Sunshine

IT'S A HOT DAY TODAY. I had to take off a layer of clothing because of over-zealous central heating in the methadone pharmacy. The sun is shining; it's actually quite hot. I know I should have done this weeks ago but I'm about to take my computer to hospital today. I just couldn't face doing it before as I thought I'd fused it. Turns out it does turn on after all ~ but then it says something about a cable disconnection and won't do anything further.

I didn't get stop smoking stuff yesterday as it turns out yesterday was "preparation day" they wanted to make quit day a week yesterday but I insisted on giving up today. I can't handle the stress of so many cigarettes knowing I'm on a slow countdown to the very last...

You have to pick one type of nicotine replacement therapy and I think they do most types but not those electronic cigarettes you smoke cartridges in... So I'm going for gum. I couldn't deal with a patch unless I had absolutely no choice: that would be too much like a nicotine version of methadone! If only drug cessation clinics gave a wider choice of therapies I might have cleaned up years ago. (I am still on prescribed methadone now, so I don't count myself as "clean".)

I've actually forgotten the password to one of my emails. How stupid can you get?

I have to go now; I have an appointment with Smoking Cessation in just over 2 hours...

O I've just remembered my password; I'm signed in.

Gotta run; take care everyone......

It Only Hurts When I Cough

MY THROAT has been colonized by alien spawn I have been sleeping half the time. Why my throat should affect the man in the moon I've no idea but it does. I'm really tired.

The bug killers came by today. We still have cockroaches in our house. The extermination man came at about 10:45 when I had just woken up. He puts this gel down that kills nearly all of them.

I don't feel as depressed as I did before. I've seen some light.

Tonight I have a stop smoking appointment at 5, so I should come out of it with a free prescription for nicotine gum. You have to choose what kind of NRT you would like and I decided the gums would be best: you use it only when you feel you need it; and chewing gives you something to do which might substitute for the action of smoking.

I'm kind of dreading giving up but I don't want to be an old smoker. I'm scared of hospitals more because of the thought of being forced to give up than anything else. I need a new life and I don't envisage cigarettes in that life.

I have to go now and buy a cream tart from Morrissons.

Things I Am Supposed To Do

AKH THERE'S so many things I'm supposed to do; I don't feel up to doing any of them. It's only because I'm such a misery, no real reason, no real excuse. And where does self-esteem come from? If anyone knows of any for sale I want to buy some. I think I was left with a short supply at birth

CHAMPAGNE SONG ~ ANGELIKA MANN: CHAMPUS LIED
this is genuine East German pop music from the early 80s



This is the film I got that song from. Doesn't this tune start like an evil flower opening stealthily in the dark...? Then it sounds deadly sad.



I can't stay on long. I have been watching a film called The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) about the Staasi secret police. I have a thing about the cold war. I would have loved to visit East Berlin or Soviet Russia...

Illustrated: Martina Gedeck "the German Meryl Streep"...

Acrobatic Mice

I WAS LOOKING for the Jordans advert with two harvest mice talking in posh accents and kissing. My robos never spoke but I'm sure they would have been posh if they did. Roborovski hamsters are like the aristocracy: a rare breed. My robbies did used to kiss hello though the way French people kiss on both cheeks. One day Itchy was running the wheel with Spherical sitting next to her on the ground. Itchy kept stopping to kiss-kiss Spherical hello. Spherical was highest in pecking order and so got the most kisses... Anyway aren't these harvest mice tiny?



I have been staying off drugs which made me very miserable yesterday when I really wanted some heroin. Somebody offered me some crack today but I turned it down outright that stuff doesn't agree with me. All these drugs affect my mood. Heroin by flatttening it; crack by switching it sometimes. Some days when I was on heroin and crack, I could stay high all afternoon just off of one pipe on the crack. It just seemed to keep going. When I smoked too much I got paranoid and my life became more miserable than ever.

I'm finding it hard not to take heroin as a life without it seems like a life devoid of meaning. Some days like today it's easy. Other days like yesterday when I ordinarily would have used it, it seems far far harder. I can't remember when I did last use it. Over a week ago. I've been using it probably once every two weeks on average so it's more and more infrequent. Luckily they're testing me each time I come into the clinic so they can see the tests are negative. Heroin stays in your system for about 4 days; crack is a bit longer, I think. I was never interested in giving clean tests before so I barely know anything about the issue. Last time they tested me using a lollypop you pass around your mouth he ticked just about everything in the "please test" boxes including stuff I'd never use in a million years like cannabis.

I think the reason I find it hard without heroin is that I was relying on it as an antidepressant mood stabilizer and without it I get far more depressed. Up until about nearly a year ago, I just couldn't handle doing any more than a day off heroin and even that one day was hard. The methadone just didn't seem to work the way it was supposed to. So I'm fighting through unfamiliar territory with methadone declining by 5mg per week at the moment. I don't feel withdrawals from that reduction as the dose is still 95mg; quite high.

Well I have to dash time is running out I hope y'all are well...!

Hummingbirds

FEATHERY FRIDAY ON SATURDAY


Psychedelic


Colourful ...


... and cute


With precision beaks that suck nectar from flowers...


... they fly amazingly; but look just as good perching.

WISHING Y'ALL A CHIRPY WEEKEND!

Better ...

I AM MUCH BETTER TODAY than I was yesterday and far better than all last week. Akh I hate to admit this but I had genuinely forgotten to take my medication and that was part of the problem. I wish I could find a doctor who would prescribe what I WANT only a small change to a different type of the same thing. As it is I HAVE NO DOCTOR. (No psychiatrist, only a GP outside whose catchment area I actually live). Thank you London Borough of Evil for messing up my life in yet one more aspect. I am housed by one borough yet live in another. I would rather live in the (more innercity) borough I am housed by. At least inner cities are funky and full of life. As for drugs they are never more than a bus ride away so it's just as druggy here. I don't happen to know the local dealers as I never bothered getting introductions to any bar two. One who seemed to have forgotten me last time and another who sells crap. I don't care about drugs now anyhow. I'm spending my money on foreign DVDs and a book. The DVDs I bought were I Have Loved You So Long (French, starring Kirsten Scott Thomas); The Lives of Others (German ~ about the East German secret police and with the same female lead who played Ulrike Meinhof in The Baader Meinhof Complex and Michael Jackson This Is It this last one was on offer for £3 or I wouldn't have bothered and frankly although I do like Michael Jackson I think for even that money they could have done better. The first two were on a two for £10 deal and it took so long to find the Kirsten (or Kristen) Scott Thomas film to make up the deal.

Tomorrow morning I take the tube into town to pay for a book I have already ordered over the phone from Waterstones. There is no Waterstones, the nation's biggest bookseller by far, anywhere close to me and I'm not saying anything about the locals. I tried WH Smith, which sells magazines and stationery as well as a selection of the most obvious titles in each genre and the man rather ridiculously said of Piaf: la verité (which means Piaf: the Truth) "it's not a book we stock on our shelves". The fact that WH Smith do not stock French language titles is painfully obvious. Can you order it specially? No. So I rang this other shop who took the ISBN and said yes for £25 and a 3-week wait you can have it. I have a thing about Edith Piaf after watching that film about her La Vie En Rose.

Now I have to go else I will get cut off; my computer is still in hospital.

Here is a high quality pop video of Edith Piaf singing la vie en rose...



Milord

thank you Buggerlugz for this one... this and la vie en rose sont les deux chansons that have been going round my head...

Dentists Done

SORRY I HAVE BEEN AWAY. My computer got briefly restored, then fused. So it's totally dead now and has to go in the repair shop down the road.

I have been feeling very depressed. I was hypomanic for just two days. Of course the second of these had to be when I was seeing the doctor at the druggie service plus my worker. My worker was visually backing off from me, I was talking so much and probably too loudly about the ins and outs of my long term heroin addiction in the waiting room. Then the next day I crashed!

I have been tempted to use heroin but only through sheer desperation. When I was still in a good mood I bought three good films in French, German and Spanish: La Vie En Rose; The Baader Meinhof Complex and Dark Habits by Pedro Amodovar (whatever his name is). La Vie En Rose, which is the life story of Edith Piaf, who grew up between a brothel and a circus, earned a living busking and was discovered by a nightclub owner named Louis Leplée. I love that film so much I have seen it four or five times already. It has been the only thing that brought meaning to my last days that have been so miserable.

I did see my Mum yesterday and I wrote her a letter explaining the past. I don't know if she liked what she read. I was beating myself up afterwards for being too frank. I didn't look at the letter in the five days between writing it and handing it over. I think I have a problem with over-frankness, the opposite of most people. I felt ill all day though it was really nice to see her. By ill I mean like a crotchety 108 year old who can't do anything without getting tired easily. My Mum seemed OK I hope she didn't notice my poor health. I really feel ill and I'm only calling it "depression" because I know from experience that's what it probably is, but I've been feeling physically sick, exhausted and as if my life is over.

I went to the dentist today for the second of two appointments and got my upper teeth cleaned (the lower ones were done last week) and had two fillings. The lignocaine took over twenty minutes to work and had to be injected twice into my lower gums until it froze me up so good I can still barely speak!

I think/hope I am starting to feel better. I am dreading next having to see a psychiatrist (whenever I get one) and having to explain my dreadful mental health. Ukh. Oh well not worth worrying about now. I have to ping off as I'm about to be terminated I will try and get in touch with some of you tomorrow.

I have to go; I'm feeling bad already.

Ordinary People Having Extraordinary Experiences

ECSTASY, as longterm readers of my blog will know, is the only drug I ever considered truly AMAZING. It was the brightest light in a trinity of MDMA, mushrooms and ketamine. But I loved MDMA the most because on MDMA you can dance for hours. Forget the touchy-feely stuff. I danced on E. I had experiences like the one Ruth has here by wandering outside house parties on my own and finding myself in grasslands at dawn, haloed by rainbows. At one such party a white Barbadian girl named Summer Rain was meditating 6 feet high on a wall.



Nate on Ecstasy (screen 2: Nate): yes this is the sort of rubbish I have twaddled too.

I think we all have.

Mania reminded me of ecstasy because of the bright lights, enhanced appreciation of sound and colour, hallucinations (which you get at high doses) and the rushing feeling, leading to "peak experiences". I got higher on E than I ever did on cocaine, including crack. Yes crack was more intense, but Ecstasy was several clouds higher (cloud 9, 10, 11, 12 and counting...) The most intense high known to man is said to be that of heroin and cocaine taken intravenously together, the socalled snowball or speedball. This reminded me of MDMA. On Ecastasy I was frequently the highest person in the room. When I danced I would come out of my trance now and then to realize I was surrounded by people vibing off my energy. On my best nights I was constantly pestered by people wanting to know if I had pills to sell. To use the NA phrase "they wanted what I had".

If you're wondering how Ruth got E'd up on a camping trip and how Nate got there at a family dinner, it's because his brother David idiotically dumped some Ecstasy pills in the aspirin bottle. Excellent TV if not entirely believable.

If I could take ecstasy once more I'd get ten good pills and do a session with my mother.

Thanks Bimbimbie

THIS PICTURE is courtesy of my Aussie friend Bimbimbie, whose name means "birdie-wirdie" or "place of the birds" in the local aboriginal dialect. She knows red king parrots or "king reds" as I call them are my favourites and this is what flapped down from the trees only a few hours ago.

If you go to Bimbimbie's blog you'll find endless snapshots of rainbow lorrikeets, sulphur-crested cockatoos and other delicacies direct from her garden.

So this is my feathery Friday on Saturday. Thanks Bimbimbie!

As y'all may have noticed I have been feeling down and flat for nearly a month now. I'm hoping the mood swing is petering out. Because that's all it is, a mood swing. Just as my OTT excitements are mood swings too. It's hard to accept that how I feel is labelled and illness. The "sickness" part lies not in the undulations but in the extremity of the the highs and lows. I have been "high" enough to be hallucinating voices from the walls, have seen spirals everywhere, especially in ceilings, which I stared at a lot, seeeing as I was going "up". I once saw a purple face appear in a man's neck at the Nutter Club I used to attend before it was disbanded due to lack of funding (my one lifeline snatched from me ~ thanks NHS) so I have had extremes. I've also had weird ideas when I was low but am too paranoid to describe them in any detail. Not because they're real to me now. More that they're too embarrassingly nutty.

Well I wanted to ask y'all who've followed this space for a long time, do I really seem nuttier now than I was before the last year when I knew I was labelled "schizoaffective"? I'm not sure I'm any madder than I ever was (between the extremes). Just that there's a name to it. I am, I believe, what is known as a cyclothymic personality. That just means someone whose moods swing up and down, in and out, like high and low tides. You could say we're all cyclothymic then, but it's a matter of degree. I'm rarely on a truly even keel for very much more than a week. In bad periods I seem to have been up down left and right all the time for weeks and weeks on end. I am not claiming to have been at the very extreme of how up down left right it is possible to be. Merely that I was to some degree in some such direction.

Well this is solipsistic twaddle yet again. I am trying to heal. I am doing my Spanish every single day for at least half an hour if not 90 minutes or more. Every single day. Without fail. Everything else has been half-cocked as my sleep has increased in line with my depressed mood and low energy. I think some days I must have been sleeping 16 hours. Not in one single go, but endless dozes, then ultra long periods in bed. I haven't timed myself as i'm no longer interested.

There was a time when I knew something was wrong, didn't know what it was, knew most of the doctors were barking up the wrong tree by calling it depression triggered by drug abuse (when actually I abused heroin because I never felt truly well and heroin did make me feel truly well. At least for the first couple of years. Thereafter I was truly addicted. So take from that what you will but don't take this as my blessing that anybody young, lost and vulnerable ought to experiment with hard drugs. I would be horrified if anybody got themselves a habit because of me. I'm anti drugs yet still a drug addict (on 99% methadone; 1% heroin ~ it's that 1% I'm fighting against). Hence the shifting sands of viewpoint you'll encounter here.

Now I must go it's getting late. Have a marvellous weekend everybody thanks again Bimbimbie, and don't get pecked by a king red!

8 Days a Week

I JUST REALIZED it's been over a week since I posted. In that week I have been eating, sleeping and feeling down. Today I went to the clinic where I was supposed to see a doctor. I would have given in a dirty test, like an idiot and the dr wasn't around. So I asked my worker, can't I come in this time next week when I'll be clean and he said OK. My dose is going down by 5mg. I have to come in on Thursday to collect the reduced script.

A friend lent me a the Three Colours movie trilogy. It's in French so I thought I might better myself by watching it.

I'm still learning Spanish every day. Playing those CDs over and over. £35 for 2400 words vocab is not at all bad. 2400 words is enough to start leafing through magazines and simple books. I've always wanted to speak Spanish, since childhood. I haven't dropped my Oriental goals, I just got fed up of substandard teaching materials eg books that printed Chinese characters in such heavy type you could not work out what on earth was there.

Well that's me for this week. Boring as ever. I hope you all are OK and better than I am.

I wonder how Anna Grace is out there in Wisconsin. Been a LONG time since that one commented here....