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I'M REALLY INTO THESE BRUSHWOOD DOGGIES now. Even the sign 柴 "shiba" in 柴犬 shiba-inu has a little brushwood tree, a 木 ki, in it. Put two trees together 林 and you get a wood. Three trees make a Japanese forest 森.



Shiba-inus remind me of HM the Queen's cogis:





Originally I wanted a giant wolf-like 秋田犬 Akita-inu. They look like huge furry shiba-inus. They're used in Japan as police dogs...



Little and Large: haven't they got furry ears!



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Grrrr: I wrote this crap earlier and just wanted to save it, but blogger wasn't having that, so you get it. I'm sorry....

I found an interesting book down the library called You Don't Have To Be Famous To Have Manic Depression by Jeremy Thomas and Tony Hughes

They make some perceptive points about addiction:

Nicotine patches no more match up to the early morning hit of the first cigarette ... than swallowing a dose of methadone matches up to jacking up a decent dose of smack. Nicotine patches and methadone have a lot in common. They keep addicts off the streets, stop them injecting/inhaling, and keep them in thrall to their drug of choice.
p251

There's a good section on schizophrenia, though why on earth anyone with bipolar, which used to be called manic-depressive psychosis, needs an explanation of what it's like to be mad is beyond me. Lots of people with bipolar type 1 hear voices, though you wouldn't know that from reading this book.

With a brain prone to schizophrenia come accompanying talents and insights. For example, some people with schizophrenia have an almost uncanny way of sensing how other people are feeling. If the gift of manic depression is energy, the gift of schizophrenia is sensitivity.
p283

That's my problem. I feel too sensitive, most of the time. Heroin is a psychic blocker: it made life very much more comfortable because I no longer felt too much.

On diagnosis:

To be diagnosed a manic depressive goes to the very core of who you are as a person. It is difficult to feel good about a diagnosis that reaches into your very soul. Furthermore there are no external signs to mark the condition out as special, to get the ordinary sympathy for illness or to provide even a hint of what you experience. Suddenly, medication becomes a permanent part of daily routine. Doctors and psychiatrists become privy to every personal fact andableto judge each personal experience...

Depression is the wages of mania. Lack of energy reflects exhausted mental batteries left for dead after the multi-millennial light-shattering firework display that was the preceeding days and weeks.

It is doubtful whether the brain ever truly recovers from an episode of mania; the world never looks the same again.
p228

When I glance over recent posts and see statements like: I cannot imagine anything that would make life worth living, I wonder if people understand what I was getting at. I meant I look to the "future" and see nothing. I cannot imagine living as some supposedly functioning independent, successful individual. Because I never did. I did jobs, but the only ones I could get were very low-key compared to the ones my grandmother thought I should have been doing. Then again my grandmother had this idea that being clever somehow got you a good job. It doesn't. Employers are looking for people full of confidence and bullshit, which I wasn't. Which is how I ended up in jobs supposedly "beneath" me. I just wish I'd gone for something I truly enjoyed and done graphic design or painting and decorating. Lots of graphic designers have been put out of busiess by the ready availability of design software, meaning small businesses just do it for themselves. There's still work for painter-decorators, just not as much of it. I'm not qualified for any of this (you don't need qualifications, do you?)

Did you know the suicide rate in manic depression is around 20% compared to around 10% for normal depression.

That's because on top of the depression, manic-depressives are suffering from something akin to hangover syndrome: when you look back to things you did in the exalted state and ask yourself: what on eart was I thinking? My Mum knows someone who lost her house because she gambled everything by hiring out an enormous warehouse with nothing at all to put in it. The woman had thought she was on the way to becoming a multibillionaire business success. She knows someone else who got manic and randomly went calling on people up the street, inviting himself into their houses for Teletubby tea and trotterdonkey Sunday roast. See that's what people do. Then they come down and have to face the consequences of being high: bad debts, malaria, repatriation costs, veneareal diseases and it's all too much. No wonder they want to commit suicide. Talking of malaria, I know someone who pretended to have schizophrenia so he didn't have to work (which annoys me, because it makes me think I should be living in a cardboard box. The government keep saying they want to cut all sick scroungers off benefits. So what are they going to do? If the government get their way, there will be over a million sick and disabled people living on the streets. When that does happen, I hope they feel proud of themselves.

Anyway, this person who pretended to have schizophrenia had a brother who was indeed a manic depressive, who married a Thai bride, not by looking in a catalogue, but by actually flying to Thailand and falling in love in a remote village where he and his wife lived happily in a thatched hut. Until malaria swept through the village and nearly killed everyone.

Strange thing about Pretending to have Schizophrenia Guy was: he most definitely WAS extremely neurotic. He just wasn't psychic-psychotic the way schizophrenics are.

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Sorry about all that.

I had a tired day. Got up. Went chemist. Scored an ineffectual tiny bit of heroin.

Waste of time. I've only the last dregs of a habit remaining.

I bumped into someone this morning with a carrier bag full of chocolate. He'd shoplifted from a supermarket ~ an entire sehf-load and was about to sell it on. How dumbfoundingly naive I used to be! Not realizing that when a small shop mysteriously stocked up out of the blue on brand-name headache pills, batteries or fairly traded chocolate it often meant they'd bought it from somebody who had pillaged Sainsbury's!



If I were a doggie I'd look like this sleeping...