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

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DIARY OF A SLOWLY RECOVERING HEROIN ADDICT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attack of the Furry Entertainers!

Attack of the Furry Entertainers!

Friday, February 13, 2009

Brrr!

OK I HAVE BEEN IN HIBERNATION. Every time I wake up I feel like I'm on day 2 of a skiing or adventure holiday. How inconvenient. Acheing all over, like I've fallen off a horse, I hobble about making cups of tea or gassing the place out with (fried) quarter lb-er beefburger sandwiches... I got a really chavtastic cheapo, thin, sugary-vinegary tomato ketchup ~ just the way it should be ~ from Iceland. It's fantastic. Only my bread is bourgeois: Warburton's Seeded Batch: £1 for a tiny loaf. But exactly the right size toasted for one 1/4-lb-er or 3 fishfingers drowning in said "red sauce"...

Hey do y'all remember back in the 1970s-to-early 80s when colour television was still something of a novelty or at least luxury. In this country we never had those whizzy colour tellies with turny-dials (I've looked all my life for one, only ever seen colour ones on American films), just four or five channel selectors, sticking out like giant silver cigarettes from a teak effect box with a screen like a giant goldfish bowl. The older ones used to ping! back into a quickly vanishing white dot that lingered in the end....

... sometimes I think that white dot tells the story of my life...

... even older tellies (even colour ones) worked via valves not transistors, which meant when you knew you wanted to see something you had to ensure the box was switched on a good 10 minutes ahead of time. Sound came almost immediately, frustratingly... from deep underwater greenish figures emerged, clothing themselves in layer upon layer of sparkly pixxels until (hopefully) at the set time you had Coronation Street or Opportunity Knocks! Aww, the 1970s. I do feel some privileged sense of nostalgia for having lived through these brown-swirly times.

Me and my brother used to nudge each other and laugh when we went to more vulgar people's houses who always had the colour turned up way too high! ~ do you remember that one? That was a chavtastic form of budget psychedelia for those unwilling actually to drop LSD...

What on earth I was going to say here has escaped me...

O, except my robos look like their nest has been hit by a cat-5 hurricane! Some cleaning bug has seized them and all empty toothpaste boxes (etc) are piled wigwam stylee in a corner. When I shove my head in the tank and say "oi you swines: come out!" three mini-gremlin faces emerge from said bundle of sticks looking surprised (hamsters nearly always look surprised, it's the look they do best...)

And that's about it. I don't know what I was gonna say but I'm going back to bed?

VIDEO:

#1 the candy selection featuring Leo DiCaprio and the All Saints: Pure Shores (music from The Beach)...




#2 Now this is something rarer: 2001 A Space Odyssey to the tune of Orbital's Halcyon:

I always thought Halcyon was a nasty banned sleeping pill from the United States... or >Halcion Days... some old novel..?
No! Halcion Days was a "text based multi-user adventure game" ... being I've never PLAYED a text-based multi-user adventure game but have only heard of ONE: ie British Telecom's "MUD" "multi-user dungeon" how on earth the phrase got so deeply embedded in my subconscious I've not a clue...
No it isn't. "Halcyon days" is a piece of cultural coinage, ie a expression, a cliche, if you will. The Halcyon game which I knew I'd not have heard of till just now, is some geektastic thing from times past...

6 comments:

Jeannie said...

I remember the black and white TVs we had and also the first colour set - in the 60's - all with the channel dial - 2 - 13. We only had an aerial then. I got cable when I married and moved back to the city.

Puss-in-Boots said...

I remember when we got our first TV. My brothers and I just sat enthralled watching Wagon Train and Rawhide.

I think I prefer my LCD with all the you beaut bells and whistles.

Go back to bed, Gleds. Drink plenty of fluids, take some aspirin or Disprin and sleep. That's the best thing to do for colds.

Get well soon.

Lucinda said...

There is a nasty flu and a nasty cold going around where I live. It's really terrible, people are ending up with fevers over a hundred for sometimes 4 days, simply nuts. I am one of the lucky ones who has been untouched. Now that I've said that though, I've definitely cursed myself.
I hope you feel better soon Gleds!
= )

Akelamalu said...

When MWM and I moved in together in 1972 he insisted on getting a colour TV despite my claims that we were short of money and a black and white one would do! Ah those were the days. :)

Gledwood said...

Jeannie: I know people who still use aerials!... I'm the only one not to have bothered with the digital set-top box...

Puss-in-Boots: cheers I been asleep most of the weekend

Lucinda: ;...->... that's sposed to be a runny-eyed AND drooling smiley :->

Akelamalu: I still remember the news read by Richard Baker and Angela Rippon on our black and white telly (and the rolling BBC globe) back in the 1970s...

Gattina said...

I don't remember TV at all, I have to say that in the 70th I was a young mother and didn't even think of TV ! We bought one when our son went to primary school and sometimes they were talking about a TV show and the poor little guy didn't have a TV. Of course then we bought a (for that time) big and colour TV. Belgium had TV cable already since the end of the 50th it was automatically put in together with electricty cables when a new building or house was built. If you used it or not. It was the most cabled country in the world, and so early.

I WANT OFF METHADONE AS QUICK AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE!

METHADONE ~ A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH







Heroin Shortage: News

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







Christiane F

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

To See Gledwood's Entire Blog...

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

Drugs Videos

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

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

Mexican Black Tar Heroin: "Dark End"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And lastly:

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































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

Manic Magic

Manic Magic

Gledwood Volume 2: A Heroin Addict's Blog

Copyright 2011 by Gledwood