Broadband

HEY I GOT MY BROADBAND BACK! So I can read your book, Anna! And I can answer your blogs, y'all.

I've been pretty down as you all might know. Not drowning in depression but up to my neck. And I can't climb out. I'm still sleeping twelve hours' straight and that's without the wonders of valium (thank you Valium Marilyn).

I decided to give up drinking cold on Saturday night. so I drank nothing at all yesterday. In the evening I had a Valium as benzos are given in drying-out clinics to alleviate alcohol withdrawals ~ anything from craving to the shakes to fullblown DTs are treate by benodiazepines. I think the one they usually use is Librium because that is metabolized without passing through the liver, unlike Valium which is. The liver of course is compromised in nearly all heavy drinkers so librium is given in preference. But it's not as strong as Valium. Whoever wrote those benzo equivalence tables needs their head testing. Same as the person who assumed that an extra £10 a day street heroin usage on top of say a 50mg methadone script, will be adequately provided for by 10mg oral methadone. And they don't even take into account the enormous difference in bioavailability (the amount of drug actually hitting the brain copared to the amount taken) between IVing gear the way I do, compared to incinerating it on the end of a crackpipe. I know the crackhead method barely touches those who use it. I used to share a house (a crackhouse) with crackheads who smoked their heroin in this way and I never once saw them look even mildly intoxicated on heroin. Their habits were purely psychological. One day Matran (the rat man) was acting like a real baby crying sick. Dealer eventually comes by, he puts about 50p worth of heroin on the crack pipe and is saying "yeah man that's it whoeah!" etc etc 50p worth of gear. Then there's me hitting up £10 bags whole for breakfast, lunch and dinner (and ideally one for the middle of the night). This heroin was going straight in my veins and my habit was such it usually just straightened me out (in the nicest possible way). Yet the clinic was prescribing to both of us as if our habits were the same. The idiots. I want off this methadone rubbish as quickly as possible.

I blew some money on gear this morning. I had two hits of 0.4g each and they barely touched me. The drought is still raging. The guy who bought the second lot (because it was from our local guy I don't bother dealing with) said it was "really good" man it was as average as average can be. I'm so unimpressed by other people's abysmally low standards and I don't like thinking of myself as fussy. I'm not fusssy, I just have standards.

And I only used because I was so miserable I couldn't think of what else to do.

I HAD to go to the laundrette because I'm booked into an antidrugs course tomorrow that is said to be revolutionary but I couldn't face this ordeal of clothes washing. The last couple of times I went into that place (between just washing my own clothes myself in the sink) I was paranoid, manic, psychotic and hearing voices and everybody seemed to be staring at me. This time, at least, it was calm and I read a Jehovah's Witness magazine about what I'd call Arabian Donkeys (racehorses). And my clothes slowly went through their cycles.

Then I went down town to buy this 3-month broadband stick and saw The Wire season one ~ 775 mins of DVD entertainment ~ for £22 so I thought fuck buying more drugs or drink and I got a bigger thrill watching the American police surveilling Baltimore drug dealers.

I don't know what I'm going to do about this no drinking. Alcohol has me in its grip more tightly than I'd care to admit. I calculated my drink intake. It's no more than 3 cans a day and these are usually cherry Fizz cyder, which is 4.5% ABV. So I'm drinking 1.5 litres a day, which is just over 6.5 units. If you add it up and factor in the days I only drink two so that's about 40 units max a week. The government's recommended maximum is 28 units per week for a man, 21 units for a woman. A unit is 10mls neat alcohol so it's easy to calculate how many you're drinking once you know how.

I bought soluble orange flavour multivitamins this morning, £4.50 for 20. They're intensely orangey and actually make a good alternative to my orangey cyder coctails I drink when I'm not on cherry flavour. The soft drink quotient is supposed to help wean me off, but it tastes so yummy some days I just wanna drink more!

I'm off to Narcotics Anonymous later. And I'm doing the whole meeting. Because I'm not manic, just depressed, I have ten times the attention span I had during my mania-induced antidrugs crusade. That is I am going to NA if I can tear myselfaway from The Wire. It is fairy addictive. I hope y'all are having a nice day. Take care y'all...