My train-wreck life trundles on and on ...

I NEVER KNOW WHAT TO SAY when I feel the way I do today.

On the one hand, scores of people read this blog, some barely know me. I assume they will think I'm being a dramaqueen. Or writing "performance diary" ~ more about posture and pose than anything I'm actually feeling.

On the other hand, this site is the nearest thing I have to a diary. It's for that reason that I won't post personal pictures. You know me far better as Gledwood the hamster than you ever could know of my "real" image. If I posted up my face I'd be too self-conscious to reveal even half the stuff I actually do. So you're better off with Hamsters and Double UO Globe logos than my face, trust me.

Let me tell you my reality.

During the deepest pits of the drought I did three weeks on pretty much methadone alone. I continued trying to use, getting almost nothing for my money on four particular days in a row, and so over this time, and the subsequent week, when I did give up scoring and spent my money on books and socks instead, I was taking fewer opiates than at any point since the late 1990s. Yet I felt empty inside, and miserable. Barely showered. Late at night when I was tired, I chatter of crack-voices came back to my head, even though I have barely touched crack in two years.

I pray that God, who understands my mind and motives won't condemn me for not coping. Because I am barely coping at all. I haven't done any washing up except single plates, spoons, mugs, in months. My clothes desperately need laundering. They stink, as do I. I wish I could care enough to bother, but I can't be bothered. My floor is a melange of dirty teeshirts, odd socks and jeans that won't button tangled with empty pizza boxes, newspapers, carrier bags, intermingled with sacks of rubbish where the urge to tidy up has seized me, but not for long enough to make any meaningful inroads into the chaos.

My drinking got so bad last week that I was having blackouts again. I lost half a gram of gear ~ in my own house! ~ I hold out no hope ever of finding it. I was so out of it the other night I actually flushed a £20 note down the toilet.

I need glasses for reading. In some troubled corner of this fleapit they lay safe and undisturbed. But though I can barely see without them, I can't trouble myself enough to bother looking for them.

The thought of suicide haunts me every single day. Knowing that people come here in desperation to find out the latest on the Great Heroin Drought 2010 and that although I hate the Mean Green, I am at least lucky enough to be scripted methadone. Entirely at the mercy of street dealers, some have spent £100s on stuff that has little else in common with low grade Middle Eastern heroin except that it is brown. As those in the thick of this drought will know, the strength of even the best heroin has fallen to a tiny fraction of what it was some months ago. Some street gear is so bad that long-term addicts have been testing heroin-negative. A fantastic achievement, if only it could last longer than present circumstances dictate.

Last week especially people were becoming increasingly frantic and desperate. I tried to do what I could, which wasn't that much. But I did try.

Of the two gears I have been buying, one looks cloudy, like orange juice with black bits floating on top. The black bits can easily be fished out. The remaining " orange juice" contains a little B and a lot of benzos and possibly some other types of downers, too.

The effect is the same every time. The miniscule drop of B I feel instantaneously. A big part of heroin's addictive potential lies in how it almost instantaneously crosses the blood-brain barrier, creating what journalists like to call a "rush". Cocaine also crosses this blood-brain barrier very quickly, hence the super-compressed two-minute "flash" experienced when a large amount of crack is piped.

Not all drugs have such rapid effects. Good example: a cannabis bong. The paranoid schizophrenia and alzheimers that cannabis smokers call a "high" keeps climbing and climbing for a good five-ten minutes, a trickle more than a rush. Heroin and crack by contrast smash into the system like a tidal wave.

Yesterday I found some better gear that looked at first glance like crushed up paracetamol. It sparkles because it appears pre-cut with vitamin C. This stuff cooks up the colour of dilute whiskey, has about three times as much heroin as the "orange juice", but ALSO contains so many sedatives that although I started trying to post around one pm, I kept waking up having to delete screensful of ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzs.

Like an evil cannabis-bong, this mysterious sedative creeps up slowly. So I didn't even know I'd inadvertently taken it till 20 minutes later when I suddenly felt heavy-limbed and buzz-eyed and dropped off so sleep till half past five.

I think I've caught up on several days' lost sleep. I even have a crazy scheme where I'll stick to methadone 100% yet again. Because if at first you don't succeed, as the saying goes ...












PS If you want lots of confessions, methadone and Suboxone (formerly heroin) and the most luridly intimate accounts of the author's "booty calls"; Anna Grace I Hate My Face, I Hate This Place and I'm Strung Out Again from Wisconsin (nr Chicago) cannot be bettered: I particularly like the blue wig shot.