My Vision

LAUNDRETTA INSISTS she has found a dead rat in her room. I don't believe this, but I don't like it. Because talk of rats is liable to mobilize Evilstein to put rodenticide everywhere. And having three baby gremlins (Itchy-Bashful-Spherical) and a furry freight train (Pingpong) under my auspices, I cannot have poisons left lying round my room. If I thought we really did have rats I'd be the first one to go mentalist. Rats eat smaller rodents - and that would especially include tubby Roborovskis who don't bite and, living Hannibal Lecter-style within four walls of glass, have nowhere to run... Not to worry: the proliferation of wild mice in here tells another story. Mice only thrive where rats are absent. And rats are most certainly absent from our midnight-scuttling, all-squeaking, all-shrilling mousery of a house!

FIVE MINUTES til appointed appointment time and here I am in the junkies' waiting room. Full of fellow clients with snivels. Walls choc-full of posters warning us of injections, infections and crack burns. Table strewn with dated magazines. (Shockingly lower class selection: the private clinic I briefly attended had Time magazine, Vanity Fair and Tatler! And, along one wall, shelves upon shelves of "borrow for free but please return and do not sell on" (well it doesn't exactly say that but may as well do: everything's prominently branded in theft-deterring rubber stamp...) Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre... among a 1960s Encyclopedia of Photography, The Piano Teacher, a novel by Elfriede Jelinek and Queen Noor of Jordan's memoirs: Leap of Faith. I purloined the last of these, plus Jane Eyre.

VISION. I'VE GOT SOME of my vision back since the New Year and posting those Not Really Resolutions (that strangely I have since found myself working towards: strange what "no pressure" can do...)

Each new day is a gift and a chance to effect changes. I used to really feel this. Actually, without getting too sobworthy, I finally grasped this fact some years ago in one of the most lost and forlorn times of my entire existence. I wasn't a junkie, and yet in my foolhardy quest for new experience, I had somehow got myself invited back home (to a nasty flat on an infamous estate or "project" as New Yorkers would put it). I had put £5 into a £20 bag, held out my arm and let myself be injected with this £5 hit of heroin in one...

All I remember was remarking how "good" the gear was... and dissolving into a dazzled protracted unconsciousness... surfacing time and again in near-amnesiac fuge to ask where I was. Finally breaking the surface of my dreams to find myself laid out under a clinical striplight. The metal handles of a trolley gleamed on either side of me. "What happened?" I had just asked (a strange snapshot of memory stretching into the shallowest layer of my personal haze). A nurse was telling me, not for the first time I was somehow sure, "You overdosed on heroin. You're in hospital." Bang! Suddenly I was back. And unable to digest these facts... I slipped slightly back into the warm dreams of my oceanic sleep...

There are ODs and there are ODs. I really had OD'd. For despite having been narcan'd to bring me round, I had somehow stayed unconscious or at least in white-out, for fifteen hours or longer: I had been given the heroin injection around midnight. Now it was late afternoon.

When a nurse informed me: "We want to keep you in overnight because we were worried about your breathing," I didn't argue. Merely lay in bed for hours longer. Repeatedly dunking back under warm bath-temperature water... In my alternative state I floated into an infinite haze of poppy-pollen gold. I was floating in the centre of the sun. Glowing yet not burning.

It was a pleasant place to be. The nearest place to "heaven" that drugs had got me thus far, in fact. For days afterwards I just wanted to return to this timeless, placeless place, realized that I couldn't; and cried.

Later on in the evening I got wheeled up to a ward, where, despite all that time spent flat out, I slept like a log all night.

Next day, when showering, I discovered multicoloured sensors stuck all over my torso. The same ones that feed into that machine we all know from Casualty and ER, the one that goes bleep-bleep and tells shocked relatives and associates how dangerously ill you really are.

I told no-one of my experience. Not family. Not friends.

Afterwards I was desperately upset and alone. So upset in fact, that I only wished for the issues this whole nightmare had stirred up to go away. To forget them, totally and utterly, for ever.

What irony: years of craving Death and now it had come so close without my willing it I was falling apart with the trauma of it all!

It was now that I learnt that life is precious. Life really is a gift. Not a chore, not an imposition. That each day is a wonder and a privilege. And that the meaning of life is appreciating the fact.

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OK FOLKS, it's getting late and I've raw chicken fillet, a tub of black bean sauce, a red pepper (sweeter than a green one) and a boil-in-bag sachet of basmati rice (rather unadventurously I'm trying boiled maybe specked with peas if I've still got some...) as well as chili powder, monosodium glutamate ("MSG") and light soy sauce... wish me luck, for "learning to cook just like the Chinese takeaway" starts today. Wahey!!

If you're curious as I was, however, here's a recipe for Chinese egg fried rice.

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Today's music:
The Prodigy: Everybody in the Place
...= my favourite piece of "commercial" rave ..!