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!

Monday, September 07, 2009

Paris Match, Stern-Magazin... und meiner Mutter!

TODAY I WENT TO SEE MY MOTHER and her husband (never really a step-dad to me ..) down the West End. We were going to eat Thai food, until we realized the "Indian and Thai restaurant" my Mum thought she'd found was actually offering Thalis ~ not a Thai menu at all! Both of my parents have the same problem: they read what they think is there. And I picked up this habit from them. But I don't think I'm as bad. It's a genetic thing. I think if it was very much worse it'd be called "dyslexia" or something ...

In fact we ended up talking about my humungous spelling problems I had (I was put in retarded readilng group) in primary school. My Mum used to teach me with flashcards and the teachers said this was confusing me as the "progressive" 1970s school was teaching reading by "phonics". In short let me tell you phonics do not work. They're based on the ridiculous premise that the English language can be taught "phonetically". And thanks to this I was constantly banging my head upon the brick walls of head not pronounced "heed" knees that were somehow K-less and so on. I still remember puzzling at a young age "why are there Cs and Ks. And Ss and Cs?" None of it made sense. My early writing books were a tangle of red corrections. And yet I grew up with the ambition to write novels!

We had a lovely lebanese dinner. My Mum had chicken skewers. I had lamb skewers (too much chicken's gone to my head. I've grown a gizzard. If we didn't have a "socialist NHS" the doctors would want $5000 to chop it off ... Branzy, unfortunately for him ordered something that sounded charming on the menu, but looked like bulls' testicles floating in a yogurty ejaculation. He kept quiet and kept nabbing bits of our salad ...

Afterwards I remembered I'm supposed to be learning Central European Dialect (ie German) so I raided the local cosmopolitan newsstand for Paris Match, Stern and Die Spiegel magazines, and sat there pretentiously leafing through on the tube home. The woman next to me was reading a novel in Swedish ...

And that was that. Today was meant to be hammybuying day but I spent so much time stressing about this evening's food experience I never did anything except the rudiments of getting ready and still I was late ...

Hope yous all had a cheery day too ... Cheerio for now!

8 comments:

Baino said...

Hey sounds like a good day. Hammies can wait until you're bored again! Have to say I'm not a great fan of Lebanese food, we have a load of it over here and it's all a bit 'meaty' for me. I was never great at spelling either and became a copywriter! Thank goodness for spellcheck and proof readers!

Lou said...

I wonder how many educational fads were a total waste of time.

Gattina said...

Apparently it exists in all languages. My son learnd with this system too and it didn't work in french either. The strange thing is that he still makes plenty of faults when he writes in french and not a single one when he writes in English and English he had never learned at school ! He picked it up while working in London ! So now he always writes me in English so I can't get angry that he still can't write in french correctly, lol !

Puss-in-Boots said...

I had to teach my girls to sound out words to learn to pronounce them, then had to teach them about syllables. So it's thanks to me they can spell so well.

The education system today is pretty dodgy and is letting the kids down. Employers are not interested in reading resumes that a full of spelling and grammatical errors with no punctuation (or apostrophes in the wrong place...my personal bugbear).

I hope your mum's husband didn't suffer too much from his rather dubious sounding meal...

Gledwood said...

BAINO: How did you become a copywriter? Who with? Was it a big ad agency? Did you get paid £$£$£gerzillions? Do you think I could get a job like that?? Would I need a spellchecker? (Yes...)

LOU: a total fucking waste of time. I mean they propound that phonics is "universal" ... yeah right, tell that to the Chinese!

GATTINA: o man all those nonpronounced word endings in French ... totally did my head in. That's why I so much preferred German. Also Germans enunciate their speech far more clearly. Beautiful as their language may be, French people sound like they're prattling with a mouth full of jelly and potatoes ...

PUSSINBOOTS: O no it didn't make him ill. I just don't think he was expecting a bowl full of lumps floating in something white ...

I think I was the very last generation actually to get taught about apostrophe's (haha!) semicolons; and : colons. The kids nowadays are totally lost and no number of spellcheckers or computer-enhanced grammatixx ain't gonna save #'em!!** £$%^*&^%!!

Lesley said...

I agree with you on the subject of phonetics. I think it just confuses children when, in the end, they have to learn how to spell the words properly anyway. Why not just start off learning to spell in the first place?! :O)

Hubby and I read to our daughter from her being a baby and she's been reading for herself ever since she was able to. She would have been an excellent speller now if it wasn't for the confusion the phonetic system has caused.

Akelamalu said...

When our eldest son was due to start school we had the choice of two schools one of which taught phonetic English. At the school open evening I asked them to explain the point of it to be told that it gets children reading quickly. I asked but reading what? They won't be able to pick up a book from the library and read that will they? I told them thanks but no thanks and sent him to the other school where they taught traditional English. Phonetics only lasted one year at the school, I felt sorry for the students who had endured it only to have to start again learning to read proper English. :(

Gledwood said...

See it's nonsense. I remember Ruth Kelly coming on the Radio 4 Today programme defending her choice of Synthetic Phonics as the reading method of choice today in force across all primary schools. All she could do was parrot that Synthetic Phonics has the best success rate in 80% of pupils ... But what about the poor 20% like me who found it utterly impenetrable?!!??

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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