Autobiographical Challenge

YESTERDAY I WENT OUT AND BOUGHT three new black pens for my memoir-scribbling. When I wrote that novel I mentioned - it was only about 200 pages (or would be if printed in volume form - ie about 80,000 words) and yet I used something like twenty Mitsubishi rollerballs just to write the first draft. In other words I spent £40 (EIGHTY DOLLARS U.S.) just in INK!!

I don't know what took me so long to get round to buying proper pens. I had been trying to write the thing out in free ones meant for betting slips. Even though I purloined five or ten at a time, these can only write out one page tops... so they're useless for writing a book unless you were absolutely desperate!

Someone left me a comment saying words to the effect of "if you're going to write a book, start with decent paper. I love lovely paper." I get your point: only I'd already invested in an A4 bound notebook. Bound is essential for me. Means NO sheet of manuscript can ever go missing! Many years ago when I was in the midnight blues of depression I insisted on writing anything "creative" in permanent certified lightfast/waterfast carbon ink on 100% acid free cartridge paper... so determined was I to leave the most permanent mark on the world that I possibly could. Now, though I still like the permanent black ink (waterfast is essential to me as I drink so much!) I just use any old paper. I'm writing for ME not the museums and it frightens me even the remote thought that I could ever become famous and my every shopping list/etc preserved. To me this is intellectual parasitism. My old university was full of it. In fact that's what lecturers/professors/whatever they call themselves of anything connected with languages and literature tend to be... they are basically "novelists manque" who, because they cannot or will not create their own works, obsess instead on every obscurest aspect of the life and works of novelists long dead. I found this faintly sickening.

I don't know why but I've found this memoir-writing so painfully slow! I use the word "memoirs" advisedly because this is NOT an autobiography. It IS just a memoir of how I became a drug addict. I've read a couple of other drugs memoirs but no-one has explained even to my satisfaction what it is that can draw an otherwise intelligent and promising young person into the grip of drug addiction. I believe this is a question the general public WANT answering and I believe I can answer it for them. At least I can explain how it happened to me.

And I don't really need to fear anyone else coming up with the same book faster - because junkies, so I've found, are famously bad at explaining their thoughts, feelings, conditions of life even to people in the same boat as them, let alone to the "straight" majority.

I remember asking around "what is rehab like". The answers I got were SO EXTREMELY unhelpful.

Instead of saying: A rehab is usually a large detached house with seven or eight bedrooms. Male accommodation is in a separate house usually from female or at least confined to separate floors. You spend about three weeks detoxing. They achieve this by daily reducing a dose of methadone for about ten days though there are detoxification programs that can take you off higher doeses over a month or so.

After three weeks the rehab proper begins. This is a bit like being at school with a timetable. The "subjects" have names like "life story", "consequences" ....

And blah blah blah.

I thought you were thrown into a hospital-like enclosure and forced to sweat it out cold turkey! Nobody gave me even the faintest picture of what, for example, a day at rehab was like. Junkies are useless at storytelling. They're only good at LYING.

Well I'd better go, stop babbling and write a bit more. It's difficult because I don't know what to include. Streamlining one's own life from a wealth of memories (and blurs where memories used to be (in my case!!)) is not easy. Not at ALL easy.

I'm trying to tell my early childhood but only as it relates to setting me up to take drugs later. Really I wish I had a publisher/editor/etc but there's no point indulging in such excuses not to get to work. I just have GOT to get this finished by Christmas otherwise it's slishy throat for me!!

Inertia! I feel as inert as an inertia reel seatbelt.... right I'm off!

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Did no-one like my Mika vid yesterday? I thought it was rather funky. Or did it get lost under so much of Somewhere!?!

Here's today's:~
Mika: Grace Kelly
Dawn Penn: You Don't Love Me (No No NO!!) This was covered by a singer called Rhianna. Who I've heard of, but she's not really known this side of the "Pond"...
Mika: Relax Take it Easy