Terrible Sleep

MY SLEEP HAS GONE SO BAD I didn't bother sleeping at all last night. We have a new girl in the next room with rough friends who are too stupid to ring the correct bell so I found myself yelling at some faceless person over the intercom at 2am. I did get a little bit of sleep around six but then Everybody Loves Raymond and Frasier came on. I feel a bit hypomanic but it probably won't last. I'll crash and sleep for hours and hours and wake up feeling run down and sad. That's scenario one. Or scenario 2 is my sleep still won't come back and I'll possibly go into proper mania. I've been having symptoms like people seeming to talk to me on the street (from the other side of the road) and my head racing fast fast fast. But not too fast. And then when I close my eyes to sleep sometimes my head is lit up with the most amazing vivid dream-imagery, even though I'm wide awake and when that happens I know sleep is going to be hard to come by. By the time the images (which are random, like golden ants circling round and round on a tree stump, or dogs wearing dinner jackets like in the Michael Jackson Leave Me Alone Video.... by the time these are more vivid than the reality with my eyes open I'm in full mania and sleep is just an impossibility. I don't think I'm manic by the way. I think I am going to sleep because I feel kind of speedy and tired at the same time. I just thought I would have gone back to bed by now. It's 11:09 and I had to get to the chemist at some time between 9 and 7 to drink one day's methadone under patronizing Supervised Consumption and to pick up another three days' to keep me going over the new year "break" (which has no good associations for me ~ at the millennium I was so stressed by the pressure of it all I found myself crying before I went out and of course you have to take your Es or other drugs early so you're flying by midnight when usually I only dropped my first one-and-a-half AT midnight ~ this was so I could dose again at 2am (a single pill, making my intake for the night 2.5 pills) and my E would be coasting down pleasantly by 6am when all major dance parties ended. After that if you were in Brixton you could go to the Fridge Bar which was full of nutters; if you were elsewhere in town there was often an official after party for pillheads who want to continue taking E and speed and whatever else they fancied right into the afternoon. Then you'd end up in someone's house you barely knew kind of stuck there not wanting to be there yet not wanting to go home. Whenever I was "having an affair" I'd ALWAYS go back to their place and rarely if ever invite them over to mine (something to do with other people in my room feeling like an invasion; I never was truly comfortable with anyone in my room even when they were just coming in to see Pandable the hamster who did a teapot trick where you flipped the lid up and he appeared hands together all faye looking surprised. The Australian girl I went out with briefly used to say "Pandable's just like a cartoon character". Hamsters are banned in Australia so the poor Aussies are deprived of the joys of tubby tail-less poppy-eyed rodents. Though I'm sure isolated enthusiasts keep them illicitly. My online friend Buggerlugz has TWENTY-SEVEN teenytiny pinging roborovski hamsters ~ the tiniest and quickest (and hardest to tame) of all hammies. And she has twenty-seven. I asked whether she ever puts a whole bunch of them in the bath to run around like furry Scalectrix. I used to let Bashful, Itchy and Spherical go for pings in the bath and they loved it. I had to put the plug in as Itchy was so tiny she could, if she'd really wanted, have squeezed her head and thus possibly her body, no matter how tubby it looked, down the drain!

Well I'm off to do some research about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome being the product of an over-active rather than an underactive brain. This makes perfect sense to me. When you have M.E. as it always used to be called over here, you feel like a phone with a knackered battery. You can rest and feel fully charged but that charge just drains to nothing so incredibly quickly the only thing you can do on a truly bad day is rest up for hours on end in bed. If it hadn't been for Talk Radio UK I think I would have lost my mind because I felt too ill even to watch television (the "photophobia" made my eyesight incredibly glary. I have this theory that all my problems are down to misplacement of energy. Depression where energy is very low. Anxiety where energy is misused, clenching itself round your heart. And mania where at the truly full-on stage the energy literally shines out of you like sunbeams. I used to have a manic headgame where I played tennis with my excess energy. Batting this ball back and forth as I paced frantically along the streets. I'm so glad to have experienced mania, it's one of the most amazing experiences of my life. To go so high I actually got higher than any drug had ever taken me ~ and I've tried everything. I felt like I was turning from physicality into pure energy and spiritual form. As the mania wore off I suddenly had a feeling one day of my feet literally and physically being on the ground, whereas before I had felt like I was flying. This manic episode went on for weeks and weeks. The very most intense part was the first week of it (following weeks of stormy moods). Within 5 days I was so hyped up I was screaming incoherently and roaring like a wild animal in the middle of my room. People in my house avoided me for weeks afterwards and people in shops visibly backed away. I have never been in such an intense state in my life and like I say, it took weeks for it to fully die down, with a couple of intense resurgences. I was medicated during most of those weeks and the antipsychotic meds actually made me feel better, because it seemed to do little to dampen my euphoria, but it did quell a lot of the agitation I felt and so respiradone was very helpful in that respect. I just wish I'd known the stuff could actually CAUSE anxiety as I started having panic attacks or near-panic-attacks in the weeks following.

What am I talking about? Oh yeah ME or CFS. Which I definitely used to have and still ahve traces of (it hardly ever goes away entirely)... being a displacement of energy and my life's illnesses being obvious displacements of energy. Chinese doctors believe all illness is an imbalance in "qi" or "chi" ~ the lifeforce. But I think in my case the imbalance was more plain for all to see. My university years were ruined by an attack of anxious depression that took over three years to fade. After that I got ME (CFS) after that I started getting mildly bipolar symptoms, after that I went on heavy drugs and the heroin levelled out my mood incredibly well. And after that (thanks to methadone) the bipolar came back with avengeance and now here I am on the cusp of New Year's Eve with my resolution and goal being to get my magazine off the ground. I am absolutely determined to produce this magazine. There's none quite like it. Ever since I was at school and co-edited the UN-official school magazine I've had an eye for publishing opportunities. I never got into any industry that truly suited me because I was so painfully lacking in confidence I'd never have got the job. Nothing to do with any lack of talent. Everything to do with lack of bullshitting skills. One thing I learned during my years on drugs was some self esteem. I hit lows so bad that I absolutely had to believe in myself ~ even in some tiny way ~ against everything. Because nothing meant anything, there was a highspeed railway line at the top of my road and all I really wanted to do was to stand in front of an express train, arms held out like a cross, and get blasted into infinity. Then I realized, because I believe in Jesus Christ, that I'd not get even one single moment's rest before I woke up again to have to live over again when all I wanted was to die die die, to never think, feel, be thought or felt about, never to remember and never to be remembered. That's what I wanted. And if it would have hurt my family that bad to see me go I'd happily have killed them too. What business anybody had actually wanting to live, I simply could not comprehend. I thought all belief in life was a delusion and I only regretted having been born to see the sheer evil in the world. A world that criticized me and called me wrong for taking a drug that took the evils of the world away, if only for a few hours. Heroin fed my nihilism in a big way for a long time. But nothing in my drug addiction was ever sraightforward or easy to explain.

I'll leave it there. I didn't mean to launch into a rant about my miseries but my point, I suppose, is that I DO WANT TO LIVE NOW, that I HAVE A REASON FOR LIVING. AND I WANT TO TURN MY MAGAZINE INTO A REALITY. I'M UTTERLY DETERMINED TO DO THIS.

Now I'll take this opportunity to WISH YOU ALL A VERY NICE NEW YEAR'S EVE AND AN EFFORTLESSLY SUPERIOR 2012 ~ MAY IT BE WAY BETTER THAN THAT MIXED BAG THEY LABELLED 2011!

HAPPY NEW YEAR FOLKS: 12 HOURS 10 MINUTES TO GO!


Illustrated: I'm a Little Pandable Short and Stout Here's my PANDABLE! HERE'S MY SPOUT!




HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 1 (TIËSTO)




HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 2