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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Gledwoods deutscher Blog

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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!

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Mein Hochschlechtes Deutsch


Goethe: Turning in his grave ...

ON TO GERMAN LATER.

I woke up this morning. Sorry ~ I couldn't sleep in the night, so I woke up in the afternoon ~
after being bothered by someone on the phone who would have wanted me to score drugs for them, which I didn't want to do at 9am. (Not that I would EVER score for anyone else ~ that is highly illegal.)... Anyway: after all this, I finally slept under a tent-like uncovered duvet for several hours, and woke up around 2pm feeling cold, tired, penniless... and craving heroin.

But I didn't take any. Now I feel less cold, and tired. But little less miserable. But hey ~ that's drugs for you.

And now an illustrated delight: I have scarring like this (full-thickness "burns" from barbiturates ~ from adulterated heroin ~ though more than twice as big) although my skin is not black ...



OK and now the German bit. That headline, knowing my luck is probably spelled incorrectly, and I may even have got the wording totally wrong. But that would be ironic/poetic/thing/whatever because it is meant to read "MY TERRIBLE GERMAN!"

Yesterday I did an online test, very quickly, that is supposed to gauge your level of proficiency. Unfortunately it concentrated on GRAMMAR which is my weakest point. Without going into detail, German grammar is (to me) fiendishly difficult. For which reason I actually found the supposedly arcane Japanese language far easier to grasp. Japanese is a so-called Synthetic or Agglutinative language, which means instead of placing prepositions (which mean something alone: on in upon, etc) you tag on "particles" expressing the same ideas to the end of already-formed words. English does this in that you say one girl, two girls. -S denotes the plural, but means nothing on its own. Likewise, "I want; I wantED" ~ the -ED means nothing alone but we all know it denotes a past action. Well Japanese you might say "Tokyo-e" meaning "to Tokyo" But! The -e, just like English -s or -ed, means nothing alone. That is the difference between a mostly "analytical" language (like English) and an agglutinative one, like Japanese. German is neither of these, it is "inflexional" and these tongues ~ in my opinion ~ are the most fiendishly difficult of all.

You can read a very good account of the absurdities of German grammar by Edgar Allen Poe, who explains them far better than I ever could, by clicking here.

But might I add, upon rereading his rant, I would guess Mr Poe had not studied any other foreign language if he is that confounded by certain other aspects of German... e.g. saying something "rests" somewhere, rather than "is" somewhere ... because that's what foreign languages are ~ FOREIGN!

Anyway, back to this test. Which unfortunately focused on grammar, my weakest point. I have been concentrating on building a passive reading vocabulary. But unfortunately the university prospectuses I read ~ and this test ~ were full of terms I just didn't know. Meaning I didn't really understand a great many of the phrases as I raced through. And I didn't spent much longer than 2 seconds on each question.

I got a B1, which is shockingly poor, considering how much time I slogged away at that fiendish Teutonic tongue in my youth ... even WITH a 19-year gap in between!

The grades go A1 (lowest) A2, B1, B2, C1, C2 (highest) so you see I got 3 out of 6. DREADFUL!!

I would say my level (dreadful grammar aside) is somewhere between B2 and C1. To give an example: I very often grasp close to or exactly what a writer is saying ~ yet would flounder for ages to express such ideas in English. Because the German writer has played to the strengths of his or her own language.

But I couldn't express myself in writing in anything better than a heavily-accented pidgin-language, of the sort one might expect of an uneducated 3rd world peasant. Truly shocking. Although people from Iran, Pakistan etc ~ as well as from "3rd world" countries frequently attend universities (somehow) in the UK. And likewise I shall go to Deutschland ~ hahar!

You can find the Goethe Institut's German test here.

And the meanings of the marks here.

ミクロネシア連邦

6 comments:

Gattina said...

Hahahaha ! I didn't know that German is soooo difficult to learn ! I spoke it already with 2 ! but I couldn't speak English when I was 2 years old, see ! I laughed so much about Edgar Allen Poe's description of learning German ! I realized for the first time that German was difficult when I had to translate German texts into English. As the sentences are miles long and the verb always at the end, I had to read first the whole thing before I could translate !
Have fun with German !
BTW you should say : Mein schreckliches deutsch (my terrible German)

Sarcastic Bastard said...

Gleddy,
It's good that you didn't take heroin, even though you wanted to. You are strong and you can stay clean. I know it.

Sending love,

SB

Syd said...

Hang in there both with the German and staying clean.

molson said...

So what's worse, the barbiturate scars or the German grammar? Both seem somewhat unpleasant.

Baino said...

Well if you could write it fluently,you wouldn't need to do the course! Baby steps Gleds! I'm so proud of you.

Gledwood said...

Gattina: you're just lucky. And you now live in that part of the world where everyone appears to speak at least 2 of: French, German, Dutch ... + English.... German is VERY involved and confused. No exaggeration that it's more difficult than Japanese. Especially when putting a simple sentence together. Japanese adjectives are like English ones ~ no endings! No words for "the" or "a"/"an" ~ and if there WERE I'm sure they wouldn't have endings either!

SB: but I felt shit all day

Syd: aye!

Baino: that's a very good point!

But if I DO want to study ih Germany I really have to shape up. Especially for an arts/humanities course... It only occurred to me yesterday that all these foreigners coming to London/etc to study TEND to do things like electronics or business. Active things, where expressing oneself gracefully doesn't necessarily come to the fore. I can't think of anyone I've ever known or known of who came here from abroad to do BA ENGLISH... not that that is any reason why I should not study German IN GERMANY

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