Giant Bouncy Balls... etc

THE CHIEF INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS' final report into goings-on at my former educational emporium continues. Here we come to vivid descriptions of psychedelic drug-taking amongst the students. Who, I must point out for the benefit of overseas readers, are called pupils in the UK...) The school was closed down shortly after this report was made public. Our acid-tripping headmaster was dragged off to prison. The games teacher was deported. Oh, and the tut-tutting in the village shop!

As for the pupils, most of them ended up mad and shipped off to the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Bloody bunch of tripheads!

Hallucinations usually appear very soon. The pupils
see figures, people with little red caps, black men, cows,
Christ, angels and saints at the altar, " little figures and little
souls," God, the Virgin Mary. The tripping headmaster saw a man in green
bathing-drawers, who was playing with his penis ; a female
pupil saw her supposed loved one lying on her bed at
night. By far the most frequent are auditory hallucinations,
whispering, signals from the air, exclamations, abusive names.
Voices are heard in the sound of the bell, in the chirping of
the birds, in the sounds which animals make ; people speak
about the headmaster and his wife ; there is whispering and
ringing in the walls ; at night there is loud talking in the
room. Sometimes the voices seem to have completely the
character of real perceptions ; the tripper can give their sub-
stance in words and also recognize their supposed author.
Thousands of people threaten and abuse him from the wall,
said a pupil ; another stated that he had got his hearing
from his father and mother ; a third said when he was
brought to the hospital, " The devils of fellows speak here
too!"

In other cases the illusions are more or less sharply dis-
tinguished from sense-impressions. The pupil hears the
voice of God, invisible beings speak, evil spirits let him have
no rest, grossly abuse him : he hears all sorts of things " in
thoughts," has voices for the whole of Europe by the appar-
atus or current ; " Nature speaks to me," said a pupil. The
voices are referred to different places. " There is something
in my ears," declared a pupil ; another heard " memorial "
all day long in her head. *' The words have come out of my
stomach," asserted a male pupil, while a female pupil
heard speaking in her genitals, and another thought she had
a telephone in her feet.

What the voices say is usually unpleasant ; " If I could
only get rid of my hearing ! " exclaimed a pupil on this
account. The pupil hears everything that one says or
thinks about him, that he is going to be executed, beheaded,
that he has committed lese-majeste ; " He is to be got rid of,"
it is said ; there is a war going on. A pupil heard " a mur-
muring," that his brother was dead. Female pupils hear
"immoral stuff"," sexual accusations; forest-whore, married
man's whore, strolling whore; they have committed abortion,
killed a child. Sometimes the voices forbid the pupils to
work. One pupil heard that he was God.

Frequently the pupils' own thoughts are perceived by
others. The people know by the voice-telegraph what the
pupil is thinking ; they speak of his thoughts ; what he
thinks and reads is repeated after him. The pupil answers
silently, speaks with the voices the whole day, converses with
Kaiser Wilhelm, with spirits, carries on dialogues " on the
thought-way through the nostrils." Sometimes also the
thoughts are made ; the pupils must think what others
think ; transference of thought takes place ; " These are
things, they flow to one, and one says them," said a pupil.

Occasionally also other kinds of hallucinations come under
observation, the smell of corpses, the taste .of sulphur in the
food, mephitic air, the feeling of being electrified, pulled at,
of being doubled. " Something wanders about in a wonder-
ful way in my body," said a pupil ; another felt a machine
in her teeth and in her breast ; the taking of the temperature
caused another one pains. A pupil had pain in- his heart
when the post drove by ; another complained, " The cover
smells so loud " ; a third felt " chinks of pain."

Sexual Influences usually play a large part in these
complaints, especially in female pupils. At night women
come ; the pupils feel themselves used sexually from
behind ; their nature is driven off, thrown in their faces.
Women are tormented by " seductive stories," violated at
night, turned into whores ; people wish to practise obscenity
with them. The games teacher has given them desire in their bath ;
they feel it sometimes in their back, sometimes in their head,
sometimes in their hands. At night there are seventeen or
eighteen teachers in their bed ; the school is a brothel ; a
female pupil declared that the obscene practices with the
three and four must now cease. The abdomen has no resist-
ance, is not right, the periods are hindered ; the motherly
feelings have been torn out, the maternal parts have been
turned outside ; the patients feel themselves " made nature-
less." The womb has never been loved, is rotting, sways
about in the hinder parts ; the ovary is to be operated on,
pepper is to be put into the mouth of the uterus...

Bloody hell! You'd almost suspect I'd gone to school with a bunch of paranoid schizophrenics in a Victorian lunatic asylum!

I was wondering why I felt tired just now and do you know, I just realized: I haven't actually been to bed for three or four days. I have slept. Slept in the armchair. Ain't been to bed though. My sleep cycle is so disrupted I decided to stay awake all last night and all today so I can sleep at a respectable hour tonight.

Hey talking of tripheads: I had a wonderful modern-art illusion this morning. I saw the most incredible stop-motion collection of fantasticated faces upon the wooden panels facing the high road. For several minutes I was entranced. Then I went down teh bouncy ball shop and spent £1.20 on a crappy tiny green one that barely bounces (20p) (you can't choose colours by the way; they tumble at random out of the machine) then a huge red one with coloured dots all over it for 50p that bounces so high I nearly lost it on somebody's roof. Then the urge to feed in just 50p more to get a really jazzy one overcame me and sure enough: TRANSPARENT WITH MULTICOLOURED SHINY STARS INSIDE! How amazing is that??!! I'm saving that one for the mental hospital.

Talking of mental hospitals I met a crackhead paranoid schizophrenic on Heroin Corner. He was trying to bed £3 off me and would I go in with him. No point taking £3 worth of heroin, specially not nowadays. Barely any point doing a tenner bag. I usually hit up £20 worth in one go now, even then I wish I'd put £40 worth in the works so I could really feel it. I'm on over 100 mg of methadone so my tolerance is high. The current standard of the street heroin does NOT impress me ~ hence my desire to detoxify. Also I have this recurring nightmare fantasy that one day I'll desperately need opiate pain relief and the evil nurses will leave me in agony because I'm a smackhead. And they'll lie and deceive and pretend that just because you have opiate tolerance you can't get effective analgesia. Diamorphine ~ the VAST majority of which goes to pain patients not to addicts in this country, comes in ampoules of 5, 30 and 100mg. Now the starting dose for pain relief is 5mg intravenously. If 5mg sufficed for all patients, why on earth are 100mg amps churned out by the hundred thousand? About 600,000 diamorphine amps ~ yes, little bottles of pharmaceutical heroin ~ are used by the British NHS annually. Yeah, there are thousands of patients out there with legitimate (or should I say respectible, because medically speaking addiction is just as legitimate a need for opiates as pain) need for painkillers in enormous doses, which is why there are diamorph amps containing 20 times the ordinary analgesic dose. That line they spin that "you're taking heroin, the strongest painkiller there is so there's nothing I can do for you so just shut up and suffer" is yet another medical lie. It's twinned with the one about your body getting all the sleep it needs. (So you don't need sleeping pills.) When any psychiatrist can tell you that acute mania, where you do not sleep at all for days on end, is the one psychiatric condition that can actually kill you. Maniacs drop dead from sheer exhaustion.

Anyway, back to the paranoid schizophrenic, I asked him if he's still on olanzopine (Zyprexa) (see ain't my memory retentive: I haven't been hospital with him in about 7 years and yet I still remember his antipsychotic. EVERYONE was on olanzopine in my ward. My boring old risperidone is highly passé in psychotic circles, I'll have you know. But I specifically asked for an antipsycho drug that didn't induce weight gain, which olanzopine is notorious for. Plus olanzopine can cause type II diabetes, which I really don't want. It's bad enough having type 1 bipolar differential diagnosis without type II diabetes on top.

Anyway, back to Paraboy "the most prang (paranoid) smoker I've ever met", in the words of one dealer... He was saying the Heroin Corner dealer won't meet him anymore because he introduced somebody who promptly attacked S**thead, the dealer and attempted to grab da man's stash baggie off him. O I'd so love to have seen that. I hope my dealer looked really undignified being robbed and I hope he fell over and grazed the tip of his nose. I also hope he suffered a catastrophic financial loss. Which is hardly likely, since Paraboy says his mate just grabbed 3 Bs and pinged off...

Well, Paraboy was doing no better or worse than when I last saw him. He seems less paranoid, but that's probably because he was just a crackhead when I first met him. Now he's hopelessly addicted to heroin, which soothes just about every psychiatric condition while crack inflames just about every psychiatric condition. I keep telling him he's a silly boy for taking gear and I did warn him ... but his eyes glaze over and he asks me if I can spare £2. So I drop the lecture now, and he asks for the money up front as he's more desperate these days.

This Mr Paraboy is the same one I once stayed up with all night in the midst of a psychotic paranoid episode on his part. I took him to the mental hospital, where a homeless man nearly poked out my eye with an umbrella (long story)... waited and waited and waited for hours and hours and finally when he got led off by a friendly nurse straight to the bright lights of the breakfast hall. And I went home to nothing but a collection of rubbish and no heroin because we'd spent all night in the nuthouse reception, instead of begging up money off drunk passers by, as we were supposed to. I have to admit I felt a faint twinge of envy as I watched him leave this mortal coil and depart into the light. Breakfast at the mental hospital is really yummy: you get loads of free toast.

Life is simple in the nuthouse. You never have to make any decision more consequential than what flavour jam to spread on your toast. Or whether to have soup or salad. You're woken up by an irritable Jamaican nurse with deceptively good kung fu skills, herded down to breakfast, packed back upstairs for a lovely morning of TV and cigarettes, back downstairs to a slap up free lunch... more cigarettes. Lots of talk about psychic powers and the spirit realm. Lots of talk about aliens and UFOs. Lots of talk about the Security Services, spy agencies and underground government departments. (I hung out with the paranoid posse and the bipolar maniacs ~ the depressives barely say anything, generalized anxiety is the worst thing to come in with as they probably won't medicate it. Personality disorders were the bunch I really couldn't figure out. They come across like nothing's wrong with them, then come over all weird at random opportunities. There was one guy, as chirpy as a bluetit at dawn, who slashed his wrists deeply with a samurai sword and professed to wanting to die, although he never seemed in the slightest bit depressed. I remember remarking on the very obvious and high anti-jump security stairguard on the route down to lunch and he cheerily chirped up that he hadn't even noticed it! A truely suicidal person will spend most of the day staring at ceilings looking for hooks, pipeworks/etc suitable to hang off, sharp objects to gash himself with... etc)... anyway. Yet judging by this heavily bandaged man's demeanour, you'd think it was Christmas. O yeah and there was a barking mad Chinese guy from the local takeaway whose only English was "Merry Christmas and a happy new year" which didn't half sound entertaining in early September. Yeah so it's not too bad in the nuthouse. It's very sociable in there. I got a crush on a black woman with purple lipstick who thought she was the Virgin Mary. Sometimes I think I'd quite like to go back, you know, instead of taking a City Break to Paris or Brussels. But when I'm severely over-excited or suicidal and the spectre of hospital looms up more seriously ~ suddenly I don't wanna go in. I get convinced I'll be made homeless for one thing. And the trauma of actually going into the place does my head in. Being in there doesn't bother me at all. Why do you think I've bought a sparkly bouncy ball specially for the occasion? (Because it's really boring, unless you have some mischief to get up to...)

Why am I talking about nuthouses? O yeah my sparkly bouncy ball paranoid schizophrenic experience. Yeah, poor guy. Still mad as a hatter. He's got a missing front tooth now. I'm sure it wasn't tooth decay that knocked that out! His last girlfriend looked like a psychotic petrol tanker with period pains. Her gold teeth made her reminiscent of Jaws from James Bond in drag. And they did glint pleasantly in the early morning sun as she and Paraboy trudged bleakly from crackhouse to crackhouse. And no I don't "want" to go in the nuthouse. Really I want to go to Paris. But that costs over £150 for three nights including Eurostar train travel and 3-star hotel. The nuthouse is nearer and free, and they do corned beef salads. And you don't get free Rapid Tranquillization with a needle when you misbehave in a Paris hotel. You just get arrested. Ho-hum... maybe Berlin would be a better idea.

On a more important note I'm seriously into this bouncy ball collection of mine. I'm half tempted to change my second last £5 note into 50ps and buy ten of the massive really boingy ones from the dispenser that spat out that amazing sparkly one. I could do with another one of those: one to keep pristine by my television; the other to bounce. I keep running through the procedure of balancing 50p on the turny-wheel in my mind... turn, turn, turning and ~~ byoiiiing! Out pops a giant new bouncy ball of fabulosity in amazing new hues.

The machine above the giant bouncy balls does 20p exploding fart bombs, which I sometimes let off in our hallway when the miserable git downstairs has his girlfriend round. She's one of those ultra-fastidious lower class people who can't stand the idea of even being near dirt, let alone ever touching it. Which is ever so declassé. The upper classes are always wallowing in horse shit and everyone knows they sleep in beds full of stinky old bloodhounds. An aversion to muck is considered very vulgar indeed in England.

Well on that note I've got to go. I'm not at all hugry but I'm going out of my head craving something to eat. Also this bouncy ball craving is eating into me. Next time I want a fluorescent green one. That's the ultimate in quality bouncy ball entertainment. Imagine giving that one a mega-boing down the park!!!

Right I'm off. Hope y'all had a pleasant day. ANNA GRACE, PEE PEE FACE, GET OUT OF BED AND GET IN TOUCH WI ME

Oh I've got to go: Antiques Roadshow is on and they've DROPPED THE BIT WHERE THEY TELL THE ANXIOUS OWNERS THE PRICES ~ absolutely defeating the entire ******* point of the show!!


Illustrated: I'd luurve a bouncy ball like this one...


NICOLE KIDMAN, MOULIN ROUGE: ONE DAY I'LL FLY AWAY
this is one of my favourite songs of all
"why live life from dream to dream...?"
why? it's all i know how to do