Hot

THE WEATHER is getting hotter this end. It's over 25C. That's hot for London. Strangely I'm not sweating like a swine these days. Maybe NOT taking heroin has something to do with that little difference. I always knew heroin was doing me no good; it was just hard to put a finger on what wrong it actually did (possibly because it did everything "wrong")...

I feel a lot better now I'm on those pills I was prescribed months ago and did take in the beginning then somehow got out of the habit of taking... I don't know. Even though they're not antidepressants they do make me less depressed and though they're not mood stabilizers they do stop my mood lunging and plunging.

When I found out risperidone is used as an antidepressant, I wasn't quite so squeamish about taking it. Maybe there is, after all, such a thing as placebo effect.

Now I'm lurking down the library hoping to bump into someone who will lend me the price of a drink. Broke till tomorrow. Ukh. Then I'm meant to be meeting one of my creditors at 9am. No rest for the wicked you see.

Ukh I've got to go. It's too quiet in here. I hate Sundays...

African Pygymy Mice

...furry friday on saturday...

THESE are the smallest mice in the world: look how one is too tiny even to make the wheel spin [at first]...



As long as a roborovski hamster, but oh so much thinner:~~~~~~~



*******


KEITH FLOYD on the docks in Hong Kong. "Mealy-mouthed water taxi owners are asking $100 each to film here where any person can walk freely..." he says and lets them reprimand away in Chinese in the background...

Day well spent

I CLEARED OUT a great swathe of my room yesterday by piling up Everest-like peaks of books ~ all due to go out to the local charity shop. Along with the books are a host of indispensible accoutrements for the modern home: Digital 8 video cassettes marked up with somebody’s holiday to Zambia (found on street corner). A white arran knitted jumper (found in skip by my house). Etc etc etc.


Then I fell asleep most of the afternoon. Cleared some more. It still looks like a bomb’s hit the place. Just leaving much less rubble.


Then I slept all night as well so it was a day well spent!

Alcohol?

AMY WINEHOUSE'S FAMILY now think it was giving up drink that actually killed her, according to today's Sun newspaper.

Whatever it was, the authorities must be pretty sure of the cause of her death in order to have authorized her funeral so quickly. My friends who have died suddenly have been kept in the fridges for weeks on end... My friend Lucky who died of multiple system failure was in the morgue for over a month before they finally cremated her...

*

I'm vegetating here in the public library, my brains feeling sluiced out with water. Washed clear. It's not exactly first thing in the morning; it's 11:20am! I've had my methadone and I'm fine. I'm very tired. I think my pills are making me fatigued.

Now I've got to go. I'm trying to be well and embrace a bright future. Only way I have of doing that is by chucking rubbish out of my house. Today I gave in 3 pairs of reading glasses and 4 books, including the autobiography of Gay Byrne, into my local charity shop. They're gonna love me (not!) by the time I'm finished with them. Yesterday I gave in records by Henry Mancini and they seemed overjoyed to receive them.

Now I've got to go: my brain's all over the place.

Methadone + Risperidone

I'M IN A FAR BETTER MOOD than I was earlier. I wish I hadn't just posted what was on my brain like that without analysis. This risperidone does something pretty marvellous. Although it does make me feel anxious within a couple of hours of taking it (anxious and drowsy, if you can work that one out) I can already, within 4 days, feel it flattening my mood. Which is precisely what I used heroin as. A mood-flattener. Unfortunately I still feel slightly paranoid but that might take ages to go.

The words of my old doctor come back to me: "I want you to take my drugs now, not your drugs..."

His drugs do work. Risperidone even blocks most of the rush I got from IV heroin. I remember this. I haven't scored since I started taking it again.

Maybe there is some future on risperidone after all...

*

From The Sun:
Amy Winehouse: Dad, I’ve had enough of drinking...I can’t stand look on family’s faces any more ... How she had nearly beaten the booze

*

Summer's day prattle

IT'S A BEAUTIFUL SUMMER'S DAY and I'm trying to stay calm. Anxiety came back. I think it has something to do with the risperidone pills I take. Or maybe not. I'm doggedly not doing gear. Can't afford it this week anyhow. But I sat myself down yesterday and decided now this is what I'm going to do and why. I'm not taking any heroin at all. And the reason why is that I hate being addicted to anything, hate cavorting with criminals, don't even feel at home in a room full of addicts any more and have had enough of the whole scene. Confounding factors include the horrible druggieclinic wanting to give some sort of psychological gold star for testing clean, which I'm not interested in. And stuff like that. I'd rather be thought dirty and BE clean than the other way about. Maybe my thinking had become confused but I had to remind myself what I'm doing and why.

Otherwise I would repeatedly give in to the urge to use, which does hit me from time to time. It never hit me before. I don't know why. The summer is the most horrible season to any junkie. Due to excess perspiration. Once it's over I have much better chances.

I'm more into Valium these days than heroin. Even that I haven't taken in 2 weeks yet somehow managed to test positive for. I only take benzos when I can't sleep or feel panicky. I have felt very panicky of late. Every morning I wake up thinking of the horror of suicide. You know, the actual visceral feeling of pressing your neck down on a vibrating rail or pressing blades very hard into bumping arteries or how sick you feel after a whole bottle of pills has been regurgitated yet you're still puking up.

I've managed to distract myself with Other Things today. And I think I'm much better off using one of those professional clinics in Switzerland where there's zero survival rate, when I do do myself in. It gives me something to work towards, even if I'm just walking towards death.

Ukh sorry for being morbid: just being frank. Drugs clinic are doing my brain in. NOT reducing my dose. No idea why. Well they're to blame now for it being so high. They can't somehow blame me, like Duta was doing before.

I've been chucking stuff out of my house. 2 chairs and a plug-in radiator yesterday. Eight records and a manual typewriter today (charity shop). I've endless books I'd really like to get cash for but also just want shot of fast fast fast.

I wish I had hamsters then I could tell you a furry hammy story instead of this boring truth. O yeah and GOOD NEWS I found out I'm hep B, hep C and HIV negative!!

I was convinced I was positive for one of them. Hep C especially. Being positive to that would just give something else not to get treatment for. Know what I mean? I'm taking the antipsychotics again as prescribed as I don't actually enjoy being mad, wondrous as the experience is. Something about sanity appeals to me. I can't say what or why. But it does.

And that's it for today!

70s sunglasses day

MY brown sunglasses have come through. Everything looks like it's in the 1970s. The moment I walk outside they start brewing up. Darker and darker. They're like the old Reactolite lenses, except these ones really do go clear indoors. When they're dark, I look Italian with them on.

I just got back from the horrible drugs clinic I have to go to. The dr asked when I had last had a suicidal thought. I said 2 weeks ago. Then I told my dr about my mind-wobble last week. I felt OK by the next evening, mood-wise. Not depressed at all. That's because my mood had spiked up in a very mixed up way. But my head is still unfocused. I try and think of something and think of something else. But I'm OK. For the last couple of days I've woken up feeling horrible, but I'm still not really depressed so that is good.

I couldn't think of much to say about Amy Winehouse because her death came as little surprise. Strange to think of the months and years I spent wishing for nothing but death by overdose or some other accident (not suicide) ~ and yet I survived! I always thought I had some reason for living; I just never knew what it was.

Now I have to go and purchase Mexican chili beef think crust pizza and cheese coleslaw. (It has to be cheese flavour). Not that I'm modern and fussy or anything.

There's a really good book in the library called Doctoring The Mind: why psychiatric treatments fail by Richard Bentall I think he's one of these people who believe mad people aren't really mad. Which, strangely enough, is what most mad people believe. Not that I'm casting nasturtiums or anything...

Illustrated: brown sunglasses (not mine, Calvin Klein's); nasturtiums

Why?

THERE'S NOT MUCH TO SAY about Amy Winehouse. What can you say?

It always got me that she was supposedly signed to do the James Bond theme. But couldn't get it together to produce one single song. With all the help and backup she gets. Not even five minutes of recorded sound.

I wonder what did actually kill her. Maybe it was suicide. Or was it slow suicide? Or was it purely an accident?

Amy

RIP AMY WINEHOUSE

Found dead at her London home on Saturday afternoon. No surprise to me. No surprise to any of us. This is what drugs really do: kill hope, promise and talent and eventually take life.

Amy having a good try at snorting a white powder while on stage:~


BACK TO BLACK ~ official video
... not just "the heart of Amy Winehouse" ...

A Furry Day

furry friday on saturday


THUMB-SIZED ENTERTAINERS



look at that deep ruffly fur:



the tiny hammies do everything together:



WISHING Y'ALL A FURRY WEEKEND!



THESE ARE 3 NATURE VIDEOS WITH MUSIC
... transcendent, inspirational ...
I was actually looking for the music, but you might prefer the vids........

UNION JACK: RED HERRING
(total coincidence) this was posted up by Trisch Li, manic lady, as featured in my sidebar...! (why do our paths cross so often Trisch? and you died before I ever could meet you)



ATLANTIC OCEAN: WATERFALL



and here are 2 more vids by Orbital


HALCYON ON AND ON
this one shows the whole world... and elephants' feet...



BELFAST
not a nature vid at all i'm afraid...



and last but not least here's a video accompanying
PAUL VAN DYK MIX of HUMATE: LOVE SIMULATION, as posted the other day. an alltime classic.....

Hi

Friday 20:26 this is getting wordprocessed in advance till I get to the library tomorrow.
I HAVE GONE ON TO A LOVELY EVEN KEEL. Not high. Not low. I was scared I was getting too high (while I actually was manic) and nearly went into a panic attack. I was experiencing a flight of ideas, as they say. So seeing a bottle of ketchup would make you think ketchup catch-up catch this catch cold catch hold of gold (metal petal: rows of roses) and so on. But Audrey Hepburn calmed me down.

The night before I had stuck my head into a cloud of exhaled crack smoke, just to get a good whiff of it. I wanted to know whether it was good or bad crap and it was indeed crap crack. Which kind of double reinforced why I didn’t actually smoke any. Surely second-hand crack smoke cannot make you crazy? I woke up at 4am next morning you see, in manic paranoia. Really went into one about how the local council are the Powers of Evil etc etc.

I had been getting little flashes of excitement for days. A couple of days before I was so restless I had to leave the library and conduct music outside. (Dancing to an inner beat.) Then I realized cars were swooshing past and people could see me and I thought o fuck you lot. I wasn’t waving my arms around that much. What I actually was doing was smoking a cigarette and playing a stone piano by the broom trees. This wore off within the hour. I was feeling so horrible and depressed that any break from it was a relief quite frankly.

Yesterday night I slept six hours. And I ate an entire Iceland chicken tikka nibbles with rice (one-container version) that’s about 6-800 cals. Yesterday I did better and devoured a whole Iceland sweet chilli chicken pizza and still felt hungry enough in the evening to eat a whole can of Heinz spaghetti bolognaise and a 500ml pot of Polish blueberry yogurt. I found out that “zywe kultury bakterii” means it’s live. Before that I was managing nothing bar huge pots of that yogurt and chicken thighs. And as y’all know I was horribly depressed and I seemed to post nothing bar endless rants. I got seriously bored by my own blog.

I weighed myself on Valium Marilyn’s bathroom scales and found I weigh 191 lbs or about 80kg I can’t remember Valium Marilyn’s digital scales reading but an analogue scales weighed me in at about 13 and ¾ stone. So I’m not underweight, and I’m not fat. I’m at my perfectly ideal weight.

This afternoon I slept another 2 hours. I’m catching up on lost sleep. My head still feels weird it’s like the world is talking to me when I go outside. Anyone talking to anyone else anywhere sounds like they’re talking to me. Sometimes cars and trees and clanking bulldozers on building sites sound like they’re saying hello to me. Yeah I know it’s mad but there are far worse ways of being crazy.

Deshane tells me I can be out of this oppressive borough and in a proper new place BACK HOME WHERE I BELONG back at my old druggieclinic never I hope ever having to set foot on this Godforsaken borough ever again because I absolutely loathe this place and all it has done to me. Messing my life up completely.

Ah! I might have a chance of posting this now. A broadband link has just become available. Take care y’all and I hope you have a cheery weekend.

☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆

Sanity

I DIDN'T POST EARLIER because nothing was new and I don't feel well. I've scrapped two long posts because there was too much telling going on. I woke up at 4am going nuts and have since calmed down. The 1959 film starring Audrey Hepburn, Nun's Story, helped calm me. I was getting very manic, and yet still depressed. And paranoid to boot. I only went outside to clear my head out. I am getting free broadband from the library. My trainers have worn through at the soles, letting rain in. Now they smell like camping material that has been stored in a damp barn all winter. They need burning.

I don't know where I am going or what is happening. I am not well. Hey but I'm well enough not to do crack. Somebody offered me crack yesterday and I got more of a buzz knowing I could watch it and smell it being smoked right in front of me and not still not want the shit.

My biggest disappointment is that it has taken me so long to truly realize that heroin, far from helping me in any way, has only ever been one gigantic con. I cannot think of one single example of anybody whose life has been improved by the use of street heroin. I think the gear has just made me sicker than I would have been, because it's become a crutch. So I'm weaker, more vulnerable and more impressionable on a psychic level and that's what psychosis is: psychic overdrive.

I can never know what I would or would not be doing now without the "helping hand" of heroin but I don't think my existence would be the mess it has become on gear, I just don't.

So there's some sanity for you. I've put the rest of what I wrote this morning in cold storage because it's just more mad ranting and I'm fed up of being that way. I cannot tell what is and is not relevant in that state so I just say everything and edit nothing. Hence the literary mess that is me in a full-flown "flight of ideas" (as the doctors call it).

I hope y'all are well!


To those of you on far-flung shores, trainers are sneakers ~ and mine look a bit like this...


HUMATE: LOVE SIMULATION (PAUL VAN DYK LOVE MIX)



DJ TIËSTO: SUBURBAN TRAIN



ASTRAL PROJECTION: AURORA BOREALIS

In which Gledwood says some more ratty things then tries to change the subject in order not to be too dismal

I WAS TRYING NOT TO SLEEP in order to reset my sleep pattern. It didn't really work because I ended up really tired lying in bed, woken by two people on my idiot phone, neither of whom I wanted to deal with. So I didn't deal with one and did deal with the other. Both probably wanted to borrow money but I don't mind lending it: I get it back next week ~ meaning I cannot spend it between now and then ~ and all is fine and dandy.

I missed the Horror Recovery Group Meeting this morning as I couldn't face it. Couldn't face the world. Couldn't face anything. I told my friend I was a manic-depressive and he said "yes, I know". I have been told I was bipolar since the mid 90s but I never believed my friends' diagnonsense. What did they know except having a mother and a sister with the disorder in one case, actually having it in another, and having spent over a decade in various mental units with depressive schizoaffective in the third. Most experienced nutters can not only spot another nutter at one hundred paces, but usually distinguish what flavour of madness they are customized by. And probably have a better grasp than doctors on what is real, what is exaggeration, what's a lie and what lurks hidden. Because mental states are far from straightforward. I call myself a manic-depressive now as I fit the descriptions in Emil Krapaelin's 1920 classic Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia for "delusional mania" (though I was hallucinating heavily, not delusional as such), even "delirious mania" (when you get so excited you go into frenzy and automatic behaviour takes over. This is when I was so out of it I was losing the ability to speak English and this is why the neighbours gave me a wide berth for weeks afterwards. Because I expressed what I felt. Loudly. And what I felt was loud, loud NOISE in my head. Like a road drill of manic euphoria perseverating through me. It's quite depressing to know you have gone mad and yes I will talk about it again because it's an issue still ongoing, still unresolved and not being treated. The one bit of consolation I found in that book was that I'm not the only one to have been depressed enough into believing ~ or more to the point, feeling that no method of suicide would ever kill me; that I was immortal. That even when I did finally submit to that train, I would lie by the trackside cold, wet and naked and in pain with trains rushing past me for ever afterwards.

This is what Kraepelin writes about "fantastic melancholia" (page 93)

The ideas of annihilation, alredy indicated in the foregoing pages, may experience a further, wholly nonsensical elaboration. The patient has no longer a name, a home, is not born, does not belong at all to the world any more, is no longer a human being, is no longer here, is a spirit, an abortion, a picture, a ghost, just only a sort of shape. He cannot live and he cannot die; he must hover about so, remain in the world eternally, is as old as the world, has been already a hundred years here. If he is beaten with an axe on his head, if his breast is cut open, if he is thrown into the fire, he still cannot be killed. "I cannot be buried any more," said a patiet, "when I sit down on the weighing machine, it shows zero!" The world has perished; there are no longer railways, towns, money, beds, doctors; the sea runs out. All human beings are dead, "poisoned with antitoxic serium," burned, dead of starvation, because there is nothing more to eat, because the patient has stuffed everything down into his enormous stomatch, and has drunk the water-pipes empty. No-one eats or sleeps any more; the patient is the only being of flesh and blood, is alone in the world.

I used to be obsessed with the idea that The End Was Nigh. That only suffering and death awaited us. That Armageddon was coming soon. And let's face it, something is drastically wrong with the world so there's some truth in that feeling (and these were feelings, not "delusions" that I had). I'm quoting the book at some length because finally, at long last, I find I'm not the only one to have thought the way I have thought, to have felt the way I have felt.

And people wonder why I continued taking heroin!!

The only food I can bear to eat these days is live yogurt. So my insides are very clean indeed. I felt as though I had no sense of humour at all this morning. But a couple of drinks and a shot of heroin cured that. The day is now tolerable. I don't know what I would do without my drugs. And I do want to live without drugs, no matter what you feel on the matter: I know. I only find it so difficult because my motives are mixed. Like I said I want to die clean. I want to die. We all want to die sometimes. Old people ill in hospital want to die. Young people, lost and abused, often want to die. We all want death at some time. Addicts are famous for their unwillingness to live life on life's terms. It's not death they're scared of: it's LIFE. So when I say I want to live, I'm not lying. My problem is, I just don't know how to. It would be so much easier to die. And the lower you go, the more death seems like the only sensible option. I've heard suicide described as an escape from pain. But I think if I killed myself I would be doing the world a favour. I'm only a drain on the state for money. I am a manic-depressive junkie ~ and this is the point I was making earlier on when I got distracted. A manic-depressive junkie. The lowest of the low.

Maybe that's why heroin addicts invariably crave death while undergoing withdrawal. Even the supposedly gentle taper at detox units is enough to induce severe melancholia in the susceptible. Ie me. Which is what annoys me about an African nurse, who has no experience at all of opiate addiction and probably none of mental illness telling me with a wide smile that the detox and rehab group session would be really good for me. This clinic I have no option but to go to, really sucks. I am never listened to. There is no dialogue. I wish the staff would do what they're effectively paid to do. Dispense methadone scripts and let you go home. The NHS could save a great deal of money if they would only install a swipe-card activated machine on the wall. It could spit out our scripts and then let us go our own way to sort out our own lives. The way we have to do, every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week that we are not in this clinic with its bullshitty group therapy and Nazi nurses.

You know why Buta was angry with me the other week? Because I came in, stone cold sober but zombified. I don't know whether I was depressed or not but all I did was act the way I felt. And I know now what that bitch assumed. That I'd been using gear. So she was persecuting me for being ill. Doing something no kinder than tipping a man out of his wheelchair and trampling all over him. That's what she was doing to me and I would love to be Christian and forgive her for it, but I never can trust her again. I always knew this clinic's agenda was to cut me off the methadone on the highest dose possible, to do all they can do to push me into suicide. That is what they are about. That is what they're there for. I want to make a formal complaint about them to the local Health Authority. If racist and homophobic language is forbidden, so should persecution of the sick be, and that's what they're doing to me. If I'm not sick then I'm simply a wastrel and I should die. This is the truth of the matter.

I need to get OUT Of this fascist drug clinic and ideally into one that is privately run. Or else I'll just get my script cut down as swiftly as possible because I would rather be off methadone and ill than on it and ill. I'm going to feel ill whatever way; whether I actually am ill or not.

Then I need to write all these amazing books. Problem with writing about myself is what you read here and what you've read for days. It puts me in a bad sour and aggrieved mood because I do not like myself. But I don't mind writing about other things. I never intended to be a memoirist though I did consider penning memoirs to make cash. What I'm doing now is following a passion of mine and writing for children. I looked around the kiddies' section of WH Smith, the major bookseller in the UK (though they actually sell more stationery and magazines than books). I looked through the childrens' books of the ilk I want to write. And was disgusted on the one hand and heartened on the other that NOBODY appeared to be writing anything remotely similar to my ideas. Nobody at all. So the field is wide open. I have bovver boots at the ready and I'm willing to give this nasty world what it fully deserves: I'm going to KICK IT'S FUCKING HEAD IN. Long as my book achieves sales into eight figures I'll be happy. What am I saying: nothing will make me happy, I know that. But I'm angry enough to be all loving and kind and spin enchanting webs of mystery and illumination for the inner child in us all and to spin this luscious entertainment forever on in glorious ever changing forms like shadow puppets playing the Play of All Ages against the wall.OK so I’m bracing myself again. To kick the world’s head in yet again. O Gledwood just write this fucking thing and stop fretting about it. All I can think is how I’m not going to children’s schools, not giving interviews. I think I’ll be like Lemony Snicketts or the other one and be a recluse. Better to put your energies into producing masterpieces than to do the rounds of primary schools full of screaming brats. Ukh. And can you imagine what the parents would think if they knew the author of this amazing non-wizard-oriented book was a dirty HEROIN ADDICT? Ukh! Beyond the pale!

Well I’ve said enough. Sorry this is a ratty post. Maybe I should start blogging about the world in general or just anything else bar my self self self; know what I mean?... Will anybody ever comment or are my posts now un-comment¬¬¬¬-on-able...?



CYBERNAUT: BOO MERINGUE (HYDROPONIX)



HALLUCINOGEN: LSD
unreleased "official short film" accompanying the track...



ETNICA: MOON INFLUENCE

In which Gledwood prattles on numerous topics...

IT IS RAINING. NOT JUST CATS AND DOGS BUT ENORMOUS ONES: WOLVES AND TIGERS. I’ve just braved the downpour to get cigarettes and some strange type of Turkish pizza bread. Not lahmacun. This one’s covered in what appears to be a mix of chilified red peppers maybe with a bit of onion thrown in for good measure. Oh I don’t know what it is but it looks a bit like minced beef, but it’s not. Soon as I was too far from my house to make it turning back a sensible option, it really started chucking it down. I was so glad of my five year old girl’s multicoloured jiggly-face-handled brolly. Two old slappers fagging away outside the local pub burst into uproarious laughter at the sight of me. Least I think they did. Who can distinguish paranoia attacks from reality. I can’t. Well I can: I just tell myself nothing is real which makes life very Strawberry Fields indeed.

I am highly annoyed with Specsavers Opticians for taking ANOTHER TEN DAYS to get one simple pair of psychotic-stalker amber Reactions lenses ready for me. In ten days’ time summer shall be over! I’m getting fed up of walking into buildings sunglassered up and having to decide whether to look like a poser yet see my surroundings in crystal clarity. Or to take off the shades and see a glaring montage of blurs. WHICH IS WHY I ORDERED PHOTOCHROMIC GLASSES TO START WITH BLOODY IDIOT COMPANY. How can it possibly take three weeks to slam a pair of specs together? I have to hand it to them they ARE WAY cheaper than Vision Express, Boots or Dolland and Aitcheson. These other companies have somehow got by charging £300 for one pair of glasses. Specsavers do two for £69 all-in. You can get both pairs tinted if you like. Which is how I ended up with black prescription sunglasses. I’m now bored bored bored of my tiny collection of eyewear. I want my old sunglasses collection back. I had five pairs alone with lenses in varying shades of blue. I specially went in for that semi-mirrored look that opticians don’t do. Do you understand why I need to be a multimillionaire now? I want to get my eyes lasered for one thing. And I’d like a few homes. One in London, one in Switzerland, where I’ll live if I don’t live in Monaco. One in Manhattan (but of course). Though I’m enough of an antisnob to live in Brooklyn just to perplex my Manhattanite friends. Where else would I like to live? O yeah Tokyo. And everywhere else I might consider renting. The whole point of having lots of money in my opinion is to make pots and pots more, so all my houses would be up for rent when I was out of residence. At $10-20,000 per week. That kind of figure. I would also make pots of cash bagging finder’s fees for people seeking the discreet disposal of private jets, yachts, fine jewellery, paintings and other trinkets. You have to do what you love and I love paintings, jewellery, aeroplanes and boats with more cabin room than a small apartment building. I was surprised nobody went for Saddam Hussein’s former yacht. For a mere $15 million you got a boat with submarine docking station and every facility down to an operating theatre. I couldn’t help wondering whether that operating theatre was fully stocked… y’know. Just out of professional interest and all.

When I was growing up I considered rich people to be normal and poor people to be weird. It was only life’s tapestry of bitterness that taught me any different. Ever since I was little I have wanted to be rich. I certainly never envisaged a life of idleness and I fully intended to work for my money, not to marry it, inherit it (no chance of that anyhow) or win it. My ideal job (apart from bestselling writer with aggregate sales in excess of one billion) would be media tycoon in the mould of Rupert Murdoch. I always thought Murdoch was eminently superior to that scabies-infested mongoose Robert Maxwell he seemed permanently to be feuding with in the 1980s. Murdoch owned (and still does down) Britain’s brightest daily tabloid, the right-leaning Sun newspaper. Maxwell owned the left-of-centre Daily Mirror. I’ve never understood champagne socialism. I’m a capitalist. I believe in low taxes for the rich, so I can pay low taxes when I’m rich. High taxation kills aspiration and moves enterprise across borders. Did you know British writers have to pay Value Added Tax ~ that is, the supposedly “luxury” sales tax imposed on just about everything that’s bought and sold in this country except food (and books, as it goes). So on top of agent’s fees reaching 20% for foreign markets I’m going to have to pay VAT at 20% and that New Labour government’s ridiculous 50% top rate of income tax. And y’all wonder why I want to live abroad. I once got a comment accusing me of ungratefulness to the country that had brought me up and nurtured me. Well I’m also a victim of Britain’s regressive prescribing to addicts. If they’d only issued me with diamorphine on prescription many years ago, I might be off all drugs by now. Instead it was ineffectual methadone and sort yourself out. As Shane in France says, the street dealer is the addict’s friend far more than a druggie clinic will ever be. Those clinic staff don’t give a rat’s arse about your welfare or my welfare. Everything is streamlined, categorized, prioritized. Which is where ridiculous exclamations: “and he even injects!” come from. If you can convince your worker you’ve ceased injecting they get a tick against their name. It’s all about coercing patients into treatments they do not want. The main reason I’m not into rehab is that most of the people there don’t truly want to be there. They want a life on drugs without the problems drugs have brought them. Fuck “consequences”. Consequences are society’s way of heaping persecution upon the misery of its most vulnerable members. Most of the “consequences” of heroin addiction are the direct result of prohibition. Just as people were blinded and killed by bootleg alcohol in 1920s America, so addicts overdose and die on clandestinely manufactured heroin of unknown purity. Even the British Government admit that the main risk posed by heroin to a healthy person is the risk of dependency! Dependency is slavery. Which is why I want out. Only when you see your addiction as chemical slavery will you have a chance of escape.

They say you should only give up heroin for yourself. That no other reason is good enough. No partner. Not even your own dear child is enough of a reason to quit taking the drug that makes you feel better than anything else.

10PM JUST GOT BACK FROM NA. I told them I used today and yesterday. They of all people won’t judge me for using. I know they probably judged me as being a bit all over the place because I’d used. In reality I feel my energy coming back; I feel an interlacing of moods. A good mood taking over from the bad one, and I hope it stays. I still have to fight to wade through the mud now and then, but the mud seems thinner, shallower. I hope this is a real change and not just something heroin has brought on. Heroin can be extremely deceptive. It had me fooled for years. A lot of you probably think I’m still conned by it now, the way I talk about it.

Many years ago I made a decision that I was going near no prison cell. Reason: I could not bear for me and my beloved gear to be parted. I know heroin is available in prisons ~ especially British prisons. (Britain, with its population less than a quarter of the size of the United States by official estimates uses nearly TWICE as much heroin as America! I’m not sure that figure is true, but it does say what a bunch of smackheads us British are.) So yes there’s ample supply of gear in prison for those willing to pay for it. I hate being beholden to dealers at the best of times. I just cannot bear even the thought of the indignity of having to pay ten pounds for less than one pound worth of gear. When something’s really tiny people say “it was like a prison bag”. No way man. No way. So I made this decision that me and my beloved gear would never be separated, even if this meant having to settle for using a lot less I was happy to be using a lot more constantly. I’ve seen how much crack some of the more successful shoplifters get through. I spent three hours in a flat one night watching this man pipe constantly, then phone up for more! Crack has all the allure to me of dogshit, so I wasn’t tempted. I made it clear I was only into the brown. There was a drought on the “B” at the time. Hence my presence at this flat. I got a very good deal for my £10 because I also found a vein on the back of this shoplifter’s left leg. I might have found it; he injected there. I’d never inject another with class A’s. That would be illegal!

So I made my money by milder means (begging) and stuck to gear in preference to crack. I call myself an ex crack addict because I did have a compulsion to use coke ~ specifically to add what I would call “a little sparkle” to my spoon. Coke in heroin is like sugar in tea. Once you get habituated it’s very hard to go without. It took me over two years from really trying to give up crack, which, as I say, I was mostly speedballing, to actually achieving my aim. For maybe a year I was using exclusively on Mondays. One single £10 rock one day a week. I knew I’d crossed a bridge when money came my way unexpectedly on a Thursday and I still didn’t score. Then, at New Year’s Eve 2008 going into 2009 I finally kissed crack goodbye and I didn’t use it one last time. Yes on a handful of occasions I have touched coke since then. Tiny bits. Not even full pipes most of them. Contrary to the received wisdom no craving was reignited. On the contrary I felt that by usingI’d got the desire to use out of my system. Reminded myself why I wasn’t into that crap any more. It might make you high but crack also makes you feel jagged and wiry. In bipolar terms ~ because crack cocaine with its mad highs, paranoia and crashes is the nearest drug I know to bipolar disorder ~ crack doesn’t usually induce a true high but a mixed state. A high with far too much anxiety, agitation ~ and often paranoia ~ thrown in. I knew I was in trouble earlier this year when my natural high surpassed the high of crack in intensity, euphoria and sheer craziness. Me and crack are well and truly over. Finito. I do not miss coke.

When you take cocaine, you’re paying for something any healthy person can experience without drug-enhancement or inducement. You don’t need excitement or wellbeing in the form of white rocks or powder. Coke wears off so quickly it was easy to reason around it: “in an hour’s time I’ll feel the same as I do now, if not worse and the £10 will be gone”. Heroin was very much more seductive. I knew that £10 of decent gear would make me feel better not just all afternoon but all day. It always seemed worth buying heroin. Even with methadone, heroin was the only thing that made life tolerable. I feel let down by a system that did not address some pretty blatant mental health issues of mine. I told the doctor “unless I address this mood problem I’m not going to get the drugs under control” this was said to a doctor and more than once. Still they did nothing. Not until I was manic, depressed, paranoid, grandiose and suicidal and hallucinating vividly was I ever taken seriously. To this day I don’t think my mental state is being addressed because methadone patently does not give mental stability. Whether this is a case of heroin stabilizing and methadone doing nothing or methadone actively destabilizing, I have no idea. But if I were a doctor I’d consider it malpractice to prescribe methadone to a person like me. I want MSTs*, DFs**, anything else but methadone and tomorrow I’m asking for it. I am considering putting my request in writing with a reasoned argument. I’ve had enough of methadone. I don’t care too much about the whats whys or wherefores of detoxifying just as long as I get off methadone and off all drugs as quickly as possible because I’ve had enough of them. The slower the detox the more depressing it’s going to be, because I’m not going to feel I’m getting anywhere fast enough. What I really would like is a reduction of 1mg per day, every single day. My last request for this was turned down flat. Because “we don’t do that”. And I thought they had a client-centred approach, tailoring psychosocial and pharmacological interventions to the need of each service-user! Yeah, I can speak Bullshit, too.

Well it’s now a quarter to eleven and my local broadband provider has yet to switch on. I’ve found a link that’s only usually strong enough after dark when radio waves flow better, but I think they’re on to the fact that somebody else is piggybacking on their broadband. If I had a car I’d drive the streets until I found free access. You’re sure to find it somewhere… know what I mean. This might have to wait till tomorrow morning for posting. I’m trying not to sleep too long at night. They say that cutting down the number of hours slept can snap one out of depression… It’s worth trying. When I want to wind down I’ve taken to putting on dark glasses and I really do think they tell the body to shut down and sleep. It’s interesting that firelight and most electric light is heavy on yellow and red; sunshine appears starker because it’s bluer and of course it contains ultra-violet which we cannot see. But that doesn’t mean it’s not affecting us. Hamsters cannot see by red light, so under a fireglow bulb they’ll ping about like nobody’s business. A side-effect of this bulb was that I felt drowsy. My housemate Laundrette who, ironically enough had worked for years in the red light district, said red light did the same to her. A long time later I discovered the science behind this: as far as they know it’s the lack of blue in a fireglow light. Blue wavelengths perk us up, yet make hammies want to sleep! So they say if you suffer from insomnia, amber-brown shades are the best to go for. They also believe that sunglasses might actually cause sunburn, tricking your brain into believing conditions are subdued and dark and switching off some hitherto unknown protective mechanism…

By the same token, they believe that artificial sweeteners may actually cause the body to put ON weight by tricking it into thinking calories are being consumed, scrambling the metabolism and defeating the object of these nasty artificial chemicals.

Does anybody know the specific health benefits of live yogurt and probiotic drinks by the way? I’ve found a shop stocking Polish ones that are very much cheaper than the British brands. I found out the Polish for “live bacterial culture”; it’s “zywe kultury bakterii”. Only problem is, I love yogurt so much I can easily eat an entire 500g tub, then drink 300mls of strawberry flavoured lactobacillus casei. I do believe lactobacillus casei shirota is the active ingredient in Yakult, which comes in tiny bottles. This stuff is huge. If it’s equipotent on a millilitre per millilitre basis I’m getting about five times the dose of Yakult for a tiny fraction of the price. For 29p a bottle they do 250ml “lassi” which comes in the original salt flavour. Because I don’t actually like this taste at all, I might stock up on the lassi because £2.90 will give me 10 days’ guaranteed supply. I drank lassi every day for over a month in India and the black shadows that have been under my eyes since childhood (they’re there whether or not I’m on drugs; drugs just make them very much worse)… these shadows vanished. The live yogurt in Indian (banana) lassi is the only lifestyle difference I can put the change down to. Other differences were swimming in the sea (daily). Catching giardia, a type of stomach bug midway between typhoid and dysentery in severity (I was so dehydrated I was hallucinating on this giardia. I started behaving very strangely. When I eventually got hold of oral rehydration salts, the sudden restoration in electrolyte balance made me so high that one of our friends was convinced I’d taken E, speed or coke. I might add that throughout this trip I was sleeping less and experiencing constant mood swings that got so bad I seriously considered buying 500 sleeping pills, climbing across the rocks at the end of the bay after midnight and drowning myself where there was no coastguard, no ambulance service. We didn’t even know where to find a doctor (you just went down the pharmacy, told them what you wanted: antibiotics, sleeping pills, anything up to and including ketamine and they’d just hand it over; the girl I was with was using grams and grams of ketamine. I indulged but rapidly got bored of it. It’s not really a horse tranquillizer by the way, it’s a general anaesthetic used in roadside situations and on battlefields. As you slip under, part of your mind stays very much wide awake and a vivid waking dream state occurs. To me it was tripping without the horror of having to deal with keys, money and friendship, all of which become very bizarre in the paisley-patterned cartoon world of LSD. Ketamine actually does what I’d imagined LSD would do before I took it. Produces a true immersive fantasy “trip” where you literally feel you’ve left your body and visited other places, possibly other dimensions even in space and time. Nobody I knew ever had a “bad trip” after the fashion of a negative LSD experience, but in the words of one nightclubber I knew, on a big blast of ketamine (which is usually snorted up the nose) you literally do sometimes feel like you’re hanging off the very edge of the universe into the Realness of Unreality (very Buddhist!) Or to put it another way, you’re fully conscious as you hover over the precipice of full clinical anaesthesia.

I took ketamine perhaps a hundred times. I very much liked the dissociative effect it produced and the dream-state, totally divorced from the here-now world. Ketamine is so powerful you lose all sense of ego and self. Re-emerging back into the world is like gathering, bit by bit, an identity of a person you used to be, with a life you suddenly remember although you’re millions of miles away. You turn from nothing and nobody back into who you Are. What I really couldn’t handle about acid tripping was the fact that you’re totally off your head, everything feels utterly unreal and yet you know, you absolutely must not follow any urge to set fire to anything, to jump from a hight, to stand in the middle of a road gazing at the amazing crystalline rainbow prisming of birdsong. All this beauty and all this potency was mixed together with a reality I could no longer handle. Keys, money, people. People are thinking about me. What are they thinking. I remember laughing and laughing watching somebody smoking a spliff. The spliff, held at a 45 degree angle kept turning into a miniature escalator, moving up. And this was the milder part of the trip. The peaks were so mindblowingly intense they defy description. Eventually I just took the spliff out of his hand and started smoking away nonchalantly. This person, who was (to put it kindly) an egotistical wanker, was so gobsmacked he just let me do it. I felt a bristling go around the room very acutely and said oh sorry and went into such paroxisms of laughter I had to go in the back garden to cool down.

I fried my brains on acid, I’m afraid. Although I probably only had three trips that were of truly mindblowing potency, they probably did blow my mind. To give an example, in one trip I was in seven dimensions of reality at once. If you can imagine different films projected on to screens and being able to switch between screens and yet experiencing every reality at once… I was flying on a magic carpet in my friend’s room (his rug). Looking down through the rug I clearly saw clouds and snowy mountain tops. An entire universe of civilizations throughout all ages was nestled in the palm of my hand. I was in the past, present and future all at once. I had 360 degree vision. I could see Stonehendge through the back of my head. When I was really tripping I could see birdsong as rainbows. It was truly spectacular. These are the mere bits I remember. Strong acid is so intense you might not understand a word anybody is saying. You might not know who you are or where you are, what is happening or why. And yet you are walking about in the real world knowing there are real consequences to your actions. And that’s what I couldn’t think out of. Knowing something bad could happen in a trip that wasn’t just a bad trip but a real Bad Thing. That’s what I couldn’t get my head round. I remember walking across the footbridge over the main road feeling my brains smeared out on the path behind me, like a snail’s trail. Then we found ourselves in a multi-storey carpark in the rain, which was like the sound of pixies singing. I hugged a tree in the pitch blackness of a wet park and a giant caterpillar devoured my brain. This is what acid did to me. I haven’t tripped like that for about 20 years and yet I recall it as if it all happened yesterday.

And this is why I get offended at the implication that I will abuse any drug that can be abused: for years afterwards I’d stop myself periodically throughout the day and think, “I’m glad I’m not tripping”. And I seriously was genuinely glad to be sober and straight and in my right mind. I appreciated my sanity. Y’all wonder why I got so upset at being told I had schizoaffective disorder? The more impressionable among you might have suspected that all the talk of acid and ecstasy during my manic episode meant I was using those substances again. Mania is well known to induce “enhanced perception of sound, colour and texture” ~ just as LSD and Ecstasy do. Mania induces an elevated Ecstatic mood, just like E does. Mania makes the mind race with spectacular velocity ~ just as LSD induces a constantly renewing kaleidoscope of form and colour, so mania turns the action of simple thought into something resembling a firework display. LSD can cause illusions (faces in the floor) ~ so does mania. LSD can make you hear voices (though it’s rare) mania does so very commonly. You can have full-blown hallucinatory visions in mania, just as you can on LSD. That’s why my sudden revival of 1991 and 1992 hardcore rave music. I experienced feelings I never thought I would feel again except this time I was in a far more positive frame of mind. There are accounts of mania published 90 years ago that bear out everything I say if you don’t believe me. Of course I used the vocabulary of raving, clubbing, Ecstasy and psychedelia because it was the only vocabulary I had. I haven’t touched E in 10 years. I took a tiny dose of acid 10 years ago but I hadn’t used it for a full 10 years before that. When I did take magic mushrooms I took little more than a threshold dose ~ enough to bring on the psilocybin euphoria, to make the world surreal. But not to be tripping on anything like the same magnitude as I tripped on LSD.

To anyone who will insist on trying psychedelic drugs, which I do not recommend, you would at least have some idea of the strength of a mushroom trip simply by weighing or counting the mushroom material. British liberty caps have a very distinctive appearance. There are about six signs that distinguish true magic mushrooms from their nearest clones and every single one must match. The red and white fly agaric mushrooms apparently cause a weird type of trip but they’re very different to true “magic” mushrooms.

By the way it is not unknown for common household mushrooms to be cut up, dried up and dropped with LSD. So make sure you know the person you’re getting these from. And if you’re picking your own make sure you check PROPERLY. True psilocybin mushrooms bruise a dark blue colour when fresh. They lose something like a third of their potency on drying. 25 dry liberty caps are enough to induce laughter and surrealness. I very rarely took more than this. On 50 (British) mushrooms you’ll be getting the full effects of a trip. Bright colours, intricate animated designs viewed with eyes closed (on a higher dose you might well see these eyes OPEN!) 200 liberty caps will produce a full-blown trip. Having already experienced this from acid I felt no need to go here with mushrooms, even though I found the mushroom spirit far kinder than the acid goblin. Sometimes we did have a strange feeling of angels inside our heads. My best friend got this too. I wonder how his mental health is today…?

Most people who experiment with psychedelic drugs are fine afterwards. By far the most common adverse effect is anxiety. Doctors have never believed psychedelics to cause psychosis. The theory has always been that people who go mad after tripping probably would have gone mad anyhow. What they have done is pulled the trigger on an already loaded gun.

There was a ten-year gap between my taking psychedelic substances of any kind and going mad. Though I don’t doubt the psychedelics helped bend and blend my mind I don’t think what I had was “drug psychosis”. Naomi, the dual diagnosis lady, who I had spoken to a lot BEFORE I went mad (because I had been hearing voices, having mood swings in a more minor way for years) once said to me “I know and you know this wasn’t brought on by the drugs…” which stuck with me, because at the time I wasn’t at all sure that it wasn’t the drugs. Now I think back and think WHAT drugs? The mania went on and on and on for weeks on end. Having seen me three times in a row with a markedly elevated mood on each occasion my shrink eventually diagnosed me with manic depression and schizophrenia. I was very upset about this. It’s the only time I’ve ever come back from a doctor and cried. Even though I was “high” I cried the tears of a crazyman. They mingled with the dirt on my bathroom floor.

By the way I’m having serious trouble remembering how long I have or haven’t gone between doses of heroin. This is because I don’t WANT to remember. Don’t want to do it again. Don’t want to know. If it’s “just for today” then surely what happened yesterday doesn’t count. So I’m focused on today and tomorrow and not using. Ever again. I want the nightmare of heroin over with because that’s all it was. A nightmare. What good memories am I left with.

I remember meeting a couple I knew at three o’clock in the morning. He was stomping solidly ahead. Probably eager to get to some crackhouse or other. She was bent double in the street, like a person trying to impersonate a capital A. I remember her saying “Aww I’ve ‘ad a fifteen pound ‘it. I’m ‘avin’ so much fun.” And even then, junkie that I was, I clearly recall thinking ARE YOU? Didn’t look like fun to me. Wouldn’t have felt like fun to me. I’ve often wondered whether I was lacking some heroin pleasure receptor gene, because I know if I was in a state like that I’d just feel like I was fighting for consciousness through something very heavy and gloopy. Like a man drowning in methadone! Yes heroin gave me some sort of high but it’s so very subtle it took me literally years to appreciate that it was there. In the years before I finally twigged what was what: what was opiated, what was “real”, I was constantly complaining that heroin didn’t work for me. That’s because no matter how much you take (or I take) heroin has never ever felt more than a 4 out of 10 strength-wise. Not in niceness. In niceness it scores at least 9. (Ecstasy would be 10). In strength, heroin never feels strong. I nearly killed myself with an overdose once and that was only a 4 out of 10. Laundretta pointed out that the junkie who feels “not stoned” is like the alcoholic who slurs “I’m not drunk”… Laundretta WAS an alcoholic, as well as a heroin and crack addict, only her drugs took exactly reverse order of preference to mine (I was heroin first, alcohol second, crack third). She was the type of person who would smoke one £10 rock, then instantly be talking about scoring another. And I’d be claiming to be out of money. I was never like that with crack. Apart from one binge I went on, when I decided to smoke and speedball as much as I pleased until the money ran out, I only once bought a second rock after doing the first. This is because crack gave me an intense craving for heroin. Mostly to take away the negative after-effects of the crack. When I think about the nastiness I’ve been involved in I’m disgusted. I don’t want ever to be involved in hard drugs again. Because soft drugs don’t appeal to me (cannabis being just about the most unpleasant experience short of actual torture, I can envisage)… being off hard drugs will mean being off all drugs. None of the drugs I used to take tempt me today. If only if only if only I could be in an Elevated enough mood to kiss goodbye to my beloved heroin for ever. I’m bored of heroin. Fed up of chemical slavery. And I’ve had enough enough enough of the crappy life that came with the stuff.

This is what I gain from NA. A sense of reality from people who are deceived no more. My feelings about the politics of heroin prescribing evaporate as I walk through the doors of NA. I’m no longer interested in prescription heroin. I just want a prescription to be DRUG-FREE, CLEAN, SERENE.

I WANT A LIFE BACK.


☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆




CHOICE: ACID EIFFEL



HYBRID: SYMPHONY



PUSH: STRANGE WORLD

Just another manic-depressive Monday...

IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY. Sun is shining. Weather is fine. I have avoided purchasing sunglasses, radical hair dyes and canaries. I didn't avoid purchasing heroin but I've used it already. Felt no better for doing it. Won't be doing it tomorrow. I'm thinking of getting contact lenses again after finding out they're only £5 a month and you can easily make 3 pairs last 6 months if you don't wear them too heavily. It does seem ridiculous to be shelling out on pair after pair of tinted glasses when you can buy what you need down the pound shop. (That's what I used to do.) I used to have a vast collection of shades ~ and that's the biggest disadvantage of being a spectacles wearer: having to keep switching between prescription dark lenses and prescription clear ones. Or wearing those dodgy ones that go dark in the sun and make you look like a child molester. Don't worry: I have a pair on order but Specsavers aren't half taking their time processing it. Watch those children flee from those amber tints! I've still another week and a half until I can play silly games covering half the lens with a piece of card and watching the remaining half darken. Etc etc. As you MAY have noticed I tend to get consumed by these all-encompassing obsessions for trifling things. They usually begin while my mood is good. But I'm hanging on to the last vestiges of enthusiasm for the present one because it concerns self-image and I needed that new image DESPERATELY. Frankly I'd rather be depressed and obsessed by dark glasses than depressed and obsessed by suicide. I look around and cannot really see anything very positive. But I force myself to do the things I would do if I felt normal like buy food. Buy a film I wanted to see when it came out (Red: starring Helen Mirren as a machine-gun wielding pensioner). All that crap. I even bought an essential oil burner from the pound shop because it was blue. I don't even know where to buy the essential oils these days. I like the resinous ones from trees: frankincense, benzoin, myrrh (ie "church incence"). I don't even know where to buy a new washcloth because I haven't gone shopping for anything bar absolute bare essentials in ten years and my Mum used to buy me shampoos and flannels because I never bought my own. My fingernails were constantly black because my hair was so dirty. You see now why I cut it off: it looked truly horrible.

Pinky, by the way, thinks my natural colour looks nicer than the dye. She says I'm "dirty blond". Dirty. You can say that again. If I can, I'm going to clipper it all off leaving just a couple of millimetres platinum at the ends. That might look really good. (Might do....)

This morning, I met an alcoholic who never recognizes me. He had bags of clothes each side, which implied he was homeless. I did ask, but he didn't want to talk about it. A great lump over one eye and a heavily dilated pupil revealed that he had been in a fight. Yet again. I told him he looked like David Bowie. I told him he needed to see a doctor and he said "oh who cares" and I said "well someone should". But he was too drunk to get through to until I started saying "o wel wel bore da ichi gyd, diolch yn fawr nawr te" which means nothing very much in Welsh but he found it endlessly amusing. He went to school just over ten miles up the road from where I did. Last time I encounterd him he was swaying catatonically in Morrisons' toilets so drunk his eyes seemed lost in mid-space. When I said hello to him then he appeared very surprised to hear his name. Then was immediately lost back in his stupor. This man urgently needs to see a doctor. All I know about head injuries is, if one eye is dilated and the other normal and your eyes are pointing in different directions you need medical attention and quick. But he won't get it. He'll take medication all right. In the form of more booze. And he won't see a doctor until the police surgeon checks him out compulsorily on his next Drunk and Disorderly charge.

I'm still glugging away at the live yogurt. I've found a Polish brand at 79p per 500g ~ cheapest going. But it has no mood elevating properties. If only it did... I'm taking it to get rid of the two black eyes junkie look I've had since before I went on the gear. Heroin only made that look worse. So much worse, in fact, someone once said my eyes looked GREEN. That is, green bags beneath the eyes. Which would have matched my own sludge coloured peepers quite well.

Gotta go now. I hope y'all are enjoying mowing your lawns, repotting daisies or kowtowing to your bosses. Whichever you do.

Someone told me I should write a book. Strangely the plot of an amazing story came to me. More to the point the END of the story came to me. I cannot stand writing not knowing where I'm going. I've always planned my fictions like a series of shopping lists. I don't take voluminous notes. If you're going to write, write the bloody book I say. But if you can't see where you're going jotting down each paragraph shopping list style makes the writing very much easier. This is a children's book. The type you can write again and again and again merely altering the scenario. My best scenario has a huge gimmick only it wouldn't make a good book number one (as it couldn't be topped or bettered for one thing). So I'm writing the plainest most basic story first. Then they get more and more gimmicky and full of novelty as they go on. Of course I cannot reveal my Grand Designs to anyone until the writing is done. I did write a short story about a different character, but short stories are difficult. Before they've barely begun they're over with. Novels gain momentum as they go until the writing becomes effortless, but you don't get that with short fiction. So I'm writing novels for kids. I mean the 8 to 12 age group. I do believe the world of children's fiction needs a good slap round the face. And a departure from wizards. Children's book editors must be sick to death of would-be J K Rowlings. I'm the first me and I don't really want to go through the pain of writing my life story (I just liked the thought of profiting from my pain and being paid by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film. Or Paul Bettany if I had to be an English actor. Or Danny Dyer except he'd have to live up to his name and dye his hair ultimate platinum and get a personality transplant to play a white mouse like me.) Well I'd better go: this book won't write itself.

I chose writing by the way as it was the only meaningful activity I'm capable of doing to a high standard despite my bad moods.

I've got to go to the fucking methadone doctor tomorrow. Along with Duta. Which I find very oppressive. Meaning I cannot use a doctor for what a doctor is actually for: to confide in. I'm not prattling a load of positive-sounding shit for anyone. If they rile me to it I will tell them that I only want to clean up so I can die. That's about as positive as you can get, if you think about it. Means whatever mood I'm in I still wanna be clean. The lower I get the more I crave heroin. But this craving is tempered by a hatred of drugs and all they stand for. The more energy and oomph I have, the more vehemently anti-drugs I become. It's all good, you see.

Wish me luck for tomorrow. I really am not looking forward to this doctorly bullshit. Three whole weeks I've been at this shit-arse service and already it's time for a "review". Like I say this means an absolute waste of time. You can't say anything meaningful to the doctor as your pig-ignorant Worker is sitting there. Anyone who seriously thinks 110mg methadone is a high dose really needs their head testing. I cannot handle anything more than a few false smiles and meaningless pleasantries these days so if any more is expected I'm afraid Duta is going to be sorely disappointed. I might bring up the fact that the less heroin I have taken in the past the more mentally unstable I have become and that I want something else apart from methadone because methadone is causing mental derangement. If they won't listen, I'm considering launching an official appeal. I'll get myself a lawyer and everything. I think I am entitled to medical care appropriate to my case and I don't feel that I'm getting it. So Duta and Doc-Doc can shove that in their crackpipes and smoke it!


☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆



three trance classics ...

HYBRID: SYMPHONY 1997



THREE DRIVES: GREECE 2000



INFECTED MUSHROOM: MUSHI MUSHI

Weekend Ramblings

IT’S FIVE MINUTES to midnight. (Saturday night.) Awful music is playing on TV. I have chicken jalfrezi and “tricoloured rice” (800 cals the lot) but I can’t eat it till tomorrow. Else I’ll be out of money and out of food to boot.

I’m not looking forward to tomorrow. I hate Sundays. And what use is a Sunday without drugs to kill the misery. I don’t think I will ever be OK ever again after that psychiatrist gave me bipolar disorder. My family pointed out that a psychiatric titles are mere descriptions. Life is not a Chinese restaurant menu. As my old counsellor said, you don’t get to pick what cross you bear. But I do feel the psychiatrists have made me mad. I was fine before I went to any shrink. Interesting I supposedly had depression for years and yet my depression doesn’t match the extremes described in Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia, the alltime classic text on the subject. My overexcitement is exactly as described in the book, but the depression isn’t. So by Victorian standards I’m a maniac with a moody temperament. Which means I don’t need medication. I’m not taking medication anyway. Medication is a way of keeping people subjugated and compliant.

I think most people who feel depressed have reason to be depressed. I feel evil and full of death. I think I’m going to have to dig out a baseball cap. They don’t suit me at all. But together with dark glasses, they hide the eyes. I cannot handle people looking me in the eye. And I really cannot stomach this nauseating drug clinic I have to go to. The absolute falseness between me and my worker. All she wants is a show of positivity so that’s what I show. On Tuesday I was feeling a bit amped up so the energy I gave out was real. By Friday I wasn’t happy at all and the effort required to bullshit through my encounters is just too much. I am not looking forward to going there on Tuesday. Fucking group therapy. What I find intrusive and offensive is that you have to say your name. Not like NA where you can skulk in and out saying nothing.

My only goal left in life is to become rich. I want money because I know it will never bring happiness, but like heroin, money is tangible. I want money so I can isolate myself. I want to be unconscious and unremembered. I am too tired to go on.

On a positive note I am planning to go to NA this Monday. I would like to say life on drugs was miserable but that wasn’t the core problem. Drug addiction is disempowering and drug addicts are slaves. That’s what’s bad about addiction. All this crap about how much better I’ll feel. I know of many many cases who left behind drugs ~ and I mean opiate drugs that kill pain and stabilize mood ~ and these people all have bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or depressive psychosis. We all knew that the drugs were holding these people together. Without exception they broke down AFTER the addiction ended.

My problem is that if I am not weak then I am powerless. Money gives power of a fashion. I can’t think of a single person I admire who was poor. Only exceptions are the New Testament Bible characters, but they somehow had means to pay passage all across the road. One of the apostles went as far as Japan. As for the old testament: Abraham had audiences with kings. Joseph and Daniel both reached the status of Prime Minister.

Ugh. And talking about money there’s a nauseating miniseries about the Kennedys playing on BBC2. What people find fascinating about Jackie Kennedy I do not understand. I have a paperback about her and only read the bits about Aristotle Onassis ~ a far more interesting personality.

I have drunk cokehead neighbours. Yelling and bawling across the street. Least it’s not quiet I suppose. I despise cocaine. It’s powdered excitement for people too dull and drab to make entertainment of their own. O shit it’s 0041 hours. I’ve gotta sleep.

IT’S 10PM (Sunday night) NOW. I stayed awake most of the night, thinking I was doing a good thing depriving myself of sleep, as sleep is supposedly the fuel of depression. By about five a.m. I couldn’t decide whether or not to stay up the whole day through, but eventually went to bed. I was woken up just before 2pm by the most terrible nightmares. So I woke up in a bad mood and stayed in a bad mood all day until I eventually gave in and scored heroin.

The drug had some effect because suddenly I was depressed no more, or depressed a lot less. This effect lasted a mere three hours and as I write the bad mood is creeping back on me, making £10 seem a very dear price for a couple of hours’ normality. Now if only methadone had this remarkable effect I might find sticking to my script a lot easier. As it is, I had been about ten days without using. I knew I was going to be tested by the doctor next Tuesday and I refuse to remain clean merely to impress another person. I never have and never will avoid drugs due to external pressures. I am only detoxing (or at least reducing my metha-dose) because I have lived the junkie life. Nothing came of it bar a handful of experiences an ordinary person wouldn’t want to experience anyhow. As an addict, there was never any tomorrow. Just one constant mono-day. Same, same, same every day. Nothing new ever happened, except when some crisis came to a head. There was nothing to look forward to, except more of the same drug. And for a long, long time the main pleasure of heroin was that a day on it was a hundred times more tolerable than a day without. No amount of methadone did very much to inhibit my desire for heroin. And unless I took a dose many times larger than the one I was accustomed to I never felt any euphoriant effect at all from methadone. Any progress I have made was despite, not because of methadone. Some ill-informed people appear to believe that this substance possesses some special property that makes it especially suitable for addicts who wish to give up heroin. It does not.
The only reason methadone was selected as a treatment for addicts was that it could be dosed orally once daily under supervision whereas nearly every other opiate required two or more doses a day. This is no longer the case. There is a sustained-release preparation of hydromorphone (Jurnista) that can be dosed once daily. As far as I know there’s a similar preparation of morphine.

Methadone is preferred because methadone is cheap and in the words of the medical manuals “produces less euphoria than heroin and other opiates”. To a miserable junkie, the so-called “euphoria” of heroin, which is no more intense than the intoxicant effect of a double Scotch, becomes the only tolerable reality they know. On methadone, addicts tend to feel flat and listless. In my darkest days I did so badly on methadone because I simply could not bear the intensity of depression that resulted after taking it. It’s no coincidence in my mind that I also became psychotically manic while taking no other drug but methadone. If I were a doctor I could in no good conscience prescribe a drug which I knew to have effects this extreme on my patient. I believe I am in fact the victim of medical negligence. I’m only willing to endure the intensely malign effects of this substance in an effort to get off all opiates as quickly as humanly possible. The more depressed I feel the more my craving for heroin increases. But strangely the desire to get off opiates does not diminish at all. Bear in mind that a methadone addict is in every way as much of an addict as a heroin addict. Methadone is known to affect more receptor sites in the brain than heroin, including ones that are known to promote dysphoria. Milligram for milligram the methadone withdrawal syndrome is far harsher than that of heroin and it goes on for weeks, not days. I consider methadone a poison and I want it out of my body as swiftly as humanly possible.

There’s nothing good to write because I see no future until I am free of this rubbishy drug the government insist I take. If I won the lottery I would gladly leave this awful new drug clinic I have been saddled with and take my custom to a private doctor who would prescribe morphine continus tablets. I’ve experimented with Oromorph solution. It feels the same as heroin without the so-called rush of injecting. In other words it does everything methadone is supposed to do but doesn’t. Gets an addict away from illicit heroin and needles, allows them to stabilize. And keeps them feeling OK. I don’t think I have ever known anyone stick to methadone without either using heroin on top at every opportunity, or else swapping heroin for alcohol or benzodiazepines. True, methadone is better than nothing. But this is the year 2011. Surely it is time for the Powers That Be to start looking at something a little more effectual than oral methadone with its 4% success rate?
Until that day comes, expect the opiate problem to continue to grow. Expect more crime. More lives wasted. More overdoses. More suicides. An ever more crowded criminal justice system and fuller prisons. If methadone worked as well as its advocates claim it to, nobody would ever use on top of it, just as street heroin addicts don’t use on top of their doses. Now that stands to reason. Methadone does work for some people. 4% of addicts are treated successfully on methadone. But the other 96% deserve something else. Something better. And they need it NOW.

Oh roll on tomorrow. Money. Phone top-up. Can ring Deshane, find out about my supposed house move etc. Roll on fucking Specsavers with my Reactions lenses so I can get my other pair tinted blue. I know blue lenses are meant to be bad for the eyes but surely the UV filter will cancel that out. Blue light triggers wakefulness in the brain, which red light cancels out. So amber lenses are very good for insomniacs to wear while trying to sleep when it’s light outside. Blue lenses would if anything make one more wide awake and chirpy. I used to wear dark blue sunglasses all the time until a freak wave in Goa swept them away…
… then there’s that poor goldfinch hopping forlornly from perch to bleak perch in a gloomy cage in a shop he hates. They say caged birds don’t sing. This one doesn’t. Part of me believes he wants me to rescue him. The other part tells me this is sheer folly, that I’m in no position to be taking on new pets and what would happen if I became ill? A hamster can be left for a week or longer. Nocturnal hamsters can happily live hidden away in closets in the dark; daylight loving birds can be bundled into cupboards when landlords pay unexpected calls and the dark will shut up their chirpings but that is a far from ideal solution. I kept my robbies hidden from view at all times when I was out of the house and nobody ever discovered them. I’ve now found a female golden hamster sleeping in a ball… there are also lback and white ones going at £5 each in the goldfinch shop but the man has a very dismissive attitude. This is the same man who said “oh they’re not Syrian hamsters; I think they’re normal ones” DUR!

Oh I’ve got to go the more I think the worse I feel. I’ve been trying to access the local wireless networks free of charge. I wouldn’t make a good professional hacker. For example “Mary”’s network I tried passwords contrary, Magdalene, London, the part of London we’re in, the name of my road, what I assume to be Mary’s road and so on. The anti-hack security is wise to this and pauses pregnantly when I enter anything raringly obvious like password or secret… I think I’m going to have to stick with Starbucks in future…





THIS IS THE BEST EUPHORIC TRANCE TUNE EVER

binary finary 1998/1999
the version i knew came out 1998

Meerkats

Furry Friday On Saturday

Wishing Y'All A Furrily Entertaining Weekend

PS Don't miss my miseryguts post from earlier today...

Another Week Ends

OK HERE'S THE MISERYGUTS WEEKEND POST.

It is raining.

I am miserable.

I rushed to the chemist. Drank methadone that made me feel SICK. Hung around in Morrisons not wanting to be there, not wanting to leave. I smoked a cigarette in the carpark and watched the sky interlace the paving slabs in puddles.

Oh yeah and the bitch doctor wouldn't see me yesterday because I was more than 15 mins late. This is the methadone dr. I'd already got my 110mg oil tanker sized script. (Well THEY insist, constantly, that it's a lot.) I feel absolutely nothing at all from this dose. It does nothing to stop me wanting to use on top. I'm totally against maintenance methadone I want take this toxin grudgingly and want it OUT of my system ASAP.

This doctor refused to see me. If the dr is late next time I come I'm putting in a formal complaint under disability discrimination legislation as I believe I'm being discriminated against for being a psycho.

Everyone who's been to my present clinic and my past one has the same opinion as me about this clinic. I was wondering how Valium Marilyn, who lives only three streets from me, manages to go to my old clinic when she too lives over the Border in the Borough of Nightmaresville. The simple answer is, she lied about her address. I'm thinking of doing that too.

I haven't taken any heroin at all. I haven't bought any birds. I still want that goldfinch-canary cross. He's stopped panicking every time I look at him. I think he wants me to buy him. I have a huge converted hamster cage with perches gleaned from the local park in readiness. I know the council will go nuts if and when his supersonically loud singing starts ringing out, because birdsong really does sound loud inside a house... but who cares? I've wanted a canary ever since I used to walk past our local florists who had one tweetling away like a bright yellow feathery Whitney Houston.

I had a good look at my neck yesterday. This exfoliation has brought up some fantastic veins there. There's one on the left hand side that looks as thick as electrical flex. Plus I have several thin ones at the front, and another thicker one on the right hand side. I've used the veins running from nipples to armpits years ago when I was addicted to putting crack in my heroin. I was such a junkie.

I read this back and I seem really cheeerful when actually I felt nothing but emptiness between waking up at 11, getting up at 12, visiting the methadonery at 12:30 and hanging around feeling ill in the rain ever since. I don't think anything will ever sum up how I feel (thank God). I'm bored of my new hair colour already. Fair do's it's better than the original chestnut brown (which had nasty grey streaks in it, I now know, having examined the carrier bag full of evidence). To be frank: the current platinum would look fantastic with conker coloured lowlights. If I thought I could do this PROPERLY so my hair looked varigated, like the feathers of a bird, then I'd go for it. Only I don't know where to get the shower cap and hook thing women use for this procedure. And I've never put tinfoil on my hair, ever. Oh yeah and I'm thinking of getting green lenses in my specks. Green against brown. Won't that look funky?

Here's a quote from Sectioned: A Life Interrupted by John O'Donoghue p132

Cerys takes a drag on her fag... I've never really heard Cerys talk at any length before and I sit quietly as she opens up.

"They're fascinated by the likes of us, fascinated by madness, by derangement, because we've been there, we've seen heaven and hell, joy and despair. It means we've got dimensions they've never even dreamed of."

She takes another languorous drag.

"We absolute fascinate them. The groups ~ therapy ~ working on yourself. It's all just crap. They're not trying to help us. No. They want what we've got, but without going through what we've been through. The doors of perception have been wrenched from our hinges. We've seen what no-one else has. But they're scared by the thought of that. They want to stay in control, they're too afraid to ever let go, of status, power, comfort. They're turned on by the idea of madness, but they just sink back into their conventional roles, their straight 'careers', their schtick. And do you know who's the worst? Dan Cassady. Because he's the one with the pwer. He wants to be the Good Guy, Mr Laid-back, Mr Cool. But he'll be the first to kick any oen of us out if we don't play by his rules. He's the one upholding the status quo, making sure we 'progress'. But progress to what? To everything we're running a mile from for Christs's sake! Everything that's screwed us up in the first place: crap jobs, a society that's afraid of us, squalid accommodation. He's fascinated, obsessed. But where he sees sickness, I see health. And where he sees insanity, I see wisdom. Dan Cassady is exactly what is wrong with the world. I'd like to open his doors, to just smash them all down."

I couldn't have said it better myself.

I've always believed bipolar "disorder" makes you more of a person. If your emotions run on a course from minus one hundred to plus one hundred, whereas a regular person barely ever dips below minus ten or exceeds plus nine then bipolar "disorder" is only going to make you MORE of a person, not less of one. Add schizophrenia to the mix and you have a very superior person indeed.

I've always suspected that drugs workers of the ilk who've never used, never watched a sibling or partner kill themselves with heroin. The ones who just take it on as a random job instead of being a librarian or a filing clerk or a plant-waterer. Those ones. They're just junkies by proxy. Too scared of actually taking the stuff. But just loving the vibe that surrounds it. Ie the exact opposite of me, who loved being high and hated the lifestyle. The way they talk about injecting as if it's freakery says everything. Heroin is a drug for injection. DOCTORS INJECT IT into cancer patients. When did you last see an NHS ward full of pain patients chasing the so-called dragon. Well then. Some reality check is required. As long as I take heroin I shall inject heroin. I never ever will go back to smoking it, which I only did in the very very beginning. And being as I no longer use heroin, I expect never to inject it ever again.

I'm only cleaning up so I can die by the way. I want to die and I don't want to die a junkie. So if you're wondering where the sudden motivation comes from: that's it.