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!

Saturday, June 04, 2011

崩すKuzusu

I AM IN A SOUR MOOD. I'm sitting here, flicking through lists of Japanese characters, thinking about food I would like to eat (except I don't really wanna eat any). Wondering what I'm doing alive.

Do you know I only need learn 2100 characters to be fluent in Japanese. Kanji are about as difficult to remember and to distinguish one from another as highway code signs. If you know nothing about far eastern writing, you'd assume Chinese characters are uniquely bizarre, each and every one. But they're not. A small number of elements corresponding to the sun 日, the moon 月, women 女, mouths 口, water 水, fire 火, trees 木 and mountains 山, etc crop up again and again combinging together eg as two moons under a mountain 崩 kuzu(su す) (kuzusu) 崩す "to demolish", so it's possible for Chinese and Japanese people to dictate unfamiliar characters to one another over the phone by spelling out the radicals. A character's radical is the unit of meaning, usually on the left hand side, under which it's looked up in a Chinese dictionary. I used my Japanese dictionary to look up the sign outside my local Chinese takeaway. They were most surprised when I came in telling them what it meant (it means a tower of wealth and prestige: in fact you'll see the sign 金 ~ "gold" or money again and again. 金魚 (goldfish) appear in Chinese takeaways time and again, because they're supposed to draw money into the shop. 鮭 this sign says "salmon" in Japanese. Note the fish radical 魚 down the lefthand side. The character is pronounced sake, like the drink 酒 sake. The three drops down the left side are the water radical. Anything with those three droplets down the side is watery, fluid or drink.

I really wish I hadn't slept last night. I slept all day as well and lay there with the telly booming, wishing I didn't have to get up for methadone before 6pm.

I did some research into sleep that confirmed what I already know. Now this only applies to people with bipolar and bipolar-type disorders (as far as I know) ~ because in normal depression people tend to complain of insomnia. But when I'm depressed I nearly always oversleep ~ once it gets going I can easily do 16 hours or more a day, every day. Not sleeping is said to be both a symptom and a cause of mania. In the past when I've really got going I would stay awake for over 40 hours, then sleep for a mere 5. Then carry on going higher and higher, more and more irritable, more and more excitable and so on. I wish I was dead when I think about this. I would rather be hyper than depressed, but I'd rather be happy than hyper. I'm not surprised I turned to drugs, namely heroin. It's by far the most reliable thing I've ever encountered in life. The problems surrounding heroin are problems in getting the stuff and enough of it. Even the Australian nurse down the druggyclinic told me "people feel better on heroin than off it, which is why people go on and on taking it once they start" so I said, why not sell it with the cigarettes in corner shops, and she just smiled wryly. I am thinking of going back on heroin until I die. Heroin is the only thing that ever made sense in my life.

I wouldn't need to kill myself until every vein in my body is done in and I can't take it any more (I wouldn't smoke it; I can't feel anything at all from smoking it and no it's not bad technique: I take heroin for the intravenous rush; the residual high, that lasts all day, is just a bargainacious by product. If I did want to take heroin for another 10 years I'd need to inject in the femoral, which I don't want to do. Most people I know who inject there walk with limps and/or have holes big enough to stick fingers in up the crook of their thighs. I only know 2 people who actually lost legs. It's all nasty.

Well this is miserable crap. Does anyone read this any more? I doubt it. I think my blog has degenerated to a series of protracted death-bed rantings.

Whenever I think about life in former times I think how lucky people were. Half of all people died before reaching a year of age, so the true horror of life was never revealed to them. Those who lived longer knew however healthy they were, they need only catch an infectious disease to die away. Now those illnesses are wiped out and only nasty ones remain.

The modern concept of mental illness, by the way, has expanded immensely. I read a book by the head doctor at a Victorian lunatic asylum. It's titled Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia by Emil Kraepelin. The descriptions of my "school report" were also by Emil Kraepelin, but they come from Dementia Praecox and Paraphrenia.

Back to Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia, almost nobody I know would qualify as depressed under Kraepelin's descriptions of profound melancholic psychosis. To be hospitalzed for depression in the 19th century you needed to be in depressive stupor, which means you had lost, or nearly lost the power of speech. Most depressives hallucinated and were delusional, believing they had committed trecherous crimes and brought poverty on their families. The worst depression was the agitated type where patients were reduced to screaming and banging their heads on the wall.

I asked somebody I know whether she had ever been so depressed her head was literally devoid of any thought at all (as the book describes) and she said yes, for weeks on end. That was when they ECTd her. I've only been severely depressed for a very short time. I remember afterwards realizing I had gone beyond suicidal. To be suicidal you need a life to terminate. Once you get to the very end, no life is left. Hey but I did come back.

Then I got to the descriptions of mania which were an exact match of mine. Thoughts flying through the head in vast numbers only to evaporate as quickly as they appeared. Walls and floor talking. Fantastical sights everywhere. Great excitement. Yeah I matched that one all right.

And just like drugs, it leaves you with nothing. From what I see the choics in life are: to have happiness without foundation through drugs and/or insanity. Or money without happiness.

To have everything you want in life you need only adjust what you want.

Anyway how did I get on this subject? Who cares.

When I think of all the suffering in the world I wonder whether anyone wants to live at all. I think most people are just conning themselves that their lives mean anything at all. Most people are arrogant, puffed up with emptiness. Think back to the times you were wonderful. In actuality you probably looked shit and people were laughing at you. When I was younger all I wanted was to take a great big bite out of the world. Now I know how sick the world actually is I'm almost glad I didn't. I only regret not making loads of money when I might have done. Because I would use that money to lock myself away from the world. If I were a multi-billionaire I'd live behind 40ft high walls and never ever go outside. I used to want to be clean, but I don't think there's any chance of that now. Darkness surrounds us.

Akkkh I'm starving. I've got to go. If I read this back I know I won't post it.

3 comments:

Liz Hinds said...

One of the addicts I know had his leg off last November. Not good. not good at all. You do not want to go back on it.

By the way 2100 characters to learn is an awful lot. Are you sure learning Japanese cheers you up? I think it would depress me.

Hang on in there, gledwood.

Jeannie said...

You are so intelligent - and I think the intelligent are always a little batty. If you have money then you are eccentric. Too much knowledge of the world keeps you from enjoying life I think. It's a curse.

Z said...

I'm still here, love, although I don't know what to say. I hope for the best for you.

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