Gledwood Vol 2 (Main blog)

Gledwood Volume 4

2012-01-31T12:27:00.002Z

MY NEW BLOG Gledwood Vol 4 is open for business at gledwood4.blogspot.com (vol 3 is in German) so go to Gledwood Vol 4 for new postings.

New Socks etc

2012-01-19T18:43:00.000Z

WHY are socks so expensive? I bought just three pairs today ~ as nearly all my other pairs have holes in them ~ and they cost £5. When I got them home I realized why. Because they're knee length and woolen. But the others they had on display were just too thin. Would get holed straight away...

I keep getting these ill feelings I don't know why. There's no point going to a GP, the GP won't be able to help me. I need a psychiatrist. I feel really wooly headed. I keep waking up what feels too early. I don't want to go into it any further than this. I'm just really glad I'm taking the pills and am trying to remember to take them like clockwork every night.

Did the news about that Italian cruise ship go worldwide? It's lying there off the coast of Italy like a sunken city. Even from beyond the clouds it looks huge...

Lion "attacks" child through glass at Wellington Zoo...

Deepside: Shudder (1992)

Have a nice day/evening everyone...

Midwinter Feeling

2012-01-15T11:09:00.000Z

IT IS ICE COLD here in London. The weather forecast said "normal weather for January". It feels a lot colder than normal. I sleep under four layers, I'm so cold. You can see passers by's breath as they go past.

I had a bad reaction to some tea I drank the other day. Four cups over the course of an afternoon was enough to put me on a high then a down. The up and the down turbulently mixed together and I felt very paranoid and weird. I think I'm hypersensitive to caffeine. Two cups of strong tea in the morning seems to be OK. I've had one today to see if I feel any better than on two. I might have to cut out tea and caffeine altogether. It never made me feel "high" until I got a manic "high" last year. But it did used to make me anxious, which made me give it up for a few years, and the anxiety flew away.

I have been feeling mentally wobbly for a while and had a really crap day yesterday. Paranoia and depression with anxiety: but paranoid, depressed and anxious about nothing at all and everything simultaneously.

If I wasn't on antipsychotics I think I'd be having a really bad time.

I was going to talk about tiny tits in the trees but I haven't seen any. Blue tits that is. When we had a birdfeeder when I was a child, our garden seemed to be full of them and great tits, which are slightly bigger.

I hope you all are feeling OK.

I finally get paid tomorrow which is a relief as I got the current non-lot of money early because of the new year. Which means it's gone quicker. I've had to borrow £15 just to survive. I must have spent it carefully as I still had £5 yesterday...

My foot is slowly healing. Maybe the vitamins from the salads help with it..? Who knows. I know that eating salad is meant to be better than not eating it. I know it's not very wintery but it's the only veg I can stomach at the moment (apart from baked beans which allegedly count towards the 5 portions a day recommended by The Government.

And last but not least my methadone has finally gone down to 55mg and is going down to 35mg over the next ten weeks. It's all planned out so no need for doctors' appointments between now and then. I can't wait to get OFF the stuff completely. Really can't wait! If all it's going to do is make me feel "normal" why not feel normal on nothing? I'm taking the last bit slowly though. Don't want to be one of those people who goes running back screaming on to it again. I know a LOT of people are said to do that. I can think of two off the top of my head. Well time's ticking must go... see ya next week.

Illustrated: a blue tit in the snow

Food!

2012-01-10T13:55:00.000Z

I BORROWED a load of money yesterday. It was only £15 but enough to buy DIFFERENT FOOD. Y'know: mixed salad, sardines, bread, cheese. Stuff you can make deli sandwiches out of.

And a big break from endless curly fries and baked beans on toast. Ukh. I was literally starting to feel physically ill from the bad diet (even though I used to eat a diet like that pretty much all the time).

My foot is still weeping slightly. It must be sad. But it's way way better than it was when it was a pussing mountain. It's just very gradually healing. The itching is a good sign. That's always been a sign things are on the mend in my experience.

Black leopard attacks little girl at zoo:
I was looking for the lion clip where it really goes for it but couldn't find it.

Lion hug:

Illustrated: my salad isn't quite this posh...

No more gunk

2012-01-08T16:35:00.002Z

MY ABSCESS is going down. The skin has all peeled off and it looks more like a pinkish crater than a very rounded purple hill. Also it's going itchy, always a sign of healing. So the time for the doctor has gone. And as I'm NOT injecting heroin there is no reason for any recurrence.

The knife I used, by the way, had one sharp spike on the end, not two blunt ones like the one illustrated. I just couldn't get a picture of tomatoes any other way.

I'm set to borrow money tomorrow as I'm so broke I'm down to beans on toast every day interspersed with oven chips on their own. I'm really hungry even though I've had FOUR small slices of toast and one ENTIRE can of beans this morning. That must surely add up to 700 calories and the risperidone (antipsychotic) I'm on makes you fat. It does this by altering the way your body processes sugar so you need fewer calories. SO I SHOULDN'T FEEL HUNGRY AT ALL. Bloody pills!

I'm due a small plate of American style curly oven chips soon (not yet broke enough to go for straight English ones) plus I have over two litres of 50p cloudy lemonade (more calories) that I use as a substitute for cyder when not drinking. Ie every day. Hasn't stopped me having the occasional one, but the constant hand-to-mouth cigarettes and alcohol is now reduced to just cigarettes.

Speaking of which. I probably shouldn't have tried to give up smoking while I was reducing a methadone dose. And I have an appointment with the DOCTOR at the clinic tomorrow morning, which I'm dreading so please wish me luck. I have to go else I'll get terminated by this public machine. Be lucky everyone!

Illustrated: curly fries and beans on toast ~ what my diet has been reduced to. But only for the next week....

SOLAR QUEST: ACID AIR RAID
This tune doesn't properly get going till nearly 4 mins into it. It's still good though...

I stuck a knife in my foot

2012-01-05T11:52:00.002Z

THERE WAS an abscess on my right foot. It was only about the size of a large coin but stood out hemispherical and purple and it hurt a lot. Especially putting shoes on. So I burnt off the end of my tomato-cutting knife, wiped it on my jumper then stuck the end right in, a good quarter of a centimetre and squeezed ~ oh and the bright red bloody pus that came out was gorgeous. Just when you thought it had all gone more huge globs oozed to freedom. Eventually I'd squeezed it so vigorously my abscess was flat. Unfortunately it's started filling up again, so I repeated the action yesterday and pus-water literally fountained at the ceiling. My two other abscesses are nearly healed.

I feel ill all the time in a run-down type of way that is probably called "depression". I've given up taking drugs every day as I can't afford it. I have £15 or £20 to last until the Monday after next, so I'm stocking up on baked beans and mini Hovis bread. I've also been feasting on sardine and mixed American salad sandwiches.

I don't know how to cure the depression. I wake every morning feeling like I want to pee and even when I do I still want to pee some more. So I get up and the uncomfortable feeling goes. Then I force myself in the shower. Many days I can only persuade myself to wash the bottom half. I get in there literally semi-clothed. But at least I've had half a shower. Then I wash my armpits in the sink. I know this is all terribly sad but when did I ever claim not to be a sad person?

I have a business idea that I reckon could really take off. Finally ~ my passport off benefits. But I will absolutely have to hire staff once this thing gets going. Purely because the running of the entire business will be down to me and I simply will not be allowed to be sick. Not even for one day. I worked out I will probably have to work 12-hour days in the beginning. But it's better than being on state benefits. If I don't get off benefits I will die on them. Probably by suicide. My single biggest regret in life is that my suicide attempts, which were serious, did not work. When I'm angry and down that's what I dwell on sometimes, because I had the drawer full of tricyclic antidepressants; I had the wherewithall to take them all. And I stopped at 70 pills. Pathetic. Truly pathetic. And when I woke up I felt more sick than I've ever felt in my life. Truly poisoned to my core.

Well I have to go. My foot is still hurting a bit. I'm looking forward to another session with the tomato knife. Maybe tomorrow during This Morning ~ as long as Holly and Phil are presenting.

Must go; hope you're all well. And HAPPY NEW YEAR.

Hey wasn't I stupid, thinking it was New Year's Eve when it was December 30? Just shows how much the ceremony means to me these days. I haven't been to a New Year's Eve party in a decade.

TAKE CARE EVERYONE.

WHY WE'RE BIPOLAR: NORMAL LIFE SUCKS
Thanks Buggerlugs THIS is real...

Terrible Sleep

2011-12-30T11:03:00.007Z

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

A Late Wakening

2011-12-29T19:46:00.005Z

I LAID IN BED ALL DAY TILL 5PM then defrosted for an hour (ie smoked cigarettes in front of the television) then HAD to go out to the bloody methadone chemist. Strangely the methadone made me feel much better. Yesterday I was manic in the morning, depressed in the afternoon. So depressed I had to go to bed I felt lousy. Couldn't even eat, so I had to buy a shish kebab. I get the couscous version in the box with salad. A full meal of smoky lamb chunks for £6. The shop that does the less salty salad is shut over Xmas. Lazy bastards!

I nearly had a big row in the library just now for phoning a friend. Some Asian guy kept coming up to me asking me to keep it down. Then he told me to stop talking when I was trying to LISTEN to a very involved story so I yelled I'M NOT TALKING then the rude woman who tells the homeless man not to sleep in the library said "well I can hear you" so I deliberately spoke as loud as possible as I gathered my things and left. Amazingly I didn't feel the biting cold that had me in sweats of misery walking down. That's because my methadone is finally working.

The poor girl in the room next to me has bought an LCD TV and expected to get Freeview channels out here in the twee suburbs where we get the worst TV reception I've ever experienced. I said you'll be lucky. Then she asked me how to tune it in I said highlight analogue tuning and she got 4 channels of snow, just like I get. The other night Gladiator came on ITV. I slammed in the DVD and compared scenes. The DVD was normality. On ITV it was snowing in Rome!

I'm feeling ill. I don't know why. Is it just manic depression again? I don't know. I feel like I want to puke. I have an abscess on my right foot. The abscesses on my legs have gone down after I stuck surgical blue needles in each one and drained them but this one on my foot is too painful to mess around like that so I might have to go to casualty (that's the ER to you Americans) to get flucloxacillin, which is the normal antibiotic for drug abscesses. Yes I'm afraid I was using every day over the Xmas break (and what sane person wouldn't?) but now I'm back in the routine of knocking back methadone like a 40 year old baby in under the chemist's "supervision" I somehow find it easier to keep the old nose clean.

I'm fretting about what I'm going to eat tonight or should I just get drugs instead? I don't really want to do anything. I wish I could have general anaesthesia. I wish I could have £10,000 to put my magazine together. I worked out start up costs would be a mere £1000 for computers and phones but several grand to pay the printers to knock out the things. In this country WH Smith are the main distributors of periodicals but I need more information about how you persuade shops to order more copies. Can you do offers like buy 20 get 20 free? Please if anyone knows anything about the magazine industry please help me. I really need a detailed book on the subject that goes into the mathematics of print run costs and advertising revenue. Websites and links please. BTW I have looked into the idea of publishing online and for various reasons it's a non-starter. The entire point of this magazine is that you take it home and read real words on a real page. Even Dickens published a magazine "Household Words". Not a website. Did you know when American newspapers went online they garnered a mere TENTH of the advertising income from the internet as from paper. Please someone who has edited or better still been advertising or circulation manager on a magazine get in touch and tell me how it's done.

Well I've got to go else I'll get terminated. Happy New Year to one and all. (Just in case I'm not in the mood to post between now and then....)

Illustrated: the standard of technology in my house (except you can't even have a set-top box in my house) ~ the landlord who takes in over £200 PER ROOM per week ie SIXTY THOUSAND POUNDS A YEAR income from this house cannot even be bothered to fit an operational high gain television aerial to our chimney!

HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 4

HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 3

A Morning of Domesticity

2011-12-28T13:04:00.005Z

(THAT MEANS SCURRYING ROUND THE KITCHEN like a blue-arsed fly, cleaning up to you!) yes I turned up the radio to top volume (I don't know why but I nearly always listen to talk stations) so Radio 4 Extra was blaring out The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe with Lucy meeting Mr Tumnuss under the snowy lamppost... then a boring phone-in without Vanessa Feltz on BBC London and then stuff to do with people being at risk of 20 years in a labour camp for not crying hard enough over the death of the aptly named "Kim Jong ILL" in North Korea. Over this time I filled an entire black sack with rubbish including at least five nearly-full cartons of milk and cleared a table top of paperclips, women's eye makeup, Vaseline lip gel and glass ashtrays. I was about to wipe it down with newspapers to clean it when I found a picture of Sunshine or Sweetie, one of the pair of Chinese pandas that have been lent to a Scottish zoo for 17 years, the tubby furry had a stick of bamboo in its mouth and just made you want to poke it in the tummy and twist those black ears round and round!

I'm so glad the "festive tide" is past us. Now it's New Year's Eve, which I haven't done for 9 or 10 years and only ever enjoyed when I was high on Ecstasy which says a lot about New Years if you require mindbending drugs to enjoy it. Then again I was at a psychedelic trance party and you require mindbending drugs to get into the groove there too so... ho-humm. All this was so very many years ago. I just wish I could kick the drugs I still occasionally take now. Even Valium is bad. I know it's nowhere near as bad as taking heroin, but I'd rather take neither. Do you know the one decent Valium dealer I know of via a friend (I also happen to know his mother) sells a minimum £20 bag. Just like a lot of heroin dealers! 20 blue (10mg) Valium for £20. The only drugs I have clinical need of are the occasional sleeping pill ~ as longterm readers will know I go through periods where I simply do not sleep. Usually I am manic and high or manic and exhausted at these times. I also get occasional panic so I started taking Valium for that over the summer. I had a near panic-attack at the Nutter Club (dual diagnosis drugs and mental illness meeting) I used to go to (where nearly everyone was bipolar, I might add and 50% of bipolars admit to their doctors to indulging in illegal drugs which means the number actually having used them must be far higher. Interestingly nearly all the street drugs tweak the same three chemicals ~ serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline aka norepinephrine ~ that are activated in manic episodes, are known to go haywire in psychosis and are probably at low levels in depresssion which is why antidepressants are occasionally categorized according to which of these three chemicals they tweak. Antidepressants can actually precipitate mania in susceptible individuals, which is why when I took Prozac I was constantly being told to calm down. One girl, who had a manic-depressive mother and sister said I was acting "manic". I did calm down... about four weeks later. And took Prozac very irregularly after that as it just made me so agitated sometimes I literally could not even sit in a chair I had to pace pace pace. This is the start of my bipolar symptoms, back in my mid 20s when my diagnosis was actually chronic fatigue syndrome. I heard a fascinating description of that condition on television last week when a former sufferer said it's due to the brain being over-activated, hence the extreme tiredness yet inability to sleep at night. I definitely had CFS and wouldn't wish it on anyone. In a way it's worse than severe depression because severe depression is taken seriously by psychiatrists whereas a person cabbaged by "M.E." (as CFS used to be known) would probably still to this day be treated as a neurotic by certain members of the medical profession. One characteristic CFS sufferers are said to have in common is a tendency to push themselves past the point of exhaustion even BEFORE they become ill. They work hard and play hard. They are not the type of people who lie down to take rests before an afternoon of activity. Yet when you have this horrible condition you absolutely have to spend your energy like a person spends money on a tight budget and you have to lie down and close your eyes and it actually gets so bad you can't even watch television because it's all there in your face. This terrible world. Glaring at you. That's what they call photophobia. Oh those were the days. My early twenties. Totally messed up by an illness many people don't even believe exists. Not even I believed it existed because it was me and I had no rights to be ill. I still had to push push push even though I'd already pushed so hard I'd broken. Not one of my friends ever truly gave any support. Except perhaps one, who did it in a subtle way. Then one day someone I'd only just met, who'd asked me about myself ~ and we were on Ecstasy after a huge party and so talking intently ~ said to me Your life has been ruined by this thing. And I cried because that was the one person. The one single person who ever listened to me, understood me and belived me.

Now I have a new idea for the future. Something I'm going to do that I could make good money out of. But it's a business requiring start up investment. I would need £5-10,000 so how I'm going to make that I've no idea. Maybe I should get writing the children's books. I know it's not the gateway to a fortune but I heard you get about £3000 in advance per book. So if I wrote 4, I'd have my money. Oh yeah but there's tax, agent's fees and VAT. OK maybe if I wrote ten books I'd have my money. But I'm determined to do this business idea. It's a magazine I want to publish and I'm sure people would buy it. So that's my wish that can and will come true. My family will remember that as I grew up I'd run to my parents with "business ideas". I was full of them. I even daydreamed of becoming a property developer. Aged 10. People don't understand me. Just because in the illegal world of drugs I'm unwilling to get deeply involved, they think I'm either soft or stupid. I'm just the type of person who likes to do things above board and to know that what's mine is mine and that the Proceeds of Crime Act ain't gonna take my plasma TV away. Know what I'm saying?

Well I'll leave y'all on that note. Have a very Happy New Year everyone. Here's to a fantabulous 2012!!

Illustrated: I love pandas and Freesat is coming! (Without the Plasma TV (for now)).

HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 5

Christmas Report

2011-12-26T18:53:00.004Z

IT WAS A VERY QUIET DAY I had hot chicken Madras (supermarket stylee) and a bottle of fake Baileys and watched the Queen's Speech at 3pm (British tradition). That was about it. Then I took some Valium and fell into merciful sleep. Anything that helps one escape Xmas is an excellent thing in my book...!

But having said that:

I hope y'all had a good one.

HARD MELODIC TRANCE

HARDCORE TECHNO TRANCE RANDOMNESS

SCOOTER ONE (ALWAYS HARDCORE)

Xmas!

2011-12-23T16:25:00.004Z

GREY, COLD, RAINY WEATHER. Waking up in the afternoon wondering just how life can go on.... Morrisons packed out with customers manically buying whiskey smoked salmon (as I did)... tinsel everywhere... yes IT'S CHRISTMAS AGAIN! I HOPE YOU ALL ARE ENJOYING IT!

AND IN CASE I DON'T POST BETWEEN NOW AND THEN: DO HAVE A MERRY ONE

(IF NOT, A TOLERABLE ONE...)

AND A FANTASTIC 2012!

MERRY TRANCEMAS!

Sorted

2011-12-22T13:03:00.004Z

I'VE SORTED out THREE pressing things today that were doing my head in.

1: the council wanted to perform a Residence Check ~ to make sure that the person living at the address really was me

2: my Service Charge payments have been messed up since I signed a form authorizing their direct withdrawal from my account. Nothing has been withdrawn, making me look like a freeloading fraudster

3: and worst of all my only bank account has been hit by FRAUDSTERS trying to take a direct debit off my account and putting it £200 in the red (that's over $300) ~ give or take a few pennies. I rang up their helpline ENRAGED and got told to enter my nearest branch where I was considerably less enraged thanks to chainsmoking and alcohol (which calms me down). Turns out nobody had tried to fraud me. A direct debit from another customer had been typed incorrectly hitting MY account not theirs. Now all £197 has been refunded and I am a fully fledged human being with a bank account once more!

Illustrated: a map of London highlighting Islington, where I don't live... or DO I??!?

HARD TRANCE

ARCHANGEL GABRIEL: TRANCE TEKNO

"AWESOME SEGMENT"

I won the lottery!

2011-12-21T09:58:00.005Z

I TOOK IN 5 OLD EUROMILLIONS tickets to my local shop to be barcode-checked and guess what? On Friday 21 October I won £3.20!!!

That's all of FIVE US dollars.

I didn't know it was possible to win so little but I still walked off in a daze, daydreaming about living up a yuppie tower block with Sky TV and a new computer.

I spent about half the money on a half litre of Fizz cherry flavour cyder, which is made in Lithuania.

Hey I found a great new blog at Lilly's place http://mymethdiaries.blogspot.com. Drop by!

*******

Not as cheesy as it could be
BEETHOVEN'S FÜR ELISE
chill out dance version
actually i really like this it's the sort of music the Queen would listen to if she and Prince Philip dropped Es together after a long day's ribbon-cutting...

This is more Prince Edward's style, methinks...
PACHEBEL'S CANON ~ CLUB MIX

... and Princess Ann mellowing out with a spliff....

E-cigarette update

2011-12-20T14:34:00.006Z

I'VE JUST HEARD OF A new smoking cessation pill that is to nicotine what methadone is to heroin: Champix (varenicline) ~ thanks Lilly.(Ie a weak and feeble substitute ideal for those with enough will to power themselves through...) (methadone is actually stronger than heroin and more dangerous; it just feels weaker).

My e-cigarette which is called "Impulse" tastes like rhubarb crumble. I've thoroughly enjoyed puffing away in shops. When one store detective gave me a funny look I stubbed it out on my eye. The end looks like a diamond and is cold by the way; it lights up red whenever you toke on it.

I think I'm getting the puffing technique right, though I have to say I felt the need to buy a pack of ten Sterling Superkings "just to compare". And I'd say the nicotine blast is about the same. Obviously with Jasper and Jasper Impulses you don't get that lovely attractive smoke curling out of your nostrils.

Do you know I once got reprimanded for walking into a clothes shop while (heavily) exhaling cigarette smoke? How pissy can you get?

I'll let you know how my e-smoking goes: I think I'll be needing a newly refilled e-fag in a day or two. The ones I'm smoking are nonrechargable and disposable. Supposedly you're getting 25 cigarettes for £6.99 (which is about what 25 fags cost anyhow...) I still think it's better than nicotine gum, and way better than patches. I'm a nervous smoker. When I need a smoke, I need a smoke!

I bought a Thai film on DVD yesterday called Sick Nurses but it's pretty boring...

PS has anyone notice Blogger's "highlight a word and add a link to it" facility is GONE today... why?

VIVALDI TECHNO TRANCE

ENYA: WATERMARK
a wonderful tune

UDO LINDENBERG: MÄDCHEN AUS OST BERLIN
sad cold war era song about a West German boy who falls in love with an East German girl

ENYA: MAY IT BE
music from the Lord of the Rings

Electric Cigarettes

2011-12-18T13:07:00.001Z

TOMORROW I'M GETTING AN E-CIGARETTE (as illustrated ~ don't they look real?!) I'm DETERMINED TO GIVE UP SMOKING!!

I'M FEELING WAY BETTER than yesterday and the previous few days. I think finally I have caught up on my lost sleep.

I have been eating microwave cheeseburgers that are so addictive. Seriously you want to try one. Use all the relish and extra relish (and extra cheese) if so desired. And mound it up with salad and I promise you that just like with mama heroin you'll be crawling back for more.

I did have a tiny bit of gear last night but I couldn't even feel it. It just made me sleep through till morning without waking every hour (like I normally do). I also realized my methadone isn't actually holding me properly as I'm getting bad sweats from my heater. Then I get bad sweats again by venturing outside into the freezing cold! I won't promise never to touch the "B" again as y'all know I will. But I'm determined to get my methadone dose cut down to nothing as quick as poss. I can't wait till I get to the magic 20mg. That means, to my mind, that I'm not a raving addict any more.

I saw a funky SQUARE satellite dish this morning. Just like one of those BSB Squariels (remember them) ~ but massive. BSB who went against Sky's (then) 30+ channels with SIX of their own and expected to win the war! In the end the 2 companies merged into "BSkyB". Freesat is operated by the BBC and ITV (the main terrestrial TV companies) but they use the same satellites as Sky. Anyone who stops subscribing to Sky automatically gets Freesat but lots of people don't seem to realize that. 100+ channels FREE. And supposedly 200 more if you tune them in manually.

What was I talking about? O, the weather. Yes it's FREEEZING COLD and yet I've had terrible sweats when walking to the chemist. O yeah and HERE'S THE NEWS.

TOMORROW I'M BUYING AN ELECTRONIC CIGARETTE. They cost £8 for a nonrechargable disposable one that contains as many blasts on the nicotine as 30 real fags. I'm determined to get my absolute money's worth by holding in the nicotine as if it's crack smoke. £8 is $12 and almost as much as real fags cost anyhow but I'm determined to give these electronic ones a whirl. I've seen people use them and they look so funky. The rechargable ones used to cost £40 ~ then you have to hunt down a supplier of refill cartridges and of course I'd only want maximum strength ones. I'll let you know how it goes...

Freezing

2011-12-16T14:11:00.001Z

IT IS RIDICULOUSLY FREEZING COLD these days and I trudged up the road wearing 2 jackets, sweating heavily under these and a scarf. Then I drank the evil methadone, went round Morrisons in the worst mood ever and retired to the library for over an hour to let that gloopy green crap take effect. Methadone is the slowest acting drug I have ever tried. It takes a good 90 minutes for any real effect and "peak serum levels" are reached after four very long hours. I wake up each morning sweaty yet cold and it takes a good 2-3 hours to steel myself for that nasty same old same old walk to the chemist for a sip of barely effectual linctus. As you all know I can't stand methadone. I have an appointment in the new year to see the doctor who should hopefully reduce the dose still further from 60mg to 40mg over the course of a month. After that I want to get down to 20mg and from then on if the clinic won't give me take-homes, I'm just buying methadone on the street and weaning myself off it at my own pace.

I got woken up by the crackheads or whoever they are making the biggest rumpus at 5am, then this idiot went and rang every single doorbell in the building at about 11. As if that's going to endear her to the residents of Halfwit House where I live.

I got a call at around 10 saying finally I have a date for satellite TV installation but it's in 7 weeks' time and there are no earlier appointments. How pathetic is that? I'm beginning to wish I'd just shelled out extra and got the installation done privately.

I'm munching "American salad" like it's going out of fashion. The British government recommend its citizens eat at least 5x80g portions of fruit or vegetables per day. Well 2x200g salad bags works out the same and finely chopped mixed salad is just about the only veg I can bear to eat (apart from broccoli and peas). I loathe cabbage (except raw) and hate brussels sprouts. They smell like farts. I eat my salad totally undressed (70s lower middle class style) so I'm keeping my calories to a minimum. I could do with losing a bit of weight. Last time I weighed myself I was 220lbs! ~ that's gotta be close on 15 stone! I've also been eating those industrial microwavable cheeseburgers you get from the chilled meats isle. They come with a relish sachet and aren't bad doused in American salad.

I was reading Jason Donovan's autobiography in the library ~ only the bits where he details his coke habit, of course. I love reading about and watching films of other people doing coke as the drug is so "glamorous" ~ to them, but not to me. Powder coke only ever made me feel jagged and exceptionally moody and there's no fantastic rush like with crack. I always thought crack was rubbish, too. As for heroin, Keith Richards got it right when he says it's all in the name ~ the arch seductress. And just like any dirty tart you can live without her without too much hassle. Methadone is like a stern overweight babushka reprimanding you for past misdeeds but I take methadone as a means to an end. And that end is a life on no drugs at all...

I wasn't back on heroin...

2011-12-14T16:14:00.002Z

I WASN'T BACK ON HEROIN when I made my last post I was off it. I was enthusiastic about everything because I wasn't sleeping and was a bit hyper. Nowhere near hyper enough in my opinion, but there you go. I haven't taken heroin in more than a week and I don't miss it. The relapse started off when an ancient dealer of mine ran up to me on the street and led me to his car where he gave me a sample of B that he guaranteed would be better than anyone else's. It was. So I scored it every day for about a week. Then one day he couldn't get it together to come to my house so I thought **** it and just left it there. I was scared of getting withdrawals so I scored off someone else whose gear was reliably crap. And the day after that, and the next day, and so on I have used no drugs at all. When I couldn't sleep I tried Valium which only took the jagged irratable edge off. I kept getting told not to talk so loud and I was losing my temper with certain people on the phone who owe me money and the Valium probably did calm all that down. One night I took a zopiclone but not even that made me sleep and zopiclone is the best sleeper I've ever tried by a mile. Even in a severe manic episode if I dropped it at 10pm I'd be asleep by midnight (and then get up, raring to go at 2:30am!!) So it looks like I had a miniature half-arsed manic episode as I was only sleeping about 2 hours a day for days on end. Then one day I slept all afternoon. Then returned to not sleeping. Yesterday and last night I slept for hours and hours and hours and surprise surprise I feel sluggish with flashes of depression. I really hope I'm not going down.

Yesterday I had to go down my ****hole of a drugs clinic. They really are the most inept bunch of people. Couldn't even book me an appointment for the new year when I NEED A DOCTOR'S REVIEW to take my methadone down even further otherwise I will be stuck at 60mg and that's beyond the pale. I want to be on 40mg now. Then from 40 to 20. Once I get down to 10 I'm either telling the clinic I want a level dose (so I get take-home doses) or scoring methadone on the street. I'm not going through the horror of reducing methadone from 10mg to nothing under their patronizing and condescending system of "supervised consumption".

I bought a fan heater (£15) so that I can urge myself into the shower with the luxury of hot winds instead of freezing damp and cold (my other heater was completely blown, even when I changed the fuse). Plus various items from Asda including a bag of finely chopped salad. So I've been reading the Andy Warhol Diaries while munching like a rabbit.

It took me quite a while to get a hang of Andy Warhol's personality. There's more humour and warmth there than you'd credit at first glance. He did his last christmas day giving handouts in a soup kitchen, which was sad. No Halston. No Bianca Jagger. None of the glamorous friends. Just him and a member of Interview staff handing out free food to the homeless. In fact at the very end it seemed a lot of his old social set had dumped him ~ and then he died, after an operation as minor as a gallbladder-ectomy.

I'd love to be an artist with millionaire collectors but I can only paint cartoons. I'd also like to be a TV magnate ~ I have ideas for channels that haven't been done. And of course I want to be a bestselling novelist. Only problem with that last one is nobody buys novels any more and my inspiration has deserted me.

Well I've got to go and eat more chicken legs and salad. I'M OFF HEROIN. And down to 65mg methadone as of tomorrow. Have a nice day y'all...

Insomnia

2011-12-12T13:12:00.002Z

I HAVEN'T BEEN SLEEPING at all well since the end of last week.

I had met one of my old drug dealers who gave me a sample of the most shyte hot heroin I had tasted in a long time. I could actually FEEL it. And so I was scoring off him every single day for over a week. Blew loads of money I'd saved up. I felt like I did in the early days of my addiction: too scared to stop. Scared in an indistinct, distant type of way and not knowing what I was going to do with myself without this wonderful heroin. My veins even started to behave, meaning I got 90% of my hits straight in. The warm buzz of yesteryear was back.

Then the dealer started taking the piss with timing. Leaving me waiting 4.5 hours one particular day. All he said was that for another £5 I could have another bag so of course I got one more. The next day he answered and promised to come right round but it transpired he had no driver and to add insult to injury he'd picked up a new batch of "B" ~ call me cynnical but it was probably nowhere near as good as the old stuff. Which is just about the only B of normal quality I've had this year. All else has been cowshit and how junkies can queue up on street corners for the crap most people sell is beyond me. They must have seriously low tolerance. I'm only on 70mg of methadone and I literally cannot feel most people's heroin AT ALL... just the vaguest opiate tinge, which could be imagination. Then nothing. Even this good stuff made me feel good for all of a minute or so then I was just tired. But not in the cross-eyed nodding out semi-conscious state heroin is supposed to put you in.

I was terrified of stopping because I was terrified of withdrawals from the extra tolerance I thought I had built up over my week and a half of using. On the last day I scored some B that was so weak I couldn't feel it (ie it was the rubbish most people buy and convince themselves they're getting some sort of buzz out of). I got my weekend methadone so I could at least take my doses when I felt I really needed them. This helped a lot.

Another issue was that I was fighting off a particularly nasty bout of depression that just made me feel my life was over. On heroin life felt OK. Without it, life was intolerable. Please please let my mood switch. When I'm manic I go vehemently anti-drugs (why waste money on illegal chemicals when you're high already?) ... It's not mania as such, but my mood did switch from exceptionally sour, down and ill to normal, up and interested. Suddenly life seems full of possibilities. Life has meaning and the meanings are beautiful. The downside to this has been pretty bad insomnia. For a couple of days I can't have slept much more than 2-3 hours. I remember one day I huddled under a duvet on my chair and just slept a while as BBC News blared away. I was taking Valium which took the edge off my ragged mood but did very little to help me sleep. Eventually on Sunday daytime I slept and slept all day. I did sleep about 4 hours on Sunday night but something's going on. I know it's not depression. When I'm down I nearly always sleep hours longer than usual. In my brief periods of "euthymia" (that is "normal mood" to me and you) I sleep almost exactly 8 hours. I am not sleeping eight hours. I feel like I've been out clubbing all night on illegal stimulants that will not wear off. Not drugged out of my head, but buzzing enough not to want to BOTHER wasting the time and effort involved in putting my head down. I dropped a sleeping pill last night and still spent longer reading The Andy Warhol Diaries than I ever did sleeping.

Good news: I've thrown out on SCART-less television, one microwave, one foodmixer. The charity shop won't accept electricals. I've given them maybe as many as 40 classical music albums on vinyl. People who should know better, people like Deshane, my Jamaican support worker, say to me "vinyl's worth money man! Don't give it away! You should sell that." The last thing a compulsive harder like me needs to hear. The ONLY records I have kept are Mike Oldfield's Tubular bells on vinyl and UB40's Signing Off. Which I very nearly gave away, thinking all the writing on the cover meant it was a Brahms concerto!

I've got to go and take my computer to the shop it came from but I'm not relishing the experience. This store is well known for having the worst customer service in the business. On the two occasions that I ventured in the staff were uninterested and dismissive and one didn't even appear to know what "dual core" meant. There's a problem on my hard drive. Not with the drive itself (so it seems) but with the cable. Unfortunately the cable is integral to the drive. I know this as I've removed and reinserted it on several occasions in my attempts at getting better connections. So they're almost certainly going to insist that I pay for a new drive thus leaving me with a totally empty computer. No Norton. No Microsoft Word. Both of which I paid extra for. What am I going to do? Does anyone know if/how the shop can reinstall these products for me. I only use my computer for blogging and wordprocessing. Oh and it MUST wordprocess in Chinese and Japanese, like the old one did. Yeah man I'm a true citizen of the 21st century. I can input in Mandarin Chinese!

Which reminds me, I really must get back to my Spanish course. Unfortunately I rapidly realized that Spanish is inferior to French. Not linguistically, but culturally. French literature, for instance, is the only modern literature that can seriously vye with English as the most superior body of writing of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. French is spoken in some amazing places. Example: I made Friends I never would have been able to talk to without the French language when I spent a couple of weeks in Morocco over Xmas/New Year 1991/1992. It was hardly a glamorous vacation. We spent new year's eve sleeping with the homeless at Fez station in bitter bitter cold mountain weather. I woke up in the very early hours seriously worried that the local man next to me, shrouded as he was in a peaked ethnic hoodie really was dead. Then the railway station master came out at 6am to loudly shoo us all away. He piped down when he saw me and my Japanese friend. Gave us a funny look. And we got on the next train to wherever. I still think back to Morocco, the most evocative place I've ever been. Even more so than India. Berber coffee, North African cigarettes and tangerines on the trees in December. I wandered the perimiter of the royal palace at dawn watching the king's trees bathed in golden light thinking: WOW, I'M IN AFRICA. Africa! How cool is that. I'd so love to go back. And I got there from West Wales taking trains and boats the entire way. It took three days but it's only a three hour flight. I can't think of anywhere else in the world, apart from the crossing from Spain to Morrocco, where two entirely different universes come so close. The one European and "Christian"; the other Berber-speaking and Muslim (Moroccans aren't really Arabs, they're Berbers. The Arabic language is mostly used in government and by the media. We got to stay in this doctor's house we met on the train and he had satellite television. Now I always think you haven't truly seen a country unless you've watched their television and I spent a couple of days glued to Egyptian soap operas and the Moroccan version of "songs of praise". The doctor could not understand my fascination. I really wish I'd known Arabic, but as I say, French is just as useful as Arabic out there and English (at least in 1991-2) was almost exclusively used for tourism (and probably international trade).

The weirdest thing that happened to me in Morocco came when the official guide joined heads with the manager of a carpet shop then came up to me and offered me a kilo of hashish on credit card!

Ho-hummm... such is life. I'd really like to go back to Morocco if and when I ever get myself 100% opiate clean. I'd rather do my healing in a faraway place... and Morocco does feel a LONG way from home ~ except it's only a 3 hour flight back to London! I could reinvigorate my French. Hashish is no temptation to me; I absolutely despise the stuff. And I doubt there's much heroin in Morocco. Morocco was the only place I could think of that I'd really like to go to that ISN'T a notorious production or transit country for opiate narcotics. So maybe I will go. One day... one day... one day.

And how are YOU today?

PS Reading Andy Warhol has inspired me to become a great pop artist in my own right. My Mum sent me an art easel for my birthday which I'd really like to get some 2x2ft canvases for, so I can paint cartoons in acrylics. Cartoons are probably just about all I'm capable of producing art-wise... I'm going to save up and blow £100 in an art shop. I'll try and slap up the results online... (dont' hold your breath until this gets done...!)

Andy Warhol ~ diarist extraordinaire; the mysteries of the "east" (actually the West (Morocco is just as westerly as the UK)); hashish ~ it is exactly what it looks like

No Free Cable But Freesat Is A-Coming

2011-12-07T21:36:00.003Z

I TOOK MY CABLE BOX to my friend Valium Marilyn's, unplugged hers, plugged mine in and hacked and hacked away trying to get a free signal. She even produced two free viewing cards that had been lying amongst a pile of junk mail but the cable somehow knew the serial numbers of the cards were mis-synchronized with my digibox. "Aren't they crafty bastards," said Valium Marilyn. It took over ten minutes to get her TV working again, then we watched Australian customs undercover on channel 100-and-something. Both of us were glued to the screen as some Vietnamese lollypops were slit open to reveal high grade white powder. We were slavering at the screen thinking "China white heroin!" But it was boring old coke. Cocaine from Vietnam. Whatever next. Even the customs inspector looked secretly disappointed.

I'm supposedly getting Freesat TV within the next month and a half at the longest. I'm hoping to get someone else's cancellation. I can no longer bear living with four channels of snow and endless trails for things on BBC3 and E4 and other channels everyone else seems to get in Britain apart from me.

Of course I am also supposedly moving house imminently. Which is what got me so het up about signing up for satellite television. If I get that installed surely sod's law shall come into play making me have to move out before I get my hands on at least 83 channels of free entertainment plus supposedly another 200 that I can tune in manually. You even get a horror film channel. So I'm doing what's known as Tempting Fate. Plunking down £67 on something that will really brighten my life, when my life is due to be brightened immeasurably more by this forthcoming move. True, everyone at the new house will be recovering from severe nervous breakdowns but so am I. Only a few months ago I was hearing voices every day and getting funny looks in shops. I still have to take medication and when I don't my mood plummets and sometimes I get quite paranoid. People on the street seem to be talking about me. So I take my medication albeit grudgingly. And look forward to moving house. Or satellite TV.

The pest controller came round today as we still have roaches marching around our kitchens. I showed him the Mount Everest of unsorted belongings on my double bed. We pretty much agreed it's Priority Number One that as much of these unwanted books, records, DVDs, classical albums on vinyl etc which includes at least one carrier bag full of WOMEN's clothes must go down the charity shop forthwith so that's what I'm doing. Also I HAVE to get my house tidy for the Freesat man. Otherwise I will die of shame.

My methadone is down to 70mg as of tomorrow, which I'm really pleased about. 70 mils! Wow. Never thought I'd see that day. I might actually be on less methadone now than Anna Grace out in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Now that would be one up the spout for her!

My newest to-do thing, apart from not use heroin on top of my increasingly lowly methadose, and to clear clear clear the rubble off my bed, is to GET MY COMPUTER REPAIRED. I found out if I move house I can get 30 (gigabyte(?)) broadband plus a landline phone plus 75 TV channels all for about £30 a month so I might go for that one. IF and when I move.

Well Xmas is a-coming, the geese are getting fat. Please put £20 in the drug addict's hat!

That's a traditional rhyme here in Britain. I'm not into begging up change any more. I even found a dropped purse, with money inside, on Morrison's floor. And instantly returned it. See, a change in lifestyle is possible... I just wish I could change quicker. And cut out all illicit druggie-use ALTOGETHER...

Well there we are then, as they say in Wales. I'll have to ping or else I'll get terminated!

Cable

2011-12-06T14:08:00.002Z

I WAS READING THROUGH the tat I have written and what a boring life! Oh yeah FINALLY I have paid the princely sum of £67 to get this free satellite dish. You only get the crap channels but hey it's better than 4 channels of snow that are about to be switched off anyway. I went outside and had a good scout round for satellite, cable and other TV inputs going into our house. The aerial on our roof doesn't work but there IS an old satellite dish up there, right on top of my bedroom and I looked and looked for a line coming in. I found the cable line which the installers helpfully split so I can route that in through my upstairs window. Does anybody know how to get free cable TV? I have the right box and everything but no viewing card. I plugged it in yesterday and it said "digital TV initializing" which was the biggest wind up as I knew it wasn't even lined into the cable. But please anybody how do I get free cable? As you can see I have become obsessed with television. This is because my life is otherwise empty and I was getting so depressed that as recently as yesterday I found myself lost and staring into space in Morrisons. Not just once but three times. I even did it at the till. Just nothing nothing nothing there. No inspiration no joy no hope and barely any life. I feel much better now because I've started taking my medication again and it works QUICK. I had genuinely forgotten to take it for about two weeks hence the lull. Remember those happy days when not taking medication made me totally off my head manic? I wish I could be on that side of the equation. Not raving mad. But a little bit high. That would be good. There is a drug dealer with heroin I can actually feel so guess who I've been phoning. The bags are tiny which just shows how rubbishy most heroin must be nowadays to even be able to get high on such a tiny dose. I don't know what I'm going to do. My only hope in practical terms is a bit of mania. When I am manic I feel high anyway and go vehemently against drugs. If I could be manic I could be clean. I want away from all these drugs but look in despair at my own life and my own behaviour and think what for what for what for?

TV Aerials

2011-12-02T17:42:00.003Z

I'm very depressed. I've been taking drugs. I'm trying to get my TV sorted out. I either need to pay for an aerial to be fitted (wouldn't count on my landlord bothering with that in a million years) or more likely a dish. If I get it pointed at 19.2E I get loads of channels in German. So I can educate myself as I stare gormlessly into space for hours on end. I'm supposedly moving house almost immediately but frankly it's worth paying £150 just to hurry the move up and I get to keep the digibox. I'll just have to convince the community nuthouse I'm moving to that Euro TV will be to my benefit. I can also get Freesat installed for £67 but that's too complicated (they only take payment by debit or credit card) whereas if I arrange it myself and pay extra I can pay in cash and should get a cash discount. So that's all that's happening at the moment. Me trying not to take drugs and getting increasingly irritated by the rubbishy picture on my telly. 4 channels and you have to move the aerial to view each individual one. On a lucky day you can even get channel 5. I do possess a freeview box and bought a £70 high gain rooftop aerial on Wednesday. Unfortunately I hadn't a clue how to assemble it. So took it back to Argos under their 14 day money back guarantee in favour of a simpler aerial which supposedly came fully assembled but I couldn't work out how to fit the coaxial cable to the gizmo that plugs in the back (even though I have done this before albeit over 5 years ago). So I brought that one back and changed it for a £59.99 really posh indoor aerial that eventually scanned in some freeview channels (minus BBC, ITV and Channel 4 ie the main channels everyone buys it for) only for it to claim "no signal" on every single one. At one point I thought Al Jezeera was going to come through but no such luck. I only like Al Jezeera because I know George Bush wanted to bomb it. And no I am not an Islamic fundamentalist. Well that's that. I woke up feeling really sick today and I think it might have been withdrawal. A drug dealer on the street gave me a free sample of strong heroin which sorted me right out. Now I've had my methadone and intend to stick forever after to that even though the clinic have a ridiculous policy of insisting that anyone on a declining dose MUST drink it in the chemists under supervision, while a person on a level dose is allowed to take theirs home! This is all "to make sure you drink all your medication". Yeah, as if you're going to drink less than all when you're on a detox. Really logical. Of course I could have opted for take homes and just cut myself down but then I'm going to get moved back to the old catchment area of the old clinic and would have to either go back up to the dose prescribed or confess to the dose I was actually on because all new "clients" at methadone clinics are automatically put on supervised consumption for a few weeks. So that's that. I took eight pairs of jeans and two pairs of pensioner style trousers plus a vase full of the most horrible artificial flowers I've ever seen (all magnolia and brown, like artistically arranged dead moths). Got rid of that tat. Still have an everest sized amount of rubbish to go. Now I must leave you as this computer is about to terminate me. Please someone send me some happy vibes I'm so miserable.

Relapse

2011-11-28T16:16:00.000Z

EVERYTHING'S gone pear-shaped this past week. I completely lost my Mojo thanks to depression. Depression turned me to heroin. Heroin made me "happy" for a while. I want the clinic to reduce my methadone dose so I can get off off off all these opiates. As long as I'm on a level dose the itch to use is there. When the dose is declining I feel galvanized towards getting clean. That's how my psychology works. I can't see any life any future. I asked a friend who's on Subutex after 35 years plus on heroin whether he feels his life is over now and he said of course it's over that's why I'm seeing a psychiatrist. I would like to see some examples of people who come off opiates and actually live as productive members of society instead of committing suicide. I would have thought suicide was the more popular option. There's not much to say I'm crowding in here in a bad mood shopping bags and all. Food shopping. Not interesting shopping. I've got to go now.

Wombats

2011-11-26T10:30:00.000Z

FURRY FRIDAY ON SATURDAY

arguably Australia's cutest marsupial...

they love to be held...

...and stroked...

"wombat in a hat"

... and the babies are very cute too

WISHING Y'ALL A VERY FURRY WEEKEND INDEED!

2011-11-24T13:29:00.001Z

I'VE FOUND a new internet cafe that hopefully lets you publish posts after posting them. The one I had been using before had something ikky about their computers. So, a 20 minute walk later... and I'm here. Just around from crack corner. But I'm feeling strong. I'm truly fed up of all drugs; the last time was "the last time". I am resolved.

There's not a lot to say today. I hadn't had much sleep and had woken up early when I posted the last thing, which is why I was so chirpy. Later that day I came down with a crash-bang of gross proportions. That was the last time I tried drugs to raise my mood and it didn't work, they don't work, I'm fed up with it all so I'm now as clean as you can be on 80mg of methadone.

[I took the drugs after, not before the crash. The good mood was a natural high.]

Next week I have a dr's appointment about getting back to normal consumption. I only have to drink my methadone supervised because I was transferred to a new clinic and they do that with all their "clients". Last appointment I ranted on about how much of a drudge it is trudging to the chemist every day at your lowest point. I always used to drink the juice BEFORE setting out. So I started the day with it working full-on. Hopefully they will hear me on this point. And reduce me down down down again.

Arghkh I feel like a stuck record, there isn't much else to say. My computer is still sick I don't know whether it will ever be OK again or whether I will have to buy a new one. I'm saving as we speak.

I would like to get a hamster. I would like to move house. All these things are supposed to be happening, but they don't. There was supposed to be some meeting with my housing manager this week. I'm not sure whether I was supposed to be there or whether it has been and gone... who knows? I have to dash off now in case I get disconnected.

Good Morning

2011-11-21T11:38:00.000Z

GOOD MORNING GOOD MORNING GOOD MORNING. Finally I have got on a (public) computer that works because the mad woman who's always hogging it isn't here today. That kebab I had yesterday had way more salad than in the picture by the way. I woke up at 7am-ish so I'm already craving a lie-down. But no! Dishes have to be washed. I have purchased brand new Alpine flavour washing up liquid just for the occasion. Also I am dead set on FINALLY EMPTYING OUT THE COLLECTED ASSORTED RUBBISH MY HOUSE IS FULL OF. I have found out I am a compulsive hoarder of spectacular proportions. Eg I have at least 4 if not 5 televisions. I haven't a clue whether any bar the one I use actually work. I threw out 3 dining chairs earlier in the year. Clutter clutter. Endless pears of jeans with busted pockets. Or huge holes in them. Or too small. Or too big. Or just wrong. Endless clothes with fag burns and holes and motorbike-repair-style oil stains upon them. No! Life is going out of control. And I missed Jeremy Kyle (stuck record talk show host who "resolves" loud lower class people's problems and is 100% likely to criticize anybody who dares not to have a job!) because I was glugging my methadone. I did drink a can of cyder this morning, but my alcohol is less than half the govt's recommended weekly limits, meaning NO DOCTORLY PERSON CAN CRITICIZE ME for the odd drink. I was never into AA type meetings because everybody seems to say "I'd have one drink then I couldn't stop" whereas I always could stop after one. I'd space my drinks throughout the day to achieve a mild but constant intoxication. I never liked the taste of booze. And I never liked feeling drunk and out of control. Ironically it was a feeling of being IN control that hard drugs, specifically heroin, gave me. Confidence. Energy. Antidepressant effect. My problems were over! (So it seeeeeemed, ahem.) Oh cripes I had better ping off now else I'll only get terminated mid-sentence. Take care y'all!

Illustrated: A a hearty breakfast; B Jeremy Kyle (looks just like my brother!!!)

Lamb Shish With All Salad And Garlic Sauce

2011-11-20T21:44:00.000Z

THAT'S WHAT I had for tea tonight.

I'm OK, not much to tell. The methadone is back on a level dose. That's 80mg more than I want to be on. It is level because I cannot handle hauling myself to that chemist every single day, freezing cold and sweat running down my back, only to have to deal with a long wait in fierce heat when I get in plus a two hour wait for the juice to come on and make me feel OK. By that time I'm so peed off I stay annoyed all day and sleep all afternoon in depression. My friend came in with me to point out this is all down to Supervised Consumption and being forced to take methadone to times suiting someone else's convenience. When I had my methadone at home I nearly always took it in the early hours, so that I got up with the full dose going full-on. I never had any problems with sweats etc. I did my sweating when I was asleep and it wasn't bothering me.

So I've supposedly got a dr's appointment in a week's time to review this situation. Then I want to go back to reducing the dose because I'm not one of these people who seems to want the maximum methadone for the maximum possible time: if I'm not using on top I see no need for flat dosing I want it taken down down down to OFF OFF OFF THAT CRAP FOR GOOD!

The only good news is that I'm getting 2 take home days: Saturday and Sunday. So I get the weekend off the grinding routine that is a life on methadone!

There's no other news really: I'm no longer in a raging mood with the clinic. Just endless irritation now. I got the anger off my chest last appointment. Lots of words like patronizing, coercive and a hindrance. Talk about making something that's difficult already as hard as humanly possible. That's why I'm not interested in rehab. Every steep detox I've tried has had me breaking down and put on extra meds. Both times I was put on extra meds. Extra methadone at City Roads crisis detox centre and antidepressants and tranquillizers at the proper rehab. When I went to proper rehab I cut down my using so tiny that when I left (still unable to tolerate the reduction) my habit was less than half what it had been 2 weeks before I came in.

I hope y'all are OK. Still no computer. Massive troubles posting. Take care everyone.

Macaws

2011-11-12T09:50:00.000Z

Feathery Friday on Saturday

Ordinary blue and yellow macaws...

With green severe macaws

Hyacinth macaws, the largest parrots in the world...

Wishing a raucous weekend to you all..!

Hello again

2011-11-11T22:20:00.003Z

I HAVEN'T BEEN BY because I could not get access to a computer. I have not been feeling well. My methadone is down to 80mg and I feel sick whenever I have to move myself to get to that overheated chemist's shop. Strangely, apart from feeling cold, I feel fine at home. As I say, it's only when I start moving myself that I get a disgusting sweat on that only evaporates a good couple of hours after sipping the noxious gunk I am prescribed. I feel my life is over now I'm no longer taking drugs. OK I do indulge about once a fortnight but I never feel the gear. I've had the odd bit of crack but I don't even like that. So I'm stuck in sobriety and hating it because I'm so unmotivated and down.

I got a letter through because they are turning off the old analogue TV signal in London next April and I'm eligable for a Freesat dish and box, fully installed for just £67 ~ about $100 ~ giving me over 100 channels without any need to subscribe. So I'm thinking of going for it.

Apart from that no news. Just missed doctor's appointments (I felt to ill to go). And poor sleep. Up all night, in bed all day not wanting to get up. Then the dreaded trek to the methadone chemist and having to remove half my clothes in that ridiculously tropical shop. I stink because I have not had a shower in over a week, just half hearted attempts at washing over the sink. I don't want to be dirty but I just feel like a block of ice when I wake up. I need my methadone AT HOME so I can take it IN BED a good couple of hours before I get up. THEN I will be able to stomach showers, changing clothes, washing hair all the things normal people do. All the things addicts on methadone supposedly start doing again but cannot when the methadone is not in their hands. The longer this poisoning goes on the worse things will get. I just want off that noxious rubbish as quickly as possible. There is no earthly reason why I should experience any withdrawal whatsoever. If I reduced a dose of heroin by 5mg per week I wouldn't feel anything at all. So why should I feel the reduction in methadone? I'm fine once I've drunk it and waited the infernal amount of time that rubbish takes to come on (over two hours). But I'm not OK when I wake up in the morning. Unless the clinic give me control over drinking my own dose at home I'm launching a formal complaint and/or simply scoring my own methadone on the street so I can walk to the chemist without hot and cold flashes and flushing half the dose they give me. They probably wouldn't notice if I did that. I don't want to play around with my dosing but I'm getting more and more wound up on this point. I got advised to issue a formal complaint some weeks ago. Everyone else I know gets good treatment apart from me. It's almost as if they were deliberately eroding my mental health. Example: by insisting I go to group therapy which is only compulsory for convicted petty criminals. I went to two groups very reluctantly just so I could say I'd tried it. Then very happily turned my back on that complete waste of time. 90 minutes of patronizing rubbish I have heard a million times before. No thanks.

I'm not in the mood for NA because I don't go anywhere these days. I feel very run down and mentally exhausted. My mother did not seem to like the letter I wrote her explaining my past. She doesn't want to face my point of view. But she did tell some very interesting stories of her own which I'm sure she considers true. Viewpoint, viewpoint. It's all in the viewpoint.

Well I have to dash I'm on a public computer yet again. I will be back sooner if I can get to a computer that actually works, which many in this shop don't. Take care everyone and have a charming weekend...

Wednesday and Sunday

2011-11-02T18:20:00.003Z

THIS IS what I wrote on Sunday, but the (public) computer wouldn't let me publish...

THE CLOCKS went back last night so it's 7pm where it would have been 8pm before. I've taken my pill. There's nothing doing tonight except Downton Abbey in an hour or two.

My computer is kaputt! The hard drive has gone so I'm *****d; only God can help me now. I believe in God. All things are possible. I suspect it's actually the cable not the drive that's gone but that still necessitates a change of drive at £50 for 160GB + £60 workmanship ie £110 or about $170 US.

The stopping smoking is going crap basically. I am cutting down on my ciggies before switching to that gum. The gum does work but I smoked near-constantly without really realizing it... I need to cut down to 12 a day then 8 a day and then 4. I was on about 25 (own rolled) before I tried to quit on Friday things swiftly went pear shaped. Maybe I'm trying to cut down too many things but I don't think so...

I have to go now before I get terminated. Hope you all had a good weekend!

PS I've been watching some horrible films: I didn't know La Reine Margot was so "lusty" or disgusting, Elizabeth shows folks being burned at the stake; Hell lived up to its name... ukh.

Viper: Hard Techno Anthem

This poor mouse doesn't know quite where to go so he just settles down and washes his ears...

OK it's now Wednesday and I'm still coughing and spluttering thanks to the Common Cold. I'm thinking of purchasing an electronic cigarette, you know, the type that light up then you suck in pure nicotine vapour minus any tar. You even see "smoke" that is actually water vapour, a vehicle for the nicotine.

I've been watching Elizabeth The Golden Age, it's much nicer than the first film about Elizabeth, far less gory. The director said he filmed inside cathedrals because stone is permanent blah blah going down the generations etc. But Elizabethan houses were wooden! So I kept wondering why the Queen was at church... I would love to be able to go back in time and tell her "m'lady you shouldn't worry too much about that Spanish Armada ~ they'll get beaten back by the weather"... etc.

I'm wearing Opium perfume that I got at £25 for 50mls about a month ago and I've already used half a bottle. I don't think I'll be getting that one again. One person told me I "smell like a French tart's boudoir" ~ and this is the pour homme version... My favourite fragrance is Chanel's Antaeus it smells like incence...

Now I have to go else I'll get terminated. Take care everyone...

PS I JUST READ THIS BACK. BOY WHAT A BORING POST!!

Sunshine

2011-10-28T12:59:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-27T14:21:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-25T14:47:00.001+01:00

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

2011-10-24T14:55:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-22T10:09:00.000+01:00

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 ...

2011-10-19T16:42:00.004+01:00

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

2011-10-17T18:02:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-09T00:21:00.003+01:00

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

2011-10-08T13:52:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-04T13:57:00.001+01:00

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....

Clearly Unclear

2011-09-26T15:46:00.000+01:00

LAST NIGHT I had about 7 hours' sleep; that's not very much for me. I've been feeling headfucked and down of late; precisely how I feel when I'm about to become hyped up and hyper. Maybe I'm just depressed though.

I made a call today. I'm half interested in going back into counselling. But there are provisos: person-centred is out. I only did well in psychodynamic deeper counselling. No time limit. The 2 year time limit the time before last got extended by 6 months but 2.5 years was barely enough to scratch the surface. And lastly no fees. And I'm not getting into anything longterm in the London Borough of Evil where I presently and resentfully reside. I want to Go Home Again. Back Home Where I Belong.

I wish I could have some manic energy back. Darkness and winter are closing down around us.

I just wish I could feel OK again. I'm taking the pills; I'm taking the methadone. The methadone is doing my head in; dose is far too high. I want off that crap as fast as possible.

I try to structure my days with books in different languages but I have no drive. I want to curl into a ball. I'm too far gone to be OK again ~ maybe. Maybe that's my problem... Too far gone. Do you think so? I don't know any more. I've turned my attention back to my house and the giant clear-out session I still need to do. So that is where I am now. Clearing, clearing, clearing!

Better Already

2011-09-24T13:59:00.001+01:00

I REALIZED while rushing to the chemist that I feel WAY BETTER than I have in days. Not so paranoid. More to the point, not so depressed.

I'm only 28 pages from the end of my French novel. That and 6 Feet Under, an everyday tale of folks living above a funeral home, have been soundtracks to my life.

No I don't think 6 Feet Under has depressed me. It's the best TV series I've ever seen. I like Billy the bipolar brother who keeps coming off my meds. People who do that are shockingly irresponsible and should be institutionalized!

I hope you like the furry chinchilla picture? I really would love a chinchilla or three (as long as they had huge wheels to ramble upon). They need a special "marble" which is a stone chopping board you slam in the freezer to be lovely and cold in summer. As dwellers of the high Andes, chinchillas find summer captivity unbearable ~ sometimes to the point of death.

I can't really keep a chinchilla. The nearest tiny equivalent is the Russian or Djungarian hamster also known as a "winter white" because its winter fur tones with the snow. They also have thick luxuriant fur, with fur on the soles of their feet; they also take dust baths and like chinchillas probably do need a "marble". Mine looked close to death one summer's day (thanks guidebook for giving no warning of this). They perked up immeasurably rambling on a tray of ice-cubes. Before y'all call me an animal-torturer, remember these are Siberian hamsters. And if they didn't want to be on the ice, they'd have walked off it.

Anyway I have to go have a charming weekend everybody.

PS has anyone else seen Made In Chelsea? Docusoap. One character is heir to the McVite's biscuit empire. I like the blonde girl with the kind eyes. I don't know her name yet. She went on the fishing trip where the other girl put a live maggot on her tongue. That's a true sign of class ~ not being afraid of dung and wiggly things. If you don't believe me, observe the reactions of lower class people around dirt. They act like they're too perfect to get dirty. True upper class people never do. I met the upper classes at university. They're OK.
I try to be classless (which makes me middle-class). How about you...?

Illustrated: chinchilla in ball with cat looking on; winter white hamsters in summer; winter white hamsters in winter...

Not Feeling Well

2011-09-23T17:17:00.000+01:00

I DON'T FEEL AT ALL WELL. I think a doctor would call it "depression" but it feels like so much more. Like something's gone badly wrong; that something is about to go wrong. That I can do nothing about it. I'm back on my meds, even though I hate them, even though I want to change tablets yet haven't a doctor who will do this for me because only a psychiatrist is willing to take responsibility and I'm between psychiatrists. I need a psychiatrist. I'm on page 315 of the book I'm reading or rather skimming through in French noting down unfamiliar words. Only another 50 pages to go then I'll be lost because "reading" this book is all I've done for the past week. It takes away the pain. I'm not sure I would have the verve to focus on a book in English. Not without whizzing through it on fastforward; the exact opposite to what I'm doing in French. Once I finish the present volume I'm meant to read it slowly from page one, homemade glossary in one hand explaining to me each and every single expression I do not know; but I don't know if I'm up to it. I can but try I suppose. I have to go now; I'm still computerless. I hope you all are OK. Don't worry about me I'm not doing or about to do crack; that was a complete abbarration. I actually enjoy being clean nowadays. More than I ever enjoyed being on drugs. In some strange sort of way. If that makes sense. More than anything I long for the end of my script; for the day when I'm finally methadone-free and everything-free and can tell myself that nightmare, 11 years and counting of constant opiate addiction is finally and at long, long last... OVER. OVER AND DONE WITH.

On a moonless night

2011-09-22T15:41:00.002+01:00

WHAT A LOAD OF BLAH BLAHS I posted yesterday. Those are the product of an unproductive brain. All I have done... ALL I HAVE DONE is skim through this one novel in French. I haven't a clue what happens because my concentration span is too fractured. Every single word I didn't know I looked up and wrote into a glossary notebook with the intention of reading back from page one, novel in one hand, notebook in the other now with a completely clear understanding of the text. O yeah and I took up Spanish, which is really easy. No more idiotic pictograms that all look the same. No more hong dong bing and bong words all nearly the same. I was looking for a project I could complete that had some usefulness. Chinese will never be useful to me at an intermediate level (ie after 2 or 3 years' daily study) unless I go hardcore backpacking. It won't be useful to in a career context unless I get past university level. That means 6 or 7 years' study at home. I can use Spanish just by flying to Spain for £50. Actually I'd like to go to Paris, Berlin and Madrid on the same trip. I love big cities. I once spent half an hour in Madrid. I looked out over this huge city, simmering on an endless plain, thinking "wow, I'm in the centre of Spain". British tourists hardly ever go anywhere but the coast and Madrid is about 200 miles from the sea.

The idiotic shitheads from the council are coming round tomorrow to criticize me for living like a pig. So I'm having a half-hearted effort at cleaning up. I'm just afraid of making a worse mess where I can't find "important" documents etc. I'm terrified of throwing something important away. Hence the hoarding. Anyway, least I can clean up to loud Spanish dialogues. I don't get why I can follow Spanish very easily, even when the words are just as unfamiliar as any other language. Eg an apple is una manzana. Yet Chinese words: hong dong shui dui lua I cannot remember. I think maybe it has to do with Spanish having grammar parallel to French. The little words are nothing like the French. A shop is una tienda; a street is una calle. When you get to posher vocabulary things are more similar to the English: libertad, igualdad, fraternidad and of course la electricidad.

I'm reluctantly agreeing (with myself) to go back on medication. Yet again.

I desperately need to see a doctor yet have no psychiatrist ie nobody willing to alter or tweak my meds.

When I went to this God-forsaken new methadone clinic I was promised continuity of care. This has not happened. The old clinic had a consultant psychiatrist who diagnosed me and prescribed the pills I'm on now. The new clinic's doctor said she could not prescribe medication so I lost my psychiatrist and appear to have no hope of getting a new one.

The bullshit on the clinic wall says you are to be involved in and allowed to make choices in your treatment. This has not happened. I am on 110mg methadone against my wishes. I want the dose lowered. And they force me to drink it in the pharmacy meaning I drag myself up there feeling crap each morning and have to wait 2 hours to feel OK. For years I drank my juice in bed meaning I got up feeling fine. I don't know whether the pharmacist is watering my dose but that is how it feels. I'm not using on top; haven't used any heroin in however many weeks I cannot remember, yet I go through spates of quasi-withdrawal symptoms in the mornings. Anyway my new worker, the third one I've had in 3 months, is getting me a clinical review so I can hopefully pick up my methadone like a normal adult and drink half of it before I sleep and the other half before I get up. The 2 times I really need it and it's not there now. He should also get my dose reduced. It was meant to stay at 110mg for 4 weeks (for no good reason). It's been on this ridiculous dose for 6 weeks. If they don't give what I want I'm making a detailed formal complaint as I feel totally let down by this clinic. The titration nurse was bullying, coercive and rude, forcing me into groups therapy I had no interest in. I went twice only so I could say I'd tried it and hated it. The second time I left within 4 minutes of it starting. Once you've been to one such group you've been to them all. They're set up as a punishment for people caught shoplifting so at least half the group announce at "check in" that they do not want to be there. I used more toned down language and said I was giving it a try.

The only week I stayed the entire session I was hypomanic enough to dominate the entire discussion. Then of course my mood crashed and I couldn't face the same group of people who I knew would have assumed only crack could make somebody that high. My experience and the life of the average junkie have diverged a lot over the last few years. I haven't been out begging or shoplifting since I can't remember when. I cut down my heroin use gradually with no help from any clinic or group. All these clinics do is put excessive pressure on you. I did a bit of crack ~ for the first time in ages I might add ~ about a week and a half ago. I used the stuff 3 or 4 days in a row. I gave up by buying a gigantic French dictionary, notebook and novel and forcing myself to look up every new word I found. It felt like Chinese torture in the beginning, then I couldn't stop it. I was up at 4am with 6 Feet Under playing and those dictionary pages whirring. I didn't "enjoy" this activity but I liked the brain-dead emptiness of it. As I say, I lost contact with the narrative flow nearly all the time so I was just looking up words words words and the same words cropped up over and over "mes larmes" means "my tears" I now know. But French isn't onomatapoeic. So a brush which is shush-ush-ushshshshshy, sweeping over the paper, is le pinceau. Which I looked up endless times yet still could not remember out of context.

So my mind is blank and my mood is low, despite all this talk.

I'm going to have to take risperidone, when I really want something else. Because I have been let down YET AGAIN by a network that seems deliberately to be constructed with man-shaped holes for people like me to fall down.

That's it for today. Don't be offended if I haven't visited your blog in an obscene length of time; I've visited nobody.

Illustrated: the book I'm reading by the Chinese immigrant Dai Sijie who, incidentally, had lived in France only 14 years when his French got good enough to write novels in the language. The title means "On A Moonless Night"

Back from Beyond the English Language

2011-09-21T16:45:00.000+01:00

I DIDN'T POST because my computer is still broken and I have spent all my time watching (rather listening to) the box set (all 5 seasons) of 6 Feet Under while marking up a notebook with every single word I do not understand from the French novel I'm reading. I've decided to better myself by reading novels and memoirs in French and German exclusively. I don't mark the books; as I said, I keep a notebook with every word I don't fully comprehend in the order it appears complete with page numbers. If a word crops up 45 times and I still don't get it, I look it up and write the definition all those times. The ONLY method of language acquisition that works is repitition.

Today I bought 3 new French novels (French literature outdoes German by a long way). They cost £2 each from a particularly eclectic charity shop with shelves and shelves of foreign crap.

I'm learning Spanish from a Linguaphone Plus course my Dad got me on ebay. It cost £35 secondhand; that's about $50. These cost about £300 new and bring you to a vocabulary of 2400 words. I know because I counted definitions per page in the glossary and multiplied up. 2400 words is about 4 times what a Teach Yourself book + 2 CDs course gives you. Plus you learn by listening. The handbook explains why it is as it is, line by line. But somehow it all goes in without much effort. Linguaphone is way better than Pimsleur. I tried Pimsleur Hebrew from the library and it's ridiculously repititious. Breaking down a simple sentence into constituent parts over and over on CD because it's designed for people who fear a simple textbook will make them feel like they're at school. I heard Pimsleur gives you a vocab of only 400 words; that wouldn't surprise me. Also Rosetta Stone level 3 gives only 1500 words ~ their customer services had to phone me back with that figure. I got the impression that neither the school-leaver who took my original call nor the supervisor who answered my enquiry had ever learned a foreign languge, let alone actually used Rosetta Stone.

Last week I was in a good mood but now I'm depressed. I decided that it's unnatural to live on psyche meds. Not to mention the fact that I want my meds CHANGED to quetiapine which has a more acceptable side-effects profile. Ever since I took risperidone I had episodic severe anxiety which I will NOT put up with. Surprise surprise anxiety is a side-effect afflicting more than one person in ten on that drug. I want quetiapine instant release. It might stop me needing to take zopiclone, which I mostly buy on the street as my doctor is too prissy to give a regular supply. I only take zopiclone as required. Every so often I go through a period, usually when I'm going manic, where I sleep 3 hours a day or less. Or just cannot sleep at night and sleep randomly during the day.

Now I feel down and out and pretty pointless. But I'm determined to be able to read these pretentious French novels in the original. Why not? They're not really pretentious. French literature is parallel to English literature. There's a huge international contingent in France, the language is used widely accross Africa. So French books are very cosmopolitan. My current one is about the last emperor of China and an ancient manuscript; the next one is called Le nègre du Palais by Thierry Pfister. Something to do with a rich man dying in a big house (wouldn't he be liable to dreaded French wealth tax?) and politics. Well it looks a lot better than it sounds. I haven't taken a dictionary to it yet so it's all a blur.

Isn't 6 Feet Under just about the best thing that's ever been on telly? I was wondering why Ruth, the mother, annoys me so much. That's because she's just like me: a mixture of prissy and adventurous. Meek yet not meek-willed. Just like me. I'm also like Phoebe from Friends. Hippy dippy on the outside; hard as nails on the inside. It's other people who call me hard. I don't think I'm hard. But when they say that I answer: well if I were as soft on the inside as I appear on the outside I'd be a fucking lump of jelly wouldn't I??

I hope y'all are OK. I didn't mean to worry anyone by not posting. If I ever do get to die I'll be a very lucky man. I know that will never happen to me. I am a born survivor. Don't want to be. But I am. Least I won't be a fucking monoglot when I do die. That would be WELL beyond the pale!

Vive le Romance

2011-09-13T13:00:00.000+01:00

DON'T WORRY about my over-ernest post yesterday. I was getting a bit over the top, psyching myself up to write write write. The writing is going, but slowly. Strangely I write almost the same for children as for adults. This is fiction I'm talking about; not blogging. Children don't like or relate to abstracts and neither do I. I hate latinate nouns in English; I like things concrete.

Anyway talking of Romance languages I got so bored of German ~ which quite frankly is NOT doing it for me ~ I went out and purchased a Collins Robert French dictionary for £6.50 (second hand) and a selection of books. One about a Burmese monk called Par une nuit où la lune ne s'est pas levée a guide to rocks and minerals: Roches, cristaux, minéraux by the way I do think it's vulgar when in English people pluralize "bureau" with an S! The proper spelling is BUREAUX. You eat gâteaux in bureaux on plateux of vast mountains! My final French book is a murder mystery by J P Manchette titled Fatale. It's only 139 pages so I'm looking forward to that. Plus someone has helpfully biro'd in notes of their own to save my time at that Collins Robert!

I should hopefully have a Linguaphone SPANISH COURSE. 4 books and 8 CDs winging its way to me. I got it on ebay for £35! So I'm very much into romance languages at the moment. Remember, before y'all tut tut on how fickle I am that my goal is to speak French, German, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese. I just got temporarily tired of Chinese and German isn't inspiring me these days. French literature is just so stately. Some of the best books in the world were written in French. I'd love to be able to read Victor Hugo and Emile Zola in the original. Not to mention Flaubert's Madame Bovary ~ which I've only ever seen on television. Amazingly well adapted, it has to be said.

I always thought Madame Bovary was a junkie who just happened to live in an era before the proliferation of hard drugs. In today's world a woman with a taste for things beyond her reach would tend to seek solace in chemicals. In her day, even as wife of a country doctor, the only things available to her would have been laudanum and possibly cocaine. Strange to think of Madame Bovary nosing up a line off her posh rosewood dining table, but there you go.

Now I must off. I got a box set of Six Feet Under, one of my favourite television programmes of all time. I like the bit with the bipolar brother weeping and wailing in the kitchen and Rachel Griffiths says "if you're looking for the olives, honey, they're right here"....

Loose End

2011-09-12T19:00:00.000+01:00

I'M AT A VERY LOOSE END. Feeling depressed. I don't get the buzz out of things that I expect to get. Example: I went into town and bought Chinese books and Paris Match and Stern magazines in French and German. I got all this stuff home and felt distinctly flat. Not depressed. Not angry. Nothing negative; just nothing very positive.

My life goals are to speak and write German, French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese to as near mother tongue standard as possible. To this end I am using every language course I can get my hands on. It's good to have one in German, even if it is "too easy". Really I need a teacher to correct my writing, because I know it's unidiomatic. Someone once asked in all seriousness whether my German blog was the product of Google Translate ~ which just about says everything about my writing. My vocabulary is pretty good now ~ though nowhere near as good as someone's who has put proper effort in. The Perfect Your German CDs and book promises an active vocab of 5000 words. Using a dictionary and multiplying the number of words familiar with per page by the number of pages I calculated I had a passive vocabulary (that is, I read a word and understand it) of eight to ten thousand words.

I've started my book in ernest. I'm only after a name for my central character but I think I've found one. I googled it and it's not been used. That is the big high jump for all children's characters' names. The more unique they are the less allowable it is for them to have featured in previous books, films, cartoons etc. Mine seemed to check out OK.

I've only written about a page of story but it's a children's book. Not a picture book, as my mother assumed, but a children's book like the Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter are children's books. Totally unreliant on illustrations. A tale spun in spellbinding language. I know I'm not the best writer alive. But I'm unique: I do believe I'm best at being me. I am not writing in the style or genre of anybody else. I hope to bring a breath of mountain-fresh air to the fetid wizard and lesbian-single-parent-obsessed world of children's publishing. Apart from this I'll say nothing until my book is done. I wouldn't say my story is so much amazingly unique as something that's magical for the way it's told. We see the world through the eyes of our little character, who is an amazing character. So it's a magical world to see. And that's all I'm saying about it.

It's my parents I credit for kicking me up the backside and saying YOU CAN WRITE, WRITE THIS TALE. So I am doing. I'm not entirely convinced self-publishing is the way to go forward. Considering half a billion people in the world speak English well enough to enjoy a novel and many of these hundreds of millions have children. How can I hope to market my production to them. I know nothing about promoting children's literature. The way I see it, writing is an art; publishing is a business. Experience as well as everything I have read about my mental situation has told me stress is bad for me. True I find it exhilarating. But that exhilaration can trip into mania very easily. I've told myself I was being hypochondriac so many times before. Only to look back and see I really was manic. When you're up at four in the morning, TV and stereo blaring at top volume, bouncing balls on the floor you're not just "a bit excited" you're manic. Mania has left me in a real mess every time it's come. It's not that mania itself is so terrible; it's the disinhibition, the feiriness of spirit (ie uninhibited agression), and hyperkinetic distractability that cause problems. Ratchet it up a notch or two and agression turns into outright paranoia, the beautiful enhanced sensory pereception trips into hallucinations. When I was truly manic I saw spirals on the walls and ceiling. I heard voices speaking to and about me. I could not tell what was and was not real. Then of course there's the depression. Less than a month ago I felt my life was so useless that lying down in front of an express train was the best favour I could do my family and friends. I was intensely paranoid and very depressed. Then I started popping my pills again and literally by the next morning two thirds of my depression and half the paranoia had dissipated. Isn't life strange.

This is why I seek a career in writing. Not only is it exceedingly trendy to be bipolar and artistic but I know from experience that rare extremes aside, I'm capable of writing almost no matter how high or low or sideways I go.

I intend to take these languges of mine far enough to qualify as a translator at least in German to English. If you calculate languges as GDP and number of speakers; German is number two in the world after English. Chinese is number three. Japanese is number four. So if you wonder why my German obsession: that's it. German is by far the biggest business language in the European Union after English. I phoned around some agecies specializing in placing bilingual temps and headhunting bilingual administrators, secretaries etc. What language had the most openings? I asked. German German German I was told. Every time.

So that's what I'm doing. Writing my intellectual story book, improving my German. Chinese is quite frankly doing my head in at the moment but I'm still slogging away. I'd like to apply my talents to Spanish if I can.

So here's the news. I hope this isn't too much of a tangle. I'm not lost but I'm trying to break free of the inertia and lassitude and apathy that has hemmed me in like a dancer frozen in a paperweight for years and years and years. Like a cage-nibbling hamster I desire escape. I'd like to go on a City Break to Berlin. And I can't wait to finish my Amazing Tale of Adventure and Wonder!

And how was YOUR weekend?

2011-09-10T16:57:00.000+01:00

I GOT A BOOK EARLIER called Perfect Your German so I'm perfecting away. It cost only £19.99 for one 300 page book and 2 CDs from WH Smiths. This might have had something to do with Smiths pricing something marked £29.99 at £10 cheaper but hey. A bargain is a bargain and who am I to complain.

I'm on the lookout for bargainacious second hand language courses so if anyone has higher German or French or beginners to intermediate level Chinese, Japanese or Spanish I'd be most interested.

I have to be pragmatic with these languages. German is the most useful language in Europe ~ or to put it another way, if you add the GDP of different nations together, language by language, German comes out number 2 in the world after English. It's way ahead of Spanish which says a lot, considering Spanish has 400 million native speakers and German has "only" 100 million. Japanese has 125 million native speakers; Mandarin Chinese has about 850 million native speakers; a total of 1,400,000,000 people speak Mandarin as a first or second language. Chinese "dialects" by the way, differ as much as Italian and Spanish. They are really languages, but because all Chinese people consider themselves Chinese the word "dialect" is preferred. On the other hand, Norwegian and Danish are really separate dialects. But they're labelled languages purely on political grounds. When a dialect has a written standard it is apt to be labelled a language. But in actuality ~ so it is said ~ you could walk from Amsterdam to Berlin and at no place would you come across any sudden language divide. That's because German blends into Dutch. And that's why I speak so much Dutch. Not because I'm clever but because I did A level German and Dutch is a version of Low German. Low German is very similar to English. Where a German person says "über das Wasser" a speaker of low German dialect says "over de water" ~ just like an English person. Some of Grimm's fairy tales are in low German. The best one has a man and wife living "in a stinking piss pot". I laughed like a diarrhoea-clogged drain over that one!

Now I must go I'm in an internet cafe. Darkness surrounds us with this weather of late. It's very dull and autumnal.

Sorry no furry Friday. I don't know what else to put! Take care y'all.

PS I'm practising my terrible German once more by blogging in German again.... wish me luck my German grammar is atrocious!

2011-09-07T13:58:00.000+01:00

AUTUMN is thick in the air. You can feel it everywhere. The leaves have fallen off the trees already in some places. Conkers are everywhere. Stormy weather is forecast. Already it's grey and cold.

The only good thing about autumn, if you're into drugs of all kinds, is that psychedelic mushrooms appear after the first rains.

I'm not into drugs and haven't taken a magic mushroom in well over a decade... I haven't used heroin since I can't remember when. But my brain's telling me it's about 10 days.

Time for all you cooks to make hearty stew and dumplings.

Cigarettes Level

2011-09-05T14:25:00.001+01:00

MY CIGARETTE SMOKING IS LEVEL at about 15 per day. That's not bad, considering they're spindly rollies. I can get by on 10 superkings per day. Those are very long, ordinary thickness cigarettes. I break off the ends and get about 6 or 7 rollups as well as 10 ordinary length cigs. So my habit costs me about £20 per week. British cigarettes are very expensive.

I used NO GEAR yesterday or today (Sunday and Monday are the only days I've used on for weeks, mostly just Sundays). So I'm over 7 days clean now. I don't miss heroin at all. I did crave it yesterday, because I'm used to using on Sundays. But I do not want or need that muck in my veins.

I'm keeping my last memory of a needle in my vein a bad one: the blood test nurse tutting and muttering over my collapsing vessels. If I have bad memories to look back on, I reason, I won't have anything to set me off. Also you tend to glorify the past as you come off drugs and only remember the good days. In spates. Then you remember how bad it really was and are glad you never gave in during those episodes of glorification.

I'm watching a drama about multiple murderers Fred and Rosemary West called Appropriate Adult. The appropriate adult is someone they keep in with a suspect during interviews to ensure procedure is adhered to and that the suspect understands what's going on. Apparently they weren't sure whether or not Fred West was retarded!

The appropriate adult's partner got so excited by press camping round their house (the British press being especially voracious) that he went and caught Bipolar Mania, buying a new car, television and hifi equipment and ending up in a mental hospital. Now the appropriate adult has been sacked... end of part one.

I laughed at the beginning of that drama when they cracked a joke about the buried au pair not "having three legs" (ie 3 thigh bones of at least 2 people were found buried in close proximity). Then he talks about ripping a baby from a murdered woman's womb. And I wanted to be sick. The Wests apparently tortured these young women to death and what they did was vile.

Anyway back to cigarettes and now I have to give up smoking. And I wish my methadone clinic would reduce my dose I hate being on over 100mg.

Take care everyone.

Today's main illustrations are from the Aussie drama, Prisoner Cell Block H. If you want to see Fred and Rosemary West click the links I put up

Countdown to Nothing

2011-09-02T13:33:00.000+01:00

I AM COUNTING EACH AND EVERY CIGARETTE I smoke in preparation to cut that number down down down... then out. To Zero. I am thinking of going on Nicotine Replacement Therapy when I've got down to five a day. I have no idea how many I currently smoke as I roll my own. I have had six so far today. It's 1:30. I have been up since about 9 or 9:30 which means 6 in 4 hours. Which is not that good.

I take back everything I have said about giving up fags being easy. I only said that in exasperation at cigarette smoking being compared to heroin. Interestingly only in smoking cessation clinics. Not heroin cessation clinics. Because smoking a fag is nothing like hitting up some "pukka B".

An addict cycled past me, saying he is running for a dealer I know and his gear is "old school". Ie good. I'm over heroin now. Like I said I've only used once a week, and looking back it's the change in routine on a Sunday that prompts me to do it. (I've only ever used on a Sunday for weeks now. When I have used extra it was on Monday. Because Sunday sparked me off to do it.)

With that nasty nauseating blood test fresh in my mind, I'm determined to hold on to a negative image of needles and keep myself reverse-fixated that way. I'm so over heroin. Yes the methadone is helping a LOT. Never thought I'd say that, but anything that makes heroin feel not worthwhile has to be good.

And here endeth my thoughts for today. Happy thoughts! (Wow.)

Police Everywhere

2011-09-01T17:24:00.000+01:00

I DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY'RE UP TO but the boys and girls in blue are everywhere today. Even "civil enforcement officers" (who prosecute you for dropping a fag end: judicious use of resources by the local council). It's as if there's some secret plot in the air and the Old Bill are out in force to foil it.

I need a new wardrobe, I have decided. I am fed up of looking "like a homeless" (not my words). Even the local council hinted I might prefer to throw my clothes away because a charity shop probably wouldn't take them. I'm going to start out looking in thrift stores as they have the nicest stuff (amongst the tat). I used to wear a lot of Paul Smith, because Oxfam didn't realize it was a designer name and priced his shirts and trousers at 50p. I think they do realize now, and price accordingly. I also had an Armani teeshirt, which I never quite had the guts to deface. It used to be highly fashionable to tear and graffiti designer names. It meant you were hip enough not to care. I haven't a clue what's trendy nowadays and frankly I do care. If you're going to get new clothes they may as well be in Vogue to boot ~ know what I mean?

So I'm left with a clothes crisis and nothing to wear.

By the way I've swapped alcoholic liquor for cloudy lemonade. It only costs 54p for 2 litres and has more of a kick. It's an acidic kick, but it's lovely. I also got free limoncello deserts from Londis. They'd gone past the date so they were literally giving them out free.

So that's all. No big news, as you can see.

O yeah I found this in 100 Cases in Psychiatry by Wright, Dave and Dogra

p89: A 38-year-old woman has taken an overdose. She is refusing to give consent for her blood to be taken for tests. She is also shouting, "you're not going to pump my stomach!"

p90 Although this woman is unlikely to have a mental illness, her acute distress might make he temporarily incompetent. If, however, she has a mental disorder and that disorder is posing a risk to her health, she can be detained under the Mental Health Act even on a medical ward.

Which made my blood run cold. NOT because I am thinking of doing myself in, but that if I did have some illness I would want the right not to be treated for it. And now I find out that because I have a Label, my wishes are wont to be overriden!

Surely it's my right not to have compulsory treatment. I didn't even WANT to have that blood test and only went for it so the doctor would sign the form for an ECG, which I need in order to continue receiving methadone. Yes I let her coerce me but she was playing stupid saying "we'll get the blood results first" even though I told her repeatedly the blood results had nothing to do with the ECG. I wonder whether that woman actually qualified as a doctor or has fake papers. She's the one who wanted to give yet again the the antidepressant that made me psychotic. And she wanted to prescribe it to me while I was clearly hypomanic, cheerful and talking 19 to the dozen. Ie not depressed at all. But not sleeping either. She was trying to pull that move where they fob you off with antidepressants instead of benzos. Hmmm...

Well I have to go. Hope y'all are well... I'm in a NORMAL MOOD. Wow!

Autumnal

2011-08-31T13:34:00.001+01:00

THERE WERE 2 UNEXPECTED EFFECTS of becoming opiate dependent (I noticed).

1. I barely ever catch cold and

2. I hardly feel the seasons of the year any more

Autumn is the only season I still feel. I feel it now, and I feel weird. In an indistinct kind of way.

I feel vaguely excited, yet vaguely depressed. At the same time.

Also I'm craving heroin in a distant way. I haven't taken any since Sunday when I didn't feel it anyhow. I only crave heroin by association. And I associate feeling autumnal with doing gear. I'm reminding myself that it's only been about 12 years, or a couple more, depending how you count, since I went ON gear. So I've done many autumns without it. I also went down the SOAS bookshop for Japanese dictionaries a year or two ago, so I could associate that with autumn too. I'm very much into associations. I need a Chinese dictionary as well. Mrs Li has finished teaching me to tell time. I'm on Unit 5 now. I still can't do the accent at all, but I'm doing OK at writing.

I nearly was sick yesterday having that blood test, it was awful. I felt so nauseated. She kept asking me if I was alright. How a junkie could be so afraid of needles. I couldn't tell you which one she used; I didn't dare look.

I spent £5 on one pen and 100 sheets of holepunched blank paper to write my book on. Yes I'm doing it the old fashioned way as my computer is down and I write better in Real Ink. It makes me focus on High Quality.

Now I've got to go before this internet cafe terminates me.

Illustrated: a Charles Dickens manuscript

PS my blood samples were tiny drizzles compared to yesterday's illustration. My vein was so collapsed she thought it wouldn't hold out...

Blood Test Day

2011-08-30T13:40:00.002+01:00

A SURLY NURSE took my blood this morning. First thing she said, upon examining my right arm, was "this may take some time; you've used all this up". She then examined my left and was in a vein first stab. "It's so slow it may well coagulate before it's all finished," she said. The draining took so long my hand was going numb.

When I saw the tiny test tubes, each with only a trickle inside it, I wanted to heave. I dashed outside for a cigarette then had a Cadbury's Creme Egg in consolation. I'm eating Chinese takeaway tonight as my reward for undergoing that ordeal. Last Chinese had undercooked chicken, so I'm going to the one I really like that closes early. The lady writes out Chinese characters on the ordering slips especially for me.

Valium Marilyn has lent me The British National Formulary "the book of life" she calls it. Every prescription drug is in there with full details. Of course I had a good read of the diamorphine page.

Following this mornings pukesomeness I'm put off gear for good. Yes I did relapse yet AGAIN on Sunday but use is down now to ONCE PER WEEK. This is the best I've ever done except those 10 weeks or more when I used nothing at all. I was drinking still during that period. I now have just under a pint of white cyder and tropical fruit juice in the fridge. Reserved from last night when I simply could not get anything more down me. I had to do a 12 hour fast so I stacked up as much nutrition inside me as I could possibly manage.

I'm going to have to ping. I hope you all had a decent weekend. And bank holiday weekend for those of you in the UK. The Notting Hill Carnival was "quiet" this year. Surely a contradiction in terms. The Notting Hill Carnival once made me the second illest I have ever been in my life. A physical, spiritual and mental breakdown all at once. It was like a fuse had blown in my head and I was sweating bottles and bottles of white wine (that's what it looked like) onto my sheets. This was before the heavy drugs episode so heavy sweats weren't the usual me at all.

I don't eat that much Takeaway, Baino. Usually once a month these days. Twice in a week is unusual and basically my way of Bribing myself into that Blood Test Clinic.

You know I nearly ended up in Nuclear Medicine by mistake. I felt so sorry for the people crowding into oncology. I might have a supposedly serious illness but it's psychiatric. I'd rather be mentally ill than physically any day. I was offended by EastEnders last night calling bipolar (in so many words) a terrible condition passed down by bad blood. I'm the only nutcase in my family so explain that one. There is a small amount of ordinary depression, some gambling and some drinking on ONE side of my family but I'm the biggest junkie nutter by far. Explain that you geneticists!!

Well I've gotta go. Make it a good one!

2011-08-27T23:08:00.001+01:00

QUETIAPINE, aka Seroquel, the antipsychotic I said I'd rather be on than risperidone, has mysteriously found its way en masse into boxes of Neurofen (ibuprofen) headache pills!

Sky News says:

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has issued a safety warning following reports that some boxes may contain Seroquel XL 50mg.

Seroquel XL is a prescription-only anti-psychotic drug used to treat disorders including schizophrenia, mania and bipolar depression.

The mix-up is believed to have happened at a wholesaler's and so far three cases have been identified in the south London area.

See! Ordinary people recoil in horror at the prospect of taking even 2x50mg quetiapine into their bodies. I would probably be dosed at 300-350mg at night. My friend who also has schizoaffective gets 700mg at night. That's 14 of those stray pills!

*******

I slept nearly all day today, woke up with a taste for Chinese food only to find my best local takeaway SHUT at only 10 past 10. This is the one who put mangetout in the mixed vegetable fried rice. The second choice takeaway tip in Iceland's own frozen mixed vegetables: cubed carrots; peas; sweetcorn. Nah! I could do with a chicken and baby corn with curry sauce. Plus egg fried rice. Hey that's making me hungry again...

I was watching Ugly Betty on DVD. Lots of people say they don't like that show. Presumably because it pokes fun at Betty. What they don't realize is you watch it the other way round. Betty is loyal, resourceful, very intelligent and a good person. Despite great opposition she makes her way in a world that mocks and derides her. THAT is why I watch Ugly Betty.

The bit where she skulks into the canteen with everybody smirking at her, is just like entering McDonalds during a paranoid episode. Everybody seemed to be talking to, at or about ME. So I had to ignore everyone and only interact with the girl behind the till, who was gazing at me with a most peculiar look in her eye...

Anyway it's not like that today. I was just saying. Today I am fine. Today all is good.

I can't get my little computer open. I tried and tried unscrewing the back where some cable is at fault, yet cannot do it.

So it's gonna have to go into hospital.

Hey maybe I should have chicken and babycorn in curry sauce with egg fried rice in compensation...

I hope you all are having a splendiferous weekend...

2011-08-26T20:32:00.000+01:00

DARKNESS IS FALLING across London. The wet road sparkles neon. Heavy clouds, dark grey against a blue grey sky, close gradually down and around.

Hey the other day we had a shocking pink sunset. Pink against orange and turquoise Chinese dragons in the sky. That was amazing!

True, I was scared of a blood test despite my former proclivities for poking needles between digits. My feet are hammered. I once missed when shooting heroin and crack between my fingers and couldn't cross them for weeks... Isn't drug addiction fun!

I got money today and didn't even think of spending it on drugs. I drugged myself nearly to death now my occupation has to be life. I would rather focus on something obscure yet useful like Chinese calligraphic character-writing manuals than heroin. Those dictionaries and manuals only come from one bookshop in Londn that I know of: the one near the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (oh if only I'd applied there! And not to the university that I did... ho hum.) There's also a secondhand bookshop near the shopping precinct by SOAS that sells ancient Chinese and Japanese "grammars" as probably used by lost missionaries and soldiers of a bygone era. I haven't been down to this bookshop lately. I'm steeling myself to stock up on complicated dictionaries. I feel totally lost in the Chinese language by the way and not at all confident. I can barely pronounce it at all, unless I'm literally repeating after the CD. I can write a lot of it, but probably have the handwriting of an 8 year-old girl. What it has in precision it lacks in spirit. Chinese calligraphy is all about spirit. I'll illustrate this post with the heart character. That's the most spirited of them all.

I can't track my real feelings any more! I want to, but I'm never sure what's my real mood and what might be a Mood Swing. Maybe I shouldn't worry about it.

Time's short; must run. Thanks for the answers yesterday.

Missed the Bloods

2011-08-25T13:19:00.004+01:00

I WAS SUPPOSED TO GET UP EARLY TO HAVE A BLOOD TEST this morning. Instead I had multiple nightmares about giving up alcohol and somehow coming into vast amounts of money. Then I had another nightmare about Russian submarines and the smallpox virus. Very vivid dreams. Then I woke up feeling ravenous because I am supposed to fast 12 hours before this mystery blood test that I don't even understand. For some reason they want lipids (cholesterol), some blood count, glucose, electrolytes and something else measured. How will they ever find a vein?? Probably straight away knowing my mysterious body. I am really not looking forward to what is labelled a "sharp scratch" but is actually a highly intrusive, assaultive, abusive STAB STAB STAB STAB STAB POKE PRY POKE POKE no thanks. Yes I have a needle fixation. The type where you don't like being stabbed by others. (Which is apparently not uncommon.) The methadone clinic also want an electrocardiogram, which I don't mind ~ it's noninvasive.

None of these tests involve appointments by the way; you just turn up and get tested in office hours...

Mrs Li is still teaching me to tell the time. You say that it's five bits two dots ~ meaning "five minutes past two". Come to think of it a minute means something minute ie a little bit. So the Chinese word means the same. O'clock is dian zhong 点钟. Zhong means the middle as in Zhongguo 中国 (China) ~ the Middle Country. But of course it's a different zhong. But the phonetic 中 lurks to the right hand side of the other zhong 钟 ~ nobody can say Chinese is not phonetic. It's just not an ABC. It is phonetic though.

I've sorted out my state benefits at LAST. I had to run about getting proof of this that and the other. Deshane the support worker needs these to prove who I am! Then I can eventually move house. And away from the London Borough of Unfathomably Evil, where I currently live and unwittingly moved not realizing I was messing my life up in so doing.

I am hoping to get a pensioners' bus pass soon.

I am less depressed than yesterday and a lot less than the day before and a hell of a lot less than on Monday. My sleep has shrivelled down to a mere 11 hours which is good for me. I'm trying to stay awake all day, to be good. Then sleep shouldn't hit me like a disease in the night, causing me to be unconscious at the wrong times.

Sorry this is boring. Everything is very in-between today.

I hope y'all are OK.

Illustrated: is a bathysphere really that comfy? I'd assumed you'd be cramped knees to chin...!

Wednesday

2011-08-24T12:05:00.001+01:00

I WENT TO the damn group yesterday but it was no good, so I left. My shiny new worker did say if it's not for you it's not for you. I'm not up for talking to a room full of people I don't know. In NA you can say your piece or not say your piece, you can wander in and out as you please, you can arrive late and leave early if you like. And most NA meetings seem to be candle-lit these days. This group by contrast is glaringly lit, everyone is in a circle, so people can look you up and down. You have to "check in" (that is introduce yourself). Then they wanted us to speak again! I was not up for that, really not. There's no atmosphere of recovery in the clinic's own group. In NA I'm the dirtiest person in there. In this other group I was pretty much the cleanest. I don't need to be dragged down. I want pulling UP.

I'm taking that risperidone because weirdly I do feel better on it than off it. It's not like antidepressants that take a week or more for even the first stirrings of a mood change. I always responded to antidepressants quickly. That was the trouble. Within 2 weeks I was often high. Not normal but high. I loved this so much I kept it quiet from doctors for years, knowing it probably meant "bipolar". I was terrified of the word "bipolar" so I suffered depression using nothing but heroin. Heroin seemed to work at the time, though I suspect it counteracted depression in the short term and definitely stopped me cycling, it actually kept me in the depressed mood state. I'm now very cynical about what "benefits" heroin might have brought me. I am sure I would be better off if I'd never tried it. Schizoaffective by the way means bipolar that gets psychotic enough to count as schizophrenia. So I think of myself as manic-depressive. There's another type of schizoaffective that only involves depression and that's said to be more severe. The mania actually counteracts some of the schizophrenia, because schizophrenia makes you very apathetic, disorganized and withdrawn. I'm withdrawn in that I hardly socialize. Professionals I have talked to in the past have been fooled because I was more articulate than a person with my problems is expected to be.

Today I have to clear out my rubbish yet again. I was doing OK until I went hyper, then gave up on the idea. Not by thinking "I can't be bothered" more by thinking of 10,000,000 other things that were more fun. Any elevated mood stronger than just borderline actually makes me more disorganized not less. Though I have tons of enthusiasm for many things, it mostly seems to dissipate ~ like spectacular fireworks ~ before anything ever gets DONE.

Script error on this page yet again. I think this computer has it in for me. My own machine is in hiding, waiting on a miniature screwdriver that I can't afford till Friday.

O by the way I tried drinking and I tried using gear on Monday, the day I felt worst. The gear did nothing to me and only after 3 drinks did I feel better. I'm not going back down that route. To alcohol and drug addiction. No thanks. So yesterday and today I'm clean.

Mysteriously Better

2011-08-23T14:04:00.000+01:00

I TOOK A PILL last night. My prescribed medication, which I have VERY mixed feelings about (side-effects). And today I feel nearly a hundred times better than yesterday. So either that's the placebo effect. Or the mood swing has bottomed out. Or risperidone really is that amazing. I have a GP appointment on Friday when I'm going to ask her to please switch me to quetiapine because I don't want a pill that's actually making me more anxious. She might say only the Psycho Doctor can authorize that. Or she might just gimme a script. I also need an ECG because my methadone could elongate my QT-interval (whatever that is) and the clinic need to know. This doctor also wanted some bloods done which I was far too paranoid even to contemplate yesterday. I felt it was some huge plot against me, or that the results would be used against me. Whatever happened I was bound to lose (I felt). Now I feel I was being STUPID. But the upshot is, no bloods have been done. Frankly I'd rather they sliced my leg open with a scalpel and collected the gushings than stuck me with needles all over. Because my arm and leg veins are now nonexistent. They could get one in my femoral (crook of the thigh, in deep) or my neck, two places I never injected. They call the femoral your "groin" which can cause some confusion as women are just as likely to inject there as men. If your femoral gets messed up you could lose a leg, which was always far more offputting to me than losing my life, as you probably know by now. I had an awful death wish for a long time.

I tried going to a group therapy session today. I did tell them I'd give it another shot. But I couldn't handle speaking to people I didn't know. I couldn't face it and so departed. The time before when I attended I said far too much, which is offputting as I feel like an idiot now. Not for any specific thing I said; just for having spoken at all. I was the happiest person in the room by a long way in that session, all hyped up. This time I was the most miserable person in the room, but not by a big margin. There's always a lot of misery in that room.

So I'm out of the group and on my own. I'm feeling OK. I'm just a bit down now. My mood has risen. Yesterday I was very down. My computer needs a hepatic infusion and is refusing treatment! No, there is a cable disconnect and the back needs unscrewing, which means me buying tiny screwdrivers from God knows where. If that doesn't work I haven't a clue what to do.

O man there's a script error on this page so I'd better hurry up and post before I get frozen out or logged out. It's soggy as a wet sponge here in London. Been raining all day. The river is turbulent and full of mud. Mrs Li is still teaching me to tell the time in Chinese...

Illustrated: quetiapine aka Seroquel..

Done in

2011-08-22T15:51:00.000+01:00

BOTH MY COMPUTER AND I are done in. The computer has to go to hospital. I'm not going to hospital they would never let me in. So much for giving up drink by the way. I feel far more depressed now than I ever did when I was drinking. I crashed on Friday and have been sleeping endlessly ever since. I only feel bad when I wake up. I am supposed to be seeing Valium Marilyn today. Don't actually want to. She's depressive too. Together on a day like this we are like Laurel and Hardy with no humour.

I have to go to that shitty drug clinic tomorrow. They are persecuting me for being mentally unreal. Their job is to dish out scripts and let me go. They have no input in my life. I'm getting clean for myself, not for them. On the plus side I do have a new worker. On the minus side "better the devil you know" and they are a bunch of demonists in there. I'm not a criminal so they have no right to force me into anything against my will.

The latest thing is some blood test they want. Well good luck finding a vein. The titration nurse said to me "for all we know you could be dying" which only made me laugh. If only. If this my getting methadone truly is contingent on this mysterious test then I'll get it. Otherwise I'm not having no test for no-one. In this country we have a right to refuse treatment no matter how serious the condition. And I made a pact with myself long ago that if I'm ever seriously ill I will go for nothing bar palliative care. Being ill like that is a sign that I'm meant to die. And I'm not going to cheat fate.

That's all.

Illustration: the letterhead my drug clinic SHOULD use.

Sick

2011-08-20T22:48:00.001+01:00

MY COMPUTER AND I are both sick. The computer has some cable disconnection and says no disk drive is found. Even though it's right where it's always been. I have caught a common cold and I feel mentally ill. I spent literally all day asleep. When I went outside I couldn't remember why I was there. So I bought some fags and went back home.

That awful X Factor TV programme is back on. It's got worse and worse. Horrible new judges with "attitude". And lots of "exciting" quick cuts back and forth on the "VT". The British X Factor is just second place to the proper American one now, with Simon Cowell over there to do that and not ours because ours isn't important enough. Cheryl Cole's over there too. Does anyone in America know who Cheryl Cole is? She's a really good judge, and I don't think Tulisa from N Dubz or Kelly Rowland from Destiny's Child could ever take her place.

Dubz always meant "crack cocaine" in my neighbourhood. It's short for W, meaning "white", as opposed to B which is "brown" (heroin). The Dubz in N Dubz actually refers to NW1, the Camden Town postcode where the band is from. I think they did best in Dubplate Drama, this late night "urban" soap. They made better actors than musicians.

O it's boiling hot. O yeah I've got my coat on. I'm going to bed early tonight. I hope my computer will work in the morning. Otherwise I have to write this book on paper. Actually I was going to write the first draft on paper to focus my mind. I don't even own a printer and I need some way of shifting my words round, keeping what I'd previously put for comparison. I often find if you remember a sentence the way you'd written it before, the words remembered are better than the version you kept officially. Just as with lines of misquoted poetry: they're actually better than the poets' versions.

There's not much else to say. Mrs Li is still teaching me to tell the time in Chinese. The CD got stuck at 5 in the morning, blaring Mandarin sounds around the place like a psychedelic tangerine.

I've got to go; my cheerfulness is running out. I'm really exhausted.

Loaches

2011-08-20T05:37:00.003+01:00

...Fishy Friday on Saturday...

LOACHES were always my favourite fishes in the community tank; more for personality than looks.

This is a sucker loach. The cleaner of the deep. Like most loaches they live on algae, come out at night and are highly territorial, lurking moodily in any cave you care to construct out of slate or bogwood and thoroughly enjoying being out of view! If anything or anyone dares disturb them they can shift themselves with truly astonishing rapidity.

I used to have a Borneo sucker or hillstream loach. This fish lives in ultra shallow water and likes a stream of air against the glass. They're agile enough to be able to swim directly down the flow of bubbles, which replicates the splashing mountain streams they inhabit in real life. Nubia, our Borneo, used to sleep upside down on a piece of slate. Whenever I wanted a good look at her, I'd just pick up the slate and she'd stay stubbornly anchored.

Unlike ordinary loaches, which hold on to rocks or the glass with their mouths, the Borneo has a sucker almost the entire length of its body. Meaning that it can withstand extremely strong currents in the wild.

Easily the fastest swimmers in the community fish tank; it once took the fuming pet shop lady a full 20 minutes to catch the last hillstream loach between two nets!

My favourite loach of all is the reclusive kuhli. This strikingly stripey eel-like creature is only 4"/10cm long in adulthood. Rarely to be seen during daylight hours, they burrow under the gravel, only to emerge by the pale light of the moon (or your moon-effect nightlight).

The kuhli loach's expression reminds me of a certain member of my family who I once, at the tender age of 12, likened to "an old hornet" in an official document!

Kuhli loaches don't live long. They are very sensitive to water quality and only survive in well-tended, established tanks. My two both died... yet the Old Hornet lives on!

WISHING A FANTASTICAL WEEKEND TO ALL THE FAMILY!

Many A Topic

2011-08-19T21:16:00.006+01:00

IN WHICH GLEDWOOD talks on many a topic in a far happier way than yesterday... Then Barbra sings "Memory"...

I DIDN'T GO to the brainwashing meeting. I only rant, interrupt and express my wonderful opinions when I'm manic. Then I come down and can't face the meeting again. So I'm too depressed and paranoid to go. So I stayed in bed all day and got up at 4pm. I wasn't lying there skulking by the way, I was fast asleep and ignoring my phone. I've learned to ignore it's chirps over the few days I've had it. This phone has the loudest ring of any phone I've ever had. But it's a flip phone AND you have to press the button to pick it up. So I miss loads of calls just by fumbling with it. And I'm too stingy to ring anyone back. Or in too much of a bad mood (today).

I have to go down Morrisons to get a 54p 2-litre bottle of cloudy lemonade. It's what I'm drinking these days instead of alcohol. I did have yet another black cherry flavour cyder today. That makes 2 drinks in 2 weeks ~ oooh. Yeah so I had this drink. The cherry flavour was my attempt at switching from strong drink to soft drink. It was meant to be a crossover. Unfortunately I loved the taste so much I think I was addicted to that more than the alcohol. So now I'm on cloudy lemonade. The acidity of the lemons matches the acidity of cyder. So my teeth don't miss out on being rotted through the lack of drink.

I'm really pissed off with Buta my old drugs worker. Buta was the titration nurse. Titration is chemical torture where they "cautiously" give doses far too small and leave you in withdrawal for days on end at the beginning of your script. Methadone takes three days to reach a therapeutic level (meaning that your blood level is twice as high on day three despite no elevation of the dose) ~ this is yet another bad thing about methadone. It takes days to "go in". But it also takes days to come out again. Making it far, far harder to detox from. Now if heroin is notoriously hard to come off, why on earth give heroin addicts methadone which is EVEN HARDER to detox from? Somehow I get the feeling nobody cares at all for drug addicts. Soon as I can I'm going on Subutex. But yet again we have a problem, because methadone is too "sticky" to transfer over from without doing two days methadone-free ~ ie two days climbing the walls. With heroin you just need 18 hours clean. Everybody who has done it says you basically go on heroin for four days and switch off that. The only other option is dihydrocodeine (DFs), which is so weak it must be dosed four-hourly. I've found a source of dihydrocodeine, so I'll get enough pills for four days and use those. Why on earth the clinic won't switch you to dihydrocodeine I have never understood. But it's just more proof that they don't give a damn about their clients. They only care for their own jobs. I already have two copies of the "how to make a complaint" leaflet. The way things are going, that formal complaint will go out sooner rather than later.

So I'm depressed today. I think sleeping has a lot to do with it. As soon as I heard that loss of sleep is a "symptom and a cause of mania" and that excessive sleep counts the same for depression, I have been sleeping as little as I possibly can, so I can be happy. Also sleeping is the biggest waste of time out there. I was hong-donging to Chinese until the early hours. I've learned to tell the time. I do know the numbers, but I hardly know them fluently. And they're not pronounced the way their transliterated. Yī 一 one is pronounced "ee", wǔ 五 five is actually "oo", qī 七 seven is "chi"... Surprisingly I managed to follow Mrs Li telling me the time on CD. I was really shocked. I was so depressed when I listened to it this evening. I must have felt how "normal" people feel, who don't truly believe they'll ever get far, when hearing a person blabbering on a Teach Yourself Foreign CD. Utterly hopeless. I'm only abnormal because I believe in myself, at least as far as picking up blabbery foreign tongues is concerned. Like I said, intelligence doesn't come into language acquisition; perseverence does. Half a BILLION Chinese speak Mandarin as their second language and they learn it through immersion. If immersion isn't possible, persistence will pay.

Anyway they say you learn a language by it being babbled out around you, but I grew up in Welsh Wales and got nowhere with Welsh ~ mainly because the teachers at school had never learned a langauge in their lives; they merely grew up speaking Welsh from the cradle. So we were never told "this is a feminine noun; that is an irregular verb" just "it goes like this". Which is like teaching mechanics without ever naming parts of the car! Teach Yourself Living Welsh (as it was called) explained all this to me and I got an A grade at GCSE. Had I relied on our teacher I doubt I'd have got better than a C. It was always my ambition to join the mother tongue set in Welsh but I never managed it. I was too thick.

The beginnings of my decline set in when I was doing my A Levels at school. These are the exams you take age 18. GCSEs are usually age 16. I did try and concentrate but my language skills were awful. Essays riddled with mistakes. Years of "tuition" and yet I still couldn't remember which words were masculine, feminine or neuter. In English I did OK essays on the "texts" we studied, but it was only poetry I was truly any good at critiquing. Already I was getting depressed in this period. During term time I felt fairly OK; it was during the holidays that it hit me. Every exam I took I got a grade lower than predicted. Then I took a year out. Rather, wasted a year out. Was more depressed then. And when I did finally go to uni, I was very quickly depressed out of my mind. The shrink I ended up seeing asked me constantly whether I was hearing voices. That should give you some idea of the impression I made on people, because I wasn't going into that office trying to create any kind of impression good or bad. What he saw was what everyone saw. I felt so dire when on my own that I ended up sitting in other people's rooms. I had nothing at all to say. My presence was only accepted because as soon as I got into cannabis (which happened very quickly) I brought a lump of hash with me everywhere so everyone got a smoke. That didn't make anybody like me, but they at least tolerated me.

It took twenty years from first seeing a psychiatrist to getting full bipolar symptoms. In the beginning I only got depressions. Then I started over-reacting to antidepressants, so I got called "manic" by somebody with two manic-depressive relatives. Eventually my mood started swinging on its own. Only the depressive swings were vicious. The highs were really nice. But then I went on heroin, which blanketed my mood to a flat-line so I thought my depression was cured. Then I went on methadone. But the methadone days were so intolerably low I continued using heroin for years while being scripted methadone. Eventually mania did break through so voraciously that heroin would no longer stabilize me. (Though I have to say this only began when there was a drought in the heroin supply and so no chance of scoring anyhow.) Ever since I went manic last December my moods have been all over the place. Deshane says I have the so-called "negative symptoms" of schizoaffective. It means I just cannot engage myself with many aspects of life. Yes I can do Chinese obsessively. I can do things obsessively. ButI cannot do many things normally. As a plate-spinner I'd have one plate going better than anyone else. But the other six spinners wouldn't even have plates on. Let alone wobbly ones. So this is how I run, or rather don't run my life. It's still in utter chaos but I won't go on about that. How did I get back on to mental health? Oh yeah because the clinic are trying to damage it by forcing me into abusive coercive brainwashing bullshit groups. Well I'm not going. Bar one next week which comes directly after my appointment I've had it with their punishment group.

Buta did tell me there was a way I could go to rehab for stabilization, not detox. Which means I could cut down my dose down to 70mls in about two weeks. I'd be up for that. In order to do this I would need to do their rehab group. I don't mind the idea of that one. Hopefully it wouldn't be full of people on a prison-swerve. The bog-standard group I was pushed into attending was for people who had been caught shoplifting. They only went under duress, because if they failed to attend more than a couple they'd get chucked in prison. Well they're lucky. I'd rather go to prison than do those groups. But what option do I have? The ways things are going I'm going to end up in the nuthouse anyhow. Guess what that CRAP they were prescribing me was actually CAUSING my anxiety. The anxiety I took street-bought Valium for. (Very infrequently, it has to be said; but one pill dirties up the test for two weeks.) So I'm OFF the pills and paranoid and depressed as a result. ALL I NEED IS A DOCTOR TO PRESCRIBE THE QUETIAPINE I WANT. But the NHS has let me down yet again. I don't even have a psychiatrist. They have transferred me from a consultant I knew and respected to no-body. My paperwork appears to have fallen down a black hole. So I'll probably only get quetiapine in the nuthouse. I could do with a break anyhow.

Why they just won't prescribe it to me I have no idea. Oh yeah because I used to have a doctor and now I don't. Will someone explain that to me please.

Well I've got to go. EastEnders is on. And they're doing prison scenes on Coronation Street. I love women's prison dramas. Why on earth did they cancel Bad Girls. When I lived with Lona, who kind of had mental health "issues" of her own, the two programmes we watched together (apart from EastEnders) were Bad Girls and Footballer's Wives. Footballer's Wives eventually got Joan Collins then they cancelled the entire show! It was the only thing about football (apart from the World Cup final) I've ever enjoyed watching. And the world cup final was more entertaining for France getting boo'd and Italy getting cheered. Because the French and the Brits hate each other ~ in a loving sort of way. Britain and France have almost equal populations. They have about five times more land. We have a superior language. They have high taxes for the rich, spectacular natural scenery and far better food. We have London. They have Paris. The best parts of London are far superior to Paris. They have Galleries LaFayette (all perfume and women's clothes). We have Harrods which sells just about everything. Harrods' pets department sells axotlotls and fishtanks connected by swim-through tubes. Their hifi department is amazing. It's the stuff you'd buy naturally if you had a proper income.

Did South Africa win the last world cup? I thought the African teams were only in there to make up numbers. World football is usually Europe vs South America. I feel sorry for Americans having to watch American football (a very camp version of rugby) and baseball (glorified rounders). Football is more versatile than American football because it can be played on just about any bit of flat ground with a ball. No special equipment required. I was actually quite good at football. When I troubled to make an effort at playing. Which I did about three times in my life. The main reason I hated it was that I was "supposed" to like it. Also I loathed all team sports in childhood. And I hated ballgames. Rounders/baseball is the worst. You're supposed to hit the stupid thing with a glorified pea-stick! No wonder I always missed. Most exciting thing about playing football at school was deliberately running to the opposite side of the pitch and avoiding the ball at all costs. The only sport I enjoyed was crosscountry walking (though we were supposedly running). The only sports I was any good at were the hundred metres sprint, the high jump, long jump and triple jump. Everything else I was crap at.

I can't remember where this post was going. Why am I watching Coronation Street? Oh yeah because of the women's prison. Best women's prison drama of all time was Prisoner Cell Block H (known by other titles in other countries; it's the 80s Aussie drama by Grundy Television). My favourite episodes were when Meg Morris (formerly Meg Jackson, until her husband was murdered with a pair of scissors by Chrissie Latham) and the governor (both the kindly witch old one Mrs Davidson and the lesbian gym mistress type... Ann Reynolds (not that I just looked that up on Wikipedia).

Oh cripes it's late I've got to go. Dà hǔ tóu fēng 大虎頭蜂！

(Say that to a Chinese person, I dare you. They'll laugh aloud. It means "giant tiger head wasp!")

Illustrated: beautiful sleep; "green" ~ yucky noxious methadone; the Welsh language; not tits and bums but manic-depressive mood swings; Joan Collins and Zoë Lucker in Footballers' Wives; cockney Chrissie Latham from Prisoner

MEMORY

I'm not sure, but this might actually be a real Barbra Streisand pop video...
Barbra's vocal knocks Elaine Page's effort out the window!

HOT NEWS! DANCE DRUG ECSTASY TO BE USED AS CANCER THERAPY!

中文小毛足鼠 Chinese Roborovskis (etc)...

2011-08-19T00:01:00.006+01:00

HERE ARE SOME OF THE ANIMALS IN CHINESE:

Roborovski hamster xiǎo máo zú shǔ 小毛足鼠 "little furry-footed mouse"

The generic word for a hamster is a cāng shǔ 倉鼠 a "warehouse mouse" (referring to the cheek pouches that get packed to near-bursting with grain)

The word for Syria is Xùlìyǎ 敘利亞 so a Syrian hamster is a Xùlìyǎ cāng shǔ 敘利亞倉鼠.

A dog is a quǎn 犬

A cat is onomatapoeically a māo 猫

A xióng 熊 is a bear.

A panda is a xióng māo 熊猫 a "bear cat"

A fish is a yú 鱼

A wasp is a huáng fēng 黄蜂 a "yellow bee"

Though you'd actually call a bee a mì fēng 蜜蜂 a "honey bee"

A bumblebee is a dà huáng fēng 大黄蜂 a "big yellow bee"...

A hornet is a mǎ fēng 马蜂 "horse bee"!

The word for a bee, fēng 蜂 is pronounced the same as "wind" fēng 风 as in fēngshuǐ 风水 fengshui ~ "wind-water"!

And that's enough Chinese (Zhōngwén 中文) for one day!

Zàijiàn 再见！ (GOODBYE!)

*******

VIDEO: a hǔ tóu fēng 虎頭蜂 "tigerhead bee" in East Anglia, UK!

Punished for Nothing

2011-08-18T22:39:00.004+01:00

I haven't edited this wondrous stream of consciousness. It's all I thought in the past 24 hours...

IT'S 4:59AM I am too excited to sleep. I feel this constant low grade HAPPINESS in me. I am INSPIRED. My book is brewing up like a cup of tea with a charming Chelsea bun at its side. My Chinese is coming on better than Japanese ever did. I scored 10/10 on the last test. When I do make mistakes I can see where I went wrong. Instead of being bemused. I'm only on lesson 3 of 22. But it's quite remarkable I got anywhere. Mandarin Chinese sounds more bizarre than any langauge on earth. Far more foreign than other tonal languages like Cantonese (as heard in most Chinese takeaways worldwide), Vietnamese (as heard in war films) and Thai (as heard in Thailand). Thai is one of the most beautiful langauges on earth. Chinese of course has the most beautiful writing. I am learning the names of animals. So far I only know two: a 蓝山雀 lánshānquè is the "tiny tit" that flutters from birdtable to birdbath (a blue tit bird); a 鰍 qiū or 泥鳅 níqiū is a loach; 鰼 xí is another loach or mudfish; a 平鰭鰍科 píngqíqiūkē is a Borneo sucker or hillstream loach (I used to keep one as a pet). I love loaches; they are my favourite aquarium dweller. They skulk around the background of the tank and claim the bogwood as their personal lair. I always identified with our sucker loach Doover. We also had a stripey khooli loach, but that one died.

Talking of stripey nasties: Japanese hornets, at 2" long, the world's largest wasps, have been invading Norfolk! Hornets are called 虎頭蜂 hǔtóufēng "tigerhead bees" in China.

Polyglots of the past; polyglots of the present...

UKH I SLEPT IN IN IN so long I got up at 4pm today. This is the first major sleep I've had all week. I got up angrily stamped down the post office then crowded up the methadonery for my dose. I retired to the library and felt cold wet and paranoid for an hour as I waited for the nonexistent effects of methadone to come on. Anna Grace alwys says 140mg methadone made her feel lovely. Lovely enough to do coke on top. Well I've been on that dose and I can tell you to me methadone does absolutely NOTHING. You literally cannot feel it. Take it away and you'll feel the lack of it. But like marriage to a limp and sappy person with a good job, its presence is not noted though its absence is.

I'm not in a very good mood today because the drugs service are persecuting me yet again. Insisting that I go to their crappy drugs group which is nowhere near as good as NA. Nearly everyone is in there to be punished for committing a crime. And I who have done nothing wrong are made to suffer too. I'm really looking forward to saying this tomorrow. My big problem in groups is learning to SHUT UP. Last time I went I did 95% of the talking on the "client" half. I consciously tried to say a little as possible and yet still dominated every aspect of every topic under discussion [because I was too manic not to talk]. This pisses me off because I know the rest of them ~ who are in there to be made to suffer for raiding Sainsbury's, trading in stolen smoked salmon and other drug-related crimes ~ are tolerating my outbursts only because they have no option but to be there or sent to prison for non-attending. And they all probably think I'm a wanker, a twat, a dork. Stuff like that. Because I dare answer back with statements like "they only give us methadone because they know it doesn't work". This bloke who thinks I'm so perceptive an refreshingly frank will soon realize I'm actually like a stuck record. I WILL not accept a life on methadone as any kind of normality. It is compromise of the worst kind. I would rather be on a proper script, or failing that street heroin. Methadone is worse than either of these because it's MORE ADDICTIVE my habit is now WORSE than ever, more entrenched than ever. I'm only motivated to use heroin because they insist I drink the methadone under supervision, like a big baby. So the day that I'm not Supervised (Sunday) I take it late and do heroin early instead. It's more a fuck you to the clinic than anything else. And I will not "behave" myself just to make some lazy arsed worker look good on paper. All the progress I have made has been despite, not because of, the half-witted efforts of the druggie servies I have been plagued with.

21:42 hrs. WHAT WAS I ranting about there? Something very involving, no doubt. I'm so glad not to be DEPRESSED these days. My mood is just very slightly hyper, pretty much all the time, and I really like it like this. Of course I enjoy going higher and higher, but the consequences are surprisingly inconvenient. I get memory loss. Cognitive deficits. When I'm really high my thoughts run away from one another, like quicksilver exploding on a workbench. So I'll take a mild high any day over a severe one. If I ever get severely high again I'm going in the nuthouse. I'm not looking after myself like a frantic three year-old doing a trolley-dash in a toyshop ever again. I "know" I'm ill when I'm ill. I might not like to accept it, and I might view the situation very differently, but I'm aware that something is radically changed about me and that to a psychiatrist this is clinically significant. Of course when I'm manic I believe psychiatry is like a bullshit mystery religion where the doctors are high priests, medication is the sacrament. Nurses would be like deacons in a church. And the volatile masses, seeking relief from their emotional wounds come piling to the temple day after day, seeking absolution, resolution, evolution and a revolution. I think one reason some sections of the public have become disillusioned with psychiatrists is because they have gone to them for the wrong reasons, not to mention wildly unrealistic expectations.

Just seeing a psychiatrist is not any kind of medical treatment in itself. The psychiatrist prescribes treatment, which may be one of any number of talking therapies. Psychiatrists treat psychiatric conditions. Some such conditions cause mental pain, suffering or discomfort. But this is not to say that anybody in psychological pain, suffering or discomfort is in need of a psychiatrist or can be helped by them! In my experience, psychiatrists are pretty useless when it comes to "emotional problems". They're only truly in their element when dealing with psychotic illness that can respond to medication.

I'm so sick to death of talking therapies. What right has any professional to my personal feelings? Last time I had counselling I deliberately turned up late every time, in order to cut down our time together. Some days I just didn't go, as I resented having to declare how I felt when what I felt was SHIT and there was no explaining it. I don't believe the cognitive theory of depression explains all depression by any means. I vividly remember coming out of a depressive episode and being able to think "I'll go down town" without a sinking feeling coming over me. That is, when I was depressed, anything, any emotionally neutral thing that might excite, inspire or enthuse a happy person, gave me a sinking feeling, a feeling of dread, or desperation, or gloom. Or just despair. Going back into the depression these feelings returned. So it wasn't self-fulfilling prophecies, or predicting the future, or anything else cognitive therapists claim to cause depression. I felt depressed over the pettiest and most basic things. The feelings I had were independent of my thoughts, and I felt depressed over things that ordinarily bore no emotional charge. I'd love a cognitive therapist to explain to me how my thought process was making me depressed when I clearly remember the depressed feelings coming on their own. I didn't think "Oh I'll go to town" and then "but it will be a horrible experience; it's not worth going". That might be how I felt, but I never ever put my depressive feelings into such words. How can a therapist specializing in cognition battle something that wasn't cognitive? Depression is a feeling, not a thought. It's true that depressive thought patterns can become engrained. I once went nuts in a Nutter Club Meeting where this girl I liked complained that her counsellor had demanded she explain why she was having suicidal ideation when not depressed. I exploded that such ground-in thoughts are extremely common in recurrent depression and that any mental health professional should know this. This was another of those meetings where I dominated every discussion. I'm not looking forward to being punished FOR NOTHING tomorrow, forced to sit in a room full of surly shoplifters who are sorry only for being caught, who are victims of a repressive government that once prescribed heroin to addicts as a matter of course and now insists onn methadone treatment, a therapy that is unsuccessful in the vast majority of cases. When you're addicted to heroin, heroin is the only thing that makes you feel OK. Addicts aren't being unusually selfish in funding their habits; they're merely engaging in the fundamental human instinct to self-preservation ~ and yet they're being punished for this and forced to sit through sessions of brainwashing. Well I'm calling a spade a spade. The guy who does the sessions is very nice, so I will tell him what he is: a very nice brainwasher. There's no atmosphere of recovery in such "lessons" because nobody really wants to be there. Just as nobody really wants to be in rehab. They're only doing rehab because they got caught yet again and it's cushier than a prison sentence. Either that or they're just trying to get their kids back. You know ~ when the kids have been abducted by interfering social services. Probably because they didn't arse-lick or kow-tow to the social worker enough. So I'm off to be severely punished tomorrow. I'd much rather go to prison for 3 days than do weeks of these awful meetings. I think I'll tell that to the doctor. It's only fun when someone gets over-emotional, resents being told to switch their phone off, falls asleep, falls over, swears, gets into an argument with the invigilator or otherwise misbehaves. The actual content of the "course" is utterly predictable. That your brain is telling you that taking drugs is good because your brain feels good. That you can alter your habits and thinking patterns. That drug addiction is a cycle. Blah blah blah. All this is only of use when you have a genuine willingness to abstain. And then you're taking second best by going to these classes and not NA which is a hundred times better. So I'm jeapordizing my recovery just because I'm capitulating to an ignorant bullying system that doesn't care for my mental wellbeing one jot. Just wants to keep its own job and tick boxes on forms. THEY get promoted because of MY good behaviour. Eg not drinking. I'm angry enough with the clinic to drink on principal, to inject miniscule quantities of heroin and cocaine just to dirty up my tests and to give a breathyliser reading so I look dirty. I'm never ever going to act like a good boy for those patronizing bastards. See how they destroy everything that's good. By bullying me they only make me want to rebel. I don't trust them. I don't like them. I'm in safer hands with a heroin dealer on the street. Heroin dealers respect their clients more than methadone clinics ever do. Heroin dealers need their clients alive, to keep making money out of them. The methadone clinic just wants me out of their hair. Well they can spit on my grave. I'm totally sick to death of them. Ridiculing me. Patronizing me. Telling me lies. I can't wait to move out of this God-forsaken shithole I'm stuck in. To be away from this particularly noxious service. Even as drug services go they are particularly coercive and intrusive. Valium Marilyn warned me never to open up to them as they'd only use my own words against me and she was dead right. I have to get the hell out of this situation. I'd rather be in the nuthouse than attending brain-rotting meetings like this one I'm forced into going to. Any more of this crap and I'm making a formal complaint. My psychiatrist said that counselling wasn't a treatment he was recommending. Probably because he knows how much I hate it. Yet this place insist on it. I can't wait to get there and let rip with some home truths...

Illustrated: kuhli loach, one of my favourite tropical fish, though they always die; mass bullshitting session; furry entertainers; one-to-one bullshitting session ~ note the look on the therapist's face; the Hazelden Dual Disorders Recovery Book ~ I really wanna get hold of this... Something that might actually work FOR me not AGAINST.

SEND IN THE CLOWNS
... a really appropriate song...

The Michael Jackson of Literature (truly BAD!)

2011-08-17T20:55:00.007+01:00

IN WHICH Gledwood speaks of health and social issues and the Chinese language yet again as well as:~~~~~~~

MY INTELLECTUAL BOOK is brewing in me like finest beer. I can't reveal ANY points of plot, character or setting but suffice it to say it shall be the finest and most amazing book ever written. I have to big myself up. Let's face it if I levelled my ordinary standard of self-esteem at my book I'd think it the worst thing since unsliced bread! I am taking inspiration from Michael Jackson and Barbra Streisand. Two entertainers at the top of their game. When they perform a song, everybody else's version becomes redundant. I've always seen my writing as the way of turning the sour old lemons of my personality into artistic lemonade. And the sour grapes of my past into finest wine.

There shall be NO heroin in my children's book. No social problems. No divorce. No lesbian single parents battling the social worker. No miserable children passed like an unravelling parcel between parents at mind-wrenching "access" weekends. I might one day write about an unhappy child because I was one myself. But it won't be my first go.

Duta my druggieworker asked me the secret of my plastic surgery-style skin improvement. I admitted to her it's just a £3 tube of "soap with bits of sand in it"... Otherwise known as Facial Scrub. Use it five times in a row after not bothering to wash your face properly in months and the effect is as drastic (if not more so) than dermabrasion or a chemical peel on a rich and overpampered female. I would have imagined that exfoliants work better on male skin than female as men have tougher skin that needs smoothing. Take a look at a middle aged woman, compare her soft skin to a craggy old man's and you'll get my drift.

The recent London riots were fuelled by Facebook and Twitter ~ so Channel 4 News was claiming tonight. I'm a bit behind the time as regards both of these social networking sites I'm afraid. Twitter appears to be like Blogger with an extraordinarily stingy words limit (how could someone like me blog in 150 characters?). As for Facebook that is not a "blog" at all. A blog is an account what one ate, of one's bowel movements and what colour toilet paper they buy. A blog is linear. Not spider-shaped, as Facebook appears to be.

A 27 year old man died after being sprayed in the eyes with chili pepper then shot and tortured three times with an electrocution device. Now this is why so many people have grievances against the police. Not necessarily that they have been abused and nearly killed in this way, but that they know that in the wrong circumstances they might be. CS spray and Tasers are used against the mentally ill with impunity ~ usually in the name of bringing a "disordered" person to a "place of safety"! Torture them first, then give them the psychiatric care they need. And wonder why they have lingering paranoid ideation and issues of trust! Mental hospitals chuck people out far too early. I remember meeting a manic woman my doctor's car park. We were both pacing frantically. I because I was detoxing off heroin (on nothing) and so was slightly "agitated"; she because she'd just been discharged from hospital following a bout of psychotic mania. If this was considered fit to go home, what on earth was she like when she was "ill", I wondered. I heard an Indian doctor, who practises in India spouting off on the benefits of care in the community. But did anyone ever ask the patients what they want? Most long term mentally ill ~ and I'm talking of severe ongoing conditions here ~ actually prefer being in hospital to the cold wide world that shuns them so cruelly. But does anyone ever ask the mentally ill what they think? I think not. Tht's why I'm only half joking when I talk about a nice retreat to the nuthouse being easier to arrange and cheaper than a CitiBreak to Paris or Brussels!

By the way I found out my local psyche unit (and I have no idea where it's actually located) is a building on the grounds of a general hospital. I'm far less put-out about the prospect of going there now. It means when I go out for a ciggie break I can go for a wander amongst the population with broken legs, drips and haematomas and those who have just given birth. I once saw a man take his drip down to the smoking area. He looked like a troll dragging a parrot's cage.

Today I learned the numbers one to ten in Chinese they are: 一二三四五六七八九十 that's yī èr sān sì wǔ liù qī bā jiǔ shí. I had problems with wǔ, liù and qī especially. I am not very good with numbers, days of the week or months because there's little to visualize when you learn the word. I don't have a numbers brain. That's why I never pursued a career in medicine ~ my absolute ideal vocational job. I cannot describe how much pleasure I would get lancing and draining abscesses, cleaning wounds, not to mention banging up old ladies with morphine! Seriously I adore medical stuff. But I'm just too thick by far to get accepted on a medicine course because not only do you need A Level biology and chemistry (and if you don't have biology you need MATHS ~ ukh! ~ but A Level PHYSICS is a necessity. I'm absolutely lost with physics. The only subjects I was any good at were English literature, modern languages and law. Law, interestingly, was the only subject I was outstanding at. I'm only averagely good at languages and literature. I persevere with the language studies because they motivate and inspire me. You are, after all, only learning to speak, listen, read and write. I know I will succeed in Mandarin Chinese, not because I'm brighter than anybody else, but more persistent. Just remember that 500 million Chinese speak Mandarin as a SECOND language and you realize there really is no excuse for calling Chinese "difficult". Different would be the operative word. German, on the other hand, is not that different but extremely difficult. As is French. Every single word is male or female in these languages and the Germans have a neuter gender on top! Now THAT is HARD. Learning pretty pictures to go with every word inspires me to eat more Chinese food. And I love Chinese food.

I'm eating Asda's own Chinese chicken curry and egg fried rice. They've made the mistake all the supermarkets seem to make; they douse the curry in five-spice to make it Chinese. This is NOT what takeaways do. Why can't they just copy the takeaway? Every single time I buy frozen takeaway-style supermarket food I have to add my own monosodium glutamate. Indian food and most especially Chinese food without MSG is like nonalcoholic beer: a total waste of time. I absolutely love MSG and have just finished a half-kilo packet. I also heard somehwere it could have triggered my manic episodes. As mania and psychosis are linked to dysregulation of the brain's glutamate receptors. So whether Chinese food drove me potty or not, I'll probably never know in this lifetime, but it does make an attractive theory...

WITH ONE LOOK

NIGHT OF MY LIFE (Freak Brothers mix)

Illustrated: Michael Jackson ~ didn't look so terrible with the original nose, did he?; the taser: officially sanctioned torture; Chinese chicken curry always contains onions and peas and lashings of monosodium glutamate!

Bipolar disorder and glutamate: research link
"The gene, GRIK2 (glutamate receptor, ionotropic, kainite 2), encodes for a glutamate receptor, specifically glutamate receptor 6 (GluR6). Glutamate is the predominant excitatory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system."

Terbinafine Hydrochloride

2011-08-16T23:20:00.007+01:00

FINALLY I BOUGHT the right stuff for my rotting feet: Lamasil (terbinafine hydrochloride 1%). There was a 4g tube for £9 called Lamasil Once ~ as the name suggests just one application is required; then I realized Lamasil normal gives you 15g of 1% cream for £6.69 and even though daily application is required for a week, you're getting nearly four times as much medication for less money. So I went with that one. I had been putting Canesten (clotrimazole) on my feet. Strangely with no positive results. As Canesten is indeed an antifungal, but it's meant for ladies with yeast overgrowth "below stairs". I found my tube in a carrier bag full of sparkly body creams, pregnancy tests and essential oils... When I was buying live yogurt Valium Marilyn mentioned she used to put it on her do-dah from time to time; so I said, "don't the black cherries, raspberries and fruits of the forest come drizzling out during the course of the day? And what if you get a giant strawberry up there? You might die of toxic shock!" Marilyn, Dear Reader, was particularly Valium'd that day and didn't realize I was joking. So anyway my feet shouldn't be smelling like a dead toad this time next week.

I went to NA and shared exactly how much drugs I'm on. I didn't want to put this here because it doesn't sound pretty, but I've found myself using heroin just once per week. I'm not proud of this and do not understand why I insist on taking something I cannot even FEEL. But I do, or rather I have. I tend to use the past tense with heroin as between doses I have effectively given up, never intending to use that crap ever again ~ and am therefore psychologically clean. Next weekend (because it's always at weekends) I intend to just stay home and reason to myself that I feel exactly the same as when heroin's in my system. Ie perfectly normal, sober and straight. I feel next to nothing even as it IVs in ~ that's if I ever manage to get a vein, which is a near-miracle now. If I cannot feel that rubbish I might as well not be taking it. But you try telling a raving addict like me something like that. Once the bug to score has bitten me, nothing puts me off. Oh well, if I have it in me I might feel a LITTLE bit better, I reason. And can reason my way into hell. That's why I'm going to NA every day now. I think THAT might keep me clean.

They don't even seem to mind hearing that I had a "nervous breakdown". I don't go into immense detail but I do label myself a "manic depressive". The term "bipolar" disagrees with me. Or I disagree with it. My philosophy is as quoted in yesterday's post; my "illness" ~ unlike any physical illness like a collapsed pancreas ~ IS who I am. So if I sound like I'm defining myself through sickness you're right. Because the condition ~ which is a better and more accurate word than "sickness", which implies all is bad ~ confers energy, power and perception. As well as messing up my life.

I'm more and more inspired to write my intellectual story. I'm plotting in my head. This is FICTION we're talking about. I'm not up for writing memoirs about myself. There are enough people writing about heroin addiction and even more people writing about mental health issues. I want to write about something else. I have a gift for characterization which would be wasted if I confined myself to fact. Fiction gives me the chance to soar.

I think the most positive thing blogging has brought me has been the experience of writing for an audience. Rather than keeping journals in the dark, what I say is heard and remarked on. This has given me confidence to express myself. I know my writing is prosaic compared to some other bloggers and I do not spend all day agonizing over what word goes where (as you can probably tell). You'll notice that the really well written blogs tend to contain weekly posts and not daily ones. That's because nobody has the time to post five hundred words of highly polished prose daily. With me you get the rainbow-glinting mountain stream of my consciousness. That's on a good day. On a bad day it's the swirling polluted urban river in an over-industrialized former communist city! When I write fiction I really take care to polish what I write. I go in for a lot of onomatapoeia, assonance and alliteration when I write for children. This brings the prose alive without the need for over-arcane vocabulary. I have to write for the inner child in us all, rather than a specific kid. I don't actually know any children I can write for. I'm dead set on writing children's books because I feel I can make a contribution to that field. A lot of adult writing is over-garnished with sex, violence and generalized worldliness; and I'm weary of this world. I'd rather write for a more innocent time. I don't care if I'm called twee for doing this. My story will probably NOT feature lesbian single parents, children's homes or divorce. I had a hunt around WH Smiths ~ Britain's biggest bookseller ~ and realized my ideas are unique. And that's inspired me to go on. I don't want to be a me too, somebody writing in the style of another, more established author. I want to be the first ME. If my writing can be half as unique as I am, I'll blow the competition out of the water! The field is wide open and just asking to be shaken up by a New Voice. And I have such a lot to say. I'm plotting my book (a full-length children's novel) as we speak... Full length for children means 20,000 to 35,000 words. It's for 8-12 year olds. The type of book that would be illustrated every few pages by someone like Quentin Blake (if only!) My Mother assumed I had in mind a picture book. No! Children do read novels. I used to. Anyway this is all I have to say on my project. The great thing about novel writing is that the talking and the doing are one and the same. You tell your tale to the page. Which means revealing almost nothing about it to anyone. If they wanna know my story, they can read it!

Righty-ho it's five to eleven and I'm off. Take care y'all....

Illustrated: Lamasil (terbinafine 1%); Jogobella fruits of the forest ~ my favourite live yogurt at 79p for 500g; lithium; NOT the kind of book I'm writing...

SOMEONE THAT I USED TO LOVE

ALL I ASK OF YOU
live studio session

PS THIS is why I am so into German. Look at the GDP of $9.5 billion compared to $6.7 billion for Spanish with all those hundreds of millions of speakers...

Skip paragraph One

2011-08-16T01:50:00.003+01:00

Ignore paragraph one in italics if you're fed up of my anti-methadone rants; the post starts in paragraph two:~~~~~~~~~

I WENT TO NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS last night. There was a very manic atmosphere in there. People flying on being clean! I went and told someone my methadone dose and he repeated it out loud several times. I'm not proud of being on over 100mg. In fact I'm ashamed of it. Methadone is the devil's drug. If I won the lottery I'd get a proper morphine sulphate (pills) script. You can't inject the pills by the way; they're deliberately formulated to be sustained release. I've never injected pain pills (oxycodone, hydromorphone (Dilaudid) or morphine in my life. Why bother when street heroin was cheaper and stronger ~ which it was until late last year. Now it's not worth bothering with. I've dabbled twice since officially giving up and the result was so disappointing I didn't even feel like I'd used. Just dirtied myself up test wise and yet stayed effectively clean. Worst of both worlds, in a sense. If I couldn't get morphine pills on prescription I'd go back on street heroin in preference to methadone. That says a LOT about methadone. I'd rather reduce down myself to £1 a day then come off using Subutex. You CAN'T switch from 110mg methadone to Subutex because methadone is such an evil drug. The withdrawals are worse. It's more addictive. Methadone has nothing to recommend it. I can't believe my living mediocrity as a methadone addict. It's too depressing for words.

I washed my clothes today and was hypomanic in the launderette. At first I thought I'd had a drink because I felt drunk. Then I realized I'd drunk nothing and was just in a "mood". My moods have been lunging and plunging all day. I got a new Where To Find and go to my second favourite NA meeting tomorrow night. I have to get there early; I'm fed up of missing the chair ~ that is a recovering addict's life story, the best part of the meeting. I couldn't stay long when I went last time; I was really too manic to sit still. Not to mention too paranoid. This was the meeting where the overwhelming smell of bodily fluids assaulted me so forcefully I fled to the street last time I was there. That was in January, when I was psychotic.

I'm not psychotic any more, so I'm looking forward to staying the entire length of the meeting. Over an hour. Wow!

I told everyone I'd given up drinking and that I felt ill enough to suspect my chemist had been watering my methadoses. I was either in withdrawal or simply sideswiped by an opportunistic infection that synchronized with my giving up drinking. It wasn't hypochondriac; I never realized any connection between no drink and farting like a whizzing balloon until the nurse at the methadone clinic pointed this out, saying I "shouldn't have stopped so abruptly". Well thanks for telling me AFTER the event. All they do is hack away telling you you drink far too much, even though I'd cut down from a peak of 30 units a day to 4 units a day (30 units a day was me bingeing when there was no heroin to buy in the Great Drought of last autumn...) Well I'm really glad not to be poisoned with alcohol any more. I loathed alcohol in my youth. How on earth I ended up drinking the crap I'll never know. Glance along the booze shelves in a supermarket and it all looks really attractive, but that's champagne, Advocaat, Dooleys, Baileys, liquers of all complexions (especially bright blue ones)... and what do people drink? Beer, beer and boring beer. I was always a red wine drinker. Yes I am middle class to my core. I only went on to cheap white cyder when I was already a heroin addict and so permanently short of cash. I only ever started drinking as Dutch courage for begging up change. I only continued drinking because it potentiated heroin. Heroin was my drug of choice. It all revolved round heroin. I only used coke as a "sparkle in my spoon" ~ again to jazz up the heroin. Coke in heroin was like sugar in tea. And like sugar ~ on its own it was pretty gruesome. Valium was taken as a cheap alternative to heroin, when I did take it. Only later did I take it more regularly and that was as an antianxiety/antimanic agent. Sleepers I took strictly to SLEEP. Not to hang off a lamppost on the high road, gurgling inarticulately not noticing the astonished looks of shoppers ~ at 4pm. No, benzos aside ~ and my benzo-popping was no more drug abuse than taking aspirin for a headache is drug "abuse" ~ my drugs all revolved around Heroin, the central point of it all. Some addicts say they were somehow addicts before they ever took drugs. Well I wasn't! I was an addict because I was idiot enough to try heroin. Anyone who persists with heroin becomes a heroin addict. So my addiction says nothing about me but that I was fool enough to kick it off by trying the shit.

In other words just from wondering whether the wedding is on or off ~ a person can develop a COUGH!!

Another highly intellectual song from Babs:
ADELAIDE'S LAMENT

I took your advice earlier and am steeling myself for applying to work in this charity shop by my house. I have NO REFERENCES except the possibility that Deshane could referee for me. I couldn't ask the druggieservice. That would be obscene, having a methadone clinic vouch for me. For one thing if it were a proper service it would be a Heroin Treatment Service, for another thing telling your employer you're a raving methadone-head isn't a good idea. Even if that employer is a volunteer position with old ladies and half missing cruet sets, dinner services with a plate missing, pink stillettos and Ray Charles albums on vinyl peppered with Barbara Taylor Bradford paperbacks...

Right I'm off. Hope you all had a constructive day.

I'm DETERMINED TO SPEAK FLUENT CHINESE IF IT KILLS ME AND IT FEELS LIKE IT IS KILLING ME NOW. I can't say much more than 请坐！"do sit down" and 谢谢你！"thank you". When I finish that one I've only seven languages to go to fulfill my decalinguistic goal... (and my Mum thinks I have no ambitions in life!!)

I love this, where she bellows
why am I FALLING APART??!?
I KNOW HIM SO WELL

http://psychcentral.com/lib/2006/the-two-types-of-bipolar-disorder/all/1/
"True, a chemical storm is raging in the brain, but the analogy to the one taking place in the diabetic’s pancreas is totally misleading. Unlike diabetes and other physical diseases, bipolar defines who we are, from the way we perceive colors and listen to music to how we taste our food. We don’t have bipolar. We are bipolar, for both better and worse."

Clipped Wings (Still)

2011-08-15T12:25:00.003+01:00

I'M still feeling like a bird with clipped wings, who should be soaring on a manic high and now, bar the vaguest tinges and little flashes of it, is reduced to sheer drudging normality and laboured workaday ordinariness. This is quite beyond the pale. I know now why I threw my antipsychotics out the window (metaphorically; the only thing that literally went sailing out of my window in mania was a PORK flavoured pizza ~ ukh. Only thing it was any good for was frisbeeing...)

The reason why is I enjoy being primary coloured, bright and brilliant ~ and that's how the manic state makes me not merely feel but be. You have to bear in mind the TWENTY YEARS I spent in various grades of depression (mostly mild). I was so accustomed to feeling depressed that people who "knew" me thought my depressed self was my real self. Which it most definitely is NOT. If anything I'm far more myself as a maniac than a depressive. Which might not say much nice about me, considering how inconsiderate, irritable and overblown I am in that state ~ but it is TRUE.

Of course I don't really think sick and disabled people should be shot. I only believed I should be shot for being a drain on my country and a disgrace to my family. I'm surprised they even want to talk to me. Then I get letters off my Mum saying I appear to have no goals in life at all. This is SO untrue. I am a serious student of Mandarin Chinese and intend to speak Japanese as well as French German and Spanish. All to mother tongue fluency. French is a really good language for those into reading books. German is superior in every way. Spanish is useful. Japanese is famously whacky. And if you don't speak Chinese you're not a citizen of the 21st century world, let's face it.

I just can't believe how LAZY I have been ~ to be NEARLY 40 and not even fluent in Chinese, let alone Japanese or Spanish. I really have been a wastrel. Of course heroin had a large part to play. First thing that put me against heroin was that it made me so incredibly lazy. But what was good about it was that heroin made life, for the very first time, make sense. Then again it made me weak and cowardly. I used to be very strong. Considering how strong-willed I used to be against my weirdo self. Everybody who knew me knew I was a weirdo. And you wonder why I talk about suicide!! Heroin was the only thing that made my warped personality fit. Even my psychiatrist said this when personality disorders were mooted.

Unfortunately I it no personality disorder except Cyclothymic Personality (ie bipolar lite). I have bipolar lite whenever I don't have bipolar heavy. That is I have a mood swing of some degree almost all the time. I only speak to my family between them, which means waiting weeks to call, sometimes.

My mother, who has "major depression" says she never feels fully 100%. This is called "dysthymia" (a mildly low mood). I heard that first degree relatives of someone with unipolar depression have a 25% chance of having a major mood disorder 50:50 recurrent major depression or type 1 bipolar. I would be type 1 bipolar (if I'm not schizoaffective). Schizoaffective disorder and type 1 bipolar are almost identical and the treatments for them are the same. So there's not very much in the name. Anna Grace has bipolar I and her symptoms and mine are nearly the same. Maybe I get a bit more manic than her, but she's on more medication damping that mania down...

Schizoaffective just means I meet full diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia when I'm severely manic. It means I have Kraepelin's "delusional mania" (which is actually marked by vivid hallucinations, not delusions, but that's what it's called). I've been reading Emil Kraepelin's Manic-Depressive Insanity And Paranoia to find myself. And I don't like what I found. He diagnoses me as a moody so-and-so with manic and hypomanic attacks on top. I don't think I ever get depression, not by the standards of the early 1900s. My depression is only a mild case. And suicidality can be a rational act of someone with nothing left to live for ~ even psychiatrists acknowledge that.

Note I'm not saying I want to commit suicide. My moritorium is on. I feel about 5% manic and not depressed. I was quite manic last night but the risperidone blanked that out, when I took it. I get the daily Risperidone Mood Swing where I feel it wearing off each evening, going higher and higher until I bosh it back and am damped down like a Sucker Loach in a community fish tank. Sucking on that glass, bored out of my brainbox (don't loaches and catfish get bored? Skulking about the community tank as they do...?)

If you're reading this blog and still wondering about my personality I'd say I'm like Phoebe from Friends. Hippy Dippy on the outside, hard as nails on the inside (if you think Phoebe isn't hard, watch Friends again and more carefully...) I've been told a few times that I'm hard. Always by people who didn't know me so well, now know me better. Always with a note of disappointment. I say if I were as soft on the inside as on the outside I'd be a fucking lump of jelly. Better to be a wolf in sheep's clothing than vice versa. Anyway there's nothing wrong with being hard. We live in a hard world.

I had a yen to test my alcohol resolve yesterday. So I had a can of weak cherry flavour cyder. The one I used to knock back because it was "mandy drink". Dear reader: it took me THREE HOURS to finish the lousy stuff and I still don't enjoy drink. It reminds me too much of sad-sacks street drinkers. I met one yesterday. A woman who was too vulgar for words and thought "I used to be like that". Ukh. I LOATHE the image of alcohol and drinkers it's untennably vulgar. The big reason I preferred drugs was that I hated alcohol and needed SOME recreational substance. Ecstasy was infinitely superior in my book. E made me feel like Buddha on a transcendental cloud of peace and love. Drink never did that for me. And I was never one of those psycho people who has a complete personality change after one drink and suddenly insists on drinking the bar dry. That's my big quarm with NA; they believe any drug of any description sets off the entire disease process again and I don't. I took drugs to feel better. Not to be off my head. Only terminal junkies are so far gone they want nothing short of general anaesthesia. Heroin gave me what I believed to be an enhanced ability to cope with life. Of course I ended up not coping at all. So heroin goes out the window too... I can't believe I'm dumping heroin. You have to be truly mad or desperate or both to give up a drug as efficacious as heroin. So maybe I have finally lost it. My dr does after all believe I'm schizo...

I've swapped alcohol for Morrisons' own cloudy lemonade; 54p for 2 litres ie 27p a litre or just over 10p a can. Very good value.

Notice no Barbra Streisand!

Video version:

I love techno choirs!

Sorry if this is yet another boring post saying nothing new; my life is boring and samey, but I do like this techno track..........

I get to see Deshane tomorrow. He's getting me a pensioner's bus pass. Wahey!!
OK it's a Disabled Bus pass but I hate saying I'm disabled. It means I'm scrounging off the state. Even though I found out I've been "disabled" for years. It's that fucking mania that disables me. Makes me too lazy for words. Schizo gives me avolition. Depression makes me not bothered. Add those 3 together and you have a wreck of a person who can blog about life yet never lives it. And that's that!

Glewood's foreign language rant

2011-08-14T22:17:00.006+01:00

I HAVE just found out that my one book 2 CD Chinese course with its 1000 word vocabulary reportedly takes you to the European Council's Common European Framework Level B2, that's level 4/6 with level 6 as near mother tongue proficiency. Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontenaity that makes regular interaction with native speakers a possibility without strain for either party. That remains to be seen!

1000 words isn't very much. Linguaphone courses teach 2000 words nowadays (it used to be 1500). Rosetta Stone levels 1-3 teach 1500 words (not very much for the £400 they cost). So 1000 words is just a higher basic smattering of day to day topics. Not "A level" (higher school certificate) standard. Which is what CEFR Level B2 is...

In A Level German we discussed nuclear disarmament, environmental protection and general politics. I don't see much of that indexed in Chinese. I think if you discussed politics in Chinese you'd get extradited!!! I've decided to wade through this book very slowly at 1-2 weeks per unit. There are 22 units. By the end I should read and write every word I know in simplified and traditional.

Simplified characters are, in my view, an exercise in fatuous vulgarity; but they are the standard now. So I'd better learn them. I just hope I don't get manic and start thinking of them; I might die of impotent fury. I mean why take the most complex and beautiful script on the face of the earth and DARE simplify it? That really is beyond the pale.

They should have simplified English spelling before they took their greedy talons to Chinese. English requires simplification in my view. I mean why is night spellt with a gh? It shoul be "nite". Or even "nait". Compound nouns sould be run together as in German. "Spellingmistake". "Pricetag" "informationbooth". It looks funkier and makes the language more intimidating for foreigners, who deserve to be confused.

What most English speaking natives appear rarely if ever to appreciate is that speakers of almost any other language can take for granted that a loud personal conversation on a foreign street ~ no matter how overheard ~ shall remain just that: PRIVATE. Not so with English!

Every bloody word you say, anywhere in the world shall be noted down and used against you. Of course this makes communication far easier and I'm not knocking that, but it would be nice sometimes, I think, to be able to converse loudly on foreign soil without the natives eavesdropping.

One tennis pro even got fined for swearing IN ENGLISH on ARABIAN soil!!! Who are THEY to tell us how to speak our language! That is an offence against freedom of speech. Not to mention highly intrusive.

Would a Czech tennis ace be fined for yelling "oh fuck" in his own language three thousand miles from home? I think not.

And here endeth the linguistic rant.

Illustrated: "horse" in traditional and simplified (vandalized) Chinese characters... be honest: which is prettiest? Clue: the one on the left.

I was talking about Mandy Patinkin earlier: here's his duet with Madonna:~~~~~~~
WHAT CAN YOU LOSE
"Mandy is NOT short for Amanda as I had assumed, but for MANDEL... DUR!!

Here's what I really look like!

2011-08-14T15:05:00.001+01:00

ANNA GRACE constantly wants to know what I look like.
Well here you are Anna!

I don't like letting my hair grow because it makes me look like Norman from Eastenders

With nasty long hair and glases I am the spitting image of Olive from On The Buses

On a particularly bad day I look like Worzel Gummidge

And you wonder why I resorted to heroin, drink and crack for years? Drugs were the only way I could cope with being my horrid self! I do have an excuse ~ it's staring back at me in the mirror whenever I dare to look!

Two Love Songs

2011-08-14T12:38:00.003+01:00

THERE'S not a lot to say today. Poor Mouth put on his blog a proverb about me "tis better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt" ~ let's face it, I've most certainly removed all doubt about me!

Anna Grace has gone in hibernation. She's back on the heroin and hiding from Anonymous, who keeps saying what a loser she is. I filled up her newest post with comments, as did Valerie and Boomer (2 drug dealers). Valerie signed in as me and started typing about her personal warts, the dodgy old cow.

My Chinese is coming along swimmingly. I keep getting discouraged, thinking "I will never learn this" I will never learn a language where all the words are weird and sound the same and there are two sets of characters (traditional and simplified). Yet I do learn it. The words are more difficult than Spanish or Italian but they're just as foreign if you think about it. The Chinese accent sounds more like an American accent than any other foreign language, as it contains retroflex R (like an American R). But it also contains sounds like a cross between S as in Sand and SH as in Shake or a sound halfway between S in Sand and CH in Church. Most extraordinary.

Usually I have zero discouragement and one hundred per cent inspiration when learning languages. It's the mysteriousness factor that appeals most, which is why Asian languages are to be preferred over European ones. Also as Valium Marilyn even knows, Chinese is "the easiest language in the world" ~ which is not strictly true as it's harder than Japanese or Thai but there you go. It's not as difficult as German, French or Spanish.

Seeing as it's my goal to speak 10 languages fluently, once Chinese is done there'll only be 7 left to go. (English is done; French and German are half done).

There's an awful programme on TV called "Ibiza Rocks" awful formulaic oldfashioned guitar music on an isle famed for brilliant formulaic and stereotypical dance music!

Here are 2 love songs. The 2nd one has a proper video:~~

I'VE NEVER BEEN IN LOVE BEFORE
the montage on this is more interesting than most of the others

IF I LOVED YOU
live recording session

ps that awful Professor Green is on telly ~ a one hit wonder if ever there was one. his only decent "song" is this one and that's because it has the best part of an inxs tune chucked in!

PPS how come Barbra Streisand stars in Yentl with a Man Named Mandy (Mandy Patankin) ~ did he have a brother called Wendy? Is his middlename Suzanne, so he could be a boy named Mandy and Sue?~?? And if Mandy isn't short for Amanda what is it short for?

Tiny Tits

2011-08-13T20:20:00.000+01:00

Feathery Friday on Saturday

Bluetits are the most beautiful garden birds in Britain...

and are known as far away as China

where the agile fluttering featheries are called the 蓝山雀 lán shānquè

"the blue mountain bird"

Wishing y'all a very
CHIRPY WEEKEND!

Clipped Wings

2011-08-13T12:43:00.005+01:00

I WANDER ABOUT feeling tired and lost. Like a bird with clipped wings, I should be soaring. Yet all I do is wander lost on the cruel earth.
I know my blog has descended to depths of ridiculous absurdity. I hope you all think I'm one of those who posts what I would have done if only I had the guts. That my blog is not a faithful account of deeds and misdeeds. EXAMPLE: me blaring out Barbra Streisand's Yentl and Chinese lessons first thing in the morning thinking I was following my true spirit, that everyone else was hopelessly uptight and sad for sleeping and not doing as I did. Why do I do these stupid things? Only the week before I had been musing on how calm I felt, how glad I was not to be bipolr anymore. How I enjoyed NOT being manic and on the drugs that were supposed to prevent this.

First sign of anything bar the pissiest weakest elevated mood and the antipsychotics went out the window, as did almost every other shred of common sense and I was ranting, roaring, raging, laughing, and wasting a hell of a lot of energy doing nothing. Thankfully the residual effet of the drugs would have been in me, preventing true mania from taking off. Which was why this attack was what I would have called "piss-weak mania" adding how much "I hate weak things" ~ meaning hypomania as opposed to mania with psychotic features, which is when you really feel wired to the national electricity grid. Fantastic!! And the chaos, like the mania, really is full-blown.

Oh what is wrong with me and why am I so STUPID. It's one thing to have "mental health problems"; quite Another to be STUPID. I wish I had a doctor, which I don't. I want quetiapine (Seroquel). Risperidone is making me excessively anxious and I cannot abide a drug that makes me need Valium on top. That is ridiculous. As for growing women's bressts, I meant what I said about making a fortune in prostitution on the back of them ~ that's exactly what I'd do if I grew tits. Gotta turn lemons to lemonade. Gotta cash in.

I'm sorry to Janice and everyone else I've offended with my suicide talk. Death is what I think of. Wouldn't you, if you were a great loser like me? I wish anonymous would actually shoot me dead not just talk about it. Being as Anonymous is all talk and life is crap I decline to be involved in such sordidness. I don't really want to commit suicide I just wnnt to die when I feel like that. Then I have all the benefits of being dead... I could possibly get off the self-"murder" aspect by claiming to be non-human. Which is quite possibly true. Anyway I'm going to try not to talk about suicide any more, for a month at least. It irritates me probably more than it irritates you. And I feel y'all are very irritated indeed by it.

What would you do if you were me? There's no answer to my problems and I feel I should never have been born. I feel like a post-Hiroshima baby who should have been aborted by nature, yet wasn't... Awful awful awful.

I'm not severely depressed by the way. According to Emil Kraepelin, author of Manic Depressive Insanity and Paranoia I have manic spells going as high as delirious mania (as high as you can go) but the reverse state is little more than morbid moodiness. Not true depression at all. Meaning there's nothing whatever wrong with me.

Videos 1: Coloring book 2: Life Story ~ "your life story began with somebody else" one of my exes once got totally the wrong impression when I wandered about singing this song. Guilty or what?! Hey that's the name of the album ha ha har. Illustrations: birds' clipped wings
Video 3: Hideaway from the "Guilty Too" album; written for Babys by Garry Gibb of the BeeGees.

Valium Marilyn and the Miaos in Laos

2011-08-13T02:28:00.000+01:00

VALIUM MARILYN noticed I was very nervous today. She somehow can tell the difference between manic and nervous, which I'm not sure most people could because both make me hyperkinetic. Difference being I keep blanking out in nervousness. Manic goes on and on and on. So I'm not a maniac any more. I keep getting letters from bailiffs trying to push me into suicide. I haven't opened a single one by the way but I know their attitude. They try and hack and hack away at you until you give in and do one. Ingredients: antiemetics, a bellyfull of medication (which won't kill you, just knock you out) and a swirling river or violent, lonely stretch of sea. Or a plain old railway. Or a posh clinic in Switzerland. I don't want to commit suicide I want to become a children's author instead. If only I could marshall my thoughts into a book. I did write a short story but stories start and stop too quickly. I prefer novels, which gain momentum from themselves. I have written 3 in my time. 3 buckets of pigshit, but 3 done. I only know where the last one is. I know what's gonna happen: still I will have the council tax on my back even after one billion sales. Agatha Christie had tax problems her entire life. Something to do with having been resident in the USA and no treaties against double-taxation in her day. Which meant she sold rights to half her income to Booker for not much more than one million in today's money. Which cleared the debt. She lived in a very nice house near the sea. I would quite like to live in the 1930s with parlour maids and skullery maids and butlers. If you want to know about that world, read A Woman Of Substance by Barbara Taylor Bradford. The first half of that book is exceptionally well written. In the second half the heroine somehow goes from servant to multimillionairess department store mogul without ever borrowing money, losing money or having the slightest glitch in her glittering business success. Barbara Taylor Bradford should do The Apprentice. With business acumen like hers she'd be bound to win.

Why do they always put Barbra's voice too far back in the mix? I would have been 3 when she made this performance. And I don't drink alcohol any more!!

You know how I stopped? Same way I always used to give up cigarettes. Just remind myself of everything I loathe about alcohol. And there's a lot to loathe. That technique never worked on heroin as I loved the image, loved the drug, adored everything about heroin. That's me and heroin. Not heroin that kills kids in magazine articles. I mean heroin that made me beautiful inside. Heroin that made the lassitude and meaninglessness of life melt away. Heroin my lovely lovely heroin.

Now I think of old junkies and me not coping. I think I got mentally ill because heroin gives you a stress-free life. Making you more susceptible to stress. Making me get sideswiped by psychosis or bipolar or whatever it is. I no longer care for the title: it's not like a diagnosis makes me Duke of Norfolk now, is it? Or that the title distinguishes me from a mere marquess? I never did understand people who wear mental diagnostics round their necks like Olympic gold medals. What for? Probably to justify living on DLA for ever and not committing suicide.

Oh I was going to say something about suicide YET AGAIN but notice how in that clip Barbra Streisand gets such an ovation ~ and that early in her career.

By the way Valium Marilyn is dying her hair exactly the same shade as mine. Schwarzkopf 00A or A00 Absolute Platinum. Still photographs the colour of nicotine stains even though it looks near-white under stark light. I'm leaving it on longer next time. My hair looks crap now with horrible roots lurking near halfway along it. I thought that look might look superior, but I don't really like it. I'm buying another pack next week. Schwarzkopf do a tomato red which I was thinking of saving for a manic episode. If I died it that colour normally I'd just wear a hat until it grew out. If I was manic I'd thoroughly enjoy striding about looking like a lightbulb in a brothel.

This song is awful, so awful it makes me laugh out loud "Extra extra! I'm in luuurve... I gotta thank my lucky stars a-ah-buuurve! Hurreh, hurreh don't be late!" Funny grandma is throwing a partay...

What actually are bluebirds? Are they like the tiny tits we get in European gardens? (Bluetits?)

Yellowbridge Chinese dictionary: http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/wordsearch.php?searchMode=P&word=zuo&dialect=M&select=whole

Valium Marilyn was pilled out this afternoon. Bloody hell. I slept for hours on end when I got back. Like an old pensioner. I'm too tired nowadays. Hey you know those photochromic glasses I got, they only darken properly in the sun. Not like the old Reactolite Rapides that went dark the minute you stepped into daylight, whatever the weather...

I think I should get a job as a poet. I wanna be the Barbra Streisand of literature. Not perfect, but unequalled. Yes I hear you yelling WRITE WRITE WRITE but I can't even clean my house. How can I write. And bailiffs wanna take away my computer, the bastards. Then I will HAVE to commit suicide. Even though I shouldn't be PAYING the council tax. I'm thinking of going to my member of parliament. Then he/she can straighten this out. I bet my local MP is a tory. Tories should be shot between the eyes (I say even though if I were tied down and forced to vote I'd vote tory ahead of Labour any day! In America I would probably be a death-penalty loving Democrat. It's easier in America as everyone appears to be pro-rich and pro-low taxes. I want to be rich and pay low taxes, y'see, so that's my one political view. Low taxes for the rich and for me. Especially once my fortune surpasses one hundred million...)

the end of the world is coming, which means a lot of us may never die because we will live through the end of the old world into the birth of the new one...

Marilyn was laughing when I tried pronouncing Chinese down the pub garden. She said "is that what you do in your room" I said "yeah at top volume" that made her laugh even more. And do an impression of a cat being strangled. Which reminds me: did you know there's a group called the Miao-Yao languages? Which made me want to go and see the Miaos in Laos. Unfortunately Laos was the original source of Double UO Globe heroin, best in the world. So I can't EVER go there...

It's 2:02am I have to go... cheerybye...

Illustrated: bluetit; baby bluetits; bluebird; Chinese ethnic Yaos

PS Miao-Yao languages are also known as the Hmong-Mien group

What I'm trying not to be...

2011-08-12T13:56:00.003+01:00

Gott
Oh Gott
Unser himmelischer Vater
Oh Gott
Und mein Vater,
der du ebenfalls in Himmel bist.
Möge das Licht
Dieser flackernden Kerze
Die Nacht erleuchten, so wie dein Geist
Meine Seele erleuchtet
Papa...
Kannst du mich hören?
Papa, kannst du mich sehen?
Papa, kannst du mich des Nachts finden?

Barbra is singing German out of my telly. I am trying not to feel depressed. I'm taking risperidone again. If you read yesterday's dollop you'll know I just found out I'm to grow women's breasts because of the side effects. I just hope they grow by Sunday so I can start out on the game. I really need some cash by the weekend. I'm down to my last £1.

I really wish Anna Grace's Anonymous would send me a gun. Then I would shoot Anonymous then shoot myself, har har. Nah: just kidding. I just made note of my goals: to speak fluent Chinese, Japanese, Cantonese, French, German and Spanish. As well as Greek and Hebrew (to read the Bible in the original). And Latin (to be educated). That makes 10 languages in all including English and I've always wanted to speak 10 languages fluently. I also want to be a bestselling novelist with sales exceeding one billion. I want over £100,000,000 in today's money. I want a house. Or ideally a collection of homes across the world. And I want to get rehoused somewhere posher. And I want £10 to tide me through till Monday. So where do I start?

I looked up Chinese characters last night. I've found a website that teaches the stroke order. Which just to confuse things is slightly different, in some cases, from Japanese. Once you get the hang you know, for example that horizontals tend to come before verticals (so you draw a cross the opposite way round to most Europeans). If you don't bother with stroke order you'll end up with dodgy looking characters.

Oh shit I've cooked sweet chili chicken pizza but forgotten the cloudy lemonade to go with it. Now I've got to blow my last 50p down Morrisons. If I really end up broke I'll have to beg on the streets. Hey they do non-cloudy for 21p. Even chips cost £1.30 a bag. The stingy govt never increased benefits when prices went up. Personally I think the sick and disabled (as well as poor people and unemployed people) should be shot dead to save money for the able bodied. There was some really good dolt on BBC Question Time saying rioters should be thrown out of council accommodation and cut off the dole. Yeah so people who've already demonstrated they're up for theiving and have very little respect for the society they live in ~ they should be made destitute so they're forcedinto thieving off the rest of us. Yeah bright idea. The former chief constable of London pointed out there's already a system where money is taken off benefits it's called a FINE. Fucking idiot people. I think rioters should be pilloried and whipped in minor cases or gassed to death in major ones. If prison is used, nobody should get less than ten years' solitary. And if they run out of cells ~ use London zoo! Prisons should take paying visitors anyhow. Wouldn't YOU have paid £100 to throw sticky buns at child killers like Myra Hindley or nutters like Charles Bronson? Most people would. They could have a torture channel on TV where you bid to be able to remotely operate callipers or red hot pokers on to paedophiles, rapists and especially burglars and muggers.

Do you think I'll get in when I run as Emperor of London? It's my ambition to throw the Queen out of Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle and to live there myself.

I'm not really manic. Like I said I'm trying not to be depressed. My friend Pinky, whose hair I wanted to dye varying shades of blue and green like a rocket lolly, phoned me up just now. She can tell I'm not manic any more. I'm no longer ranting and cackling at every opportunity. I wish I could be manic without the chaos. My house was in such disarray earlier I just wanted to curl up and sleep rather than deal with it all. Whenever I sleep I have nightmares about crackhouses up tower blocks.

OK I'm off to Morrisons for that 20p lemonade.... Please someone send me some money. I'm broke till Monday! And no it didn't go on drugs. I haven't spent ANY of my DSS money on drugs. And I gave up the tiny bit I drink about a week ago (don't know what day, don't wanna know). I just want to be able to go to AA as an EX-drinker. NA-wise I'm still a user, as I'm on methadone, which is more addictive and more evil than heroin. If only I won the lottery I'd go to a private doctor for morphine pills. Failing that I'd go back on street heroin and just reduce myself. Better for the mental health. No wonder I'm falling apart ~ methadone does nobody any good. It's appalling stuff. Well I'm stopping this rant before it starts have a nice day y'all...

THE WAY HE MAKES ME FEEL

MY COLORING BOOK

Photophobia

2011-08-11T20:48:00.004+01:00

20:14 HRS and I'm sat here with dark glasses on because of the GLARE. Bloody hell. Why do I have to go and catch photophobia now? I could turn the blinkin' light off and open the curtain actually.... There that's better. I'm not taking the shades off. I like to look cool when I'm blogging.

Barbra is crooning tunes from Broadway over my TV. I always play CDs through the television: the sound's way better than the £17.99 stereos I buy. Why a woman with a voice like that wasted years recording middle of the road pop, true with the odd gem thrown in, and only late in her career recorded the stuff everyone wanted to hear, I do not understand. That's why I don't count myself as a fan of Babs; she is too annoying. I'd better watch what I say as I'm still hoping for an invitation for dinner round at hers before I die. Knockout tunes with a knockout voice. Inspirational! Latitudinal! Roses!! There Barbra. Can I live in your house please, so you can sing me lullabyes when I can't sleep? Also can you leave me your house after you die? I need a house desperately. That's my new goal: to get several million pounds and a house. You need millions just to buy Tescos Finest basic necessities in today's world...

Well I spent most of today sleeping in my chair like a pensioner. Then I had to go out, do someone a favour. That made me all excitable again and my head was racing. Then I started getting tired again.

I have to say when I woke up this evening I wandered about wondering what the hell I have been doing the past week. I remember feeling incredibly euphoric and pacing back and forth at 4am. I remember deliberately putting Barbra Streisand and Chinese lessons on my telly at top volume at 5am. I remember becoming furiously angry over nothing several times. Luckily when I'm with other people I generally calm down because I have some focus for my energies. They just find it disconcerting that I hate sitting still and would rather wander about babbling than be all boring, like I normally am. I wasn't into rioting, strangely. You'd think a manic person would be well up for smashing up a few shops, but I never knew where the riot would be as I'm not a gang member or Blackberry owner. Also I'm way too paranoid to indulge in crime. I think fingerprints, CCTV, DNA. I'm prone to paranoia as it is; I don't need to fuel that fire, I really don't. Anyway I don't approve of mass shoplifting and certainly don't approve of arson. As for attacking the police, well I do understand that one I won't lie there. The police are 2'-faced bastards. Sometimes they're so kind it would make you cry. Other times they basically break the laws they're meant to uphold just to secure convictions. They don't care. On the morning I went up to have a good poke through the wreckage, I was quite tempted to crawl through HMV's window in Wood Green. I doubt the looters would have cleared out the Barbra Streisand section so it was all waiting for me. If I'd got caught I'd just have claimed squatters rights and declared I intended to live there. Now this rioting just makes me feel sick. I'm glad I didn't feel much at the time, it would have sent me off on one bigtime.

Well I don't recall what the hell it was I intended to say here. Oh yeah! Anna Grace and I got a comment telling us both to commit suicide! I love these:

you and gledwood so do yourselves a favor and both fucking shoot each other in the heads at the same time. you are both fucking lame-ass losers who seem to have nothing better to do than write about thier sorry ass lives on a computer and also lie about them. oh boo hoo my life sux and I am bored and I am high...got news for you, your life doesn't suc, you have no fucking life so you may as well just kill each other and make the world a brighter place LOSERS

It's more sorry ass to read that crap than write it. If I kept a journal I'd just lose it, that's why I post it online instead. Anyway I've come too far to stop now. And why do those comments always come to Anna's blog and not mine? Do they see her as a softer target? She barely ever answers back. I directed that commenter in Melody's direction. Melody loves haters. She says she enjoys people obsessing over her life.

As I told Anonymous, my life is pretty perfect at the moment. I'm off drugs, off drink and I feel spectacular. I'm certainly not depressed. I only felt ill because I caught some diarrhoearal disease. Also I think I might have expended too much energy being manic or hypomanic. Whichever it was.

Right that's it I'm off.

PS I just found out risperidone could give me woman's breasts. In which case I hope I geat great pendulous knockers so I can get a job as a tranny prostitute. I desperately need something to bring the money in. I know a heroin addict who did that and bought a pretty nice flat with the proceeds! WHILE using gear every day!!

I'm thinking of getting my meds changed to quetiapine (Seroquel) it's meant to knock you out way better. I don't know whether to take the risperidone again as I stopped it as soon as I started getting manic, in order to become as manic as humanly possible, which I thoroughly enjoy and revel in, in case you didn't notice, because mania just means being your natural self without restraint. So should I take these pills or those pills and GIMME A DOCTOR BACK I don't even have a shrink!! Thanks a lot XXX healthcare trust for shafting me yet again.

WHY DID I CHOOSE YOU?

I HAVE DREAMED/WE KISS IN A SHADOW/SOMETHING WONDERFUL

Riot News... etc

2011-08-10T21:10:00.001+01:00

RIOT NEWS: it's all gone back to normal now. It was back to normal last night in fact. All the shops open. Some rumour had gone round the night before that gangs would come and trash the place,
which meant nearly everything was shut. The big 24-hour convenience stores stayed open world war ii style ~ ie you had to squeeze in past 6 East European bouncers, nip into the partially lit shop (blueberry live yogurt was in stock but they always buy far too much of the apple flavour. No British person buys apple flavour yogurt and everyone knows that so why stock up? You can tell a man has done the ordering in these places. They'll have 5 brands of butter all priced the same. No spreadable, no unsalted. As I say EVERYONE knows these places are fronts for drug money. The most obvious ones have partially empty shelves and yet have remained open for years...

The riots have spread to some northern towns but nobody knows what's happening up there, it's too far away. (I mean too far away to know the word on the street.) I can tell the atmosphere here is far more relaxed than 2 days ago and that's about it.

Oh crapping hell the internet connexion keeps going down. I'm using my neighbours' to get Barbra Streisand crooning free of charge. Stingy old T Mobile have stopped letting me watch Youtube all day except between 4pm and midnight after day one when I bust out my data allowance watching documentaries on Hiroshima etc. One big reason I want to speak fluent Japanese is to read some good books on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have a real thing about atom bombs. I also like the poetry of Matsuo Basho.

I'm doing Chinese first because I happen to have the CDs as well as the book. I was too addicted to heroin when I got into Japanese to bother buying the discs as well. A Japanese accent is FAR easier to master than Mandarin Chinese. You do have tones, but only as Yoruba has tones. That is the sentence inflects in a certain way and some words are distinguished by high or low pitched syllables. Just as we say "I record a record" altering tone and pitch to distinguish "record" the verb and "record" the noun. I always had an ambition to learn a language that was as different from English as possible. It absolutely had to be nonIndoEuropean (so Hindi was out). Had to have funky writing. Ideally had to have tones. So I picked Thai and chose to go to Thailand. Then I went to India instead. Long story. I do find it irritating that people go "oh that's such a hard language" and yet expect all the Thais to understand English! It's probably easier for an English person to learn an East Asian language than a person from there to learn English because English has torturous grammar compared to Chinese or Thai, which are like pidgin English "today I go shop buy chicken, go home cook chicken eat dinner!" like that. The words are unchangeable, there are no plurals, no inflected tenses (teach/taught). All is simple. And the lazy English claim such languages are exceedingly difficult, just because they sound a bit like a cat being strangled ~ well they do when I try and pronounce them!

Having these yummy zopiclone pills I now don't need sleep. I'm sleeping like a baby all hours of the day. My mood is still a bit elevated and I'm still very excitable compared to normal but I can sit still and don't find myself pacing endlessly at 3 in the morning. I had horrible nightmares last night about heroin and crack. I am sweating like a swine. I was so disorganized last week my house looks like a bomb's hit it (yet again) all my clothes are dirty. I am living on biscuits because I just cannot bear to eat proper food (can't afford it for that matter). The less I spend on drugs the LESS money I have not more!! I was doing OK on heroin. Now I'm in chaos. I'm really glad I gave up alcohol though. Noxious stuff. I'm not one of those people who turns into a psychopath after half a glass. Or one of those who has one drink then won't stop until the bar is dry. Or they're lying unconscious under the bar. For one thing I never drink in pubs; I hate them. The formula of loud music and lots of young people crammed in never made sense. Nowhere to dance. Wrong drug for dancing (Ecstasy doesn't mix with drink at all and E was the only drug that really made me wanna dance. Drink just makes you sway then fall over.) What I really loathed about pubs was not being able to hear a word anybody said for all the loud music. If you want loud music go clubbing ~ then you can dance and do as you please. Ukh I loathe pubs. I never even liked the taste of booze. What other people call a "warm glow" was to me a burning stomach. Alcohol does not give any kind of high, let's face it. It just blanks bad feelings to an extent. When I was manic I barely felt drink at all. When I was depressed it made me feel better but not better enough. Just because it's a CNS depressant doesn't follow that it exacerbates melancholia. They say IN SOME PEOPLE and I don't think I was one of them. I felt just as depressed off drink as on it and I gave it up for weeks at a time just to prove it. This is years ago, when giving up was easy. I only found it hard more recently because the habit of a can in the morning (first thing) and another in the afternoon was so entrenched. Now I can go in the shop and buy the drinks I used to fantasize about but couldn't afford: Coca Cola/Pepsi, chocolate milk, ginger beer (nonalcoholic). Cloudy lemonade. I far prefer soft drinks to yucky old beer, which I avoided on principal. Uptight men drink it because they're too scared to drink anything else. That's why I drank cyder mixed with fruit juice. The fruit juice made it look like a soft drink for the benefit of people in waiting rooms, on buses etc.

By the way my doctor is MONUMENTALLY FUCKING THICK. What kind of an idiot gives someone they know is bipolar an ANTIDEPRESSANT when they're not sleeping because they're MANIC. Fucking idiot. That's how you put someone in a mental unit. That's more negligent than smoking crack. It makes you higher. She really is stupid. The methadone clinic want an ECG. Some bullshit to do with "prolonged QT-intervals". Dr Schoopid went and filled out a bloods form and said "no we'll order the ECG after these tests come back" so I repeated another three times that the methadone clinic want an ECG because my dose is over 100mg but the silly cow would not listen. How the hell this woman manages to practise medicine without killing her patients I do not understand.

Hang on a minute my dr is foreign. I bet her medical degree is a forgery. Wouldn't surprise me at all.

Maybe I should get her investigated by the general medical council...? She brought up the issue of mirtazapine (Remeron) yet again. Mirtazapine that made me so out of it I was stood outside my house in awe at 3am watching lightning course down the walls constantly then dropped me down so low I was hallucinating dead bodies. That drug. I know what she wanted: to fob me off with that crap instead of a true sleeping pill. I'm getting an Indian male doctor next time. They dish out sleepers like sweets.

I've gone long past that prissy stage of believing sleeping pills are bad. My attitude is if ya can't sleep zonk yerself out or just don't go to bed. But don't complain about it. I only get insomnia when I'm too hyper anyhow. When I'm too depressed I sleep all day and all night!! Which is a good thing. I don't WANT to be awake when I feel like that.

Has this gone all boring? Rant rant rant. How did I get myself such a THICK doctor? She even asked WHY she was prescribing risperidone if I don't hear voices. I said to keep me sane. Fucking idiot. I dont' hear voices all the time, only in phases, which she SHOULD KNOW if she knew anything about psychiatry. My consultant sent her a letter which she obviously didn't bother reading ~ the instruction to set up a rispeidone script would have been enclosed, so she can't claim to have received one and not the other. Silly cow. Right I'm off:~~~~~~~

O man I've really gotta do something about my feet. They smell like a dead toad!

And that reminds me: what do frogs drink?
Croaker-Coala!

LAZY AFTERNOON
this is one of Babbsie's best vocals. and a highly intellectual song about beetlebugs zoomin' and there not being another human in view...

THE LOVE INSIDE
the BeeGees recorded a demo of this song for Barb, ruining it with their horrible voices. Hers is much better; she reaches a high E6 in this song...

Illustrated: zopiclone (Chinese version); eszopiclone (Lunestra) nearest equivalent available in the American market. Eszopiclone was refused a licence in Europe for being too similar to zopiclone which was already there... Zopiclone might have been turned down in America because it does cause memory loss. Eg if someone phones you when you're on it you might tell them you've moving to Holland then forget all about it the next day... LIKE I DID!!

Der der der!

2011-08-10T15:20:00.001+01:00
I WENT TO THE DOCTOR'S determined to walk out with a party-pack of drugs and indeed I did. The stingy cow only prescribed 14 zopiclone and this after trying to fob me off with ANTIDEPRESSANT and questioning me over and over why I still can't sleep on risperidone. True answer: because I stopped taking it soon as I went into an "elevated mood" (I wanted it as "elevated" as possible, obviously). But even when I do take it, antipsychotics only keep you sleeping longer once you ARE asleep. They don't knock you out. She cannot pretend not to understand this elementary fact because in anaesthesiology different agents are used to produce and sustain unconsciousness. Zopiclone produces it (far better than any benzo ever did); risperidone prolongs it... I also got antifungal for my nasty feet. Plus loads of yummy risperidone. She said "oh well done well done!" when I confessed to having given up drink. I haven't even craved a drop since I quit. Then I questioned her about free nicotine replacement and she said I shouldn't do smoking cessation right now; I'm taking too much on. Ha ha! I'm getting a free script for this nicotine spray that goes right up the nose like coke. Surely that would give me the best hit.

O man I've run out of money ALREADY I so need to borrow a tenner of somebody. I bet my stingy friends will pretend to be out, then call each other up warning that I'm coming round when I go on the warpath for dosh.

This amazing tune is going around and around in my head. It goes something like this DER DER DER DER DER. I'm desperate to find out the title. Can anybody PLEASE help me. And after that first phrase there's a twiddly bit: DER DIDDLY DIDDLEY DE-DER-DER-DER then more DER DER DER DER DA DER!

PLEASE SOMEBODY HELP ME WITH THIS DREADFUL CONUNDRUM IT IS DOING MY HEAD IN.

ALSO if anyone can lend me a tenner I'd be most gtrateful.

My screaming trots have gone, thank the LORD . My body is tired ore tewwwwwwww kjiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiil

I'm falling asleep at the screen and I'm not on drugs. I have to go now cheerio people ;-).......
'

YOU'LL NEVER WALK ALONE
this is a rather over the top performance and she keeps going off the proper tune but hey it's "inspirational". Is Babs a Liverpool FC supporter then??

WINDMILLS OF YOUR MIND

PS the London rioters are supposedly NOT just street gangs but persons of all creeds, colours and ages. Including primary school teachers and social workers! Mayor Boris Johnson says they will "bitterly regret their actions" when they are punished with the full force of the feeble British law!

Ill in an ill city

2011-08-09T18:45:00.001+01:00

I WAS FEELING TERRIBLY ILL TODAY. I couldn't sleep until well past 6:30am. Woke in terror just after 7, thinking I'd overslept and eeked out my sleep until 9:45. Then I flew up the road, drank my methadone, which frankly doesn't seem to be holding me as I get up feeling like a block of ice every morning and got the bus to the drug clinic. I was dressed in full winter coat and my pajamas (which are a pair of jogging bottoms and a crusty old jumper). No way was I going in a shower the way I felt. I crawled up the road to the clinic with chills, nausea and fatigue. Of course as soon as I started talking my head was going quickly yet again and I was in an "elevated mood" (I'm starting to get sick of that phrase, but it's better than being depressed, hey). It's now 1814 hrs and part of me could sleep now but I don't want to sleep. Considering I didn't get a lot more than 2 hours last night I feel pretty good.

I called in on Valium Marilyn on the way back and was instantly struck with terrible wind. I ran to the toilet. Bullets of constipation came firing out, followed by a slithering serpent of diarrhoea that got sloppier and sloppier until eventually it was like melted chocolate ice cream spraying out of my arse. It got all over the round-the toilet rug, all down my leg. Then I tried to flush the toilet and it blocked nearly spilling my diarrhoea water all over the floor. Valium Marilyn said "aww don't worry about it we all get the shits sometimes" but it was like a scene from a Ben Stiller film. You know where the rodent prevents him flushing the loo or whatever it does.

Tomorrow I'm hitting my dr for sleeping pills. I desperately need some zopiclone 7.5mgs. They are the only sleeping pill I find truly effective ~ equivalent to over 40mg temazepam. Temazepam just makes me watch late night TV feeling relaxed and rubbery. Zopiclone actually makes me drop off just like natural sleep. Within an hour I'm usually out for the count. Even when severely manic I got to sleep within 2 hours of a single pill. I did only sleep 2.5 hours a night but would have stayed awake for days on end without it. That stuff about your body "getting the sleep it needs" is a damn lie. Yes it might be true as regards MILD insomnia, which isn't worth worrying about. But if you're sleeping less than a quarter of your normal ration with no end in sight it just hypes you up more and more and more and causes severe irritation. Actually I have FOUR separate issues for my GP, so I'd better write them down.

Duta my drugs worker laughed aloud when I ranted on about my farts but she said the chills and malaise were probably down to alcohol withdrawal. I haven't drunk anything since Saturday morning latest. Possibly Friday afternoon. (I don't want to know when my last drink was: frankly I don't care). It's true gastrointestinal distress, nausea and diarrhoea, sweating and malaise are symptoms of alcohol withdrawal but I thought you usually got the shakes and I haven't had any shakes... So I don't know. Also I feel worse today than any other day. Yet I'm not craving drink at all. Does this make any sense to anyone out there? Could it be drink withdrawal? I have been drinking fairly heavily for about ten years. Though the consumption was little above the government's recommended limit in the end, I did used to drink three litres of white cyder a day for a long while. At one point my consumption exceeded a bottle of Scotch a day ~ when converted into spirits. That's when I realized I had to stop. I literally could not remember what I had done for days on end. Tiny scraps of memory remained, like a blowtorched photo album.

RIOT NEWS: London's police cells are all FULL. There have been disturbances North, South, East, West and Central. Imagine riots in every borough of New York City, including Manhattan and that's how widespread this trouble has been. Most of it is mass looting but homes and businesses have been burned out. Many attempted carjackings have been reported. I've seen no rioters who looked North European or Asian but you're not allowed to state this obvious fact. Tonight the Met police promise 16,000 officers on the streets ~ most being busssed in from other forces. Though those other forces may soon be needing their personnel as there are copycat events in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool...

The government promise rioters and looters will "face the consequences of their actions". This probably means 50 hours community service each! Construct a mass pillory I say and let the populace get their own revenge with rotten eggs and dogshit!

I'm focusing my attention on learning to speak Chinese. Astonishingly my accent is pretty good ~ considering how different it is from English. I had it blaring through the telly at top volume last night ~ between Amy Winehouse and Yentl ~ and replicated vowels, consonants and tones pretty faithfully. Wow.

Wish me luck at the doctor's tomorrow. If it's not a lack of alcohol I have some weird disease... whatever could it be??

By the way, the BBC are calling the riots "the worst in British history"... ooer!

A CHILD IS BORN
a beautiful song... the visuals are from The Little Mermaid ~ no connexion with the song, which comes from the album Color Me Barbra

This is stuff I keyed in last night:~~~~~~~

ps that Classical Barbra cover (Japanese version) says in katakana: Kurashikaru Baabura ~ that's the nearest the Japanese language comes to it! And her name in Japanese is Baabura Sutoraisando! (the syllables are run very quickly together so it sounds more like Baabra Storaisando. You learn something new every day doncha know!

0352 hrs I cannot sleep. Haven't tried. I feel too hyper. I just did an online entertainment test "are you manic?"; it's supposedly a clinical evaluation. I scored 15 "you are severely manic, see a doctor immediately!" I'm not "severely" anything I'm just a bit manic that's all. Severely manic is when the stairs talk to you as you run down them and nobody can follow what you're saying. That's severe. I'm mild. Bloody internet drs. Get a life!!

RIOT ALERT: the civil unrest has spread to Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol. London is burning North, South, East, West and Central. Nothing like this has ever happened here before. Previous riots were confined to small areas: Brixon (where I used to go clubbing; it also happens to be a notorious centre for hard drugs, which I wasn't into at that time) and Broadwater Farm (very dodgy housing estate where I nearly died ODing on heroin (I was in hospital for 2 or 3 days afterwards). I've been back once since then and it makes my blood run cold...)

Here's some Chinese:
妈骂麻马吗（ma1 ma4 ma2 ma3 ma) "is mother scolding the hempen horse?"
you just say ma ma ma ma ma ma that is ma with a high tone, ma with a falling tone, ma with a high rising tone, ma with a dipping tone, then ma with no tone ~ it's a kind of Chinese pun. Note every single ma except ma3 (which means "hemp") is written with the horse radical 马. A woman and a horse 妈 means mother (ie sounds like horse, means woman); two mouths over a horse 骂 means "to scold" and a mouth next to a horse 吗 means it's the ma particle, which just means "innit"! See: Chinese is easy. Easier than French or German BY A LONG WAY. And none of that irritating "English with spelling mistakes" phenomenon of European languages. No grammatical info that can only be expressed in tabular form (I loathe that). No verb endings. No plurals as such. The Mandarin accent sounds most peculiar (much more foreign than the Cantonese most people know from Chinese restaurants) with retroflex r (like the American r) and even a retroflex shhh sound. Retroflex means you turn your tongue backwards to pronounce it. I'm getting the accent pretty good now. Having practised via the DVD player and TV at top volume. My housemates already think I'm crazy so I'd rather be thought of as crazy and industrious than plain nuts. Wouldn't you??!?