HAMSTERS & HEROIN: Not all junkies are purse-snatching grandmother-killing psychos. I'm keeping this blog to bear witness to that fact.

LIVE FROM LONDON

Gledwoods deutscher Blog

Bitte hier klicken ...

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!

Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Sleepy Maniac

UKH. MY SLEEP IS ALL OVER THE PLACE. At 8pm I started feeling tired. I realized that, having got up at 1am, it was actually time to sleep. So I slept for one hour. Then I woke up and felt too excited to sleep again until it was light outside. I got to sleep finally at some time around 6, 7 or 8 in the morning. I kept waking up. Then I slept all day and missed my clinic appointment. I didn't have bus fare on me, so would have had to walk all the way down. I wasn't up for this, so I just skipped it. Now I've got to go in tomorrow and do penance in the waiting room.

I slept 6 or 7 or 8 hours and got up some time after 4. I seemed to spend most of the day half awake and smoking. Anyway I realized what I've been doing, instead of spending about 16 hours awake like a normal person, then sleeping 8 and going to bed and getting up at the same time each day, what I've been doing is staying awake longer than 24 hours ~ past the time I last got up ~ staying up staying up somewhere between 30 hours and a day and a half. Then I'm sleeping an average amount of sleep ~ somewhere between 7 and 9 hours. So I think I've slept OK. But I haven't. The spaces between periods of sleep have grown huge.

I wasn't in a good mood today. I still feel kind of hyped up but irritable and tired. The bouncy ball shop was SHUT when I skulked round there with my 50p. I avoided heroin and bought 3 zopiclone sleeping pills instead. These cost me £5. Ripoffsville; but I was desperate for them. I've popped one already. I'd rather sleep now and get up in the early hours. There's a slim chance I might sleep right through but I dunno. Every time I try and sleep I feel like an over-excited child I just cannot wind down. I'm definitely not full-on manic; when I am everything looks bright and luminous and incredibly textured, I feel even more excited (as if I'm on drugs) and when I close my eyes my head is lit up vividly from the inside ~ it's literally like watching a particularly luminous cine film of the most spectacular dream-imagery in the style of Michael Jackson's Leave Me Alone video. So I'm not manic, just a bit hyped up. And I have been hyped up for days. I'm not complaining by the way. Sleep deprivation and agitation aside, it's a million times better than being depressed.

For some stupid reason, instead of buying proper food I went and bought a highly indulgent chocolate cake complete with buttercream filling and heaps of milk, plain and white chocolate shavings on top. And I also think I'm getting crouton poisoning from too much cup-a-soup.

I lost my second worst bouncy ball under a car last night. I was lying on the street with a stick trying to poke it out. Thank God the police didn't drive down the road, I'd have been a gonner!

I really want to speak Japanese (again). I'm so glad I decided my language books are the only ones I'm going to keep. No novels. No crap. I've so many books to get rid of it's unreal. Anyway I have two kanji character dictionaries. One teach yourself Japanese which is falling apart. I don't know whether to buy another copy or switch brands. I need a book and CD compendium. I've got Teach Yourself Mandarin Chinese which I also want to learn, but the pronunciatio's VERY difficult (for me) ~ far harder than Thai ~ and though I do want to learn Chinese, I want to learn Japanese more. In my opinion no person can call himself a citizen of the world without speaking French, Spanish and Chinese fluently. Out of those 3 I only know French of a terrible standard. But good enough to go to Morocco and speak practically no English. African French is way easier to follow than French French.

Enough of this: o yeah German. I've got a real bug to speak perfect German (yet again). When I was at school my teacher used to lend me ancient 1970s copies of Stern magazine, which is like a cross between Time and Newsweek magazines and the best of the Sunday papers rolled into one. O man I vividly recall leafing through longing so badly to understand what was in that magazine. Finally, after doing a year of German at university, dropping out, picking it up again about 18 years later by ploughing through the original text of Christiane F (the true story of a child prostitute and heroin addict ~ which yet again, stemmed from an original report guess where? In Stern magazine! It's also a cult film in the history of heroin cinema, you can watch it here.)

Yeah so that's about that. I hope this isn't too swirly I'm not in the mood for reading back the crap I've written tonight. The Apprentice is on and I must ping and gobble more cake.

Sweet dreams y'all!!!


If you wonder why I rave on about how I love being manic, take a look at this. It's the exact manner of thing that I see when, during a particularly exalted excited episode, I shut my eyes ....

MICHAEL JACKSON: LEAVE ME ALONE


4 comments:

Naomi C. said...

crazy, i just been tidying and found my christiane f dvd. was so happy. i got the book from ebay a decade ago, and i paid over £30 for it- believe its was out of print. you can fine her now on the internet, she had a kid, believe he recently got taken away according to news reports. sad :( im just tidying up (which is a massive fookin effort in my house) ready for the midwife tomorrow. home visit, then 2nd scan to double check everything is cool. that will be my 3rd rather. but no anomolies shown so far thank god. you are creative gled, any names that go with the surname CAVE? hope you are ok mate xxx

Gledwood said...

Anastasia
Emily
Beatrix
Agatha
Daisy
Rose
Samsara
Vivienne...

boys' names

Robin
Jack
Simeon
Ezekiel
Woden
Tobias/Toby
Benedict
Michael

these are my first ideas. If I had a baby I'd give it a very long name that's shortenable, rather than an informal name. Excmple: Katarina instead of Kate hece Tobias not just Toby, Benedict for Ben and so on...

I hope you're feeling all right. Do you like any of those names?

Gledwood said...

o ps i found the book on ebay for £5 or so... instead of underlining and vandalizing the book, i filled a notebook and a half with page-referenced definitions of words I was't 100% sure of... Intention being that I could read back the text with a indexed glossary to the entire book every uneasy word appearing in its proper order... a huge boost to the reader.

There were some words I wrote out 30 times or more. Despite having looked them up 29 times I still had to check them yet again... my skull is just to thick for anything much to get into!

Spindrift said...

Hey there, I was going to reply to this post earlier but my mother-in-law passed away and everything has been a bent out of shape since then. I remember the first time I read Christiane F, although from memory it was called H. I was 20 and with my parents back in England after my gran died.(1992) I was a raging alcoholic and the ruckus it caused. Although I was off doing my own thing mostly. I still remember the David Bowie references. It had a Catcher in the Rye feel to it. I thought it was a perfect novel at that stage of my life as I trudged through elements of my childhood (I left England for Australia in 1982) getting smashed along the way.
I'm going to Japan tomorrow for the funeral. It's a Buddhist ceremony. I don't speak Japanese, I dare say yours is better than mine. it's lucky I have my wife with me. I dare say I should have learnt at some stage. There are so many things I need to get around to. Hope you are well. Paul

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