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, August 17, 2010

Stabbed with a pear in the house of the dead ...

I AM READING NOTES FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD, a cheery tome by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov (which my English teacher dubbed "the most boring book ever written") and The Insulted and Injured ~ I'm sure the authors of modern misery memoirs are peeved to find that particularly evocative title already used up!

I had some drinks this afternoon and sat under an electronic posterboard leafing through the cheery tale, which is set in a Siberian hard labour camp.

Dostoyevsky's characters ~ murderers, alcoholics, gamblers ~ remind me of some of the junkies I have met in my time ... I'm not saying anything else.

I googled various topics concerning Siberian labour camps and came up with a page from a school punishment book, detailing how many lashes of the cane various miscreants received for such crimes as stabbing someone with a pear(!) and grave robbing~(!!!) Am I badly misreading things (you can click on the picture to enlarge)~? Or was the world even crazier in Victorian times (or whenever those whippings are from)..? ~ than it is now?? (Surely not!)



I thought I would invent some comedy crimes of my own ...

The only sample offences I could come up with were:

Allowing school hamster to grow too tubby.

Allowing goblin to chase school hamster
...


I don't think I'd have done too well making up school rules in the dark ages, do you?

COMPETITION TIME ~ roll up and give your guesses, educated or otherwise, please! Tell me WHAT LANGUAGE ARE THESE SCRIBBLES WRITTEN IN?

Answers in the commentary box, if yer please...

PS the end of my HAMMY AND THE GOBLIN tale of wonder is coming soon. I bet y'all are yawning with excitement!

13 comments:

Sweden said...

it must be "stabbing with PEN", not "pear" ???????

Jeannie said...

I think it was likely stabbing with a pen.

Grave robbing? was it a medical school? anatomy class?

The world was crazier in the past. I read a study online years ago - I should try to find it again - that compared the murder rate of London a couple hundred or so years ago (they kept very good records apparently) with today's rates. It seems murders per capita were 14 times higher than modern Chicago, Detroit or whatever other major city in the States had high rates. Altogether, people are much less violent and the world is a safer place today.

The scribbles look like shorthand to me but I know as much about shorthand as I do about Arabic.

Gledwood said...

Swedes: yeah you must be right. Why on earth did I think it was a PEAR... I have no idea. I does kinda look like that...

Jeannie: was the murder rate really that high? I dimly recall hearing such figures before, but I don't remember them being quite that high...
What were people so upset about, I wonder??

Akelamalu said...

Is the writing Sanskrit?

Welshcakes Limoncello said...

Oh, I think the world was definitely crazier then!

Anonymous said...

After careful examination of the title of the photo of that sample of scribble, I have determined that it is Gabelsberger shorthand from 1834!

Syd said...

It's all Greek to me. But I know that the scribbles aren't. I read his books so many years ago because I had to.

Liz Hinds said...

I think it's stabbing with pen.

But surely grave robbing is more than 2 strokes worse than indifference!

Reeny's Ramblin' said...

I think that the aliens wrote it.

Gledwood said...

Akelamalu: no not Sanscrit! If I were guessing I'd guess it were Armenian. It does look quite a lot like Armenian or Georgian writing, with the up-&-down-iness

Welshcakes: yep!

Igsquirrel: o you cheated. Yes it is, it's German written in Gabelsberger shorthand, which it has been said (accurately in my view as I've checked the competition internationally) "has a beauty of form and outline that is unsurpassed" ...

Syd: didn't you like Dostoyevsky? I heard he got paid by the page and was in debt... which stuck in my mind and certainly explains why his later work was far more boring than his early stuff. Up to Crime and Punishment he's really good, but the supposed great novels (Crime and Punishment aside) are intolerably dull... nothing at all like Tolstoy, whose Anna Karenina is unsurpassed. No film has ever captured its glory even closely

Liz: I think "indifference" was their ability to give a good whipping to anyone they pleased!!

Reeny: looks like Alien, aye! Hey perhaps it's Klingon. Actually I've seen Klingon Official Script online and it's nothing like that. Did you know Klingon has a higher number of fluent speakers in America than Esperanto. Dunno what that says about Esperanto... PS did you know Google do a Klingon language portal? It's here:

http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-klingon

Gattina said...

Although I never learned steno it looks like steno to me ! No idea about the language though.
To your questions, yes there are lots of construction work in London ! It's really awful. I hope the result will be good at least ! When my son lived in London I didn't go that often to the center, it's just now because I have to take the Eurostar there so I always stop for the day to smell London air, lol !
I hate automn, If I could I would do like a bear and disappear in a hole from End September til April ! I have been in Brighton quiet often 15 years ago, there was always a lot going on. Eastbourne is much calmer, some bad languages say that it is the last door to the graveyard ! There are so many retired people from London living there now !

Sweden said...

i Love Dostoyevsky, and i think "the idiot" was a really good book.

Anonymous said...

Hey, Friend,
I can transliterate this script for you, and also translate into English, if you don’t have it yet but would like to.
Greets from Hamburg (Germany),
A Fellow of Yours.
» g…b.d…g…w(at)w…e…b.d…e

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!































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