All to the good?...??

MY QUEST for ever-perfect grooming goes on... with Elnett hairspray (found months ago on street) sprayed to front of head causing permanent pilo-erection. Paddster says I remind him of Billy Idol.

I've also done this trick I used to achieve with a crusty old washcloth but the cosmetics version is nicer. You exfoliate three times in a row with the grittiest facial scrub you can find and then continue to use this scrub every day in place of soap and if it works on you like it works on me you'll look a good five years younger.

In fact when I take off my dark glasses (I'm wearing them at all hours, to get full money's worth)... then stare at my blond microdermabrasioned image in the looking glass I look like an angel. My old look was something like an extra from a Hollywood bubonic plague epic. That kind of look.

So I'm doing all I can. I even wear P20 sunscreen (expired 2001) the sun lotion I took to Goa and Madras. It's so powerful you exfoliate (very important) then apply just ONCE to unmoisturized skin (why moisturize when nature provides something called GREASE??!) anyway so you put this stuff on once a day. It never needs reapplication and even if you swim all afternoon it only reduces 2 factor points to 18.

Oh and I eat pro-biotic yogurts and drink tiny mysterious vanilla flavour drinks that are so nice you knock back eight in a row, ya know, the type containing bifidus digesticus lactobacillus. That habit originated in India too. I came back glowing with health without my normal two black eyes look. Months of pondering ("was it the food? No. Indian farmers use about twenty times more pesticides"... was it the lack of cigaretttes? No. Ciggies are 15p a packet of 10 in Goa so we smoked three packs a day each... I did catch giargia food poisoning but I don't think that would make me look much healthier. Then I realized my biggest change in diet (apart from barely any meat at all for six weeks) was "banana lassi" morning noon and night. Lassi is Indian drinking yogurt. Live yogurt. So maybe there is something in this probiotic bullen-scheisse. I'm rotating brands to get as many "friendly bacteria" as my body can take.

Having said this I hobble up to my chemist's each morning, drink over 100 mls of pig-sick and spend the next hour wanting to puke. My sleep cycle is all over the place. A couple of days ago I was exhilarated to be dropping off at 5pm and getting up with the nightingale at 11. It meant all the bad films I'd missed while I was a heroin addict got caught up on.

I spent all day yesterday telling myself I wasn't really fighting incoming waves of depression, I was just PISSED OFF AND ANNOYED THAT SOME BASTARD HAD BOUGHT MY PET CANARY. The most beautiful one in the shop. Heartbreakingly, this little bird actually sang to me before I said goodbye. (Rather stomped out in fury.)

And if you're wondering how it sang to me after being purchased: this is the very crux of my irritation. The **** who paid for these birds left them in the cages on display so people like me could fall in love with their royal chirpiness only to be told "nah: the two that look like crash-dieting sparrows are on sale but some bastard's already bought and paid for the proper pair"...

So I'm officially feeling SHIT and it just goes to show, as I always knew, moods come and go. They have very little to do with anything else that happens because I've lived in a pigsty covered in cockroaches and been so manic I literally felt my body turning into cosmic energy. Now that's HIGH MAN!! I've also been depressed as can be when I had everything going for me. I frankly don't care any more. Oh and I did buy heroin this morning. And no it didn't make me any better at all. Best move I ever did was memorize the last arrivals and departures into and out of London. It means when suicidal thoughts strike late at night I know what time to lie across those rails. I give my odds of survival at 50:50. I have nothing worth living for. Not really.

Yeah yeah I can distract myself watching the news, smoking cigarettes, being glad I never bought a loudly chirping canary (recipe for psychosis) but deep down. No, I tell a lie. Barely a millimetre deep under the glowing exfoliated peroxided good health is despair just as black and pustulent as it ever was and I don't think it will ever go away. That's why I wanted to win the lottery. The proper Euromillions lottery, at least £100,000,000 lump sum untaxed. Then I could prove to myself for once and for all that happiness is a mere illusion. In fact when I think I'm happy other people think I'm mentally deranged. So what does that say about me?... More to the point WHAT DOES IT SAY ABOUT THEM??

Bitch Worker II

ME AND BUTA MY NEW DRUGGIEWORER DO NOT HIT IF OFF. She's cut from the same cloth as Maple Syrup ~ bitch-faced drug worker of yore who I fired. Does not listen. (Yet accused me of not listening to HER! So much for being client-centred!)
All she did was bang on about these amazing groups and how I need to go into a detox unit. I told her I've been in detox twice and had a terrible time. But already she wasn't listening. She grabbed the Group Therapy Timetable, cicrled three: alcohol, detox/rehab and "stabilization". She absolutely insists that I go.

Until she said that I was quite open to going. Now I don't want to go at all. I'm not bothering with the alcohol group on the basis that I'm drinking 28 units per week. This is within the UK government's health guidelines and hence I have no need to sit in a room full of drinkers lying about their consumption because they're under the clinic's roof and know anything they do say might get back to their worker.

I said I would go to the detox/rehab group because you can't knock something until you've tried it. I have no intention whatsoever of going into inpatient detox because they cut you down too quickly. My plan always has to be to taper my methadone "in the community". The end of the taper will be very drawn-out indeed. I don't really care what the clinic thinks about my plan because by the time I'm on 10mg, I'd just buy spare methadone on the street as an when it was required. I'd only consider detox/rehab if I were unable to go on taking methadone "in the community" without using on top of it. My resolve is far stronger now than it's been for a while. So I don't think I'll have that problem.

As for stabilization: I'm fully intending to pee out heroin-free piss next week, which means I will be stabilized. I'm looking forward to this group the most because I know most "clients" will be lying through their teeth about how stable they actually are and how much drugs they use. I envisage lots of opportunity for being mischievous and truthful at the same time. So I'm really looing forward to that one.

So I'm going to these two groups and won't be bullied into any more NHS-run groups again. Difference between these groups and NA is that NA has an atmosphere of Recovery. Most NA members are drug-free (that means methadone-free too). Whereas the addicts at these clinic-run events are almost all still using and trapped in the mentality of a crackhead looking forward to their next pipe. That's why I found the last lot of group therapy so insufferable.

I don't forsee any improvement in mine and Buta's "relationship". She seems to think I'm mentally retarded and speaks to me like a 3 year old. Because I don't feel "well" I am not engaging with anything or anyone very much. I'm not putting on a nicey-nicey happy-smiley act for someone who doesn't respect me. I know the woman's problem: she doesn't know how to handle me, so she patronizes.

One big advantage of attending those awful groups is that you get to know other members of staff. Once I have found an ally I will put my complaint forward, the same way I complained about Maple Syrup. I was rid of old Maple that very morning.

So that's that.

I have heard nothing from this supposedly amazingly integrated mental health care approach team plan malarky. As I write, I have a risperidone pill lying on top of my coleslaw pot. Yes I am going to submit to the chemical cosh once more. I've taken a Valium in readiness. Antipsychotics are so rough you NEED Valium to take the edge off the concussion-like effects of them. I am supposedly meant to continue with these pills, even though they're "antimanic" agents, when I'm depressed. But really I need some kind of antidepressant. I know they won't want to give that, so it'll have to be a dreaded mood stabilizer. Part of me would really like a bit of Elevated Mood. What I could do without is my my mind going into such overdrive I'm falling to pieces. It took weeks and weeks to recouperate from the last "episode".

When depression goes away the worst I've been left with has been some lingering self-esteem issues and occasional automatic depressive thoughts. Mania on the other hand put my brains into meltdown. I couldn't remember simple things. Words. Names. Appointments. I lost the ability to do multitask completely. I even had trouble typing. Words consistently appeared backwards. Occasionally I could glance at a page of text and see meaningless wiggles ~ what an illiterate tribesman would see. Nothing seemed to make sense any more. I didn't know where I was going or what I wanted from life. My attention span was so fractured I had to watch DVDs 5, 6, 7, 8 or more times to get the gist. So that's about all I did. Watched endless DVDs. Because my mood was elevated, not depressed, I felt OK. Like a car crash victim, stoked up to the eyes on morphine feels OK. Totally disabled but not too bothered about it. Every evening I felt a distinct rise in mood as the last pill wore off. On a couple of occasions I went into full-blown mania before I took the antimanic pill. Then I'd potter about totally lost in my flight of ideas and racing thougts, unable to sleep because of the cinematic images I saw whenever I closed my eyes. Sometime in the early hours my energy would briefly lull and then I'd run to the bathroom cabinet and knock back the pill.

Those days are gone now. I need some of that energy back.

Only good news is, my methadone has been dropped another 10mg. I knew they wouldn't countenance 1mg a day.

And now I have this bitch-features hacking away at my mental health. I don't now whether she's trying to give me another breakdown, but that's where I'm heading.

By the way, 豚 Buta is the Japanese word for "pig".

No, no, no!

THIS is from the Inspectors' Report of behaviour in the dining room at my old boarding school. Just before it got closed down:



Frequently the pupils [those are students to you Americans!]
simply thrust their hands into their plate, fall upon the
common dish, hurriedly stuff their mouths as full as possible
and swallow their food down almost without chewing, or
the spoon is grasped quite lightly with their finger-tips, often
at the extreme end and the handle is used for eating; their
food is invariably stirred about with their forks two or three
times before each mouthful, the vegetables are divided into a
row of equal little heaps, their hands are first wrapped up in
their coats, their nose is stuck into the soup, or there must be
a mouthful drunk between each two mouthfuls of food till
twelve are counted and so on. Others lap the soup like a
dog or pour it with profuse spilling into their mouth without
more ado, press the vegetable dish flat on to their face and
steadily lick it clean. One of the pupils took hold of the
spoon quite correctly with the right hand, but brought it
round her head by the left side to her mouth ; another crept
under the bed cover at meals.


TRAUMATIZED by these horrific schooltime memories, I've been reluctant to go back to instututional life, which is why Rehab has been out of the question.

Nah. Real reason was I couldn't hack the detox. I was out that door quicker than you could say "Giro day!" That's right. Every time I knew more money I was in the bank, there I was in tears of euphoric disappointment, fleeing to the railway station and straight to my dealer, who happened to serve up right behind my local tube station. The celebratory hit was tiny: I divided half a gram in three. I only took 2/3 of my hit and even that knocked the living crap out of me. I remember my friends shaking me awake to say they were leaving me with the TV and purring black cats as they had to do something (probably buy some crack). Y'see contrary to the rumours and lies I tried to disseminate to myself I had actually made a big effort to cut down my using to 12x 30mg DF118s (dihydrocodeine) (4 pills every 4 hours) and one £10 bag of heroin (0.2g) daily. The gear I used that week wasn't the best, but it was my firm intention to cut down, so I saw weak gear as a blessing in disguise. Paid-for willpower, if you will... The morning I left to go to rehab, a friend wanted to see my dealer and gave me either £10 or £20 worth... I can't remember, but it was my Proper Dealer, who served up behind the tube station and his gear blew me away. I was so high on that train journey down to the South Coast, I almost got my head knocked off leaning out the window as we whooshed into various tunnels. I had an entire oldfashioned compartment to myself to smoke cigarettes in. It was a breezy summer's day (very breezy with the window wide open!) I felt wonderful.

I slept like a baby the first night through. I was still high the next day. The doctor said "sometimes the angels are with you" and I thought: wow!

Then, on the evening of my first full day, withdrawal kicked in. I slept barely at all. Or the next. I watched everybody else sprawled unconscious, mouths wide open as if to catch flies (everybody else, who claimed not to sleep a wink. Everybody else who did the best impression of snoring decrepitude I've ever seen!)

The night staff were in no state to talk to me, having worked all day. So I was left alone and tormented by constant suicidal urges in a kitchen full of knives and icepicks (we got through a lot of cold drinks in our tiny smoking area-cum-back yard) and temptingly breakable glasswear and crockery. I had the recurrent urge to gash my throat, cut my wrists, hang myself. And no sleep. Despite everything no, no sleep. It was awful.

Mornings with breakfast TV and then all the crap on BBC1 that reminded me being round my friend's house (where I used to show up like clockwork Monday to Friday waiting for the man)... Midmorning television without the faintest chance of a hit! Intolerable! It was like waiting for a dealer who never came. When eventually I got it, far too late for my ragged system, the meds (dihydrocodeine) did hold me. But by then my resolve was shattered. My mind was firmly tuned to the Using Channel. Would I have to live the entire rest of my life like this? Never feeling any better? Never plunging beautiful gear through a shiny new needle into my glorious veins ever ever again? I just couldn't live like that.

Can't live with gear; can't live without it. Except I could live with it. And for another seven years, I did. I had almost no semblance of a life to speak of, but I did have my glorious, wondrous heroin every single day of every week of every year, year after year. My attempts to stick to methadone during this period were halfhearted to say the least. If they could at least have prescribed it in an injectable form (which private doctors still do in the United Kingdom) it might have soothed the itch to inject at least. As it was, drinking 50 or 60mg (which is all my script was back then) of sticky gloop just didn't cut the mustard when the streets of London were flooded with the cheapest, best quality gear they'd ever seen. At that time a "sixteenth" (of an ounce, which actually weighed a gram and a half) could be had for as little as £45 (in fact, my hazy memory tells me it might have been as low as £40 from one particular bastard I gave thousands to...). That's $60 or so. And a gram was £30 ~ just over $45...

O how vivily I recall the soft aroma of Afghan fields, the golden glow of poppies washing over and through me, making me feel purified and clean. (Heroin doesn't feel rough or jagged or dirty at all, it feels like the softest and most benign of all drugs... until you try to sever relations. Only then does it truly show its ugly side!) The first kiss of the needle ~ and life itself came rushing into my veins. O, how I adored heroin! How could I ever stop it?

Well now I'm old and faded and wearied and grey. I'm looking for a new existence. I'm beginning to think the only way there might be via rehab... Trust me, this is far from a knee-jerk reaction. I have a plethora of issues surrounding rehabs. From the uncomfortable fact that most of them appear to be run to suit the convenience of staff more than "peers" (as they're called in there). To the long night hours of torment as the drugs drain inexorably out of you. No hope of anything exciting to take the pain away. Not now, not ever. I was as galvanized, and resolved; my mind was made up as firmly as it was possible to be when I went before, not once but TWICE. Yet at the first opportunity I ran away and thoroughly enjoyed "relapsing". Drug addiction is the only illness I know of where a relapse is undiluted fun. It certainly was for me. NA's mantra that "one meeting and you'll never be able to use the same way again" (their implication being that you'll be riddled with discomfort and guilt) never washed with me. I understood Recovery and the 12-step process as well as any using addict whose never been able to clean up long enough to actually put the philosophy into practice ever could. And yet I used with gusto. Heroin didn't just feel like life itself, it WAS my life. I've never loved anything or anyone the way I loved heroin. I absolutely adored it. As long as I had it, it never let me down. The problems were invariably caused by dealers, who charged too much, watered it down, didn't come when they said they would... etc etc etc. That's the way I saw it.

Somehow, heroin and I are falling out of love. To be honest, I'm bored of it. When you consider that in actuality the drug is giving you a pleasantly and very slightly comfortably exaggerated version of normality... you might as well learn to live without it and get your normality free of charge from life. Then at least you know your wellbeing is not being held in the hands of ruthless criminals who could snatch it away any time they please (as they did do, last Autumn, when they effectively droughted the entire UK heroin market. There was no good heroin on sale anywhere at all. Only people who had imported their own supply or were personal friends of people who had done, still had gear. The rest of us went without. I didn't even bother touching it for... I can't remember how many weeks. It felt more like a year. I learned to live without heroin. Even though I had the crutch of methadone, I never felt it did very much for me. I'm fed up of methadone more than I'm sick to death of heroin. I don't want either one. I want whatever comes next...

Which might have to be rehab.

I can't stomach a "normal" rehab, it would have to be a place geared to taking on dual diagnosis clients ~ that is, people with "mental health" "issues" alongside their addictions. Every single time I've attempted to come off opiates I've felt like the rug has been pulled from under me. Every single time I had some manner of "breakdown". Every time. No way could I handle losing my marbles in front of a bunch of hatchet-faced crack-addicted housebreakers and prostitutes. Not again. This time, they have to be my kind of addicts: yes, nutter junkies!

I emailed one place yesterday morning and got a reply back saying they could reduce me to 30mg methadone and switch me over from that to Subutex, so I detox from Subutex to nothing. Which is a far brighter move than methadone to nothing. Subutex is very easy to reduce. It's an agonist-antagonist to the brain's opiate receptors, meaning the body is already ready for being clean. Methadone is particularly "sticky", hanging around for far longer than heroin, meaning the withdrawals last considerably longer. In other words, it's harder to come off. Methadone is only prescribed because it's cheap and can be dosed orally once a day. Most opiates require at least twice-daily dosing. A one-a-day hydromorphone (Dilaudid) pill is available for heroin addiction, but it's not given in Britain ~probably on grounds of cost.

Subutex is a different story. You do the nasty suffering when you go ON Subutex. I felt desperately ill. But very rapidly it swooshes into the body, working its own peculiar magic. Best thing about Subutex is, it gave me a euphoric high that I now know was almost certainly a mild bipolar mood swing. It had all the same characteristics: 4 hours sleep a night. Mood most intense in the mid-morning. Constant excited feeling. Music sounding amazing. It only lasted a few days, but it got me through the awkward transition phase, when body and brain acclimatize to a radically different medication, with ease. Tapering off Subutex to nothing, so I'm told, is far easier than methadone discontinuation, so I wouldn't be worried about that.

My email warned me that methadone might be acting as a mood stabilizer, and I can grudgingly accept that it probably does. Heroin stabilizes my mood far more effectively, but methadone probably does do something. So my medication(s) might have to be reassessed prior to and during detox.

Here (really for my information, but I put the list up in case anyone else is looking) are some of the best rehabs I looked up. Castle Craig Hospital in Scotland even do Trotterdonkey Therapy (better known as Equine Therapy)..!

I would quite like to do beekeeping and hamster-keeping. Imagine window set into the wall, viewing right into the buzzing bee colony?! Imagine a big tank of robos pinging around on their wheels atop the rehab telly..? Well here's hoping...

And BTW I go back to Narcotics Anonymous on Monday. I'm still feeling VERY reticent about what I might and might not share. I really found the reaction to my Manic Self rather offputting. But ho-hum. You live and learn...


UK rehab directory
http://www.addictionhelper.com/what-to-expect/9/What-to-Expect:-Dual-Diagnosis-Treatment

Castle Craig Hospital, Scotland
http://www.castlecraig.co.uk

Promis, Kent
http://www.promis.co.uk/enquiries

ANA
http://www.anatreatmentcentres.com/index.html

St James Priory (Walsingham House) dual unit, Bristol
http://www.stjamesprioryproject.org.uk/13.html

Loudon House dual unit, Ayrshire, Scotland
http://www.piramhids.com/case-studies/view-casestudy?resid=674

List of rehabs in Scotland
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2004/11/20231/46408

Park View, Salford, Manchester resiential home (is this ia rehab?)
http://potensial.co.uk/locations/park-view-salford



CAFE DEL MAR: ENERGY 52
classic ibiza trance tune:~

first here's the original tune "3 in 1 version"



OUT OF OFFICE
moi, j'adore cette version; c'est la vraie signification de l'euphorie....


PAUL OAKENFOLD


MICHAEL WOODS
this is the meaning of U4EA

My Special Tonkie Plan

I HAVE A SPECIAL PLAN. I'm in a good mood now and planning my future. My DRUG-FREE FUTURE. YES A FUTURE WITH NO MORPHIA, NO METHADONE NO NARCOTIC SUBSTANCES.

See I feel hypomanic enough without needing shitty drugs to bring me up here. Why am I hypomanic? Because I scored methadone on the street a while ago and indulge tonight in an extra dose. [A tiny dreg that I had extra, not a whopping huge dose.] That little bit extra plus lots of sleep, plus depression which cycles anyhow (high and low and I really do mean HIGH at the extreme ~ even higher than crack) so this has switched my mood. I was NOT taking illicit methadone during my most intense mania, I ought to add. If anything I was FORGETTING to take the shit, forgetting until I wasn't too far from having my head down the toilet puking from withdrawal [I felt physically sick and didn't know why]. I was so high I not only went into a literal spiral whirl where my words broke up into noise, a brain full of roaring NOISE without words I was turning into literal pure energy and felt invincible. My friends told me not to fuck off the methadone clinic but that was my plan. To tell them where to go and hike along the high speed rail track to Paris. Knowing that withdrawal perturbs my mood severely I would in this state have probably gone so manic I literally didn't know my own name. I was already out of it enough that I didn't grasp what people meant when they said my name in front of me. I wondered who they were talking about.

This was on NO drugs bar a couple of cyders per day as I'd been drinking for eyars on end without mania, and just enough methadone to survive. No speed, no crack, no E, no psychedelics to put me in this state. This is what I mean when I say my highs are higher than my lows are low. And thank God. I've heard tales of manic people believing they are Emperor of the World or at the very least multi-billionaires. And they very often take other people in and get first class air tickets New York to Paris, leaving chaos in their wake. Because I'm schizoaffective I can barely get it together to keep self, house keys and phone in the same place. In my most severe mania I had no glasses (I just lost them) and no money at all (I lost the card). I was pretty badly disabled and only able to post because I type by touch, have been blogging for years and know the procedure for posting back to front. Otherwise I'd no way be able to put up my experience online as I went. All that weird spelling mistake stuff with U U U A A A, that stuff was literal stream of consciousness. I didn't edit because just as I'd keep my private journal the way it was, so I wanted my blog to caputre the moment. This was like holiday photos from the Light Side of the Moon.

How did I get on to this? Oh yeah because I'm UP and Addressing My Drug Problem.

Here's what I'm doing. I KNOW SOMEONE WHO DEALS IN SUBUTEX OR SUBOXONE.

[They're the same stuff: buprenorphine one has a useless added ingredient so you can't inject but I wouldn't waste a vein on it anyhow. I don't know which he's on now but he sells his script and offered it to me several times.]

I'm willing to switch methadone to heroin for a week to sweep the Mean Green out of my system. If you don't sweep it out you have to be down to 30mg AND do 36 to 48 hours of NO METHADONE which is just not something Im going to do, not something Paddster ever did and he's the man as regards Drug Knowledge. He's now 100% opiate clean ie on NOTHING and he achieved this using the same manner of scheme I came up with. So Im going to clear out evil methadone which is MORE ADDICTIVE, WORSE WITHDRAWALS and ONLY superior to heroin in that it can be dosed orally under supervision once daily. Paradoxically methadone's advantage is key to all its disadvantages. The long half life means it's a slow drug, taking ages to take effect, ages to detox out of the system. Most people agree it is better to die than to detox off methadone. Sorry to be realistic. Life ain't too hot. Life without opiates when you're addicted to them is utterly bleak and meaningless and during detox you feel this in all its realism and intensity.

To any person reading this in a state of withdrawal I urge you to keep hold of how you feel and to make an adult decision. Is this really what you want to be doing with your life? You don't need to commit suicide. You need to come off these drugs that are making life not worth living.

There is no need to suffer unduly.

This is why I choose the Subutex option. You do the suffering BEFORE you come off. The worst suffering occurs during switchover. I'm going to switch over under NO medical supervision. I will wait a couple of hours and use heroin to cover the receptor sites Subutex has left wide open leaving me partially sick. I'll start off on 4mg day one, 8mg day 2, 8mg day 3. I'm not going over 8mg. Then I'll tell the clinic I'm on 8mg Subutex and don't need methadone and they can treat me or not treat me but this is what I'm doing. I MUST switch to heroin first as my methadone dose is way too high it would take months to switch down. I'm doing 18 hours clean before I pop a Subbie. Then I'm crushing up the 8mg pills and reducing by approx a single milligram every couple of days. I've BEEN ON SUBUTEX AND DONE THIS. I felt NOTHING. No withdrawal whatsoever after the 3 days of "suffering".

A lot of people say buprenorphine makes them feel terrible for 3 days but I felt fantastic. I now realize I was hypomanic! Music on TV sounded luscious. My mood was soaring, particularly in the mid-morning. I was sleeping approximately midnight to 4am. On the zopiclone the dr prescribed the next week I got another 2 hours; midnight till 6. The pattern of my moods (the precise swing in intensity; my sleep pattern; the way music sounded so amazing) all this matches the mania I get now which is why I can confidently say I was mildly hypomanic in my first few days on Subutex. I was high enough to feel about 95% physically OK on day 2 but not be AT ALL bothered by these slight withdrawals. On day 3 I was about 98% OK and again simply not bothered by the sweats and shivers I had I was so hyped up. I had all the upsides of hypomania, which is mild mania and all the positive feelings people use cocaine for. Unlike cocaine which makes me feel ragged, brittle, paranoid, anxious, and often extremely jagged this was a wonderful smooth secure feeling. It's more like being a kid excited over Father Xmas than being an adult on drugs.

So I'm switching MYSELF to the substance I wish to use. I'm withdrawing myself far more quickly than the clinic would allow (which is why I'm not telling the clinic till it's done). I know my family will worry but they needn't do. I'm NOT doing this next week I'm keeping myself on the most even keel I can manage for several weeks before I even consider putting myself through this. Eg I had NO DRINK YESTERDAY. Not one single alcoholic unit. I need to get used to being FREE, being EVEN, being SURE OF MYSELF OFF DRUGS. Because for the rest of my days, be they many or few I'M OFF DRUGS FOR GOOD. Once I get off the shit that somebody chose to name after a female hero Heroin, once I get off this, that's us DIVORCED.

TILL DEATH DO US PART?

No darling. You cheated on me, you abused me, you nearly ruined my life. WE ARE THROUGH.


Illustrations: with the obvious exception of the perky-eared tonkie house mouse, I found these by looking through schizoaffective and schizophrenia and they sum up how I feel. The most accurate two are the top two, the red one is me when blurry and the woman is how I feel when I'm crystal clear but "ill" I'm all there, just not there as I was when I was "weller" ....

Rethink (mental health charity) schizoaffective disorder fact sheet.


Lizzy, thanks for this
Radiohead - Street Spirit Funkagenda's Spandex+Ketamine Mix
"ketamine mix"



A little tonkie poem.
Byron: Childe Harold Canto 1; XIX

The horrid crags, by toppling convent crowned;
the cork-trees hoar, that cloathe the shaggy steep,
the mountain moss by scorching skies imbrowned,
the sunken glen, whose sunless shrubs must weep,
the tender azure of the unruffled deep,
the orange tints that gild the greenest bough,
the torrents that from cliff to valley leap,
the vine on high, the willow branch below,
mixed in one mighty scene, with varied beauty glow.

Snobbery

OK YA GOT YA SHOT OF FURRINESS look one post lower. Hibernation. I haven't done very much today except hibernate. I wanted to sleep last night and was maniac instead, as soon as I hit a lull I chucked risperidone down my throat, still didn't sleep. Realized I'd forgotten methadone. Took that and Nytol. Slept. Slept all day till four pm.

Heroin is slipping down down down in my affections. I got a really cool message last night callling me a drug snob over H4, H3. That is, preferring the injectable hydrochloride salts of heroin over heroin base which is strictly for smoking but can be injected with the addition of vein-rotting fruit acids. If I'd used more H4 (instead of just TWO batches in ten years) my veins might be in better shape. But then again I'd still be using and would have gone even more insane when I stopped, as more time would have passed and everything would be worse worse worse so maybe I should be thankful for H3 the drug that made me stop it. My veins are so bad now I just skin pop, rather than go in the neck or the femoral. Skin pop WHEN I do it. Which is now never. If you follow me you'll have to excuse the constant lapses in time. Past, present and future all converge here.

Anyway, yes I am a drug snob and doncha just love it! I love being a snob. There are drugs snobs, fashion snobs, intellectual snobs and cultural snobs (not strictly the same thing as painting and opera are cultural but not intellectual); money snobs (big time) and here in Lovely Britain you still get Class Snobbery or more commonly Inverted Class Snobbery. Just about any aspect of human life is enshrined in snobbery of some sort. Even junkies are snobs. To do with how long you use. How much you use (the littlest the best; the most the best)... and so on.

Moulin Rouge is on as I felt musical. I like the music in Moulin Rouge. If I were in that film I'd want to play the conductor. I'm way thinner than the conductor they cast but I'd do a good job at King of the Crazies.

Outside it may be rainining
But in here it's entertaining!

Couldn't have written a better couplet meself.

Here's the conductor:



The Moulin Rouge must have been quite good on absynthe.

According to Wikipedia, "a critic" said (probably last year) that:

Absinthe makes you crazy and criminal, provokes epilepsy and tuberculosis, and has killed thousands of French people. It makes a ferocious beast of man, a martyr of woman, and a degenerate of the infant, it disorganizes and ruins the family and menaces the future of the country.

Vincent Van Gogh was said to have been a heavy drinker of absynthe. I spell it with a Y.

I'm so not into drugs I have a pack of unopened needles. Just lying there on the floor. I am throwing all dirty ones out. This one stays vigin and unpenetrated until the day comes when I chuck it out or use it. Possibly to squirt ink over canvas or for some artistic purpose. Didn't say I'd use 'em for heroin did i?!

Well this has gone on too long. I tried to watch Cleopatra last night but was semi-conscious by the end. See I told you it was a drain on the attention.

Do you know City Roads drug detox actually have a "no cutting" rule. So they expect you to take away the only thing that "makes life worth living" and not act at least pseudo-suicidal. That's what happens in drug detox. Most people are suicidal. If you don't know that you don't know about addiction! Why do you think I get offended when NA tell me to "detox". They haven't seen me do it! It makes me lose my marbles. I lost then every single time I tried to do it or even switched medication. I got hyper on Subutex. Never realized what was happening but music suddenly sounded incredibly lush. I was glued to the music channel for days on end. In the mornings I was so happy it was unreal. Made the 3 days of going from heroin/methadone to Subutex a doddle but looking back I know I wasn't right. The other times it was just horrible.

I was into doing that Waismann method anaesthetic detox and getting the druggieclinic to fund it. They might if I impressed them with my logic. But considering every other detox I have done has perturbed the balance of my mind very obviously (and not worth going into here) and that even switching heroin to methadone had the walls speaking to me, and that my mind is fractured enough to be labelled schizo... I cannot see that I would wake up exactly in one piece... Know what I mean?

PS Heather's Mom writes addiction book reviews
http://heathersmom1.blogspot.com/2011/02/book-reviews.html?showComment=1299375596672#c563837765930657841

Well I wanted to end this on a positive. See below for the entertaining furrybunnyhammywithatail sleeping. That is a dormous:~~

Librium

I HAD TO GO VISITING today. My friends live in flats. Downstairs. But no light on. Seemingly she saw me as the intercom crackled with her distinctive Liverpool voice: "wait a sec!" So I did. Then I thought I'd phone anyway and she sounded off-beam, like she hadn't just spoken to me a few moments before and I thought, That was odd.

Then he comes out and I said "Did she just talk to me through the intercom" and he said "No, what are you talking about! That hasn't worked for years! What are you on?!"

And I said "Nothing," he said: "No you're on something." So I said, "No, I'm not drinking so it must be DTs." He looked at me carefully and said, "I'll go and get you a couple of Librium," so he did, he got me nine and said "Don't tell her."

I'm to take three every four hours, then they should hold me till next day. I don't know the milligrams but they're blue and white, like Prozacs. I took three as directed and barely felt anything.

So they probably make a good substitute for alcohol. Pills that don't do anything are easier to cut down on than drink, which I can feel something off.

Later on someone quite different asked me whether I'm on LITHIUM. Thanks so much, Friends.

I'm not on anything. I'm not taking gear, that's why I'm falling apart. I feel the fractures. It doesn't feel bad, it just feels bizarre. Quite fun though. I've been sleeping like a harvest mouse. Hibernating for hours on end.

O will I ever get off these drugs? Yes, because I have to.

Tomorrow I'm planning an expedition to Mr Temazepam (Mr Librium cannot go on sparing his partner's pills.) Mr Temazepam wants good dollars for his supply but as I say, if it's more "medical" than cutting down on just drink then I'm willing to go for it.

I got hooked on the feeling of drink. Now I'm without that feeling. So it's a step ahead already!

There is a significant risk of pharmacological dependence on diazepam and patients experiencing symptoms of benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome if it is taken for 6 weeks or longer.

(Wikipedia: Diazepam) Being as I shouldn't be taking it for any longer than 10 days maximum, I ought to be fine ...

Drink Day

I ACTUALLY FOUND MYSELF entertaining the idea of taking heroin earlier on. With a longish history of heroin addiction this is hardly a surprise, it just hasn't happened so far (this time). On previous attempts at coming off, it's just about ALL that happened. Apart from wanting to die.

My deepest fear as a heroin addict wasn't dying, it was living. Something I had little-to-no idea of how to do.

I had been all day at a friend's house where we were drinking. First just me and him. Then a knock at the door. Someone I haven't seen in maybe 8 years. He remembers me when heroin addiction was all new and still felt (to be honest) like Xmas every day. Xmas with a lot of desperation and despair and puking on the doorstep waiting for our terminally slow dealer to show up, it has to be said. But the good atill far outweighed the bad...

Nobody drank very much. There was a lot of talking. It was boys' talk. After 3 drinks (I know how much I had, only three!) I started feeling sick from lack of food. So I bought a cheese and red peppers bread in Morrisons (79p). That made me feel better. I tried to go to NA. I went right there, but the meeting that used to be there wasn't on so that was annoying. But I felt let off the hook. Really I wanted to get home.

On the way back I felt empty without heroin to come home to. Very empty and desolate. Even though I was tired and knew what heroin would do: just make me sleep, I still wanted it. In days gone by I would have wasted no time in scoring. Despite being tired and cold and pissed off, I would have ensured lovely heroin was in my hand, then in my veins, making everything all right.

Which is annoying as I was saying only an hour before how much I loathed everything to do with drugs. Mostly the people. I told a story of where I used to live. I would get up at 2 or 3am to buy drink (24-hour shopping, doncha love it!) very often I'd get accosted by a crackhead I knew. There were two in particular, who I knew pretty well, who begged money off passers-by. If I had £4, £4.50 or so, I'd sometimes go in halves on a £10 rock, which we smoked on the mid-level bathroom in my house. One particular night we found ourselves a few streets away, in a downstairs room full of black men who I didn't know. Both of these addicts were black, I suppose I point this out to say it made me feel the odd one out. Being White Boy in this room full of crack smokers where the atmosphere was like something from a lower circle of Crack Hell.

There was a white girl on the couch by the window. Long blonde hair. Sour expression. The archetypal "crack whore". And one on whom the tables have been turned, as they often are. One of the men said to her will you stay here and watch the door/my phone. Something like that. She said yeah yeah. they left, after telling us they had no drugs. One had at least 3x£10 clingfilm crack wraps in his hand. The girl rolled her eyes and said in a quieter voice "As if I have any choice."

I think we left before any more crack returned. Outside I said, "Don't you think there was a bad atmosphere in there?" and he just stared at me, blankly. He was far more interested in his pipe. This is just one event that convinced me I was no true crackhead. Heroin I would have been more than happy to bang up, if only there's been a decent light somewhere in that gloom. Heroin insulates from sensation, like being wrapped in furry blankets inside a bulletproof bubble. I never cared very much what went on elsewhere, as long as I was stoked up on gear. Of course most of the time I never had enough gear and that seemed to be the problem.

When I did have "enough" it got to the point of heroin just not "working" on not much more than 2g a day (speedballed*, with coke extra). In my one proper crack binge, my body said NO NO NO to coke, quite early on. Maybe within a week or so of 24-7 snowballing and piping. (When I slept I don't know. I think I just conked out at various points round the clock. woke up and carried on hitting up, drinking and piping.) Heroin my drug-saturated body said MORE MORE MORE to. But just could not feel it. Yes I was blowing way way too much money on drugs. And of course I'm not proud of it. A friend of mine smoked a house. He inherited a bundle of money and put £100,000 or more on the pipe in a single year. This stuff didn't make me happy (certainly not impressed) then. Now it makes me feel sick.

I know I need to drink less. Thanks for all the comments. Caeser I'm sorry I seem to have missed answering you. I'm answering every point in a second. I want to say to everybody I do read all comments. Not necessarily precisely when they come. The only reason I wouldn't specifically answer one is when I'm upset about something or when lots of people are saying lots of things and I feel deluged but in a good way. I would rather be deluged than left alone, I think any blogger who says they don't want comments must truly live in la-la land.

When I got home, by the way, I slept for five hours, till 1am. Without heroin. See what I mean..?

Re my drug history, so it doesn't sound contradictory the timings are this. All drugs: about 20 years (started age 19). In the 1st 10 years there were long spaces when I just did not use them. I did experiment with everything that came my way so the list is long. I also took acid and other drugs (especially speed) when I really shouldn't have. I was clinically depressed, on high dose antidepressants, seeing a psychiatrist. Me on acid then was not pretty, and I probably caused damage. Full-on heroin (+ heroin/methadone) addiction dates back almost exactly 10 years, though even it is hard to pin down a precise start date. Heroin experimentation began in any "meaningful" way about 2-3 years before that. So that's why I mention 20 years and 10 years. It's not a typo and it's not lies.

Methadone is the only drug I'm on now. The dose is far too high for my liking. I want to cut down and come off as soon as I can. Me detoxing is not a beautiful sight at all. I have had a "nervous breakdown" to some degree every single time I tried and it would be really foolish to try and achieve detox too quickly. Some of these "breakdowns" (I use the word losely) involved symptoms of bipolar** and more serious conditions than ordinary anxiety/depression. This is not to say I think it is bipolar or anything else. I'm trying not to think too much about that particular issue. Probably any inpatient detox would be too fast for me. The standard would go from around 60mg to zero in about 2 weeks. The longest I know of goes from about 120mg to zero in 6. Staying off drugs and cutting down slowly in the outside world, if I can do it, is probably the most sensible route FOR ME. Perhaps for many other people the opposite would be true.

Drink is still an issue. I know I drink too much. I drink about 3 x half litres of 7.5% ABV cheap cyder. Yesterday I managed one litre, by buying it in a bottle not cans, and drinking three smaller drinks. I think I'm going to try the 1-litre bottle from now on, cut down from there to one can. There's no great hurry and this isn't me making excuses. Bear in mind this addiction is 10 years old. To break it overnight may well put me in a Fool's Paradise. The progress may not be real. I need reality now.

I am supposed to be "taking care" of myself. So I'm trying to be responsible. I have to be consistent on the one hand (not breaking resolutions) and not get over-enthusiastic go too quick on the other. Bearing in mind I lost my marbles just transferring to methadone, I cannot see that rapidly cutting out anything would (in my own situation) be wise.

To anyone in a similar condition, my best advice is find yourself a good doctor (not easy). Or a good drugs worker. Or a good drugs/mental health professional. Drugs come under mental health anyway. I say this because what's good for me and what works for me may not be best for you. If you've had specific problems detoxing/switching meds/taking any psychiatric or other meds you need to explain this clearly. The problem could be mental or physical or both. Here in the UK if you need special treaetment due to a co-existing condition, you should get a programme tailored to you. I have tried to explain how a methadone detox would be tailored to me. In a way it's good the dr saw me as I was. Now they know I'm not just exaggerating or fantasizing when I talk about going cuckoo. I was bouncing off the walls in that there office!

Better leave it there. I hope I will look back one day and be able to stand by this when I say: CONGRATULATIONS DRUG DEALERS, THANKS FOR THAT DROUGHT. YOU'VE LOST YOURSELF A LONGSTANDING CUSTOMER.

*speedballing or snowballing means mixing heroin and crack (or cocaine) in the same IV shot. It's v strong and v dangerous

**bipolar disorder is what used to be called manic depression; it differs from ordinary depression in that bipolar involves swings from feeling slow, sleeping a lot, eating a lot and pretty down to going very fast, being irritable and angry and/or euphoric and high and barely sleeping at all. The moods can become mixed up and don't necessarily come in clear-cut "episodes".

Anna's description of bipolar depression (yesterday) is here

Naughty Baby Itchy + Why Was I Born

I WASN'T REALLY IN THE MOOD FOR POSTING TONIGHT but I have internet time so why not. I don't know exactly why but all weekend I have been so depressed and feeling like I'm drowning.

I once read a book by a psychologist called Kay Redfield Jamison who suffered from severe bipolar disorder. In the depths of her illness, before she settled into a routine of lithium-taking she suffered a double bout of depression (that is, a depression that lifted very briefly only to return just as devastatingly as before)... this went on for 18 months.

Even in the very depths of despair, despite wishing for death, she said she has never regretted being born. Well that's more than I've done. When I was depressed it was, I would say, because I knew I should not have been born. And have had life foisted on me. Something I never asked for. A responsibility. That was the great appeal of heroin, a drug that could kill me in my sleep. And yet death eludes me.

That was how I felt when I was most depressed. And the worst depression went on for about two years. The psychiatrists I saw were useless. The counsellor I saw I suspected at the time and am pretty convinced now looked down on me for being too similar to how SHE had been before she sorted herself out. Only a dedicated GP who made for me weekly appointments made any difference.

When I was a bit nutty a couple of years ago I honestly started to believe I was immortal. Every conceivable method of suicide I was convinced would only end up in failure. I desperately wanted to detox so I would not die a junkie and spend all eternity in withdrawals.

According to a Muslim who was preaching outside the library last year, if you do commit suicide, whatever method you use you will repeatedly go through the motions of this through all eternity in hell yet never dying. For this reason I would most like to die injecting heroin.

I know I'm never going to die though. Especially not through heroin. The ONLY hope I have of dying is by taking my own life and as I said the more depressed I feel the more hopeless I am of ever succeeding with that. I watched the trains slicing along at 100mph Londonbound convinced that if I did venture in front it would only kick me out of the way like a football. And I'd bounce harmlessly into the bushes there to shiver eternally cold and damp in the morning dew.

I have been writing some of my book but it is very depressing. Writing a book is hardly the most difficult of life's tasks. Damns have been built. Bridges constructed. Undersea tunnels dug. Hundred storey skyscrapers erected in less time than this book seems to be taking and with a whole lot less fuss.

One thing I never expected (remember I'm the one so often accused of "thinking too much" yet my biggest flaw seems to be NOT thinking things through)... never expected from writing my book was that the pattern and flow of my own life would be held up close for me to puzzle over. I have never examined my own life's story in such detail before. Nor the way one consequence leads on to another.

It has been freezing cold this weekend here in London. Night temperatures have dropped to near freezing while yesterday was aparently only 4 degrees celcius.

I have been sleeping with the cooker hob on all night.

Baby Itchy roborovski escaped yesterday and was awol for a quarter of an hour until eventually she rambled blithely right into my waiting flytrap-style hands. She panicked bigstyle when I captured her and had a guilty look on her face. She has been banished to the teabox in disgrace.

Sorry for such a depressing post. I am not suicidal but I have to think about these things as I did at least twice attemptedly kill myself and must reason these events out. The first time I was so blitzed afterwards that I could not and did not even consider events. I just felt poisoned to the core of my being, because I had done a bottle of vodka and a bottle of tricyclic antidepressants. Most of the pills, as I've said, I sicked up so soon after swallowing they still had the coatings on them... The second time I woke up freezing cold in a bathful of clothes, planks of wood, housebricks etc etc having attempted to drown myself while unconscious. I woke into a hazy white space and at first, for one elated moment thought I really had managed it. Then the bleak chilly wetness impinged and I realized the white ethereal space in which I "floated" was merely my unfocused view of the bath's white side...

Well I had better go now.

On a more positive note I got a new mobile phone today for £15.

Take care everyone...

G
xx

Videos of the Day

Sugababes: Shape
Her Majesty the Queen's Tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales...
Robby the Entertaining Parrot's Bedtime Story...

***

Tagged on a "meme" thang!

Annie Bimbimbie from Queensland (Australia), whose name means "place of many birds" in a mysterious Aboriginal tongue ~ or to translate into my own kind of language "birdery" tagged me with this meme thing which is to explain my blogging name.

Well it is quite simple really.

Gledeber was the name of a dog we once had who looked like a seal.
Edward the Confessor was the last but one Saxon king in South England before William the Conkeror came over and defeated King Harrold.
My blog is quite confessional and I miss Gledeber to this day and hence the name "Gledwood"
The Vol 2 comes because originally my old blog was on another blog "hoster" thing. And not as good. Hence that was vol 1; this is vol 2...

And I tag:
Lime

Sickly Sleep Sunday Superbathon

WELL TODAY I FELT MUCH BETTER THAN YESTERDAY. I went to bed early; I can't even remember when but it was surely before midnight. Then I slept for hours and hours and hours and woke up and drank methadone and slept for hours and hours and hours and when the radio proclaimed "six o'clock" yet it was light I knew it couldn't be six a.m.; though it felt like it - it was SIX O'CLOCK IN THE EVENING! I had slept EIGHTEEN HOURS AT A STRETCH! How/why on earth I did this I've no idea at all. Especially as people blame the drugs for my oversleeping (I can see why they do) well this is proof positive that is NOT the case. I slept considerably LONGER on methadone than on heroin so there!

My furballs were really entertaining last night. At one point all three were running their wire wheel vigorously in the same direction except Bashful kept pausing for a rest - which caused her to do countless revolutions looping the loop. It was like a Kentucky Derby for gremlins. Then I took the wire wheel out so they would use the other one. It was spinning round and round and round. I didn't realize all three were running it most of the night for I was unconscious (mostly) of course. I cannot really keep them in this cage as it's too flashy and obvious and if some stupid person interfered with it they would escape really easily whereas to get out of a fishtank they must be scooped out ... so it stays their holiday home. A French "gite" with a spiral staircase and turret haha! I can even extend it with special piping to make a gynormous hamster wonderland. Only prob' is the pipes cost about £4.99 each for 10cm extra tunnel. You know the coo. I had one of my business ideas to make a special kind of hammy home yesterday but I can't really tell else someone from Texas with $1000000s of funding will steal my ideas and make 'em themselves.

This evening I felt horribly shivering cold (a sure sign I need more meds) so I drank them. Meanwhile the radio was prattling on about inheritance taxes and redistribution of wealth. I'm not one of these people who believes making the rich poorer will make the poor any richer and I believe that obsessing on the "gap between rich and poor" is a misnomer. To improve the lives of the poor one must first learn how they live as I don't believe most politicians, even the most down to earth, have much of a clue about that and focus on them. Taxing the rich out of existence is merely the politics of envy and young people, ambitious people and the daydreamers among us won't want to live in a country that will steal back any fruits of their future success. The best way of helping the poor is by improving working conditions and pay. 1.2 million outsiders come into this country to do agricultural work (e.g. flower picking, fruit picking) that our own population could easily do... if only we arranged transport and accommodation. Imagine - travelling all over the country from work to work lashing down the alcohol it could be a lot of fun. The reason the Brits don't want to do it is because such work is hopelessly underpaid and I don't blame them. The poor of this country and every other western country will suffer increasingly as globalization takes jobs away from them. Even clerical jobs are disappearing online now. Why pay a Brit £5.50 an hour when an Indian may do it for a tenth of that?

Well that's my soapboxing of the day.

I have a drib of methadone left to take me into tomorrow.

I haven't done much writing. Isn't it stupid - in a way I'm forcing myself clean as it makes the only fitting conclusion for my memoirs. Also I'm scared that if they were a big success I'd only binge away the money on drugs. I don't see drugs as part of my future so the best time to stop is now... Of course the last thing I will stop is methadone and that is where I really wanted to focus. Many thanks for all the messages of support!

Video of the day:
Can your film change the world?

Second video of the day
New Hamsters in New Cage
Shows precisely the same cage (better than the other video did) mine now stay the weekends in. Note it has 2 upstairs bits etc etc...

It's a little bit wonkier certainly than a glass aquarium. E.g. the transparent green bit upstairs; the clip has broken off - but you can hold it closed easily with sticky tape. The wheel on the turret easily comes off just by lifting. It's just slightly too fragile for my own liking if someone walked in and kicked (sort of stupid thing my landlord might do) it it could easily come apart enough to let them out.

Note how baby the hammies in this film are. They all look like Itchy!
I'm convinced now that Itchy is a dwarf dwarf hamster and will never properly grow up.
I was going to advertise on the internet for someone with a male equivalent so we could start a new ultra tiny hamster breed ... (imagine!)

***

Two great photo-travel blogs of the day
Papy en Afrique http://papyenafrique.blogspot.com - African villages.
This Too Shall Pass http://lustoftenlovealways.blogspot.com - American travels
http://mouttamijeasso.blogspot.com - Tamil photos from someone living in France

And last but not least - to the person who took the Lake District Shots I said I'd feature PLEASE leave your url with me - it escaped my mind and computer...

Thanks I got the url
Zooper59 http://zooper59.blogspot.com - these are pictures of the Lake District I used to go hiking here and in the nearby Peak District as a tot

Stopping Forgetting To Stop

MY CONSTIPATION DREAM CAME TRUE THIS MORNING... O! I was shockingly blocked up and had a terrible time... Do you really want to hear this?!? Suffice it to say I did not end up with a dead-eyed dollie lying in the lavvy "pan"...

Yesterday evening I dropped in on an old friend called Rebsie who I used to see all the time. She used to drink really heavily; stopped all together; started again. Has at least managed to stick to normal-strength beer rather than premium cyder (the grot I drink).

Do you know - the puritanical side of me was musing this very morning - that strong white cyder, the cheapest alcoholic drink in this country costs less for 500mls than Coca Cola? This in a country that is supposed to tax alcohol highly, partially as a public health measure...

Anyway I ended up talking about Roborovskis and playing Grand Theft Auto on this £200 white piece of equipment (about the size of a cigarette packet)... with a ten year old girl telling me what to do as I was so lame. After it was revealed I was supposedly driving an ambulance round New York (after I'd stolen it - you can steal any kind of motor vehicle you like, including a motorbike or a police car) I took being in the City of Dreams rather literally and kept asking, "Where's Brooklyn Bridge? Is it that one? And how do I get to Fifth Avenue~?!?" etc, which the kids found rather exasperating. There is aparently a game where you can drive round a realistic replica of London (you'd have to be a much better driver than for New York City as the winding streets are narrower)...

Posh Spice has got a part in one of my supposed best television progs, Ugly Betty. (I really like the space-ship style offices of the magazine company. Also did you know the boss man used to play Jim in Neighbours?) Well anyway I don't watch television any more, except at other people's houses. I've gone all bouregois and twee and intellectual and left Radio 4/BBC World Service switched on 24-7 instead... I can't really put my finger on it what it was about TV I got tired of... I suppose nothing really grabbed me any more...

Did I have something else to say? I feel like I did. But it's gone! O! I'm giving up drugs tomorrow!! How could I forget that? Oh I know how: because every single time I've made the attempt in the past I've fallen directly down on my face. Usually straight away.

I had an emergency appointment with the duty worker at the drugs clinic yesterday as my script had run out and I'd no methadone for that day. So I saw this very down to earth non-nonsensical middle aged lady who informed me I was merely wasting my money by using and that it's the addict in me who keeps telling me I can't do it, I can't live a day without a jab (or ten) from a needle, that if I do stop I will feel better not worse.

I took all this information on board and told her the reservations expressed by the shrink about my picking a day and just stopping from then. (By "stopping" I mean ceasing using (heroin) on top of my methadone.) He had cautioned not to put it all onto one day in case it fails... But I see it that, as the saying goes:

If at first you don't succeed; try, try, try again!

As NA point out, you only ever need to do one day at a time. And that is what I was planning on doing. Picking a day on which I would ordinarily have used, then not using on that day. And not using the next day. And the next. And so on. I have after all managed to stop crack by exactly the same method. And if you do fall down you pick yourself up, dust yourself down and keep going. It doesn't really matter as long as you don't change direction.

So that is my plan, starting tomorrow!

***

Video1:
Pet Shop Boys: West End Girls - this song has hardly aged (to me) in the 22 years since it was released... Oh what a contrast between the music of the 60s and the 80s when I was in my youth! The 1960s felt like an entirely different era. The 1980s are simply a low-tech less hypocritical version of today...

Video2:
Pet Shop Boys - So Hard

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Photoblog choices of the day
http://shinchua.blogspot.com - Tibet photos
http://mielikuvitusmasentuu.blogspot.com - misty atmospheric Finland photos
http://photonodie.blogspot.com - brilliant illusionist's photos from France...

***

Joke of the day. I found this at Scroblene's blog under the heading

Old/new ones are best department...

A Polish chap went to apply for a driving licence.

First, of course, he had to take an eye sight test. The optician showed him a card with the letters:

'C Z W I X N O S T A C Z.'

"Can you read this?" the optician asked.

"Read it?" the Polish chap replied, "I know the guy."

***

Here is a fascinating post about life in Norway 25 years ago (by a guest blogger) at Sicily Scene whilst Welshcakes is away

Part 10: Beggars Cannot Be Choosers

WHEN I ENDURED MY WEEK'S "TURKEY" at my family's place, there had been several motivating factors. Although I'd still (except on odd occasions) yet to exceed £10 a day even on heroin (which is very low compared to the "average" of £30 a day. Though having been in rehab and having had extra meds I suspect that £30 a day includes crack as well as heroin.) Anyway, even this £10 was causing financial problems. Bills were going unpaid. The rent shortfall that I'd always had to make up ~ this totted up week after week. My mobile (an early pay-&-go) went un-topped-up for ages. The landline phone I'd had specially installed years before ~ as my solitary luxury item ~ piled up with bills and eventualy had to be sacrificed all together. We still had a payphone in the hallway that took 10p pieces (10p to call a mobile!?! Those were the days!) so I was reduced once again to using that. Me who'd been the first in the house to get my own phone line put in. But ho-hum: there we go ... I was too scared of debt collectors and bad credit references and suchlike at this stage to risk defaulting in any spectacular fashion. I still had dreams of returning to a "regular" life with a car and a cred it rating. Etc. So I treid to behave financially. Eventually, though, the proverbial muck hit the fan. Psychologically I was in crisis. And my family refused to help me out at all. Except for getting some sort of treatment. They searched. I searched. Private doctors who prescribe methadone do not advertise (in Britain I don't even think they're allowed to) so without the luxury of word of mouth (and I still was pretty much keeping myself to myself, apart from the local crusties I didn't know any addicts. And crusties do not use private clinics. So we were all stumped there. Anyway: financially, straights were dire. Reluctantly I realized the time had come to start grafting for a living: to earn my own gear.

To this day I look back to that particular corssroads and wonder, whether they had bailed me out, if I'd finally have accepted that this addiction simply could not go on... not in conjunction with living any ostensibly "normal" life any more and whether I really would have learned my lesson and turned my back on the stuff for good back then. Addiction is such a slippery, deceptive state to be in that I long ago learned to distrust my own so-called motives. Time has a habit of turning these on their head or shining light from hitherto unforseen angles and nasty truths are illuminated. So I don't know. But I still believe it I had a genuine chance of reforming at that point. And I was refused help. Being in debt was my worst nightmare. I'd spent years scrimping to restore my finances to "respectability" folowing my student days fiasco. All I was asking was, in effect, one last chance. But to my family, I was asking for money to fund my habit. These two viewpoints would never meet and I was too tired to argue. No help wsa forthcoming: so cardboard sign in one hand: "HUNGRY: PLEASE HELP. Thank you. & God Bless xx" and a torn-off McDonald's cup in the other, I hit the mean streets of London to beg the general public.

Within a week my "gear" usage had trebled. To achieve "Dutch courage" I took to hitting the White Cyder before "going to work" ~ as I put it. A drinking habit that has remained with me to this day...

Soon, of course, I'd met a variety of new friends, dealers and connexions. Having used almost at times in my own "bubble" I was now literally on the streets. Which always makes me laugh when the so-called "urban" musical fraternity and various assorted trendies talk about "coming up from the streets" and "the sound of the streets" I know the sound of London's streets only too well and believe me there's no two-step to it and no breakbeat either. The true sound of The Streets is roadworks, pedestrians and the relentless passing of traffic to a background of wind, rain, sunshine, moonshine and the silence of 4am streetlights. That's the original sound of the streets, believe! The pavements are hard and scuttle with empty food wrappings, rin-tin-tinning tin-cans, losing lottery tickets and occasionally something beautiful. A rose dropped from a bunch. A photograph of somewhere gorgeous. A lost £20 note ... Londoners are inverterate litterbugs.

On the other hand I was provided with a constant supply of smokes ~ both in the form of bus-stop dogends and donation from the public. Drink kept me in enough haze not to be upset. When I did cry I only got more money: so that was a win-win situation. Sometimes I formally "begged" people: "Excuse me, sir, can you please spare me any loose change at all?" Other times I kept my mouth shut. The money still came. Sometimes I played the cheery cheekie chappie. Others, I was a picture of misery. I lost sight of when I was and was not acting. Feelings come in layers like the skins of an onion, and all actors do is delve beneath to a deeper truth. So when I was acting, I wasn't really lying. I was indeed destitute. Why else would anybody choose to sit on the streets asking for loose change??

Bad weather was a problem. People literally don't want to take theri hands out of their pockets. But come rain or shine, I was out there. I made my pitch my own. I never was impatient or resentful: the time would pass by anyhow, so why not spend it begging? And what else was I to do with it? As slow as my sluggishest days were, I always, but always made my money. More than once I remember waking cross-legged on the cold street, in a downpour, being nudged: opening my eyes to encounter a £10 or £20 note fluttering under my nose. The kindness of the general public ~ many of whom I'm sure had a good idea what had put me out on the streets ~ I will never forget. The kindness of so many strangers actually restored my confidence in human nature. It boosted my self-esteem. To be able to sit there ~ just to be there ~ selling nothing, doing nothing except saying to all intents and purposes "help me; I'm desperate" and to know that I could indeed rely on the kindness of strangers, however long it took in coming. Somehow this seemed to justify my existence as nothing else could. Life didn't feel so bad when I was getting money just for being myself. I can't explain it any other way ....

Begging was hardly an ambition fulfilled, yet for years it was my vocation in the most literal sense. Every day I heeded the calling to go back out and scrape another few notes together ...

While, as I say, my drug use trebled in a week; I also altered the way I took my drug of choice. My one drug was heroin. Heroin was the only thing I touched. I woke up, used whatever I had, felt poor and hungry; went out and begged. Scored, used, probably slept a bit more. Was always ready by four or five o'clock to go out for the evening rush-hour, which was by far the most lucrative time of day.

If you weren't there early enough you'd oftten have to fight for a good pitch.

One late afternoon, when I had "only" £5, I threw in my money with a Portuguese fellow at the local tube stateion . He was one of the last of the old-skool of travelcarders ~ folks who made their living begging used one-day Travelcards off homeward-bound shoppers and commuters and selling 'em on at half price to people who ahd somewhere to go in the evening time. Juan returned with a great chunk of white-rock "brown". I got a ghood deal for my £5. Took it home, cooked up a light-brown solution. This would not be anywhere near strong enough, I told myself, to bother subcutting or skinpopping. the pale and meagre hit would creep over me so gradually... I may as well not be bothering .... what was I thinking? ... glancing to the crook of my left arm where the veins were fresh and bulging .... I saw another bridge to cross right before my eyes ... why not? I'd degraded myself in every other way! I'd hurt my family more than I ever expected to in a lifetime. I'd flirted with deadly drugs and viruses already. Why not inject straight into that ready vein? What was to stop me? I'd get absolute maximum value from my £5.

I knew hte procedure. This wasn't to be the first intravenous "hit" but it was the first I'd self-administered. Clumsily, I fastened a belt round my upper biceps (later I learned that belts are only used on television. A shoelace makes a far better "tournie" ~ if one is needed at all...) ~ all sweating and a-trembling I slid the needle in. Pulled back the plunger. Dark blood rushed into the pale brown heroin. Then no blood. I'd lost the vein. I steadied up, found it again, loosened the awkward clip-jangling leather belt and resolutely pushed in the entire "hit". It was not weak. My first sensation was one I'd never experienced from injecting before: that of running naked through stinging nettles. Prickling all over. Thugh the prickles were rapidly dulled by the same drug that had initiated them... A warmth broke out all over me, gliding into a haze. My face felt hot and flushed. My eyes ~ when Iturned to the mirror ~ were "pinning" down, the pupils contracting to needle-points of nothing. I ensured that the belt was properly off and the needle safe as the heroin overtook me in a slumber. This we call gauwching here in London, though I'm sure junkies the world over have their own expressions for the desired effect of their drug... Gauwching rhymes with crouching. And it's a bizarre state of affairs where the lights stay blazing on all over the building ~ but quite patently nobody at all is home.

Unlike the blackout of true sleep where you tend to need to lie down, in this white-out state, the heroin gauwcher can often remain crouching ~ or standing ~ or bending ~ or kneeling would-be statue-like for long periods, rocking sometimes or twitching in gormless, teddy-bear eye-rolling Muppet-like poses. This is often comical ~ or sordid, depending on your viewpoint ~ to behold. Sometimes you can even hold conversations with the gauwcher, but these are never remembered afterwards. Other times normal sleep ~ so often missed, forsaken or mercilessly broken to bits at night ~ is replaced by this life-consuming gauwching ...

But as a doctor once tol dme ~ whether or not you remain nominally conscious after a dose, heroin is sending to much of the brain to sleep, you fail to realize while you're on it. Just as the eyes adapt to dark glasses, so the mind adapts to the brain's being drugged 24-7 with something even as powerful as heroin. However much of the drug you take, you somehow never feel as stoned as you appear on the outside. "Normality" to the brain, is of course whatever state of being it becomes most accustomed to. So if "stoned" becomes normal, the brain adapts automatically. This is part of the "never enough" syndrome at the heart of all severe addictions. When the drug state replaces normality and "stoned" becomes "normal" ~ how can you ever have more and more normality? It's just not possible.

You get used to drowsing whenever life's hectic rushing between one money-making scheme and another or a dealer or a place to use. Just like an old pensioner, I found msyefls napping on teh bus ...

My body so swiftly adapted to the particular effects of IV heroin that no other "route" of administration would do it for now on ...

Morning, noon, night and in between, I was hitting up ever-increasing doses. So that I soon found msyelf on a gram of the stuff a day. My habit had entered its most raging phase. Heroin heroin heroin heroin. Heroin with everything. Before. After. During. Life was inconceivable ~ basically not doable ~ without this heroin. I needed heroin to eat ~ the flush of warmth, the distancing from bodily sensation ~ somehow gave me bon appetit. I needed heroin to sleep. If I didn't have it, I slept fitfully until I did get it. Even if that meant waiting till late into the next morning (by which time I'd met the dealer and scored) for any proper rest .... And then I could not get up without heroin either. At my habit's raging worst I awoke evey single morning feeling sick and tired and chilled to the bone and nauseated and bellyacheing. And could not function at all (although I had to drag myself against this deathliness to walk or bus or otherwise do what had to be done to get money into dealer's hand and heroin into mine and very rapidly afterwards into my bloodstream... That morning hit was my equivalent to the "normal" person's cup of tea and cigarette ...

Raging. Raging. And so my habit raged mercilessly on ...

More tomorrow....

Part 8: Cold Turkey

SO HERE I AM WITH MY DEAR FAMILY a good four hours' journey from home (I know you Aussies and Canadians will laugh; but in Britain that's a long, long way!) In fact very few journeys in the average Brit's lifetime (so long as they are within the UK) will take much longer than four or five hours ...

Anyhow I arrive and the first withdrawals have already crept up on me on the train. So I'm shivering and hot and getting the shivers and yet sweating all the more. Which is a really horrible state to be in; trust me. It's not just that the body's going haywire but sweating when you're already cold can become an agonizing experience. As the withdrawal progresses it's like stripping layer after layer off your own skin, off your resistence to the world's minor irritations. Which is why, as I mention, the sweats became like an "agony" ~ the threshold of discomfort of any kind plummets. That fairytale "The Princess and the Pea" might well have been written about a detoxing royal junkie, because the author's point about luxury lowering tolerance to suffering and all suffering being relative is very much applicable to the heroin addict's self-inflicted lot.

Even the medical text I once consulted conceded that junkies in withdrawal tend to be majorly tormented by minor discomforts. This may well have been the same text that counselled nurses not to be overly concerned by the impossibly accelerating anxiety and agonizing withdrawal sickness of any opiate addict no matter what the length or degree of their addiction and to remind the patient that although these symptoms feel very distressing and unpleasant at times they always pass within a matter of days and have never killed anyone. In other words: be patronizing and dismissive and unaware of the fact that if heroin withdrawals could indeed kill a great many more addicts would be willing to suffer them. At least that way, a clearly positive outcome might be in sight.

Some drugs do present complications in withdrawal: benzodiazepines (Valium and most modern sleeping pills) can bring on seizures if withdrawn too rapidly. As can alcohol. Alcohol withdrawal in particular can elecit the most florid hallucinations atop mental confusion (delirium tremens; the so-called DTs). But it's because a detoxing heroin addict generally loses the will or capacity to drink ~ and frequently tends to cut out all drugs together at the same time if they are going to brave the full-on "cold turkey" ~ that all manner of phenomena tend to get blamed on withdrawal from heroin that actually have nothing (directly) to do with it.

OK AND BACK TO MY OWN STORY, it soon proved that the methadone I had brought with me would nowhere near be enough to last the week. So, having thought the matter through, and realizing that to take a pitifully small dose of methadone would put me in the worst of both worlds (as I saw it then) ~ ie still being addicted and yet not being held ~ that I poured the entire lot down the toilet. Watched as the water in the bowl went a mouthwash shade of green and promptly flushed all this away in case the urge to scoop it back in a cup should seize me (addiction is a powerful motivator). Now I had to option but to stick to my resolve to come off "cold turkey" ...

"Junk" sickness comes on agonizingly slowly and refuses to hurry. It is an expert torturer. Having said this: within 24 hours my pupils had gone enormous, I was sopping wet with sweat all over. "Cold turkey" was getting into full swing. What I hadn't counted on, however, was a restlessness of mind and body so extreme that at the peak of the experience I could barely stay still for longer than 20 seconds. My mind raced uncontrollably. Ideas of all varieties whirling about me in a tornado. My anxiety was extreme. I could focus on nothing for longer than a handful of seconds. My moods flew up down and sideways. At one point my mind was rushing so quickly I felt like I was flying.

My family, of course, hadn't a clue what was wrong. And I refused to admit the reason for my odd behaviour until three days into this admittedly farcical scene. What caught their attention, far more than those supposed "flu-like symptoms" I'd been conditioned to expect (anyway, the worst of these ~ the cramps and vomiting ~ I managed to control with hysocine (scopolamine) travel sickness pills. What grabbed their attention was my frenzied, pointless, restlessness. There seemed no earthly reason for this. When my Dad suggested it might be "drugs" I countered, "who on earth would take a drug that would make them feel like this?" and for the time being that particular subject had a lid on.

At this point in time I had been "dabbling" in heroin for over three years. Had been using daily for several months; and though it's hard to state precisely how long becuase inherent to the state of addiction, as I've already stated, is massive self-deception, I did manage to pinpoint at the time that I'd been using on a daily basis for at least six months when I made this concerted attempt to come off.

My point here is that the withdrawals I went through, though intensely nasty to me, were nothing compared to the syndrome that might well confront me ~ with literally years of heroin plus a tankerfull of methadone ~ were I to try and come off cold today ...

"Cold turkey" ~ incidentally ~ is more the media's expression than one that junkies might use. (London junkies, anyhow. I can't vouch for the rest of this cruel, wide world!) Junkies themselves might use the term "clucking" or "doing your cluck" ~ yes I know how laughable that sounds: I've laughed at it myself. But that's the language heroin addicts use.

Anyhow, now that heroin is available round the clock from a great many dealers and the days when you had your "man" and stayed loyal to him and might even have to go for days at a time without when droughts hit the city and "the man" couldn't "get" ... these days, when cold turkey was a fact of life, have long gone. In fact I seriously doubt whether many of the younger addicts today have even done a straightforward "cluck" as I did at least go through to the bitter end (I did eight or nine days clean) ... the modern-day addict in the west is coddled from the worst consequences of his addiction and so not only receives a mixed message from society that with one breath condemns his actions and threatens conviction, fines, imprisonment ... and yet with the next condones them, offering clean needle exchange, easy access to methadone (that you can go on and on using on top of) and so on. A thoroughly confusing point of view. Though I'm not saying the situation in South East Asia (or even in America) is in any way desirable.

Merely to do the proper "cold turkey" you need certain facilities in place. First of these is a place to stay well away from all your druggie connexions. If you don't have this and attempt coming off in your normal milieu unless God grants a miracle, you're pretty much doomed from the start. No way will you see the withdawals though.

Addiction erodes willpower in a way thta's near-impossible to explain to a nonaddict. For one thing one's desire to clean up actually increases once you've had a lovely great shot of the drug. This is because once high and distanced from the details of life cleaning up seems as straightforward as it is desirable. When in fact it is not straightforward at all. Because an entire life must be substituted new for old in almost every detail. The less high you are. The more straight. The more under the weather beneath straight that you get as the last of the last hit trickles from your system your brain only turns with single-minded fixation to obtaining more of the drug and using it and contriving always to have more to use when you need it. As the author of a junk memoir put it (my paraphrase) ... "I was never so minded to get clean as when I was dirty" ... that's pretty much it in a nutshell. But straight people would assume it's the other way round. How can it be. You cannot be hooked on a drug without first loving it. Any addict who pretends they hate their drug of choice is a liar! You can get tired of it the way you get tired of a longterm spouse. But you gotta love the stuff at some time. Otherwise how on earth are you gonna get hooked in the first place!?!

Over time, heroin seeps under your skin, eventually, to all intents and purposes, becoming your skin, as it sets up home in brain and body. And all wellbeing and all normality come eventually to depend on heroin's compelling presence in your body, you find yourself in due course utterly hijacked by the substance that once added life's spice. Now, it's somehow become a substance for life itself. All the emotional stability that I, at long last, seemed to have gained in my life, I suddenly realized ~ had been built on a foundation of heroin. Without heroin I was in such a bad way I felt I'd never cope with life on it's own demanding terms ever again. Indeed, life without heroin seemed like a black hole, a dreadful, intolerable void stretching forever and destroying all who entered in. When this hit me I basically flipped my lid and, panicking and full of suicidal ideas, detarmined my only option was to get back home and get myself killed by an express train. I ate a miserable last supper and kept as composed as possible all the way to the station. The physical withdrawals had by now faded (I was a good week clean if not longer) ~ but my mind was still in tatters.

Before I did the nasty deed I would use just once more, to straighten myself out.

The drug worked.

In fact it worked a seeming miracle. All deathwishes ceased.

All I'd done in attempting to quit, it transpired, was to seal with myself a new pact and resolution. I knew beyond any doubt now that I was an addict. And finally I understood the debt I owed heroin for the nominal security in life I enjoyed once I was dosed up. From now on: I cold not stop. I could only go on using. Because heroin had saved me. If it hadn't done it's favour and made me feel so good now, I would surely be dead. That was the deal I made with heroin. Or heroin made with me. Simple ~ uh?

And what the future held ~ God only knew ...

Part 7: Downhill

THIS IS A SHORT POST. IT WAS CUT SHORT BY MY SLEEPING, PEN IN HAND. The writing trails off, spaghetti-like...
Anyhow:~
DECEPTION ALWAYS PLAYS A MASSIVE ROLE in drug addiction. When you're not showing false faces to the outside world, you are inevitably deceiving yourself. So as Libra's and my relationship went on (I wouldn't really say that it intensified or deepened, for as I said earlier, we just "clicked" right from the very start and that was that. It wasn't even "love" at first sight. It just felt like we were somehow meant to be together for the time that it lasted. I went fom "chasing" the heroin on tinfoil and occasionally snorting it to injecting it subcutaneously ("subcut") and skinpopping (intramuscular or I.M. injections). These were like the injections you get at aschool when the time comes for immunization against childhood nasties. Although Libra, with her long-term habit, looked down at this type of injecting: "It's just like deliberately giving yourself a miss!" the effects were more than twice as strong as smoking or snorting and came on in under ten minutes as a slow, extended trickle, like gradually pouring hot water into a cold bath. There was no specific occasion when I decided needles were for me. Becaus Libra was using them, these plus all their paraphernalia were left lying all over my room and cooking up was easy. So one thing crept on to another. Though I was undoubtedly getting a "habit", my first experience of coming off, remember, had been deceptively straightforward. This gave me the courage or excuse to go on using for months on end, always telling myself I was going to stop "tomorrow".

When I did try to stop ~ total cold turkey ~ I found this was nowhere near as easy as I might have hoped ...

(sorry it has to continue yet again ...)