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!

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Aprendo a hablar español


YESTERDAY I RAN to the library with a pocket full of pound coins ~ because they CHARGE for language courses ~ and got out two from-scratch ones in Spanish. I was looking for one that would take me as far as possible and foolishly picked an outsized Berlitz 4-CD one with outsized blown-plastic moulding and two flimsy books that could be reprinted on the amount of paper that would fit in a cigarette packet. In other words hardly anything is explained properly. The other, a CD-only Teach Yourself Spanish Conversation is excellent as you never have to refer to any booklet (in fact I think there was one, but it is no more and the man at the desk, who looked like he yodelled in lederhosen in his spare hand, was far more indignant than I, who would suffer more from its loss.

Frustrated by the lack of grammatical explanation in Berlitz, I've now changed it for Routledge Colloquial ~ only 2 CDs but a nice fat explanatory textbook (I'm such a swot). Incidentally these loans cost £2 a time ~ now isn't that taking the peepee? On the other hand it's good because it keeps them on the shelves for people who actually want to use them, which is something, I suppose...

My Mum got me a bargain-basement CD-player (called a Tesco Value Boombox ~ that wording alone is classic). I had been saving the moment of unwrapping until I had something new to play on it. O man! I couldn't believe it! Even though this was the cheapest budget CD player-cum-AM/FM radio you could get, it was more beautifully designed than almost any other small electrical item I've ever come across. It could barely have been any funkier if when you punched PLAY and the CD started to whirr and prattle una habitación individual por favor... etc a rainbow of mouse-sized miniature donkeys didn't irridesce from the speakers in a blaze of stardust and take to clopping round the CD-closed lid in hoof-waving formation.

I am having lots of fun with the Spanish language and have no inhibitions about yelling out things like "I want another hire car that doesn't smell of sick!" in those "listen and repeat" exercises ~ in the stately language of Cervantes and Lorca. I'm polishing up the most ridiculously posh Castillian accent I possibly can muster ~ lots of lispy Ss and Cs and B and V pronounced the same... por fabor, theñorita! Probably sounding like I've had too much BINO...

Before I fell asleep last night I had a go on the AM radio and was amazed to get a jabbering 20 to the dozen channel in German on medium-wave with elementary Spanish lessons bleeding in on the side... what kind of cosmic coincidence is that??!?

In the end I got fed up with interference in my ear all night and so set the Spanish dialogues on play. This is supposed to embed the language deep in the subconscious. What I can say is I dreamed of old donkeys pulling carts up narrow alleys of the old town...

Illustrated top and bottom you see the Andalucian clifftop village of Rhonda ~ yeah man I've been there. The clifftop is inland and so the soaring town walls go plummetting down to ordinary farmland... quite an amazing place... like a location from a dream...

11 comments:

Jeannie said...

I want to learn Spanish - I did take a couple courses years ago but have forgotten most of it now.

Sarcastic Bastard said...

Gleddy,
I, too, love to over-enunciate and shout Spanish responses. What fun!

Tons of love,

SB

Syd said...

Gled, I never learned Spanish. There is a lot spoken in this area. I like the clifftop village. You will be multi-multi-lingual. Good for you.

Melody Lee said...

Gleds, you must come join my latest un-social network. Well I suppose you don't HAVE TO....but it would be awfully sweet if you did. Just one more thing I've come up with to waste time and keep me from doing anything REALLY productive haha. It's 'The junky underground' badge in my sidebar...
Oh and that pic of the twins isn't from a fashion shoot, it's from the movie "Brothers of the Head" an excellent movie too, if you like that sort of thing. Which I do.

Akelamalu said...

Spanish as well as German - well done you!

Some years ago we learned Turkish before going on holiday. We only learned enough to speak a little but understood more - the locals were very impressed.

We went to Rhonda in February - it's amazing!

Baino said...

Gleds the CD tutorials are quite good. Clare learned 'passable' spanish from them and ended up working in Spain for six weeks before coming home last year. Keep it up . . does the subliminal thing really work?

Gledwood said...

Jeannie: that should be quite easy in the USA... After all, with 30,000,000 speakers or more, you ought never to be too far away from one..!

SB: it's the only way langauge CDs can be done. And you know that!!

Syd: oo aye. I could never handle being a monoglot. I would kill myself. Also I cannot stand being spoken-over. For that reason alone, aged about 7 I decided I would learn "foreign" and never be left out of a conversation ever again... (THAT didn't quite happen...)

Melody: Righty ho I'm off there in a sec... Have a look at Una Paloma Blanca (Wednesday) BTW...

Akemalamu: Rhonda is indeed fantastical, isn't it. Good on yer for learning Turkish.

I once learned holiday Thai: e.g. "WHY is that so expensive?? Usually I pay just 500 baht..!" Then went to Goa, India!!

Baino: I hope to too, but the first (Berlitz) one, though it had 4 CDs barely took you anywhere. You're only allowed 2 courses at a time, so I exchanged it for a far more "literary" one, with written exercises and the like. I do hope to be able to write SOMETHING afterwards, you know... Also a lot of the words ARE like English but not quite the ones you might expect, e.g. "una habitacion individual" means "a single room". Not that you'd ever in 1000000 years think of approaching a hotel desk anywhere in the English-speaking world and saying "an individual habitation, please..."!!

Gledwood said...

BAINO: THE last bit of your comment got lopped off by this eejut computer: subliminal ~ I think it will. I'm sure I'll learn more Spanish with it than without..!!!!

Liz Hinds said...

You are very clever, gledwood. Much too much brain to waste your life so get on with that Spanish learning, and you can show us all around when we come to visit you in your empire. Spain seems a more likely place to be able to make money than Vienna or Berlin.

I love libraries but for some reason very rarely get there these days. But they are such a treat: all those books and for free!

Domesticated cats on the whole haven't improved much over their wildcat relatives. (I do like cats but they can be so vicious unexpectedly.)

Vincent said...

Awesome :-)

Gledwood said...

aye ~ another place I really really wanna go ~ but have yet to set foot on any of these ~ is the Canary Isles

I WANT OFF METHADONE AS QUICK AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE!

METHADONE ~ A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH







Heroin Shortage: News

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







Christiane F

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

To See Gledwood's Entire Blog...

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

Drugs Videos

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

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

Mexican Black Tar Heroin: "Dark End"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And lastly:

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































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

Manic Magic

Manic Magic

Gledwood Volume 2: A Heroin Addict's Blog

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