, fell down the stairs in an overdosed state and broke her jaw but lived;) "I realized that I was just going to have to make it."

Which is pretty much how I feel.

***

Debs: in answer to your query, the music to which today's Diana tribute was set is by Enya. Who was originally lead singer of Clannad. I will post up one of her best tunes tomorrow...

***

Hey did no-one watch or like the teenage kid's alternative video to Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive?

***

O BTW here's my blog recommendation of the day: Muench Bunch News

Such a Day

HOW DO I START A DAY after such a confusing night?? I fell asleep with Amy Winehouse's Back to Black CD on repeat play and so kept waking in the night with the funkiest jazzy sighs and screams and well-produced strings sections perturbing my consciousness. One of the songs made me cry all morning. I am seeing my mother this afternoon. Of course that has no connexion.

Yesterday I did a tiny bit of crack and felt so dreadful afterwards... CD player and everything nearly went flying out the window... All life's music and dance killed stone dead. By the crack...

Poor Amy Winehouse is all over the Sun newspaper today. I was going to write about her yesterday in fact. The Mirror was claiming an exclusive "Amy's in rehab in America" while the Victoria Newton, The Sun's entertainment columnist vehemently disagreed; insisting she was in rehab but in the UK; in Essex. The poor girl has really been through the mill. I'm sure carving out a career as a (highly talented) funky jazz singer she never expected in a million years to be "gracing" the covers of this nation's tabloids. But that's where they've all put her. Her husband, a goodlooking guy called Blake Fielder-Civil obviously means the world to her (you can see this plainly in their photographs) but the press are deadset against him, claiming he is ruining her and it is he who has turned her on to drugs. The news now is that Amy is a heroin and crack addict. She and blake had a crisis meeting with their families last weekend during which they had to strip to prove they weren't using needles. Amy's father wants her away from Blake, so the papers say. Even Amy's "caring" manager (and it's unusual for the Sun newspaper to use a term like that for anyone in the music bizniss) is supremely worried about her... so the allegation goes...

I like Amy Winehouse. I don't want to see her self-destruct. I was even going to write to her in rehab but something told me to hold off a day and I'm glad I did: the letter would never have got through.

Don't kill yourself Amy!

Why is it those who bring beauty into the world seem to lead such ugly lives?

I don't know... I really don't know

Well these are my video clips of the day:

Gloria Gaynor, I Will Survive
and a original soundtrack one-man remake vid - highly recommended
and the other clip:
Princess Diana tribute

OK I gotta get myself ready shortly. Gotta see my Mum

Fallen. Rise.

FALLEN? FALLING? RISING (HOPEFULLY). WOTEVA - O! Gimme some sweet inspiration!

THIS MORNING was my scheduled appointment with the nice lady from the Council (who technically are my landlords) re my rent arrears. These have peaked at a shocking level. I highlight the word "peaked" as no way can they ascend any higher from here. I dare not disclose the number either because it is shocking and shameful.

Well I crawled in ther like a depressed water snail and when the lady came down she couldn't see me for ages. We couldn't get a private room and so sat between partitions for this meeting, during which she said mercifully little. There's nothing to say; it's all been said before. When my memoirs finally do come out I'm dedicating them to her because it's only her personal kindness that has kept me of the streets. She could easily have had me removed for running up arrears that ridiculously huge.

Thankfully I wasn't asked any whys or wherefores. I hate excuses and bles the fact that I wasn't pressed to give any. I now have a brand new rent book and so no excuses from here on in.

I smoked so many cigarettes before and after (but not during!) this meeting.

Hey I got a Sly and the Family Stone CD for £2 the other day. It is so phunkie, seriously.

Right now it is raining and I gotta go. Brollies and cars splashing outside. A massive red London bus just trundled by. Righty-ho ...

These are me clips of the day:
Music
Aretha Franklin - I Say A Little Prayer
Other
Thai Cookery: Satay, Peanut Sauce. Mmmm.

Bluesday Tuesday

BLUESDAY TUESDAY: BOO-HOO! Yeah, I'm OK. No I'm not OK. I'm depressed because I lately came to realize how incapacitated I have been by sheer apathy. Inability isn't a word I use lightly here but if you intellectually know you're meant to be doing something, sorting something out and yet days pass into months with this thing still notdone and though you know it there is still noting you can do to move yourself towards it; you have passed from unwilling to unable.

Unable to do the simplest things for yourself unless they lie, like train-stations on the self-same structured looping tracks ... Daily running round and round. But only between those repetitive same few things.

In my deepest pits I totally absconded doing anything for myself like cleaning, cooking, even washing and changing clothes. I tried hard to break free from this morass of self-disrespect. So though I did resume cooking; I could only cook the one new thing. The very same dish. Day after day. (Remember: this was the era of the beef and lamb stew. Alternating meats felt a big liberation for me and not to be taken lightly. It almost felt like breaking some unwritten rules ...) I've always been prone to falling in love with one single dish of the day and making it the dish of every day for days on end until even I get sick of it. I can't understand why on earth I'm like this. And I don't, on a day-to-day basis recognize I'm doing it "oh! I'm being obsessional again!": I just do it. My writing may seem reflective but I don't engage in self-reflection as frequently as you might assume. And you don't know how much this confession pains me: I'm a 35 year old man who's lost the wherewithall to function as a grown-up, self-sufficient member of society. Addiction is of course a grossly prolonged state of repetitions. And the OCD of my childhood span round and round: "Germs. Germs. Now wash your hands," like a stuck record. The issue here isn't fishing out from my festering morass some excuse for my behaviour by merely spotlighting it. I'm asking: how do I break out of this broken-down way of existence? How do I get free? Do I make another circle to run in? Or do I break down the fences to ramble hapless and confusedly, freestyling my life when I've never before let myself fly free...?

I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO

Vids of the day:
Music -
1. Amy Winehouse on Letterman performing "Rehab"
2. Amy Winehouse at Joe's Pub NYC performing "Back to Black"
Entertainment -
Amy Winehouse on Australian Sunrise TV

On Some Forgotten Day ... Extracts from Scribblings ...

3:30am ON SOME FORGOTTEN DAY:- GAAH! AWAKE. Oh - before I forget: this is the label nutnut doctors slap on some naughty children: oppositional-defiant! Yeah. Horrible little brats in other words.

O what am I doing what am I doing? Clutching at straws. Straws snapping off in my hands. I have handfuls of straw not.

I have been bingeing. On food. (Pasta.) And chocolate milkshake. Milk is cold. The nights and days are hot. Milk's good for teeth. That is my reasoning!

Aaargh! What am I going to do? I am so desperatly looking for a crutch of some kind. Why, having lived without outside distractions of any kind, at some points (no TV, no books; just the background radio chirping), am I insisting such distractions might somehow help me? What am I going to do? Distract my whole life away? Well isn't that what most ordinary people do? With their jobs, with their families and relationships, with their TV, computers, CD collection, exotic getaways?

Is my animals blog really boring?

Am I ever going to relinquish my grip on heroin? Let alone shake myself out of its grip on me ..??..

This is what I hate about hot weather: it makes life into a nasty, hazy, flickering consciousness that makes me uncertain. It is not nice. As Slaghammer of Texas pointed out: it's the drinking and drugging that makes the heat intolerable.

Before I became a living, breathing sponge for opiates I never sweated so heavily ever ... unless I was ill. Before I got junkified I was fine with summertime.

Sometimes I hate the countryside.

Once I went on a bikeride outside Norwich. The landscapes there are flat. I ound myself exhausted, stuck on a wide, quiet road with a slight incline. Fields of cabbages stretched out on all sides. And in the background, curtaining this reality in all directions were lines of trees. It was like being stuck in a painting by Van Gough. How the world glistered and flashed and shimmered, sparkled and dreamed. Every now and then a car would come rocketting past with a swoosh - cutting this picture-world in half.

How I wished I could crumple this picture in a ball, like such a bad drawing, and chuck it in the trash ...

SUNDAY. I do apologize for letting Barbra Steisand and a poodle and a chinchilla stay up for three dreadful days.

Reason? No computer time. No money to replenish it.

Tomorrow (ie today, but I never got round to tapping this then) I'll be able to update: also respond to comments. Today I literally have a mere 2 mins left to type and go.

OK ... I would have been off to Mother Hubbs' for Sunday lunch at this point had all gone nicely, but it didn't. I didn't feel right. I don't think Mother H was right. I stayed away, having slept through till 4 in the afternoon... five... six o'clock; nudging evening now ... Got up. Sat down again. Still I was sleeping by three and dragged myself up at nine a.m. ... What's wrong with me? Nobody can tell. I just don't wanna have to answer for it. My inconveniences to me become great big deals to others when it's their sleep that's interrupting. Yet those dismissive doctors over the years never have been there to feel the distress ...

SATURDAY NIGHT NOT SLEEPY. No. Streetlife. No nightlife. The local pub is closed already, which means it is late-late. Past midnight; into Sunday now. And now when I've no computer credit of course I've so much to say to specific online friends ...

I feel I have been very remiss in commenting on the blogs I used to go to all the time. And I haven't fallen out of affection. Not at all. It just feels like life has passed me on to different tracks. Like the image of teh runaway train I used to use to describe my life, I fel I have no control And I've realized that haplessly collecting a random CD selection is not going to do it for me. Even though some do have strong pre-drugs associations ...

And there I talked my way through my meagre music collection ...

But I gotta go meet a friend in town now ...

Cheerio and L8Rs

Gleds ...

Monday: Still Around!

SORRY I'VE NOT BEEN BY ALL WEEKEND... financial logistics prevented me from topping up my internet account and so I could not get on to change anything which is why you've been lumbered with Barbra Streisand's The Way We Were up top for three days ... I do apologize. Though I was surprised how many of you liked it. Streisand reminds me of more innocent times, before drugs. But a lot of people I know do not like her music. But hasn't she got an amazing voice??? Did you see how mesmerized the crowd were by The Way We Were? Wow. Not a lot of performers have that ability.

Today's musical choice is by Don McLean: The Grave.
And the entertainment clip: Barbra Streisand on What's My Line 1965 (American TV) - "321 views a/o 13/8/7: 13:53".

I've not been up to particularly much over the weekend except excessive sleeping. Felt too ill yesterday, upon waking at 4pm, to go over to Mother Hubbs's for Sunday lunch, so I just stayed in and had chili'd up scrambled egg on toast ...

My goldfish bowl plant selection has been dying, I've just found out of lack of water combined with excessive heat. Even when I water the earth every few days, I come back and it's so dry as a bone even that succulent I had has lost most of its seedless grape shaped leaves and to of the five stalks have badly wilted ... So everything's removed, repotted in cut-off (plastic) lemonade bottles (holes in the bottom to replicate plant pots) ... my flowers, which all died, now have little green buds; the ivy, some of which totally carked it, has partly revived (well one of the two trailers has ...) but the succulent looks ill still and I'm after a new lemonade bottle to cut off for that... Wasn't till I put my hand in the now almost empty glass sphere and felt how very intensely hot it gets in there ... I think I was right to have decided right from the start to reserve it as a cactus plantation ...

I will let you know how all my replanting jazz goes ... Sorry this isn't much of a post: I just wanted to change my daily vids to something else and tell yous all I was living, breathing and quite OK. Spoke to my Dad last night. Some kind of future must be on track for me, but only I can do that ...

Righto, till laters ...

Gleds

Cool Friday

NOW THE HEAT OF THE DAY HAS COOLED, legions of smokers congregate on the pavements round the tables to smoke, smoke, smoke ...

I slept in today... finally waking around 3pm nightmaring about my Australian cousin's friends (who were the best crowd of people in the world and they say a man (or a woman) is known by is (or her) friends ... too true. Very true ...) and my "eye" teeth rotten and falling out. In this dream I was so upset and distraught about this ... and then I woke up in this mid-afternoon, fan a-blasting and Amy Winehouse a chirping through my silver new CD player (had been on repeat-play all night ...) ... I didn't feel good. And then I got a letter that nearly made me cry. I don't even wanna write about that until later....
POOR AMY WINEHOUSE, who is probably ahead of Pete Doherty as the tabloids' favourite over here (she has substance and style and, seemingly, a very reportable alcohol-&-drug problem ... was on the front page of The Sun for a reported three-day binge on cocaine, ecstasy, "horse tranquillizer" (ketamine), brandy and whiskey..." that began on 1pm Monday and eventually culminated in an emergency admission to London University Hospital at 1am on Wednesday morning, with Amy pale and shaking (she had been in convulsions) ... and with "the dead eyes of a shark" ... ooer. I sincerely hope the poor girl doesn't kill herself before she has a chance to achieve even greater things because she has one hell of a voice on her. (Why do Jewish girls get the best voices??)
Righto! My time is nearly up so this is all until tomorrow afternoon at earliest. I'm having severe plant problems so all is being repotted as a matter or urgency. Idiot Homebase sold me a mixture of high and low water requirement plants in one arrangement ... eejuts!!

Clips:
Streisand - The Way We Were
Poodle Watches Chinchilla's Dust Bath

Post 301

WOW.... that's a lotta posting in six months... which is surely how long this blogue's been going...
HEY! I've only had one can today! Which is fantastic, considering it's 7:29pm as I speak...
Does everyone like my Amy Winehouse clips? F Me Pumps and her Never Mind the Buzzcocks drunk "performance" ... she is funnay!!
What's to tell today? Not very much except I've been heartily knackered out.
Had a bath this morning.
Elvis the gnome left a log in the toilet that was unflushable... man I don't know what the guy had been eating but this one had bark peeling off it, I swear ..!
A naked four year old Turkish boy just ran into the street and was about to start peeing up the front of the family shop when his mother came, packed him up, carting him in upside down ... That family are pretty crazy... They had an endlessly chirping budgie in their video shop. I don't know why it's not there any more. And their little boy has this electric toy tractor thing he goes gradddering up and down the pavements in as his dad and about seven uncles smoke cigarettes and talk about drugs consignments or whatever business keeps their very sparse local shops afloat ... (It's well known the Turks are bringing most of the heroin in. Strangely nine out of ten times you hear about drugs seizures it's always cocaine and not heroin that's been found. Am I the only one who finds this slightly odd??)
Right that's me for today I don't have lots to say ...
... O! But the Louis Armstrong CD is excellent!

***

Edyta asked me why the little Turkish boy wears no clothes... sorry it was a slight exaggeration, he had on a teeshirt but was naked from there down (ie the rude bits!)... and he was about to chirpily pee all over the front of their shop.. I mean...!!

If you like the second Amy Winehouse clip (her drunk on the BBC2 show) you can CLICK HERE TO SEE MORE AMY WINEHOUSE ON THE BUZZCOCKS - Entire show uncut! ... sorry but that's all Youtube have; else I'd have pasted up the entire show for yous ...

Oh, and if you want another entertaining Winehouse clip: see her here desperately upstaging Charlotte Church on an impromptu duetted rendition of Michael Jackson's Beat It! (yes! her of the "angel" voice has become an endlessly tubbing-out beerdrinking swearer with a TV show to match. Though no-one in the UK needs to be reminded of that little fact ...)

I HAVE TOLD MYSELF I AM WRITING MY MEMOIRS: what do you think of this idea? Is it a good one? I wanted to write a warning on the dangers of drugs that not only preaches to "say no" but explains how, as fully as possible, an ordinary person like me can get addicted. And how very hard it is to turn your life around once you are trapped ...

SORRY if today's post was a bit boring... was it? I force myself to post every day and not worry about the resulting blarble ... is it just blarble sometimes ..? .. surely , sometimes ...??~!?(!)

***

BEST BLOG OF THE DAY: POST WAR KID... excellent reminiscences in writing ...

Plants and the Clinic. Amy Winehouse Basket.

AT THE DRUGS CLINIC. I went there first thing as missed my appointment the other day. She did at least say to me "I know you would have come on time if you'd remembered," which is quite something. Lots of people just can't be bothered to turn up. Also it can be quite a strain if you don't feel like talking because the appointments can go on for over half an hour.

Well my instant CD collection has finished (for now). I just innocently went into Sainsbury's for pasta when Amy Winehouse accosted me from the shelves (not the spirits aisle either!!) and jumped into my basket. Well it was "only £4.97" for "Frank" ... wow that was her first CD and she has some style! Thankfully it does not encompass that song "rehab" ... which would wind me up hearing that word ...

All that remains on my mental shopping list is:
Frank Sinatra
Bing Crosby
Ella Fitzgerald ...
... that type of thing.

I keep watching that Say Say Say video ... it tells an old-fashioned story. I like videos like that (another one would be Madonna's Papa Don't Preach). You don't get too many vids like that these days. Just the star dressed and made up in thee or four different styles in three or four locations, a nonsensically surreal "plot" if you can call it that and the three or four totally ill-matched performances spliced together as if the whole combo "means" something ...

What else? Not much.
Oh!
The drugs people have leaflets all over the place warning that there is indeed barbiturated "gear" doing the rounds. Which would certainly explain my very extreme hypersomnia those days ago ...

... also I forgot to say what I did there. We are coming up with a plan to improve my life.
It involves repotting my plants: the ivy withered thru lack of watering: whereas it's bunged in (in a glass sideways goldfish bowl type thing) with a succulent and ... sorry I can't remember the exact name of the flowers but Ruth identified them. Big dark serrated-looking leaves; tiny pinky-white budlike flowers (I mean even when they're open they're reminiscent of buds) ... the succulent will stay in with a new cactusery in there, the plants will come out ...
... it just so happened I was looking my filthiest because I was on my way to pick up clean clothes and a towel which must have looked really bad ...
... so as well as repotting plants and putting diddy things like them around and CD players and music, trying to make the hovel I lived in (admittedly it was a hovel partly of my own making I accept that) but I'm trying to turn it into a normal home now. If I can do that I can become drug free, she says. (OK not like a celestial magic wand will be waved. She means if I can do that I can start to work towards the other. And by drug-free I mean methadone free not just illicit drug free.
Which is good news!
Wahey!!

***

PS: isn't Linda McCartney lovely..? Poor Paul marrying that strident cow who seemed nice at the beginning now they're barricaded behind bulwarks of newspapers flinging false legs and old copies of Pipes of Peace at one another ... nasty business

More New CDs

WELL GNAT KING COAL AND JUDY GARLAND HAVE GONE WALKIES AND KATE BUSH IS FULL OF SCRATCHES so in despair I hit WH Smiths with my £10 drug money and walked out with four CDs and £1 change!

How exciting!!

Here's my purchases. I'm on an easy listening tip yet again ...

Edith Piaf: The Essential Collection (shouldn't that be "le collection essentiel"?) ~ £1.99
Tammy Wynette: Best of ~ £3
Louis Armstrong: The Collection ~ £1! (His eyes look like they're about to pop out on the cover, he's blowing that trumpet so hard!!)
and lastly, by no means leastly:
Barbra Streisand (again!): Live Concert At The Forum (1972) ~ £3

Good thing I've got cheap taste in music, isn't it!?

O, & here's my pop video of the day: Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson ~ Say Say Say "Acted" intro starring the late, great Linda McArtney (of substitute frozen pork sausages fame) plus Michael Jackson winning an arm wrestle. Highly entertaining.

And entertainment clip: Itchy Baby Bunny ..!

CD Player!

YES! I AM SO EXCITED!! WEEEE-HEEE! YES! I BOUGHT A CD PLAYER FOR £11.99 FROM ARGOS. Wow! So now I can listen to Kate Bush: The Whole Story, Beauty and the Beast (Original London Cast Recording), Judy Garland: Best of and Gnat King Coal: Best Of.

I cannot actually remember where Beauty and the Beast came from. I think it was lying on the street or something where I picked it up. Having tried to play it, the entire thing comes out so quiet ... maybe the disc is faded?

Judy Garland and Gnat King Coal I bought for £1.99 each in anticipation of buying a CD player about two years ago ...

Kate Bush: an old junkie friend gave it to me. I quite like Kate Bush although in some of her younger recordings she does sound like a witch ...

Then I decided to buy a CD. Which entailed queueing up at the post office for an inordinately longlongLONG time ... Surely at least 20 minutes. Usually I am heartened as I progress down the line and 20 or so people more miserable-looking than myself pile in behind me. Not today. Although I was amused to see an 80 year old woman, who looked like a retired prostitute complete with blonde Dolly Parton wig and a lower-class version of The Queen's clothing take up flirting with two big black men about fifteen places behind me (the line curled round so they were only standing a couple of feet away - hence I heard everything). She stared pointedly at the biggest of these men's crotch and repeatedly looked him up and down before launching into a rant: "Be careful because they'll steal your money you know!" "Who?" said one of the men, probably thinking, as I was, that she meant the kind of robbers who rolled Valium Marilyn in the self-same place only two weeks ago. But no! She was talking about the post office staff... At this moment I switched off and wished I had something to bang my head into... only to be perked up by the arrival of an attitude-ridden young black single mother who fractiously said "Excuse me!" to anyone who dared come within a two-foot radius. She was pushing a young boy who looked to me to be at least 14 years old in a toddler's push chair! Seriously! Some people do coddle their kids...

Thank you everyone for proving you are more crackers than me.

Bloody personality tests. I did do one that seemed especially interesting (and potentially enlightening) two weeks ago... only upon finishing and giving my email address I was informed I must send $20 to some paypal site thing ... oh no. So my mystery character-flattering 50 page report must bite the dust now ... (I mean, let's be honest. No-one does these tests except to hear back self-validating gobbledygookridden personal flattery: do they? This one did ask some quite pertinent questions about how you ran with an idea and developed a project (even if you don't work in the kind of job where you have heavy responsibility the questions would still tease the same info out of you. Shame they were so stingy. And I never got the complimentary "free" email report promised ...

O yeah I got my CD it was a 1970s extravaganza of Barbra Streisand easy listening! Wahey!! Think what you like about my dodgy taste but you don't have to listen to it ... (or Beauty and the Beast Original London Cast Recording ...!) Barbra Streisand has certain connotations with me of pre-drug-using days (and remember I said I was buying these things to help come off drugs? ... THAT is the connexion, if you really want to know. So there.

DOES EVERYBODY LIKE my new fixture of Tune of the Day? I.e. you can clickonit and have shiny happy sounds drifting throughout my blog.

Seeing as I was yesterday informed I'm an obsessional paranoid schizophrenic I've chosen as Tune of the Day Rockwell's Somebody's Watching Me ... (Vocal by Michael Jackson) ...

Also I've taken to posting up an ENTERTAINMENT CLIP of the day ... which will be under the tune ... The one I'm thinking of putting up today has been in my Animal Crackers Blog for a couple of days ... but I don't think many people bothered with it. It is called Black and White. Not much happens: but it's very cute to watch ...

Oh Dear

OOER I JUST ANSWERED AN INNOCENT-SEEMING PERSONALITY TEST and have found out the website who posted it up thinks I am crazy. Thanks a lot! Now I can put in a nutshell what I distrust about psychiatrists. Apart from 1. the fact that they engage in soul-crushing mindgames at times of absolute crux and crisis they 2. have dissected and bisected and cut up and scraped open and analysed and bled the colour out of all human experience to such an extent that almost any behaviour, reaction or even thought can nowadays be construed as evidence of a "disorder" or some type. I mean...! There's even a posh label for obnoxious naughty children. I think their parents are informed that rather than needing a good hiding, they have a "conduct disorder" ... I mean how depressing this all is. I don't know how much I made it plain that I used to go to weekly counselling sessions for several years ... OK I did learn some things, but got very annoyed whenever I got too upset the counsellor started saying "I think you need more help than I can give you" and attempted pointing me in the direction of an evil psychiatrist! Then they keep asking what "our" relationship means to me (ie my relationship with the counsellor) ~ well not very much, I had to reply. Seeing as I don't know anything about you. And that little factor I used to really resent: the fact that I was meant to lay myself open to someone who told me absolutely nothing about themself, in fact nurtured it as an aspect of professional pride that as little of the self was given away as possible:~ whereas I was meant to give away everything. O boy! How free I felt on having left the very last counselling session! I no longer had to account for my life or answer to anybody. I'm not talking about being responsible for my actions. I'm talking of a kind of weekly emotional book-keeping exercise.... all I can say is I was so glad when it was over! As for all these stupid labels I've scored "high" and "moderate" on ... did you notice the schitzy-witzy one and the avoidant one were self-contradicting. Which means having one means you of necessity do not have the other. Bluster and guff! Psychiatrists: they're the ones who need help

I just need some tropical fish.

Does everyone like the Sinead O'Connor track I posted in the top of my sidebar? You can click it and have cheery music twinkling as you indulge in this blackforest gateau of a blog ...

And by the way WHY is nobody watching my Geriatric 1927 videos? They are different! Very different indeed!!!

I want to go home but there's nothing to go back to ... that's why I don't know what to do ... what to buy ... should I spend £12 on that cheapie CD player? Or should I do something else with the money (I don't mean drugs) ... ooer stupid expressions are coming back from that test site. Am I being "dependent" now? Because I'm indecisive? Ukk. In the rubbish bin with it all!!

***

COME ON EVERYBODY TAKE THE TEST. I WANT TO SEE HOW NUTTY YOU LOT SUPPOSEDLY ARE

***

My Personality ?!?!?!!!????!???**??

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid:	High
Schizoid:	Moderate
Schizotypal:	High
Antisocial:	Low
Borderline:	Moderate
Histrionic:	Low
Narcissistic:	Moderate
Avoidant:	Moderate
Dependent:	Moderate
Obsessive-Compulsive:	High
-- Personality Disorder Test -- -- Personality Disorder Information --

Laundretta is Not Mentally Retarted*

*THOUGH SHE IS LIVING WITH MATRAN.

THE COUNCIL MAN HOUSING MANAGER was pokeing about our house this morning, according to Laundretta. She's been spinning me some repeated cock-&-bull story about regular visits from a council officer to sort out her Council Tax situation. I'm afraid, after hearing her vociferously complain about mouse infestation (she has mice - not me! If anything the smell of my Chinese Mouster has been putting them off venturing across my territory) and then launching into her serial gripe which goes: "nobody ever cleans the bathroom except me!" I've told her time and again it's Elvis the Gnome downstairs who diarrhoeas up the side of the toilet and nothing to do with me but as I said, she wants me chucked out of here. Matran, her slimy, sleazy boyfriend is not speaking to me at all. Which is a relief, as I didn't like it when he did speak to me. Too much of slimy, false mannerisms nauseates me.


On our doorstep, where she was kncking back Special Brew, chainsmoking Richmond Superkings and flicking through the Daily Mirror, she feigned sympathy for my housing plight by enquiring solicitously how my housing "transfer" was going.

I'm actually, as far as I know, not having any transfer at all. But I've made out to her that I'm dead keen on this supposedly promised "transfer", as I want her to believe her and Matran's ousting campaign has been working ...

When Matran returned to witness her in dialogue with me he brusquely ordered her UP! and huffed past me into the house, slamming the front door momentously behind them.


I don't know on what grounds Laundretta's claiming her urgent rehousing requirements, as she professes neither to be signed off "sick" by the State, nor to have been put down as "vulnerable" by the Housing. Which means Laundretta, who has set off the fire alarms, headbutted a hole in the back window and did, until a couple of months ago, throw regular fake-weeping tantrums on the staircases (Valium Marilyn revealed that they were faked-up and Valium Marilyn of all people should spot fake tears when she comes across them...) and so on and so on and her staggeringly drunken behaviour. If Laundretta counts as mentally normal then - I'm serious! - there's hope yet for us all!

31C/88F was yesterday's official temperature and it's just as sweltering today.

Phew!

Does anyone know the famous Pensioner Youtuber Peter who posts filmettes of his reminiscences? He goes by the moniker "Geriatric 1927" and his most popular confessionals have accumulated over 2.3 million viewers each ...

Geriatric 1927 is my video star of the day.

Also: have you all seen my Animal Crackers Blog? Give it a mighty great click: I promise you'll love the escapades and entertainments.

Right: that's my Post of the Day over and done with.

Give Geriatric 1927 a click!

2 Schizophrenics in One Day/Accidental Spliff/Sleep "Disorder" ..?

I WAS TROTTING PAST A LOCAL PAVEMENT CAFF THIS SWOONILY SWELTERING AFTERNOON when a perturbational voice hollered my name. I reluctantly turned, only to be confronted by a ginger-haired schizophrenic I know from my old begging days taking a seat outside the massive plate-glass windows. Through which all three staff members appeared to be standing in a row and scrutinizing us. "Take a seat, take a seat!" he demanded. "I can't I can't I'm late for dinner." I protested. "What is time?! Time is all relative!" he replied. "Except when you're getting told 'bugger off your dinner's gone cold and you're too late,'" I said back. He couldn't answer that one, and so after all the how are you's launched into a story of how he had "lost £227 last week" having given his post office benefits card to a rasta (who'd performed the job of withdrawing money, scoring crack with it and returning home with said crack flawlessly only a week or so before) ... only to find himself still waiting in rastaman's flat for rastaman's return 48 hours later. "So what did you do?" I asked him. "I took his DVD and his stereo and some food and reported the theft (of the money, not the electricals!) to the police. So now when they catch up with him he's a robber and he will go to prison!" Hmmmm, I thought. But he did invite me round next Thursday for a cracksmoking session. Which I thought twice about and am probably not going. Unless I temporarily lose my marbles between now and then ...

Got to Mother Hubbs's sweltering late. Charles, the schizophrenic boxer was eating chicken dinner in the kitchen. "Hello," he said. He believes he is going to win the next Olympic Games in London in the 1500 metres category, as well as the 100, 200, 400 and 800 metres. I said, "isn't that a little ambitious" (considering Charles is approaching the age of 45 and has no athletic experience outside school sports day). "No," he replied flatly.... Ho-hum ...

Having found a long rolled-up cigarette end at the bus stop this afternoon, I re-rolled it into a lovely filter-tipped Golden Virginia roll-up ... inhaled freely on and off for five minutes. Until I realized the odd taste and smell emanating from this cigarette were not tobacco (no wonder I kept getting funny loooks from everyone else at the bus stop) ... and I was feeling quite dizzy and slightly odd. My fault! And considering that mental psychotic research appearing in the papers all last week thanks to research in the Lancet hopefully that won't make three schizophrenics out of us in one afternoon!!

I cannot help wondering what it is that has had me flat out unconscious most of the weekend? Was it really "barbiturated" heroin yesterday? Or just my insane proclivity for massive oversleeping at the most inopportune times..?? I really don't know. Well that's another great cause for stopping all drugs... I want to know how well I really am without them. Hopefully I'm better off than when they all started. My great goal is to earn enough of my own money to escape the dreaded governmental poverty trap for once and for all! And then I shall answer to no-one. And be free!

Well I'm a cheap one to satisfy, seeing as all I want in life right now is a DAB radio £24.99-£39.99 and a CD player (about £11.99 from Argos). I think I shall go for the CD player first as I've loads of Gnat King Coal CD's, original London cast recording of Beauty and the Beast, Best of July Garland ... etc./don't ask how I obtained any of these things. They kind of got into my possession over many years via other people who didn't want them. Also via £1.99 bargain buckets ...

Still I am debating the likelihood of setting up tropical fish at home. I do love fish. Some amazing fancy tanks are available. But I'll tell you a sad (but heartening) fact about fishanks. Once set up, the boring oblong ones actually look by far better than anything that comes in hexagonal, outsized fishbowl shape or anything else ...

... or maybe I'll just compromise with some entertaining furries like Roborovski hamsters ... which seem pracically inobtainable in London these days ... why ..??

Ho-hum: Monday approaches. Wonder what tomorrow shall bring.

I'm off to read my Apocalyptic "nonfiction" about the end of the world. Pleasant dreams everyone!!

Video of the day:

Bunny Rabbit 24 Episode

Sweltering

IT IS ABSOLUTELY BOILING HOT TODAY. I just tried checking the weather via Google. Not much by way of sense was obtained. The average temperature report seems to be about 30C which is 86F (I think). And humidity 40%. But some websites like concierge.com are saying it is "59F" - I mean, where do they get that figure from~?? I woke at 5am it was still intolerably hot. Had to switch on fan. Fan still on. Afternoon really hot. Feels more like 90F than just 80something. This town was not built for heat. Underground is horrible in this type of weather. Buses are more intolerable. Air con: only supermarkets have it and posh offices and places like Harrods. I am retiring to bath. It is too hot.

Barbiturates Alert!

I AM SURE I MUST HAVE INADVERTENTLY TAKEN BARBITURATES in my "gear" ... yes I did use today. The initial hit felt "weak" and I stayed awake and ate some pasta. Then WHAM! ~ I'm unconscious for about five hours ... I know this sometimes happens to me anyhow without drugs ... but this time, on awakening I felt extremely drowsy and drugged ... I haven't a clue what happened and the only explanation is barbiturated heroin. Only top-end dealers have access to barbiturates in 100% pure form (adding the contents of Seconal capsules, even if you could find Seconal capsules would dilute the "gear" down so much it would be utterly ineffectual ... no if barbs have been added they've been added "neat" to street heroin. O I feel woozy! Serves me right for "using" I know ... still I am making lists of things I really want to do (more to the point want to buy instead of drugs. List so far is CD player (haven't owned one for over five years) and DAB (digital) radio to get BBC 7 which is back to back radio plays and comedy as well as World Service through the day as well as night ... so no I have not given up on giving up!! Note to self: remember this is what it was like NEXT TIME ...