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