Freezing

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...

Cable

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?

Hello again

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...

Acrobatic Mice

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



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

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

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

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

Not Feeling Well

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.

Cigarettes Level

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

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.)

Autumnal

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

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!

Skip paragraph One

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."

Lots of things, including an anti-drug rant

I JUST HAD A GANDER at my new passport photo. The one showing me tanned with nicotine stained hair and an attitude. I look like a Costa del Sol criminal wanted for the importation of 7 metric tonnes of China White heroin (I look way too classy to be involved in the smuggling of dirty old "brown").

By the way I heard a friend of mine has a criminal record for Heroin Importation. You Gossipy Ladies out there: you'd all have been proud of me the way I pumped this individual for information. What type of heroin was it (brown! ukh!!) And how much? (2.9kg) Who paid you and how much (a dealer paid £4000 plus the price of the holiday to Nigeria). How long were you punished in prison for? (2 years 6 months of a 5 year sentence ~ in the UK thank God). How did you feel when customs pulled you with kilos of heroin and freedom glowing joyfully round the corner? (More gutted than words can ever describe. And more terrified.) The ex-smuggler told me I should be a journalist. Never had she been grilled so thoroughly, except by customs when she was being punished for bringing the dodgy contraband over. Oh yeah and how long did you THINK you were going to do in prison? (20 years ~ ie 17.5 years more than she actually did do.)

Every single person I have ever met who claims to have smuggled drugs has been foreign. It is drummed into the British very deeply, being an island race, that drug importation is very heavy shit and only fools ever get involved in the sharp end of that business. And only bastards get involved in the cushty "my kitchen is so high tech it was fitted by NASA" end... "And I've never physically touched heroin in my life. Let alone actually taken the stuff. Even though heroin made me my houses, my cars, my boats, my wife's jewellery and my planes."

I just spent the afternoon round Valium Marilyn's. I weighed myself on her scales and still weigh 194 lbs. That's a weight gain of circa 4lbs. She noticed I was restlessly perky and said don't worry about it. Except when I got a vehement attack of the farts and had to keep going out the room to quack the foul wind to freedom in the confines of Valium Marilyn's hallway.

I asked Deshane about Moving to Posh Park and it's still "on the cards" ~ so I'm told. I can even go and have a poke round the Posh Park house very soon indeed! A meeting between me, my support worker and my housing manager has been arranged. I cannot wait. Means some progress is mighty soon to be achieved.

Why has NONE of you commented on my WONDROUS, AMAZING, FANTABULOUS MUSIC posted yesterday? Ave Maria sung by The Voice of the 20th Century ~ Barbra Streisand. And Barber's Adagio sung by a "celestial" choir as wonders of the universe ~ courtesy of Nasa ~ flash by.... This stuff is amazing. I shall STERNLY REPRIMAND YOU if you FAIL TO COMMENT AGAIN. come ON!

Valium Marilyn kept politely telling me to calm down because I was getting hypomanic in her house. She has bipolar disorder in her family and so knows the signs. I had a healthy 3 hours' sleep last night and was getting cocaine style rushes all the way home. In fact all day I've felt like I was coasting up on Ecstasy or coke. Lovely jubbly. FREEE DRUGS FROM THE MIND ~ WHAT CAN BE BETTER. I wish I could have unipolar not too severe mania. That would be the best mental illness of all. But as it is I have to plunge the depths of reality as well as the stratospheric heights. I'm only glad that I've gone higher on bipolar than I ever went low. That is some consolation to me. I once went so high I was atop the universe, gazing down upon everything. I felt infused with the power of God Almighty. I don't think bipolar disorder is any type of genuine madness; I believe it's a true way of perceiving reality. If you view any type of bipolar mood chart you'll see peaks and valleys and a pitifully narrow band in the middle marked "normality". Now if that's as far as Ordinary Joe's emotions ever go, then give me bipolar any day. I have seen everything, felt everything, experienced the highest exaltation and the most dismal meaninglessness; I have been a worthless, worn-out hunk of human junk and known it and felt it with every fibre of my being. My perceptions, being wider, are truer than Average Joe's. Where's the madness in that? Joe is blinkered into retardation. Not craziness but emotional constipation. I with my bipolar enhancements am effortlessly superior to most other people alive and that is a Simple Truth. Don't worry about it. But feel privileged to read my proclamations. (My tongue is only a bit in my cheek...)

Here's something amazing. Forget the singer, hear the song:
AVE MARIA sung celestially:~



Valium Marilyn got ripped off on a 14 temazepam 20mgs deal when I was there. Not a lot we could do once the *****r had gone, leaving just THREE temazepam 20s and 11 dihydrocodeine 30s. Dihydrocodeines, which we call "DFs" after the old brand name "DF118" are equivalent at 30mg to 3mg methadone and hence worth only about 30p a tablet. Not the £1.70-ish Valium Mal was paying. She kept asking my advice and I said "look he will not refund your money so take whatever reparations he offers, whether you want them or not: take take take". I also left an ansafone message for her. Very polite but very firm too. I had drunk 2 cups of tea on top of my hyper mood and so was well and truly soaring by this point. Caffeine has a cocaine-like effect on my manic self.

Well I have to go and find something else to get really excited about. It's raining. It's pouring. My love life is boring me to tears... after all these years...



Eh, talking of Donna Summer, what post would be complete without thee greatest disco track of all time: I FEEL LOVE!?!





A meeting has to go ahead with my housing manager, Deshane and me and I MOVE MOVE MOVE. Moving on! I so want to LEAVE THE AREA, live somewhere more salubrious. Kiss the drugs goodbye. I don't crave heroin AT ALL now. The last time I used heroin was about 2 or 3 days ago and I did get it straight in a vein on my torso and I did feel it. And it wasn't worth it. And I never want it again. And I will not miss something that nearly destroyed me, nearly killed me, left me without a life worth living, kept me depressed and yet told me it cured my depression, removed what scraps of self-esteem I had left and dropped me to depths where the only rational course of action appeared to be suicide ~ and yet I was too disorganized, depressed and generally mentally destabilized to get it together even to kill myself (and I did genuinely want to die: what I didn't want so much was to actively commit suicide. If I'd have found out I had a terminal illness during this stage no way would I have elected for any treatment bar opiate painkillers.) Heroin nearly destroyed me. I can see that now. For a while I was confused by the fact that heroin is prescribed to some addicts in this country as an experimental or last-resort treatment for severe, entrenched dependency. Knowing this, and WANTING such treatment and knowing that heroin was and is used extensively in British hospitals as the painkiller of choice for terminal illness, trauma and emergency medicine, prevented me ever being able to believe that heroin was "evil".




HERE'S A LITTLE RANT TO ANYBODY CONSIDERING EXPERIMENTING WITH HEROIN OR ANY SIMILAR DRUG:~

Let me tell you something: heroin is evil. It does no good to anyone to abuses it. Take heroin and you lose. Every time. Not everybody loses the same way or to the same degree. But I have never known a case where a person is truly better off for being on heroin. If you do know a person you believe has made heroin addiction somehow "work" I would urge you to look closer and to bear in mind that you don't know somebody's life until you've walked a good mile in their shoes. A mile is a good deal longer than any junkie would ever walk without a pressing reason. Example: a lack of heroin. Because no amount of heroin is ever enough for long enough.

Heroin addicts just want to keep the world at bay. To float in that primordial amniotic wonderland that is called the Opiate High. Junkies aren't afraid of dying: they're afraid of living. The longer you indulge in heroin, the more worthless life seems, and the more frightening, until ~ if you're like me ~ you just can't cope. I know I am an extreme case. Not everybody has the psychopathology I have. But everybody who plays with heroin suffers for it. Heroin is a painkiller. If you make it your life's ambition to escape pain, the laws of nature decree you'll suffer for your folly. My one word of advice to anybody considering experimentation with any kind of strong opiates is just don't. You have survived an entire lifetime up to this point without heroin or oxy or Dilaudid or whatever else is gnawing at your soul before you even took it. Because I know you have mixed feelings and I know you feel confused. The reason is very simple: you know that taking opiates is playing with fire. Somehow you reason you'll get high like every other junkie, yet you won't get burned like every other junkie. It doesn't matter whether or not you use a needle. Opiates get under the skin like you wouldn't believe. Eventually they become your skin, like a luxury coccoon. And life without them becomes not merely unbearable, but unthinkable. You may reason that you'll only use once a week, once a month, once a year, once in a lifetime. Every addict I've met, with the exception of those lost souls who deliberately got addicted, only ever intended to try heroin once. But heroin doesn't work like that. You do not get the full effects until your body is already well on the way to becoming habituated. Then it's already too late. If you want to be happy, want to be free, you must piece together your opiate-free time into one continuous stream of drug-free existence. That's the only way to do it. Take it from someone who didn't do it, who nearly died doing it all wrong, who lost all semblance of a life. So much so that at my lowest points, even the other junkies didn't want to know me. Heroin only kills the lucky few. Chances are you won't die. Chances are you'll live in pain. There is nothing more painful than learning to live without the strongest painkiller in the world.

Heroin? TAKE MY ADVICE AND GIVE IT A MISS.

And if you do have a problem, my advice is contact Narcotics Anonymous. They're not the only way out of addiction, but their programme most definitely does work "if you work it". I advise it because it's run by addicts for addicts, and it's free. Be very very cautious about shelling out money you can't afford to cure an addiction that might only be in it's earliest stages. It took me ten years to go from intending to stop heroin tomorrow to being able to survive on methadone day in day out without constantly using heroin on top. I'm still addicted to methadone. I don't know when I will ever get off the stuff. I'm "dual diagnosis" because I have mood swings of psychotic proportions on top of my drug problem. I can't advise anyone anything except to stay away from hard drugs, from mind-bending drugs... from all drugs. No drug has ever benefited me. I hope someone somewhere reads this someday and hears me. As the old saying goes: if one person stays clean due to what I say, it's all worthwhile... Maybe that would make my mess seem somehow worthwhile. Because I can tell you, it certainly doesn't feel worthwhile from where I'm stuck. Still addicted. Stuck on methadone and hating it.

STAY AWAY FROM DRUGS! STAY FREE!

✰✰✰✰✰✰✰


Nelson Center for Emotional Healing: Did Amy Winehouse die of self-loathing?

Sanity

I DIDN'T POST EARLIER because nothing was new and I don't feel well. I've scrapped two long posts because there was too much telling going on. I woke up at 4am going nuts and have since calmed down. The 1959 film starring Audrey Hepburn, Nun's Story, helped calm me. I was getting very manic, and yet still depressed. And paranoid to boot. I only went outside to clear my head out. I am getting free broadband from the library. My trainers have worn through at the soles, letting rain in. Now they smell like camping material that has been stored in a damp barn all winter. They need burning.

I don't know where I am going or what is happening. I am not well. Hey but I'm well enough not to do crack. Somebody offered me crack yesterday and I got more of a buzz knowing I could watch it and smell it being smoked right in front of me and not still not want the shit.

My biggest disappointment is that it has taken me so long to truly realize that heroin, far from helping me in any way, has only ever been one gigantic con. I cannot think of one single example of anybody whose life has been improved by the use of street heroin. I think the gear has just made me sicker than I would have been, because it's become a crutch. So I'm weaker, more vulnerable and more impressionable on a psychic level and that's what psychosis is: psychic overdrive.

I can never know what I would or would not be doing now without the "helping hand" of heroin but I don't think my existence would be the mess it has become on gear, I just don't.

So there's some sanity for you. I've put the rest of what I wrote this morning in cold storage because it's just more mad ranting and I'm fed up of being that way. I cannot tell what is and is not relevant in that state so I just say everything and edit nothing. Hence the literary mess that is me in a full-flown "flight of ideas" (as the doctors call it).

I hope y'all are well!


To those of you on far-flung shores, trainers are sneakers ~ and mine look a bit like this...


HUMATE: LOVE SIMULATION (PAUL VAN DYK LOVE MIX)



DJ TIËSTO: SUBURBAN TRAIN



ASTRAL PROJECTION: AURORA BOREALIS

In which Gledwood prattles on numerous topics...

IT IS RAINING. NOT JUST CATS AND DOGS BUT ENORMOUS ONES: WOLVES AND TIGERS. I’ve just braved the downpour to get cigarettes and some strange type of Turkish pizza bread. Not lahmacun. This one’s covered in what appears to be a mix of chilified red peppers maybe with a bit of onion thrown in for good measure. Oh I don’t know what it is but it looks a bit like minced beef, but it’s not. Soon as I was too far from my house to make it turning back a sensible option, it really started chucking it down. I was so glad of my five year old girl’s multicoloured jiggly-face-handled brolly. Two old slappers fagging away outside the local pub burst into uproarious laughter at the sight of me. Least I think they did. Who can distinguish paranoia attacks from reality. I can’t. Well I can: I just tell myself nothing is real which makes life very Strawberry Fields indeed.

I am highly annoyed with Specsavers Opticians for taking ANOTHER TEN DAYS to get one simple pair of psychotic-stalker amber Reactions lenses ready for me. In ten days’ time summer shall be over! I’m getting fed up of walking into buildings sunglassered up and having to decide whether to look like a poser yet see my surroundings in crystal clarity. Or to take off the shades and see a glaring montage of blurs. WHICH IS WHY I ORDERED PHOTOCHROMIC GLASSES TO START WITH BLOODY IDIOT COMPANY. How can it possibly take three weeks to slam a pair of specs together? I have to hand it to them they ARE WAY cheaper than Vision Express, Boots or Dolland and Aitcheson. These other companies have somehow got by charging £300 for one pair of glasses. Specsavers do two for £69 all-in. You can get both pairs tinted if you like. Which is how I ended up with black prescription sunglasses. I’m now bored bored bored of my tiny collection of eyewear. I want my old sunglasses collection back. I had five pairs alone with lenses in varying shades of blue. I specially went in for that semi-mirrored look that opticians don’t do. Do you understand why I need to be a multimillionaire now? I want to get my eyes lasered for one thing. And I’d like a few homes. One in London, one in Switzerland, where I’ll live if I don’t live in Monaco. One in Manhattan (but of course). Though I’m enough of an antisnob to live in Brooklyn just to perplex my Manhattanite friends. Where else would I like to live? O yeah Tokyo. And everywhere else I might consider renting. The whole point of having lots of money in my opinion is to make pots and pots more, so all my houses would be up for rent when I was out of residence. At $10-20,000 per week. That kind of figure. I would also make pots of cash bagging finder’s fees for people seeking the discreet disposal of private jets, yachts, fine jewellery, paintings and other trinkets. You have to do what you love and I love paintings, jewellery, aeroplanes and boats with more cabin room than a small apartment building. I was surprised nobody went for Saddam Hussein’s former yacht. For a mere $15 million you got a boat with submarine docking station and every facility down to an operating theatre. I couldn’t help wondering whether that operating theatre was fully stocked… y’know. Just out of professional interest and all.

When I was growing up I considered rich people to be normal and poor people to be weird. It was only life’s tapestry of bitterness that taught me any different. Ever since I was little I have wanted to be rich. I certainly never envisaged a life of idleness and I fully intended to work for my money, not to marry it, inherit it (no chance of that anyhow) or win it. My ideal job (apart from bestselling writer with aggregate sales in excess of one billion) would be media tycoon in the mould of Rupert Murdoch. I always thought Murdoch was eminently superior to that scabies-infested mongoose Robert Maxwell he seemed permanently to be feuding with in the 1980s. Murdoch owned (and still does down) Britain’s brightest daily tabloid, the right-leaning Sun newspaper. Maxwell owned the left-of-centre Daily Mirror. I’ve never understood champagne socialism. I’m a capitalist. I believe in low taxes for the rich, so I can pay low taxes when I’m rich. High taxation kills aspiration and moves enterprise across borders. Did you know British writers have to pay Value Added Tax ~ that is, the supposedly “luxury” sales tax imposed on just about everything that’s bought and sold in this country except food (and books, as it goes). So on top of agent’s fees reaching 20% for foreign markets I’m going to have to pay VAT at 20% and that New Labour government’s ridiculous 50% top rate of income tax. And y’all wonder why I want to live abroad. I once got a comment accusing me of ungratefulness to the country that had brought me up and nurtured me. Well I’m also a victim of Britain’s regressive prescribing to addicts. If they’d only issued me with diamorphine on prescription many years ago, I might be off all drugs by now. Instead it was ineffectual methadone and sort yourself out. As Shane in France says, the street dealer is the addict’s friend far more than a druggie clinic will ever be. Those clinic staff don’t give a rat’s arse about your welfare or my welfare. Everything is streamlined, categorized, prioritized. Which is where ridiculous exclamations: “and he even injects!” come from. If you can convince your worker you’ve ceased injecting they get a tick against their name. It’s all about coercing patients into treatments they do not want. The main reason I’m not into rehab is that most of the people there don’t truly want to be there. They want a life on drugs without the problems drugs have brought them. Fuck “consequences”. Consequences are society’s way of heaping persecution upon the misery of its most vulnerable members. Most of the “consequences” of heroin addiction are the direct result of prohibition. Just as people were blinded and killed by bootleg alcohol in 1920s America, so addicts overdose and die on clandestinely manufactured heroin of unknown purity. Even the British Government admit that the main risk posed by heroin to a healthy person is the risk of dependency! Dependency is slavery. Which is why I want out. Only when you see your addiction as chemical slavery will you have a chance of escape.

They say you should only give up heroin for yourself. That no other reason is good enough. No partner. Not even your own dear child is enough of a reason to quit taking the drug that makes you feel better than anything else.

10PM JUST GOT BACK FROM NA. I told them I used today and yesterday. They of all people won’t judge me for using. I know they probably judged me as being a bit all over the place because I’d used. In reality I feel my energy coming back; I feel an interlacing of moods. A good mood taking over from the bad one, and I hope it stays. I still have to fight to wade through the mud now and then, but the mud seems thinner, shallower. I hope this is a real change and not just something heroin has brought on. Heroin can be extremely deceptive. It had me fooled for years. A lot of you probably think I’m still conned by it now, the way I talk about it.

Many years ago I made a decision that I was going near no prison cell. Reason: I could not bear for me and my beloved gear to be parted. I know heroin is available in prisons ~ especially British prisons. (Britain, with its population less than a quarter of the size of the United States by official estimates uses nearly TWICE as much heroin as America! I’m not sure that figure is true, but it does say what a bunch of smackheads us British are.) So yes there’s ample supply of gear in prison for those willing to pay for it. I hate being beholden to dealers at the best of times. I just cannot bear even the thought of the indignity of having to pay ten pounds for less than one pound worth of gear. When something’s really tiny people say “it was like a prison bag”. No way man. No way. So I made this decision that me and my beloved gear would never be separated, even if this meant having to settle for using a lot less I was happy to be using a lot more constantly. I’ve seen how much crack some of the more successful shoplifters get through. I spent three hours in a flat one night watching this man pipe constantly, then phone up for more! Crack has all the allure to me of dogshit, so I wasn’t tempted. I made it clear I was only into the brown. There was a drought on the “B” at the time. Hence my presence at this flat. I got a very good deal for my £10 because I also found a vein on the back of this shoplifter’s left leg. I might have found it; he injected there. I’d never inject another with class A’s. That would be illegal!

So I made my money by milder means (begging) and stuck to gear in preference to crack. I call myself an ex crack addict because I did have a compulsion to use coke ~ specifically to add what I would call “a little sparkle” to my spoon. Coke in heroin is like sugar in tea. Once you get habituated it’s very hard to go without. It took me over two years from really trying to give up crack, which, as I say, I was mostly speedballing, to actually achieving my aim. For maybe a year I was using exclusively on Mondays. One single £10 rock one day a week. I knew I’d crossed a bridge when money came my way unexpectedly on a Thursday and I still didn’t score. Then, at New Year’s Eve 2008 going into 2009 I finally kissed crack goodbye and I didn’t use it one last time. Yes on a handful of occasions I have touched coke since then. Tiny bits. Not even full pipes most of them. Contrary to the received wisdom no craving was reignited. On the contrary I felt that by usingI’d got the desire to use out of my system. Reminded myself why I wasn’t into that crap any more. It might make you high but crack also makes you feel jagged and wiry. In bipolar terms ~ because crack cocaine with its mad highs, paranoia and crashes is the nearest drug I know to bipolar disorder ~ crack doesn’t usually induce a true high but a mixed state. A high with far too much anxiety, agitation ~ and often paranoia ~ thrown in. I knew I was in trouble earlier this year when my natural high surpassed the high of crack in intensity, euphoria and sheer craziness. Me and crack are well and truly over. Finito. I do not miss coke.

When you take cocaine, you’re paying for something any healthy person can experience without drug-enhancement or inducement. You don’t need excitement or wellbeing in the form of white rocks or powder. Coke wears off so quickly it was easy to reason around it: “in an hour’s time I’ll feel the same as I do now, if not worse and the £10 will be gone”. Heroin was very much more seductive. I knew that £10 of decent gear would make me feel better not just all afternoon but all day. It always seemed worth buying heroin. Even with methadone, heroin was the only thing that made life tolerable. I feel let down by a system that did not address some pretty blatant mental health issues of mine. I told the doctor “unless I address this mood problem I’m not going to get the drugs under control” this was said to a doctor and more than once. Still they did nothing. Not until I was manic, depressed, paranoid, grandiose and suicidal and hallucinating vividly was I ever taken seriously. To this day I don’t think my mental state is being addressed because methadone patently does not give mental stability. Whether this is a case of heroin stabilizing and methadone doing nothing or methadone actively destabilizing, I have no idea. But if I were a doctor I’d consider it malpractice to prescribe methadone to a person like me. I want MSTs*, DFs**, anything else but methadone and tomorrow I’m asking for it. I am considering putting my request in writing with a reasoned argument. I’ve had enough of methadone. I don’t care too much about the whats whys or wherefores of detoxifying just as long as I get off methadone and off all drugs as quickly as possible because I’ve had enough of them. The slower the detox the more depressing it’s going to be, because I’m not going to feel I’m getting anywhere fast enough. What I really would like is a reduction of 1mg per day, every single day. My last request for this was turned down flat. Because “we don’t do that”. And I thought they had a client-centred approach, tailoring psychosocial and pharmacological interventions to the need of each service-user! Yeah, I can speak Bullshit, too.

Well it’s now a quarter to eleven and my local broadband provider has yet to switch on. I’ve found a link that’s only usually strong enough after dark when radio waves flow better, but I think they’re on to the fact that somebody else is piggybacking on their broadband. If I had a car I’d drive the streets until I found free access. You’re sure to find it somewhere… know what I mean. This might have to wait till tomorrow morning for posting. I’m trying not to sleep too long at night. They say that cutting down the number of hours slept can snap one out of depression… It’s worth trying. When I want to wind down I’ve taken to putting on dark glasses and I really do think they tell the body to shut down and sleep. It’s interesting that firelight and most electric light is heavy on yellow and red; sunshine appears starker because it’s bluer and of course it contains ultra-violet which we cannot see. But that doesn’t mean it’s not affecting us. Hamsters cannot see by red light, so under a fireglow bulb they’ll ping about like nobody’s business. A side-effect of this bulb was that I felt drowsy. My housemate Laundrette who, ironically enough had worked for years in the red light district, said red light did the same to her. A long time later I discovered the science behind this: as far as they know it’s the lack of blue in a fireglow light. Blue wavelengths perk us up, yet make hammies want to sleep! So they say if you suffer from insomnia, amber-brown shades are the best to go for. They also believe that sunglasses might actually cause sunburn, tricking your brain into believing conditions are subdued and dark and switching off some hitherto unknown protective mechanism…

By the same token, they believe that artificial sweeteners may actually cause the body to put ON weight by tricking it into thinking calories are being consumed, scrambling the metabolism and defeating the object of these nasty artificial chemicals.

Does anybody know the specific health benefits of live yogurt and probiotic drinks by the way? I’ve found a shop stocking Polish ones that are very much cheaper than the British brands. I found out the Polish for “live bacterial culture”; it’s “zywe kultury bakterii”. Only problem is, I love yogurt so much I can easily eat an entire 500g tub, then drink 300mls of strawberry flavoured lactobacillus casei. I do believe lactobacillus casei shirota is the active ingredient in Yakult, which comes in tiny bottles. This stuff is huge. If it’s equipotent on a millilitre per millilitre basis I’m getting about five times the dose of Yakult for a tiny fraction of the price. For 29p a bottle they do 250ml “lassi” which comes in the original salt flavour. Because I don’t actually like this taste at all, I might stock up on the lassi because £2.90 will give me 10 days’ guaranteed supply. I drank lassi every day for over a month in India and the black shadows that have been under my eyes since childhood (they’re there whether or not I’m on drugs; drugs just make them very much worse)… these shadows vanished. The live yogurt in Indian (banana) lassi is the only lifestyle difference I can put the change down to. Other differences were swimming in the sea (daily). Catching giardia, a type of stomach bug midway between typhoid and dysentery in severity (I was so dehydrated I was hallucinating on this giardia. I started behaving very strangely. When I eventually got hold of oral rehydration salts, the sudden restoration in electrolyte balance made me so high that one of our friends was convinced I’d taken E, speed or coke. I might add that throughout this trip I was sleeping less and experiencing constant mood swings that got so bad I seriously considered buying 500 sleeping pills, climbing across the rocks at the end of the bay after midnight and drowning myself where there was no coastguard, no ambulance service. We didn’t even know where to find a doctor (you just went down the pharmacy, told them what you wanted: antibiotics, sleeping pills, anything up to and including ketamine and they’d just hand it over; the girl I was with was using grams and grams of ketamine. I indulged but rapidly got bored of it. It’s not really a horse tranquillizer by the way, it’s a general anaesthetic used in roadside situations and on battlefields. As you slip under, part of your mind stays very much wide awake and a vivid waking dream state occurs. To me it was tripping without the horror of having to deal with keys, money and friendship, all of which become very bizarre in the paisley-patterned cartoon world of LSD. Ketamine actually does what I’d imagined LSD would do before I took it. Produces a true immersive fantasy “trip” where you literally feel you’ve left your body and visited other places, possibly other dimensions even in space and time. Nobody I knew ever had a “bad trip” after the fashion of a negative LSD experience, but in the words of one nightclubber I knew, on a big blast of ketamine (which is usually snorted up the nose) you literally do sometimes feel like you’re hanging off the very edge of the universe into the Realness of Unreality (very Buddhist!) Or to put it another way, you’re fully conscious as you hover over the precipice of full clinical anaesthesia.

I took ketamine perhaps a hundred times. I very much liked the dissociative effect it produced and the dream-state, totally divorced from the here-now world. Ketamine is so powerful you lose all sense of ego and self. Re-emerging back into the world is like gathering, bit by bit, an identity of a person you used to be, with a life you suddenly remember although you’re millions of miles away. You turn from nothing and nobody back into who you Are. What I really couldn’t handle about acid tripping was the fact that you’re totally off your head, everything feels utterly unreal and yet you know, you absolutely must not follow any urge to set fire to anything, to jump from a hight, to stand in the middle of a road gazing at the amazing crystalline rainbow prisming of birdsong. All this beauty and all this potency was mixed together with a reality I could no longer handle. Keys, money, people. People are thinking about me. What are they thinking. I remember laughing and laughing watching somebody smoking a spliff. The spliff, held at a 45 degree angle kept turning into a miniature escalator, moving up. And this was the milder part of the trip. The peaks were so mindblowingly intense they defy description. Eventually I just took the spliff out of his hand and started smoking away nonchalantly. This person, who was (to put it kindly) an egotistical wanker, was so gobsmacked he just let me do it. I felt a bristling go around the room very acutely and said oh sorry and went into such paroxisms of laughter I had to go in the back garden to cool down.

I fried my brains on acid, I’m afraid. Although I probably only had three trips that were of truly mindblowing potency, they probably did blow my mind. To give an example, in one trip I was in seven dimensions of reality at once. If you can imagine different films projected on to screens and being able to switch between screens and yet experiencing every reality at once… I was flying on a magic carpet in my friend’s room (his rug). Looking down through the rug I clearly saw clouds and snowy mountain tops. An entire universe of civilizations throughout all ages was nestled in the palm of my hand. I was in the past, present and future all at once. I had 360 degree vision. I could see Stonehendge through the back of my head. When I was really tripping I could see birdsong as rainbows. It was truly spectacular. These are the mere bits I remember. Strong acid is so intense you might not understand a word anybody is saying. You might not know who you are or where you are, what is happening or why. And yet you are walking about in the real world knowing there are real consequences to your actions. And that’s what I couldn’t think out of. Knowing something bad could happen in a trip that wasn’t just a bad trip but a real Bad Thing. That’s what I couldn’t get my head round. I remember walking across the footbridge over the main road feeling my brains smeared out on the path behind me, like a snail’s trail. Then we found ourselves in a multi-storey carpark in the rain, which was like the sound of pixies singing. I hugged a tree in the pitch blackness of a wet park and a giant caterpillar devoured my brain. This is what acid did to me. I haven’t tripped like that for about 20 years and yet I recall it as if it all happened yesterday.

And this is why I get offended at the implication that I will abuse any drug that can be abused: for years afterwards I’d stop myself periodically throughout the day and think, “I’m glad I’m not tripping”. And I seriously was genuinely glad to be sober and straight and in my right mind. I appreciated my sanity. Y’all wonder why I got so upset at being told I had schizoaffective disorder? The more impressionable among you might have suspected that all the talk of acid and ecstasy during my manic episode meant I was using those substances again. Mania is well known to induce “enhanced perception of sound, colour and texture” ~ just as LSD and Ecstasy do. Mania induces an elevated Ecstatic mood, just like E does. Mania makes the mind race with spectacular velocity ~ just as LSD induces a constantly renewing kaleidoscope of form and colour, so mania turns the action of simple thought into something resembling a firework display. LSD can cause illusions (faces in the floor) ~ so does mania. LSD can make you hear voices (though it’s rare) mania does so very commonly. You can have full-blown hallucinatory visions in mania, just as you can on LSD. That’s why my sudden revival of 1991 and 1992 hardcore rave music. I experienced feelings I never thought I would feel again except this time I was in a far more positive frame of mind. There are accounts of mania published 90 years ago that bear out everything I say if you don’t believe me. Of course I used the vocabulary of raving, clubbing, Ecstasy and psychedelia because it was the only vocabulary I had. I haven’t touched E in 10 years. I took a tiny dose of acid 10 years ago but I hadn’t used it for a full 10 years before that. When I did take magic mushrooms I took little more than a threshold dose ~ enough to bring on the psilocybin euphoria, to make the world surreal. But not to be tripping on anything like the same magnitude as I tripped on LSD.

To anyone who will insist on trying psychedelic drugs, which I do not recommend, you would at least have some idea of the strength of a mushroom trip simply by weighing or counting the mushroom material. British liberty caps have a very distinctive appearance. There are about six signs that distinguish true magic mushrooms from their nearest clones and every single one must match. The red and white fly agaric mushrooms apparently cause a weird type of trip but they’re very different to true “magic” mushrooms.

By the way it is not unknown for common household mushrooms to be cut up, dried up and dropped with LSD. So make sure you know the person you’re getting these from. And if you’re picking your own make sure you check PROPERLY. True psilocybin mushrooms bruise a dark blue colour when fresh. They lose something like a third of their potency on drying. 25 dry liberty caps are enough to induce laughter and surrealness. I very rarely took more than this. On 50 (British) mushrooms you’ll be getting the full effects of a trip. Bright colours, intricate animated designs viewed with eyes closed (on a higher dose you might well see these eyes OPEN!) 200 liberty caps will produce a full-blown trip. Having already experienced this from acid I felt no need to go here with mushrooms, even though I found the mushroom spirit far kinder than the acid goblin. Sometimes we did have a strange feeling of angels inside our heads. My best friend got this too. I wonder how his mental health is today…?

Most people who experiment with psychedelic drugs are fine afterwards. By far the most common adverse effect is anxiety. Doctors have never believed psychedelics to cause psychosis. The theory has always been that people who go mad after tripping probably would have gone mad anyhow. What they have done is pulled the trigger on an already loaded gun.

There was a ten-year gap between my taking psychedelic substances of any kind and going mad. Though I don’t doubt the psychedelics helped bend and blend my mind I don’t think what I had was “drug psychosis”. Naomi, the dual diagnosis lady, who I had spoken to a lot BEFORE I went mad (because I had been hearing voices, having mood swings in a more minor way for years) once said to me “I know and you know this wasn’t brought on by the drugs…” which stuck with me, because at the time I wasn’t at all sure that it wasn’t the drugs. Now I think back and think WHAT drugs? The mania went on and on and on for weeks on end. Having seen me three times in a row with a markedly elevated mood on each occasion my shrink eventually diagnosed me with manic depression and schizophrenia. I was very upset about this. It’s the only time I’ve ever come back from a doctor and cried. Even though I was “high” I cried the tears of a crazyman. They mingled with the dirt on my bathroom floor.

By the way I’m having serious trouble remembering how long I have or haven’t gone between doses of heroin. This is because I don’t WANT to remember. Don’t want to do it again. Don’t want to know. If it’s “just for today” then surely what happened yesterday doesn’t count. So I’m focused on today and tomorrow and not using. Ever again. I want the nightmare of heroin over with because that’s all it was. A nightmare. What good memories am I left with.

I remember meeting a couple I knew at three o’clock in the morning. He was stomping solidly ahead. Probably eager to get to some crackhouse or other. She was bent double in the street, like a person trying to impersonate a capital A. I remember her saying “Aww I’ve ‘ad a fifteen pound ‘it. I’m ‘avin’ so much fun.” And even then, junkie that I was, I clearly recall thinking ARE YOU? Didn’t look like fun to me. Wouldn’t have felt like fun to me. I’ve often wondered whether I was lacking some heroin pleasure receptor gene, because I know if I was in a state like that I’d just feel like I was fighting for consciousness through something very heavy and gloopy. Like a man drowning in methadone! Yes heroin gave me some sort of high but it’s so very subtle it took me literally years to appreciate that it was there. In the years before I finally twigged what was what: what was opiated, what was “real”, I was constantly complaining that heroin didn’t work for me. That’s because no matter how much you take (or I take) heroin has never ever felt more than a 4 out of 10 strength-wise. Not in niceness. In niceness it scores at least 9. (Ecstasy would be 10). In strength, heroin never feels strong. I nearly killed myself with an overdose once and that was only a 4 out of 10. Laundretta pointed out that the junkie who feels “not stoned” is like the alcoholic who slurs “I’m not drunk”… Laundretta WAS an alcoholic, as well as a heroin and crack addict, only her drugs took exactly reverse order of preference to mine (I was heroin first, alcohol second, crack third). She was the type of person who would smoke one £10 rock, then instantly be talking about scoring another. And I’d be claiming to be out of money. I was never like that with crack. Apart from one binge I went on, when I decided to smoke and speedball as much as I pleased until the money ran out, I only once bought a second rock after doing the first. This is because crack gave me an intense craving for heroin. Mostly to take away the negative after-effects of the crack. When I think about the nastiness I’ve been involved in I’m disgusted. I don’t want ever to be involved in hard drugs again. Because soft drugs don’t appeal to me (cannabis being just about the most unpleasant experience short of actual torture, I can envisage)… being off hard drugs will mean being off all drugs. None of the drugs I used to take tempt me today. If only if only if only I could be in an Elevated enough mood to kiss goodbye to my beloved heroin for ever. I’m bored of heroin. Fed up of chemical slavery. And I’ve had enough enough enough of the crappy life that came with the stuff.

This is what I gain from NA. A sense of reality from people who are deceived no more. My feelings about the politics of heroin prescribing evaporate as I walk through the doors of NA. I’m no longer interested in prescription heroin. I just want a prescription to be DRUG-FREE, CLEAN, SERENE.

I WANT A LIFE BACK.


☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆




CHOICE: ACID EIFFEL



HYBRID: SYMPHONY



PUSH: STRANGE WORLD

Just another manic-depressive Monday...

IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY. Sun is shining. Weather is fine. I have avoided purchasing sunglasses, radical hair dyes and canaries. I didn't avoid purchasing heroin but I've used it already. Felt no better for doing it. Won't be doing it tomorrow. I'm thinking of getting contact lenses again after finding out they're only £5 a month and you can easily make 3 pairs last 6 months if you don't wear them too heavily. It does seem ridiculous to be shelling out on pair after pair of tinted glasses when you can buy what you need down the pound shop. (That's what I used to do.) I used to have a vast collection of shades ~ and that's the biggest disadvantage of being a spectacles wearer: having to keep switching between prescription dark lenses and prescription clear ones. Or wearing those dodgy ones that go dark in the sun and make you look like a child molester. Don't worry: I have a pair on order but Specsavers aren't half taking their time processing it. Watch those children flee from those amber tints! I've still another week and a half until I can play silly games covering half the lens with a piece of card and watching the remaining half darken. Etc etc. As you MAY have noticed I tend to get consumed by these all-encompassing obsessions for trifling things. They usually begin while my mood is good. But I'm hanging on to the last vestiges of enthusiasm for the present one because it concerns self-image and I needed that new image DESPERATELY. Frankly I'd rather be depressed and obsessed by dark glasses than depressed and obsessed by suicide. I look around and cannot really see anything very positive. But I force myself to do the things I would do if I felt normal like buy food. Buy a film I wanted to see when it came out (Red: starring Helen Mirren as a machine-gun wielding pensioner). All that crap. I even bought an essential oil burner from the pound shop because it was blue. I don't even know where to buy the essential oils these days. I like the resinous ones from trees: frankincense, benzoin, myrrh (ie "church incence"). I don't even know where to buy a new washcloth because I haven't gone shopping for anything bar absolute bare essentials in ten years and my Mum used to buy me shampoos and flannels because I never bought my own. My fingernails were constantly black because my hair was so dirty. You see now why I cut it off: it looked truly horrible.

Pinky, by the way, thinks my natural colour looks nicer than the dye. She says I'm "dirty blond". Dirty. You can say that again. If I can, I'm going to clipper it all off leaving just a couple of millimetres platinum at the ends. That might look really good. (Might do....)

This morning, I met an alcoholic who never recognizes me. He had bags of clothes each side, which implied he was homeless. I did ask, but he didn't want to talk about it. A great lump over one eye and a heavily dilated pupil revealed that he had been in a fight. Yet again. I told him he looked like David Bowie. I told him he needed to see a doctor and he said "oh who cares" and I said "well someone should". But he was too drunk to get through to until I started saying "o wel wel bore da ichi gyd, diolch yn fawr nawr te" which means nothing very much in Welsh but he found it endlessly amusing. He went to school just over ten miles up the road from where I did. Last time I encounterd him he was swaying catatonically in Morrisons' toilets so drunk his eyes seemed lost in mid-space. When I said hello to him then he appeared very surprised to hear his name. Then was immediately lost back in his stupor. This man urgently needs to see a doctor. All I know about head injuries is, if one eye is dilated and the other normal and your eyes are pointing in different directions you need medical attention and quick. But he won't get it. He'll take medication all right. In the form of more booze. And he won't see a doctor until the police surgeon checks him out compulsorily on his next Drunk and Disorderly charge.

I'm still glugging away at the live yogurt. I've found a Polish brand at 79p per 500g ~ cheapest going. But it has no mood elevating properties. If only it did... I'm taking it to get rid of the two black eyes junkie look I've had since before I went on the gear. Heroin only made that look worse. So much worse, in fact, someone once said my eyes looked GREEN. That is, green bags beneath the eyes. Which would have matched my own sludge coloured peepers quite well.

Gotta go now. I hope y'all are enjoying mowing your lawns, repotting daisies or kowtowing to your bosses. Whichever you do.

Someone told me I should write a book. Strangely the plot of an amazing story came to me. More to the point the END of the story came to me. I cannot stand writing not knowing where I'm going. I've always planned my fictions like a series of shopping lists. I don't take voluminous notes. If you're going to write, write the bloody book I say. But if you can't see where you're going jotting down each paragraph shopping list style makes the writing very much easier. This is a children's book. The type you can write again and again and again merely altering the scenario. My best scenario has a huge gimmick only it wouldn't make a good book number one (as it couldn't be topped or bettered for one thing). So I'm writing the plainest most basic story first. Then they get more and more gimmicky and full of novelty as they go on. Of course I cannot reveal my Grand Designs to anyone until the writing is done. I did write a short story about a different character, but short stories are difficult. Before they've barely begun they're over with. Novels gain momentum as they go until the writing becomes effortless, but you don't get that with short fiction. So I'm writing novels for kids. I mean the 8 to 12 age group. I do believe the world of children's fiction needs a good slap round the face. And a departure from wizards. Children's book editors must be sick to death of would-be J K Rowlings. I'm the first me and I don't really want to go through the pain of writing my life story (I just liked the thought of profiting from my pain and being paid by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film. Or Paul Bettany if I had to be an English actor. Or Danny Dyer except he'd have to live up to his name and dye his hair ultimate platinum and get a personality transplant to play a white mouse like me.) Well I'd better go: this book won't write itself.

I chose writing by the way as it was the only meaningful activity I'm capable of doing to a high standard despite my bad moods.

I've got to go to the fucking methadone doctor tomorrow. Along with Duta. Which I find very oppressive. Meaning I cannot use a doctor for what a doctor is actually for: to confide in. I'm not prattling a load of positive-sounding shit for anyone. If they rile me to it I will tell them that I only want to clean up so I can die. That's about as positive as you can get, if you think about it. Means whatever mood I'm in I still wanna be clean. The lower I get the more I crave heroin. But this craving is tempered by a hatred of drugs and all they stand for. The more energy and oomph I have, the more vehemently anti-drugs I become. It's all good, you see.

Wish me luck for tomorrow. I really am not looking forward to this doctorly bullshit. Three whole weeks I've been at this shit-arse service and already it's time for a "review". Like I say this means an absolute waste of time. You can't say anything meaningful to the doctor as your pig-ignorant Worker is sitting there. Anyone who seriously thinks 110mg methadone is a high dose really needs their head testing. I cannot handle anything more than a few false smiles and meaningless pleasantries these days so if any more is expected I'm afraid Duta is going to be sorely disappointed. I might bring up the fact that the less heroin I have taken in the past the more mentally unstable I have become and that I want something else apart from methadone because methadone is causing mental derangement. If they won't listen, I'm considering launching an official appeal. I'll get myself a lawyer and everything. I think I am entitled to medical care appropriate to my case and I don't feel that I'm getting it. So Duta and Doc-Doc can shove that in their crackpipes and smoke it!


☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆



three trance classics ...

HYBRID: SYMPHONY 1997



THREE DRIVES: GREECE 2000



INFECTED MUSHROOM: MUSHI MUSHI

Freshly squeezed

EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING TODAY. Or possably not.

The Council are supposed to be coming round. Right while I'm supposed to be at this antidrugs group. So I'm avoiding both by blogging at a secret location and trying not to feel too nauseated by my compulsorily glugged-all-at-once methadone. I don't know what's wrong with it, but the new brand, although it tastes far nicer, makes me wanna puke for an hour after taking it. Puking and methadone do not mix for obvious reasons. So the whole thing's nasty business.

This afternoon I've an appointment with the methadone doctor as I'm on "such a high dose". All I wanna do is come off it. I don't care it it makes me ill in the process. Addicts are supposed to feel ill aren't they? And it'll give me more to complain about, won't it? I mean, where ja think the phrase "whining junkie" comes from anyway..?

Aside from this I am in a very bad mood. I wish I hadn't said what I said yesterday. I wish I had lied and said all was sunny. It is sunny. Everywhere but inside my head. I took off my dark glasses thinking maybe they're making me depressed, cutting out the light and all. But I doubt they're the cause, bearing in mind I was feeling fantastic in February ~ not exactly a month known for its long hours of daylight.

The best thing about today is, I get to walk past that petshop that sells wild birds (how do you crossbreed a goldfinch and a canary without illegal trapping playing a part?)

It's a ridiculously hot day. I'm sweating like a swine on Ecstasy pills. I'm glad this methadone is inside me. Means I'm on the coutdown to feeling better, not worse. I cannot believe that a mere 10mg reduction is so noticable. It's not that I wake up feeling horrible (those days are surely to come) but as soon as I get moving around I'm sweating amphibiously and feeling too hot, too cold or both can barely tolerate walking up the road and certainly cannot tolerate buying yogurt from Morrisons except that I force myself to, then I hang out in their carpark feeling pale and wan and soggy, then I skulk into the library where I scan books on irrelevant topics idly for about an hour. My particular favourite is a misery memoir by a doctor who got such bad depression she had to have psychosurgery on the bit of her brain that makes her happy. Cah't recall the title but there's a daisy on the cover. Sometimes I read about pets but those books just make me feel my life is empty without an American Akita so I'm avoiding all reference to feathered and furry friends. No clockwatching is required during this reading, because the methadone takes almost exactly one hour and ten minutes to kick in. On a bad day an hour and a half. If you have a serious habit and have been screwing around with heroin and/or your dose the methadone could take two hours to sort you out. Yet another reason why addicts hate it. Compared to heroin which is instant, methadone feels like a cruel joke.

Anyone who can feel better half an hour after drinking methadone either has a seriously screwy metabolism or is the type of person who can get high on orange Smarties. (Or by incinerating heroin on the end of a crackpipe, I might add.)

Well I've got to go now. My new hobby by the way is bathing. I only shower twice a day but I've got through about half a tube of that dermabrasion scrub. Boy, does it work! I even use it on the soles of my feet. Oh and my roots are showing ALREADY. Being as hair grows at approximately 3mm per week it's not surprising 2mm are already visible. But it is highly annoying.

Well I've got to go. Does anyone know a cure for depression when you've done everything logical not to be depressed and yet you feel like you're drowning?

This afternoon I've got to face Duta who thought I was so happy the other day. I can't tell any of these people how I really feel. They like to flatter themselves that depressives might want to use methadone as a tool for finishing themselves off.

As if!

To any junkie with half a habit, the glass bottle is far more dangerous than the pathetically weak gloop it contains. Do you know I calculated your bladder would probably EXPLODE before you managed to overdose on British strength 1mg/1ml methadone? I seriously doubt 3000mg would kill anyone who could do 1000mg diamorphine in a day, which is what a £100 a day habit translates to. I never used £100 a day for very long but I was able to take that much without batting an eyelid. And they go on and on and on at me that my 110mg methadone dose is "very very high", oh fuck off.

Well I'm going. I hope y'all are doing something nice like gardening. If I had a garden I would grow herbs in pots. I'm not into non-dual-purpose things, me. So herbs fit the bill perfectly gardening wise: they look impressively bushy plus you can chuck them into bubbling hotpots. I would also like to keep bees. It's not just the pun of "B" meaning Afghanistan's best Brown that appeals; I've had a thing about bees going back to childhood and would love to have a box of the buzzy entertainers on my roof terrace. When you go on holiday you could put the hive in your kitchen (with the window open a crack to let the little darlings fly in and out) ~ I mean wouldn't THAT give burglars a shock!!

I've really got to go now and by the way my feet really stink. I do have new trainers (new as in fished out of a bin new but they don't have holes in the soles like my present pair)... but don't want to sully these up with my rotting extremities ~ know what I mean? Not until at least four tubes of Tinaderm have been between my toes.

Well I'm off. Happy gardening.


★★★★★★★★★★★★



KEVIN AND PERRY GO LARGE
I watched this when I woke up at midnight a few days ago...
A piss-take on the British party isle of Ibiza, this film has a better soundtrack than any other....



★

THIS IS FROM BUGGERLUGZ; THANXX BUGGERLUGZ

Be Here Now

WE'RE HAVING FULL-ON SUMMER HERE. It's been sweltering. I have behaved myself most of this week (haven't stabbed myself in the foot for a few days and am not intending to stab myself anywhere ever again).

I have switched to drinking my methadone in the morning rather than at night. This seems to prevent excessive sweating. I'm less "peeved" with methadone than I was a few days ago. That was depression talking. I find it hard to accept that it's supposedly "better" to drink a sticky gloop to get off street heroin, when the gloop's a lot more addictive than the heroin.

Knowing that heroin is used extensively in British hospitals as a first-line treatment for serious pain and that a small number of addicts (and a larger number in central Europe; Switzerland being the only country prescribing heroin to addicts as a matter of course) muddies the waters. It would be far easier to convince myself that heroin is pure evil and I'm better off without it. I console myself that I'm better off without it, and whether or not heroin is evil, or how evil it is, doesn't matter. Because I don't want it any more.

I believe it's better to be off heroin than on it and I want to get off it. The practicalities of heroin involve placing your wellbeing in the hands of ruthless criminals and being treated as a social pariah ~ especially by the medical profession. It's true that most of the damage caused by heroin is a direct result of "prohibition"; but as I say, I'm moving on from wanting anything to do with heroin at all. So the ins and outs of legalization and heroin prescription to addicts concern me no longer.

As Shane of MemoiresOfAHeroinHead fame pointed out, methadone clinics are no more "caring" (or reliable, for that matter) than your friendly neighbourhood drug dealer. They're often little more supportive. Shuttling "clients" at whom from worker to worker. Motivated more by box-ticking than any true measure of your personal welfare. My fellow blogger Sid has run up against the NHS's predictable "one size fits all" mentality in drug treatment clinics. He's worked for years and feels the system is set up for "junkies". I would say it's worse even than this. I shambled into my old clinic for years with pretty obvious "mental health" symptoms that were never, ever addressed. Nobody ever asked how I was. They were totally obsessed with drugs. Only interested in what drugs I had and hadn't been using. Never asked about me or my history. One was surprised to learn I'd "only" been a heroin addict since 2000. I'd had depression for many, many years before I ever got involved in heroin.

I used to marvel at the fables some of my friends told down the drug clinic. About how little they were drinking. About how little they used. People on the gear and crack constantly, who the clinic appeared to believe were doing ever so well. Until the Heroin Drought last year, in fact, everybody I knew used heroin at every opportunity. Most of my own circle had given up on crack or never really been into it. That drought gave a lot of us the option, at long last, of putting our weariness into practice and finally giving gear a miss. I know at least three people who are still clean to this day. One is in her fifties. The other two are in their sixties.

I was always pretty frank down the clinic about my using. I wanted a bad record so when diamorphine prescription got brought in I'd be first in line.

Now I see things the way everyone else always did. You help your worker out by saying all the right things. Then they can tick the right boxes and look like a successful worker. You take your methadone scipt and go. You sort out your own life yourself. The tedious group therapy they costantly try and bully you into is yet another cosmetic exercise. Sounds good on paper. In reality I found selected fellow "service users" too exasperating for words. Parroting what they knew was expected of them. I don't remember ever going to such a meeting without drinking heavily first and hitting up smack afterwards. That's what drug-talk does to you. Makes you wanna use.

I'm fortunate in that my new worker is Africian. I'm hoping she'll be to teach me whatever mysterious language she speaks. That's the best use of our time as far as I'm concerned. Considering I'm not intending to be ON any drugs, there won't be any drugs to talk about. And I'm not considering group therapy yet again. I've had enough therapy to last a lifetime..

I think the standard of personnel these clinics take on has actually gone DOWN in recent years. When I first got scripted methadone nearly ten years ago I got the distinct impression most people working down the clinic were ex-junkies themselves. That does not seem to be the case now. My new worker didn't even know what schizoaffective disorder WAS. I wouldn't expect a normal person to know this, but I would expect it of a drugs worker. Also, they seemed obsessed by the suspicion that I must surely be using something else apart from tiny bits of heroin on top of my script, which just isn't true and which irritates me, because I'm so over cannabis, crack et al that the mere thought of them offends me. Both the doctor and the new worker pushed this point. They seem to have this expectation that the more drugs you take the less together you will be. When in actuality most opiate users (in contrast to stimulant users) take their drug to hold themselves together. So of course, when they stop taking it, they crack up big time.

I gave up on Intuitive Recovery when the course leader talked about "self-medicating" on crack. Self-medicating, as I understand it, means gaining a very real symptomatic improvement through taking an illicit drug. Not getting high or losing yourself in an excitingly new criminal lifestyle. I only accepted I had been self-medicating after I stopped doing it! The whole issue makes me angry. If they knew I was self-medicating, why the hell didn't THEY medicate me properly?! I suppose I always had low expectations of the methadone clinic. It's just that now and then I get these little flashes of what is supposed to be. And a methadone clinic is supposed to offer psychosocial therapies. Which they never did.

Anyway I'm beyond all that. And trying to STAY beyond it. And never again allow depression to mire me in such a morass of bitterness. I was getting to the state where I couldn't distract myself with anything at all. Whatever it was my mind chose to occupy itself with, something about it would irritate the hell out of me.

I have tried to focus on finding out all I can about methadone therapy ~ something I never bothered about before because I had so little enthusiasm for it. I'm going to have to wait and see whether it agrees with me in the longterm. I found it so extremely difficult to stick to the stuff before because the moods I experienced on methadone were so intensely nasty I continued to use heroin at every opportunity. Even tiny doses on top of my script produced marked "improvement".

My mood was exaggeratedly good earlier on, which is why today I'm able to view the situation with some detachment. The more I think about the whole situation the more motivated I am to just get OFF opiates of all varieties. I know heroin made me miserable. However you want to argue it, whether I was or was not self-medicating and whether or not I was successful it's a simple law of life that whatever you do, you'll get used to it. You can develop "tolerance" to rollercoasters if you ride one every day. If you marinade your brains in hard drugs, your brains come to accept such pickling as "normal".

I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't gone on heroin for over ten years. I suspect I would be a lot less messed up. To be fair, the drug gave me something I'd never really experienced before. It killed the multifarious discomforts I'd entirely got used to living with because they were parts of me. For a brief while I had the luxury of not being me. But I still don't think heroin made me happy. What I really wanted was to kill myself off ~ both literally and metaphorically. In a metaphorical sense I think I've achieved my object, because I'm a different person now to who I was then. Totally different. I'm very glad of that.

So now the truly mysterious part begins: I have to start from here, not knowing where I am. I've somehow to learn Mastery of Life. That's my goal.

I never set my sights low, except when I don't want to be doing something anyway.

I do want to live and be alive, because I have chosen life. If I hadn't, I wouldn't be here now.

I'm reminded of one of NA's sayings about accepting life on life's terms and living in the moment.

It's all about being here now ...

Just Be Here Now ...


Link of the day ~ Drug Abuse: UK Guidelines for Clinical Management