Tired

I'M AWAKE. The computer's on. I suppose I'd better find something to post.

I went down the methadone clinic today. My worker smiled wryly (though still somewhat annoyingly, it has to be said) when I asked after injectable methadone. I don't see why I shouldn't get an injectable script. It might permanently stop me using street drugs ever again. Especially if it's injectable diamorphine.

But anyway. I was still a bit manic this morning. And this afternoon. But it's all worn off now and I feel run down and tired and just want to go to bed. It's one minute past nine.

Anna Grace is having an affair! She says she found a Latin Lover on suboxone who doesn't know she's heavily back on heroin.

I haven't used any gear at all. I spent my money on bouncey balls and pizzas. VERY annoyingly I didn't get a sparkly one (bouncy ball that is, not pizza). I'm thinking of going down a toy shop where I can take my pick instead of having to brace msyelf to the irregular machinations of a ball dispenser. Does anybody know where you actually buy bouncy balls? I mean the big sort a German Shepherd dog would want to catch and bite with its nose. About 2"/5cm diameter. Not the really tiny pathetic sort you keep losing. I was thinking Hamleys on Regent Street. They of all places ought to do a spectacular selection of sparkly and/or transparent ones.

I just saw a telly prog by Andrew Marr about megacities of the world. Curiously London with ot even ten million population was included. The official population of London is said to be seven million. It wouldn't surprise me if that figure isn't a good million out. Definitely under-out, not over-out. There's a new building going up called The Shard. It's the tallest building in Europe. Just over a thousand feet tall, but a shameful 87 stories. Why on earth can't we compete with some vigour against the inferior foreign competition and truly show 'em who's boss in the tall building stakes. No new skyscraper ought to be allowed up unless it marks a new world record in height. And that's that. Also there should be a law stating that all street lights must be different colours. So that London shimmers like a rainbow and looks really cool to visitors flying in. I would totally abolish planning laws and ensure all areas of town are mixed business/residential/retail. No huge areas of midnight ghost town. And I'd allow anyone anywhere to set up a market stall. So London would be a towering multicoloured wonderland of unending tapas stalls and trains. I would also allow railways to run along the streets. Not trams or street cars but proper full-length trains.

The police are on television, committing travesty once more. They've just seized heroin. Probably the sergeant will be getting high this evening (they do after all point out that all seizures are incinerated. Yes on a sheet of ripped off tinfoil with a fag lighter underneath.)

By the way I was talking to someone down the methadone clinic this afternoon and she said two people she knew went paranoid psychotic at the beginning of last year's Great Heroin Drought. Nobody else of course went manic-depressive like I did. Why do I always have to be the odd one out? O yeah and the gear they were using looked just like the gear I had. There were 2 dodgy gears I had. One type was brown and cooked up cloudy, the colour of orange juice, and left globs of sticky tarry black stuff floating on top, which I fished out prior to injecting. This stuff was heavily sedating. The heroin came on first, then another sedative crept up on you over about ten minutes or so, suddenly making you extremely drowsy. Days spent on this were all but wiped from my memory. The other dodgy stuff was almost white (very pale) and cooked up the colour of weak piss (clear). It also cooked up with no citric and though it did seem to include an opiate I'm not convinced there was any heroin in there at all. Judging by the way it felt, this stuff contained precisely the same downer as the orange juice gear and this is the stuff she was complaining about. She also happens to live very near Bouncy Ball Corner 2, where I bought this stuff.

What am I doing whittering away about heroin again. Why on earth did I end up taking that gunk? I used to really love heroin, but I'm not at all sure it's ever going to be as cheap or as strong in London as it once was. I think the Heroin Honeymoon is well and truly over and I'm not sure I'm interested in being married to opiates for life.

Ho-hum. That's that. Gotta go. I'm knackered.

Plug Hole

6:22PM I'M IN A GOOD MOOD. Finally. I just took a £20 bag of gear. It looked more like a 15 and didn't smell too strong, but in tis day and age you gotta be grateful for whatever you can get.

I tasted a micro-drop and sure enough the strong acrid taste of Afghan B beautified me back... Which wound me up all the more veinstabbing wise.

I had a lucky feeling and sure enough after a handful of sticks in the usual places (legs only: arms dried up donkeys years ago)... I found a beautiful barely-touched surface vein at the top of my left thigh. And pyoinnngg! in it went like a yellow-arsed hornet into its paper-nest. I'd already skinpopped about 40%; in went 60% straight in and it's beautiful gear.

I needed that gear I really needed it. All the things I'm supposed to do to cheer myself up from depression: they just don't work. Or they even make me worse. I gave up drinking for over a month several years ago when that "alcohol is a depressant" line was being hammered into me over and over. No difference. I don't drink myself into a morose stupour; I drink mostly in the morning, to give me a lift. And it works. I drink in moderation because I don't want to be out of control, dislike being out of control and plan someday to keep to Narcotics Anonymous's vision of "clean". And that means no drink. No drugs. At all.

When I went downtown earlier on to score myself some roast chicken and cheese coleslaw and roll-on antiperspirant-deodorant rather than pushing up, my mood went down. The other people on the streets made me feel slightly paranoid. I don't clike crowds and I don't like people any more. I far prefer being on my own. I know it's "symptoms" of my "illness" but it's felt very deeply in fact.

So all these people were irritating me. I found what I wanted in the shop and used the electronic till. Their self-service counters are far better than Morrisons'. When my mood was yummy and "elevated" (as my shrink called it) I got a real buzz out of the boing boing pipp! sounds Sainsburys' machine makes in comparison to Morrisons' dullardly ones. Also Sainsburys don't insist something like ten washingn up sponges doesn't weigh the wrong amount because it practically weighs nothing. Only hitch was an electronic reprimand for putting my newspaper in with my coleslaw before I had paid.

I tried my #1 man but he was switched off. Still unable to reload on half-decent gear. Sad situation.

For all of 30 seconds I was wound up about this. Then I scored myself a white cyder instead. 85p for a little buzz seemed worth it.

Then I got home and stewed all over nothing. I mean literally there was no irritating or negative thought in my head, this was emotional not cognitive. Some film called The Princess Diaries or some such crap was on (Julie Andrews playing the queen). It's always a fictional version of Monaco named Bolvania, Molvania or something else that all sounds the same.

I couldn't get the negative feelings out of my head. I was irritated at Anna Grace's blog not because of Anna baby but because she's getting messed about by someone promising heroin who may or may not come through with what was offered. Also I am pretty sure she's being ripped off on price. I know very little about American heroin but nowhere I know of has gear weak enough that someone who not long ago detoxed and came off all opiates completely has gear weak enough that you'd have to contemplate hitting up eight points (0.8g) in one shot. Not even hardcore addicts take hits that big. My friend had a 3g a day habit from dealing years back and she took six half-gram hits. I've never known anybody take more than that in a hit which is why I mention taking 0.3. That was my old binge-mode dose and lately I've been hitting up that amount as a matter of course because we've had a Heroin Drought that still hasn't restored back to normal; the gear which used to be lovely. They said it averaged 46% in December 2009 ~ went down to 13% earlier this year.

Eventually after feeling sheer anger, just this miserable unfocused dull rage, I rang up a dealer who sold me absolute rubbish a few weeks ago when I was too mentally ill to care. It literally had no gear in it and he had the cheek to inform me that nobody else had complained. Probably because nobody else was low enough in his estimation to be sold trash like that. That's what I thought. Anyway this one finally said he had something decent so I had to go to a road near my house so his friend could drop it off to me.

I stood there feeling irritable, down and paranoid in a generalized way. I actually felt like I'd been piping (crack) which irritated me even more when I recalled how my old wellmeaning but typically uninformed druggieworker promised me my paranoia would go away when I gave up the pipe. And has it? No crack in weeks*. No crack at all during that psychotic breakdown. And paranoia worse than ever. Hallucinations most spectacular off drugs of my entire life. Manic mood swing so intense I felt literally on top of the universe and higher than I ever went on any drug, ever. All this on nothing. And they never listened. Never listened. Not one of them. When I told them again and again that I wasn't feeling right. And I was not right. For years and years.

So I took my irritable jagged jangling cracked out except not at all on crack self home and hit up this heroin and BINGO!! I'm magically cured. Heroin won this battle for me, but it's up to me to win the war.

So thats me done posting for today. I was partly annoyed because I was thinking of myself as mentally ill. Remember when I was having an "episode", rushing to get ready in time for NA and I heard 2 voices, one in each ear, saying "nervous breakdown" and "schizophrenia". I didn't cry then; but merely thinking seriously that I might have schizophrenia was enough to make me cry. And now I'm told I have not only schizophrenia but bipolar on top of it! That's what schizoaffective means. At first I just accepted that's me. Partially, as anyone would be, I was relieved just to have a name for this thing that has been bugging me for years that I knew wasn't depression, wasn't depression with psychotic features (as one dr suggested it might be), wasn't drug-psychosis (the dr who diagnosed me is a consultant psychiatrist who specializes in drugs cases: if anyone can tell the difference between drug-induced and "real" conditions, he can)... that it wasn't a personality disorder either... I was glad just to have a name, any name. I was ill enough to think it reminded me of a night-club ("schizo-disco") but too paranoid to post that little baby online. He explained to me "it's like manic depression and schizophrenia together" and I did cry afterwards. Because I'm scared of schizophrenia. I have never known anybody with bipolar well enough to have actually been with them and known they were having an episode.

But I've known a couple of people pretty well who had paranoid schizophrenia, so I knew what schizophrenia entailed and knew their medications worked. But they were never going to be normal, either one of them. They would be on medication on life and mentally disabled for life. And stuck on sickness benefits, for life. And I suppose it was right then that I saw any sense of any true recovery to what you would call good health... I saw it drain down the plug hole.

And glug glug glugg away, like the Devil laughing at me.

Illustrated: special sorts of donkeys

PS I hope this all makes sense, I'm not up for reading all my crap back. My attention span is going pretty dire. Again.

*I gave up crack for new year 2009 and have had a handful of pipes since mostly because i was weak enough to give into circumstance (someone else wanted to smoke it in front of me). i hate crack and never intend to do it again. the mere thought of crack makes me feel physically sick

RICHARD MARX: HAZARD
This is for you Anna Grace. Only song I can think of that you might like.
It's was going round my head at some time....



this version is far louder, for anyone who just wants the tune but no video



heroin? what am i doing on heroin? that's sad, sad, sad

21:02 INSPIRATIONAL LINK: American doctor Elizabeth Baxter, a psychiatrist who has schizoaffective disorder:
http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/37/2/5.1.full?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=psychiatrist+with+schizoaffective+disorde%2520r&searchid=1098657466879_889&stored_search=&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&journalcode=psychnews

Is schizoaffective disorder a gift:
http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Have-Schizoaffective-Disorder/108188
I like the last comment where the guy locks his furry doggie in the shower-room for protection. I wonder if it bays at the ghosts..?

i like the comments on this story
http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Have-Schizoaffective-Disorder/1187238

Ever Increasing Circles

I'M HAVING AN EXTREMEMLY LAZY DAY TODAY... even lazier than usual, so that's extreme! I could barely be bothered to take the cap off my methadone just now. Cooked food. Didn't want to bother fishing it out. Lazy lazy lazy.

Hey I slept 8 or 9 hours last night, so that's good (is it good?) I'm listening to Papua New Guinea below, wow. I like all the cool fresh air in the video. Switzerland! That's where the air is truly "Alpine".

Do you know I thought back to my old dealer, from a few years ago when gear prices were low (£13,000 a kg supposedly; last year it was £20,000 at the beginning; £40,000 at the end ~ hence this "drought". And I'm using figures from BBC News.

So it just goes to show we all knew what was behind this Heroin Drought, a price hike due to lower availability.

Heroin takes at least a year to get from Afghanistan to London. I got that direct from the horse's mouth (so to speak) ~ Rebsie my friend used to serve up in the 80s and early 90s. She picked up from the Turks, who knew very well what was going on. She hasn't sold heroin in years (it's mostly black kids nowadays).

... anyway I thought back to my old dealer and actually wanted to score. I thought Gledwood how can you be this indulgent. Heroin is evil! Actually at the time I thought it would be quite nice. And what I really thought was "but I don't do gear any more". Much easier to think that way. "Just for today" and all that.

People sometimes describe heroin as like a lover, like a relationship, which in a way it is. But I never felt lost without any of my exes. To me it's more like being a small child. Being without heroin is like losing your Mummy. They often say the feeling of smack is "amniotic". A peaceful state, like before birth. No worries in the world.

And you wonder why heroin addicts can be a bit immature!

NA like to say or imply that you cannot grow at all emotionally when you're addicted to drugs. I don't think this is true. It's a partial truth. You grow less. And where does "drugs" stop at? Cigarette addiction?

I don't agree with everything NA say. That no addict can resist any drug is patently nonsense. If I found a strip of LSD I could resist it quite easily! Yes I like acid imagery, yes I have acid-memories. Yes I also DO NOT WANT IT EVER AGAIN.

None of the drugs I used to take at some time are temptations to me. Ecstasy I had 5.5 of when I got chucked out of my old house. I was ragingly addicted to heroin and didn't WANT to do E on the street! Or in my old room, which was like a full-on opium den by the end. So no I do not automatically want to take any intoxicating substance, and resent the idea being slipped into my head that this is what I would do if I relapsed.

Also the idea that if you take one sleeper you might as well go back to gear and crack because you've relapsed, I do not endorse. I'm speaking of a specific person I knew who did just that. He felt by taking one zopiclone (of all things!) he had lost all the years of sobriety he had built up. For this reason I'm not into day-counting. Just for today, yes. Counting days: No Way!

I still go back to NA, because as I said yesterday they do what they do and what they do keeps them clean. You don't chuck out a baby with the bathwater.

So these are my feelings on NA.

I will keep coming back because I want what they have. They have a Serenity I don't. They also have Recovery which means steering away from drugs and becoming a rounded person again. [On heroin I was a mere shadow of who I could be; I see that now.]

Here's the Narcotics Anonymous Serenity Prayer

God, grant me the Serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
the Courage to change the things I can ~~
and the Wisdom to know the difference.

Thanks Jess for reminding me.

I miss the serenity prayer when I bolt out to avoid the Group Hug (then I come back in).

Anna Grace I'm sending the story Mid-Pacific Serenity to you. I'm sending it to you because it's about Hawaii and it's about drugs and it's about somebody who one day realizes: "It's over, you never have to use again." It also contains the immortal line: "Skid row is in the mind." You don't need to have used Everest-sized amounts or sunk lower than anybody else ever has to want to sort yourself out. You can drop drugs "Just for today" and try it from there and see

the link should take you directly there, but if it doesn't:~~~~~~~
look on page 128, it's the second full-length story (ie the 3rd article down) under Beginnings

THE ORB: LITTLE FLUFFY CLOUDS (DANNY TENGALIA MIX)
some beautiful scenery in this ...



FUTURE SOUND OF LONON: PAPUA NEW GUINEA
Lizzy I found the video!
i like the style of psychedelic montage here
cool, fesh air, reminds me of Switzerland, where I wanna live (one day)



on the back of that i found...
MICROSOFT'S VISION OF THE FUTURE!

Away Day Return

MESSED UP DR APPOINTMENT: something went wrong re the dr's appointment between me, my family, my worker, the dr, and the time but I've got another for later today so no harm done. I had to pick up a methadone script for next week anyhow. And I saw some nutters I know. And some junkies I know. Nutter-junkies are the best. Only type I truly understand.

Where me and normal junkies go off at tangents is in lifestyle as there was no way I was barging into shops every single day, multiple shops per day, stocking up, hiding it all in alleys and bins and hoping no other bastard shoplifter or tramp runs off with it all, then when all that's done having to sell the crap, probably feeling tired and your lovely customers being able to read how desperate you are (not that I've ever "sold stolen goods" but say, hypothetically, that I did it as a favour for someone else; then that someone would have been really surprised at how much cash I got, as I came in daisy-fresh and got money for their toothpaste and shampoo (when I didn't know it shocked me just how humdrum these shoplifted items are! I thought addicts nicked nice stuff. Not coffee, headache pills and razors! Another thing that shocked me was realizing that stuff on sale in small shops was often shoplifted from bigger shops, sold on at less than wholesale. The kind of shop that would go nuts if you got caught nicking from THEM, the hypocrites!) anyway shoplift thing over... what was I on about. O yeah

here's a point (at last)

how can I possibly know how much another person suffers? How good or bad they feel? That's (part of) what stopped me thinking I was clinically depressed when I was. Not having a point of comparison, even among people I hung out with and/or knew very well. As everyone's personal hell is their own, y'know...

Well I SLEPT 8 HOURS which was lovely. From about 6:30 to 2AM. OK probably 7 and a bit all told, and that... does it make up for last night's hardly any sleep? I dunno. I got up at 2am last night after taking the zopiclone late so I can't have got much more than an hour and a half sleep. I write down my sleep for this diary thing I WAS doing properly. Or going to to. You ALL won't remember; someone will.

O I hate going to doctors to describe how I am not how some physical ailment is affecting me. That's a headfucker if you think about it. Doesn't psychiatry mean "care for the soul". Does my soul need caring for? Shouldn't I myself do the caring? What can a headshrinker actually do for me? Apart from write down their medicalized version of how and who I am and think about prescribing drugs of their own. While telling me not to take ones obtained for FAR TOO MUCH MONEY from bastards on mountain bikes.

My phone is full of desperate text messages telling how THEIR gear is the best how one "runs" amazingly even though I'd never in a zillion years SMOKE THE CRAP. Unless it's H4 [for injection] I'm not in the remotest bit interested. H4 is pure white heroin hydrochloride. China White is still heroin. Heroin is shit. I wouldn't actually take heroin. But enjoy the oblique "your wares are shit" dig. Plus being way more knowledgeable than the idiot selling it. Surely if you're retailing you wanna know your product? But they don't. Hence the absolute SKANK sold during the worst part of this ongoing drought....

Khhh. My worker listened very closely when I described having once given up caffeine and cigarettes. Caffeine for more than a year. Cigs for at least 6 possibly as long as 9 months. And the mental persuasion entailed in dumping nicotine. My point was I was so intensely addicted to heroin none of that ever worked on me. Heroin was as intertwined round my soul as anything ever has been. Total and utter addiction. Never again!

And yes I do need to remember this. I'm the sort of bastard who doesn't recognize the same landscape in summer and winter. Message to self:~ Seasons change. No heroin in any season. Thank you.

I was so knackered today. I actually came down to the ground in the morning. Like coming home after a wild an whacky holiday (Vacation you Americans! Not Xmas hols)... yeah an adventurous holiday. Imagine sunning yourself on a beach on Ko Phi Phi, which is said to be sublime, somehow the walls of your own living room impinge into this scene and a sun-lounger turns into your own chair. Wow! Then I had a bit of coffee to get me through both these appointments and I was flying yummily again. On less coffee than most people take to get to Work!!! How amazing is that. Free illegal drugs in my coffee. Wow. Anyway I was so tired I was zombified on the outside, bizzy-buzzing on the inside. Which meant whenever anybody asked me a question I suddenly sprang to life and wouldn't stop rabbitting. Then stared into space again: wearied close to exhaustion. That's why I slept so very long, and it did feel like 18 hours, not just under 8... like when you wring out a sponge and wring and wring more and more water so I got all the sleep out of me I could. A nice good long lie in. Getting up early AM. Yeah I know it's stupid. It's also fantastic not to be addicted to sleep any more. Not the way I was. Not struggling to function on 10, 12, 14, 16 and even more hours. Get my attitude to sleep now? It hits me like a disease and I can't function through exhaustion, depression and sheer ukkhhh-ness. THIS is why I have a rave, an ongoing party when suddenly I'm OK, don't need DAYS of sleep don't need don't want get rid of my old shitty life... ukk. Live on fresh air! That's the ideal. Like a sky blue flower aginst a blue sky. Blue into infinite sunny blue and cool fresh air. I'd love to live in Switzerland, wouldn't you? OK I'm gonna leave it there else this will never get finished.

RESTFUL CLASSICAL MUSIC. OK the restful is sarcasm. Sometimes I am sarcastic you know. E.g. when I asked would a caramel cadbury's creme egg set me off hyper. I'm not the kind to get high off a red smartie you know. And as for caffeine... all it used to do was give insomnia and anxiety. Never got high off that cept when I was on Prozac or naturally high anyway (not drug high).

MOZART: REQUIEM TRANCED UP



MOZART: LACRIMOSA (IE SAME PIEC) TECHNOD DIFFERENTLY
oh man: well you might like it, I'm saying nothing about this one



EVANESCE: (MOZART'S) LACRIMOSA
OK we're starting to go down a blind alley with this one but here:
05:04 finally got this to play properly: what an oppressive dirge! doesn't suit my mood at all. I far prefer that On With the Story Higher than the Eiffel track (look for a tiny little box, shrunken youtube screen last Sunday) for clish-clashing waves of music. Does anybody like this?:~~~~~



Illustrated: I was trying to find bindweed to illustrate heroin and me and that's the flower ~ WHAT AN AMAZING COLOUR BLUE! The bottom shows what bindweed actually does, view from a beach, Ko Phi Phi (Thailand) which is pronounced "pea pea"

NA Meeting

I WENT! I'M GOING TOMORROW. Apparently a lot of people got sick and tired during the drought I'm not the only one. I'm not interested in rubbishy gear or good gear. No gear was ever good enough for me. Even when unusually strong I got used to it disturbingly quickly then couldn't feel anything else. That's the main reason I drink, I needed something else to intensify the effect of heroin.

I had some difficulty keeping still and not fidgetting and keeping quiet. Walking hypes me up when I'm feeling a bit hyper. So walking there gave me a nice euphoria. At one point I just had to go and walk around a few local car parks, ones with nice lights and shiny windows (I get a great buzz off lights). I think I'm getting a lift to another meeting tomrorrow. A lift is a ride: do you say a lift on foreign shores? I've no idea.

I found American online meetings. The UK meetings are given in the post below.

These take place at 10pm Eastern time which is 3am UK time and there are no physical meetings to attend at this time although in London there are some around 6 or 7am.
3am uk is 4am Central Europe and 2pm Australia (the next day). The link is here.

I'm really hungry, my body is hungry, food is there. Little appetite. Have to try.

The abstract bassy dmm dmm dmm dmmm dmmm is what I particularly liked about the music of this time. Thanks Lizzie
BTW if anyone is thinking this makes me want to use just because I talk about drugs I gave up more than a decade ago and haven't used at all for a good 8 years you really are barking up the wrong tree. Not interested!



01:14 Hey I just googled Domes and Snowballs which were the same thing, really strong trippy E and absolutely lovely and the link came back saying exactly what we were told "half at a time, lads" I did as told, reluctantly and was Eeeeeing and tripping strongly, cabbaged on the floor of the rave seeing acid smileys jumping out of people's dancing knees. I fell in love with a girl called Abbey from Gt Yarmouth. The pill was so strong I saved the 2nd half for later and scored speed instead and did the rest of the night on that, still tripping, tripping for 24 hours. And it didn't feel like MDA which I tried. It felt like MDMA+something like DOM it was intensely trippy, trippier than the MDA caps I got. Unless the MDA was something else, maybe 2ct7 and the domes actually were MDA. I do remember the girl saying "they're MDA domes" and we both thought "she's left an M out" (ecstasy is MDMA). Beautiful beautiful beautiful I adored it like nothing else.

05:55 THIS is why I love ITV Nightscreen: trancy supermarket music. Am I getting really old or is the first track especially really cool? This is a mockup but it's just the sort of stuff they play and highly addictive once you get used to leaving the telly on and sleeping with it in the background

Sunday night

I HAVE NOT GIVEN UP BLOGGING I AM STILL HERE AND WILL BE UNTIL LIFE OR DEATH PREVENTS ME.

17:12 I FEEL really really upset. Somewhere sometime I have done totally the wrong thing and now I'm paying for it. I don't know what to do except a whole load of nots. Not drinking being a big one.

The rest of it is stuff that I don't want to face. I don't want to do anything at all. I'm totally sick and tired and I have had enough.

22:03 I went abysmally low this evening I really felt bad. i went out to get money from someone who owed me £20. my old best dealer had just come back on. my first reaction after being told at the end of my road was to ring straight away. then i thought hang on a sec you don't need that.

even if the gear had been ok which i doubt it would only have set me back and i'd have to go through all the same stuff. i was lucky enough to be crazed through the first 14 days which is supposed to be the worst even if it is just methadone switchover.

Still, I went out and got a £20 I was owed, the person wanted to pay in 3 days time but I said no I need it now. So I had the option to use and declined the option.

A pervert tried to pick me up on the way home. This did nothing to help my frame of mind.

The gist of what went through my head was repeated aloud a couple of minutes later. I was hearing myself, someone was repeating me, whatever I wasn't really listening. I went home and stood outside my house but didn't want to go in. So I walked round and round the block, not wanting to be anywhere. It started to rain, I didn't want to go inside.

I went to the Mongolian Chinese takeaway, finally it was open. Somebody else was standing there I couldn't face another person so I handed over my cash and went outside in the rain on the pretence of smoking. Rather get wet than be near another person. Sorry: simple truth.

I still can't eat because I feel sick. Chicken curry mix vegetable fried rice is my favourite meal it's half left at ten to midnight I can't handle it.

I had 3 drinks. Drink number 3 made me feel a bit better. I got another just now it's going in the fridge.

How I'm going to give up the only crutch I have left I cannot envisage. No I don't feel powerless over drink. What I see is a future where the one thing that holds me together goes and I fracture up. Imagine you took a chisel to your own reflection and smashed the mirror so none of you connected any more? That's how I feel when I crack up. I feel ill now. Better than before; still ill. I'm going to bed I've had it with today.

3:30am still awake. It occurred to me a couple of hours ago that come 4am I'll have been awake 24 hours, that this isn't normal. I tried to sleep. Not in mood for it. Appetite terrible, did force entire Chinese takeaway down throat over course of 5 hours. Usually I'd eat half, then eat the other half a couple of hours later.

I'm back on the black coffee.

Yeah earlier on I went into real depression only for a few hours, I don't really feel too "well" now. Yeah it could have been a bad mood. A bad mood where you hear echo-thoughts, are too low to go in your own house and would rather walk aimlessly in the rain than be inside even though you've fallen out with nobody, are avoiding nobody who's there. The reason I wasn't at home was that I didn't want to be there, I didn't want to be anywhere so I walked on and on and round and round and up and down the road. I could not engage with myself with anyone else with food with sleep. I am engaging with ITV Nightscreen purely for the music. And coffee and cigarettes. And that's it.

I'm going as long as possible on no sleep at all. See if I can break my 4-day zero hours record.

So there's self indulgent post number infinity+1.

Did anybody out there know Trisch Li personally? Trisch Li as featured in "phone calls to Jen" videos posted over last few days....? Please get in touch.

I'm posting this without reading back, not in mood.

Here's how you do a chart that shows how you feel. Mine was too simple. Dur.

06:30 Uuuuuuuuh. I don't really wanna go more than 4 days without sleep, but what do you do when you can't? I'm gonna bed now. At last. Ignore the rave videos unless euphoric recall is appropriate (got that expression from NA, doncha love it?!)

LIQUID: SWEET HARMONY
I don't know if the vid looks as terrible on yours as on mine. Like heavy psychedelic without ya contact lenses in:~



PRODIGY: EVERYBODY IN THE PLACE
I remember this being played at 6am on white label in a barn in Thetford forest, Norfolk, tripping on Domes/snowball Es.... wooo

I hate myself and I want to die

BEFORE I START I WILL GIVE YOU ALL ANOTHER REASON TO BE DISAPPOINTED IN ME. I scored heroin last night. I felt so depressed I didn't know what else to do. I have never felt that way before and not used. Once I had the heroin in my hand I cheered up a bit and blew the last bit of money I had on Chinese takeaway.

The heroin was crap, even worse than usual. It solidified twice in the works but I recooked and banged it up anyway. I lost respect for my body a long time ago. I only hate having to live in it.

Despite this heroin I didn't sleep at all last night. I was looking up ways of inducing a mood-switch. These are 1. stay up all night or get jetlag 2. abuse stimulants (including caffeine) 3. drink alcohol 4. (possibly) eat MSG 5. take antidepressants: I have a 28-pack of expired Prozac, which makes me hyper, agitated and euphoric. Drinking 3 cups of tea in a row on Prozac used to give a speedy high 6. stress (not much you can do about that). Stress induces racing thoughts, and sometimes "voices" (same thing, higher volume) which feel really good 7. sugar. I ate a Cadbury's Creme Egg yesterday and the day before. And the day before it was a Caramel one. Could this tip me over the edge~??

The sleep deprivation (which wasn't intentional) didn't work anyway. I slept all afternoon into the evening and woke up feeling miserable, sinful, full of guilt and wishing I hadn't seen that NutNut doctor when I did. Because I have made a reality out of what was previously dismissed as me lying to make myself look more interesting. I know what they thought of me. Well they can spit on my grave, those bastards.

A week or two ago I the same experiences I had when I went cuckoo started coming back but at lower grade. Racing thoughts, euphoria, disinhibition, less sleep etc. Then of course it just mingled into depression and I've felt miserable ever since. I know a lot of you out there want me to just do myself in, well I have a proposition for you. I'll provide the broken bottle YOU slash my throat you bastards. You want me to die, you fucking kill me. I get death you get life and I hope you get ****d every single day you're in there.

So there we have it. I am an illusion. I'm thinking of getting a job as a support worker. Most people feel miserable. Act their way through life, especially at work. Get home, don't even kick off shoes just fall into exhausted coma only to have to get up again far too early to work again to pay for things you don't want. That's what I should be doing. I'm not taking heroin today. I only had one drink.

I know I should work with the dying but I was thinking about that earlier and I couldn't handle the misery. Doesn't mean I'm not doing it though. I've pushed myself through loads of things I didn't feel up to, past tears and into complete physical and mental collapse. How come other people do stuff they don't want to and are fine, but with me I'm in bed for a week too ill to move? I sweated so bad that week the bedsheets looked covered in white wine stains.

I don't know what to do. I know no-one can help me. I always told myself if I ever felt really crap again I'm going straight in the nuthouse but the nuthouse wouldn't take me because there's nothing wrong with me except life.

That's been the problem all along.

And I don't have bipolar disorder either. The drugs worker, the mental health nurse, the social key worker all say my experience sounds very bipolar but the dr wants to think it's drugs and I'm with the dr. If I actually am a true manic-depressive I will kill myself and have done with.

Anna you bitch leave a comment under that REM song or was it really such a cliched choice? I put it there specially for you. Or are you really still feeling too shit for words? Anna has the most gorgeous blue eyes and a blue wig. I love all things blue. I love Anna.

There was a pill out a few years ago called Blue Mystic. With a name like that I'd have ran to try it, had I not already been engulfed by heroin by this point. I knew it was good as the press claimed several deaths (I've taken heroin for years and know loads of people who died on or via it; I went clubbing two years and didn't even know a friend of a friend of a friend who'd ever died on ecstasy or been put in hospital by that, blue mystic (2C-T-7) or anything else.

That bitch from QVC is on terrestrial television. How this is allowed I do not know. Home shopping! On ITV. And worse still LIVE ROULETTE for hours on end. Imagine this on ABC, NBC, CBS in America, that's what ITV is to us.

*******

Question: have you ever wept bitterly to this tune?

REM: LOSING MY RELIGION
This is way better than the official video. The official one's crap:~

Hamsters and Heroin and Chinese Food: a Polydrug Addiction

IT IS 07:13 in the morning. I didn't score yesterday until the evening when the urge for Chinese food possessed me like that naughty goblin who killed my hammies, nibbled through my computer cable, lost me my broadband dingle-dongle once and pulled out and scarpered off with the SIM-chip one other time.

So possessed was I by this naughty goblin who used to say to my best hammy "Hammy, ramble!" and he'd prance on his enormous 12" diameter rat-wheel and scuttle away from dusk till dawn every single night, that zombie-like I wandered in a trance to the Mongolian-Chinese takeaway.

Poor Hammy, my very best hammy lived to three-and-a-half ~ that's past 100 in hamster years. Early one morn when I had insomnia but Hammy was wideawake and healthily pinging like billy-o on his enormous wheel, I hid him in my pocket, took him out for a ramble amongst the dandelions in the unmown lawn of our old back garden. The dandelion-and-clover exotica was as tall as Hammy himself and his poppy panda-eyes were wide with amazement as he rambled carefully through the dense jungle foliage of our lawn. When the time came for him to go back to his nest he was most displeased. Back in his tank, he angrily shuffled his nest back and forth for three hours as if to say "I don't want to live in this cracked old aquarium any longer. I want to live in the garden, like natural hammies do in Turkey." What Hammy didn't understand of course was that in Syria and Turkey, where golden hamsters originate from, the tubby rodents are predated by owls and foxes and wild cats and other birds of prey and are endangered species.
There are many more golden hammies of the species mesocricetus auratus in captivity than anywhere in the wild. As long as they have a nice BIG home (not a tiny one more suited to dwarf hamsters that many are lumbered with) and a proper big wheel that is NOT selfishly stopped up at night to stop the irritating rattling and squeaking, a hammy will be quite happy. Female hammies are apt to escape as they come on heat every four days. In golden hamsters, it's the female of the species who goes on the trek for a mate, hence the tendency of females, who are slightly bigger than the males to be exceedingly good escape artists, despite their tubby appearance and outwardly docile manner. Hamsters are extremely persistent at "worrying" the bars in their useless cages. Any structural weakness will be located and worked upon until escape is achieved. Another method that works wonderfully on the type of cage where bars are clipped over a plastic base is to angrily nibble at the bars all night ~ which they only do when bored for lack of toys of a selfishly stopped up wheel. Eventually their nibbling pays dividends when the accumulated vibrations cause the entire top of the cage suddenly to ping off, and the intelligent tubby wastes no time in pinging to freedom,often to construct a burrow at the top of the stairs in one of your favourite houseplants.

Squeaky or rattly hamster wheels can easily be remedied with a drop of cooking oil. Not only does this silence the irritating night-long commotion, it also makes the wheel run far more smoothly, giving you a happy pet who's less likely to escape, burrow in your bonsai pots or set up a nice nest at the back of your sofa, the swines! A hamster should never be deprived of a wheel, except under veterinary advice where, for instance, running on one might aggravate an acute injury preventing healing. Young mothers sometimes run on their wheels to the neglect of their pups. Hammies love wheels!

How I got onto hamsters I've no idea, except that they ARE my favourite small animals. I relate to hammies as we share many characteristics. We both like our sleep and are bleary at best, enraged at worst, to be prematurely woken. Hamsters appear to be docile but ask any vet which small animal they dislike treating most and "hamsters" crop up time and again. Hamsters are NOT docile. When they lose their rag they do bite, but not normally without warning. When I used to wake up Hammy during the day with tasty titbits of Safeways chicken pie with petits pois, Hammy would gnash his teeth ~ literally chattering them as we might do when very cold ~ had I been stupid enough to try and touch him in his nest he no doubt would have bitten me HARD. A golden hamster can bite through a stick of chalk with ease. Occasionally when I woke him up he struck out poisonous-snake style, leaping at the shadow of my hand. For all he knew I was a hawk come to gobble him up for breakfast. Hammy didn't have a hammy-house; he had an enormous nest of print-free newspaper strips cut from the sides. These he would chew to his own satisfaction constructing the most enormous bed I've ever seen for an animal so tiny. Another characteristic Hammy and I shared. I have at least five or six quilts and about seven pillows and another five or so cushions. Ideally, when I'm organized, I construct an Arabian-nights-style nest with all this bedding on the go at once. Just like a giant hamster. If anyone dares knock on the door during a daytime snooze of mine fair enough I don't bite them, but I am very offhand indeed and my landlord's henchmen are usually intimidated into coming back later.

Now what got me onto Hammy bar the excuse to post up lots of hammy photos with this post?... O yeah ~ that naughty goblin's back, causing havoc in my life once more.

I didn't score any heroin at all yesterday, would you believe it! Out I went in search of the best Chinese takeaway I knew. This one also does Mongolian food and I was really in the mood for a mysterious Mongolian chicken curry. Guess what? That evil goblin had seen to it that the Mongolians had shut up shop! I was so furious I rang my heroin dealer without a moment's thought. Some idiot answered, the dealer's "cousin" as they like to call their partners in grime. Who am I? Where did I last meet him? Just round the corner yesterday and the day before you idiot (of course I never call my dealers idiots. Idiotic people tell me I should. This is all well and good if you want no dealers left. The particular person who keeps telling me to do this has multiple tales of being ripped off, whereas I don't. So who's doing something right, who's doing something wrong? I don't think it's me in the wrong. When you talk to dealers you have to be direct, to the point and not take any crap off them. Give those bastards an inch and they'll take a mile next time. You don't have to be rude and you certainly never tell one to **** off (at least I never do) no matter how bad you think you've been treated. Heroin is an addictive drug. You never know when you might need that particular dealer again in an emergency. Compared to the way certain individuals I knew got treated ~ one was sold an empty wrapper as crack, yet came back a second time to score! ~ I was always treated fairly and reasonably. I always paid the full price when I had money. It's people who think they're being clever, routinely handing £7.50 for a £10 bag who complain the service they receive is terrible and the bags tiny. You get what you pay for. When the bags were generous I always paid the full asking price (though you get discount: e.g. perhaps 2x£10 for £15 or 3 for £25. Again you're tending to get what you pay for, the 3 bags for £25 will tend to be more generous. The stingiest dealers will do 2x£20 or 4x£10 for £35. They should also do 5x£10 or 2x£20B+£10 crack for £40. 3x£20s are £50 in drugs mathematics. 4x£20s are £70 or £65 if you're lucky. 5x£20s should always be £80. 6x£20s should always be £100. You don't negotiate these prices, they're bog standard. Anyone charging more should be "shotting" genuinely enormous bags weighing 0.6, 0.7g and you should still get three of these for £55. I only had problems with dealers in the end when I wasn't such a good customer and the number of kids, who didn't know their trade had multiplied. Many were transparently out to get as much as they could as quick as they could, not comprehending that heroin is a longterm business. That's why it's such a good business to be in as a dealer. To be a good dealer you need to treat your customers with respect. Making less profit on bigger bags of good gear will make you more in the longer term as your punters will keep on and on coming back. The "alphabet" of Bs, Cs, Ds, Hs, Js and Ts ~ horrible little kids (19 year olds probably with no qualifications, no college, no job. They don't even know the job of heroin dealing. Say "China White" and they think you're stupid. "Coke comes from South America" one informed me. I rolled my eyes in despair and skulked off. When someone's that stupid I don't bother putting them right. Let them go on being ignorant. If they don't know their trade they have no respect from me. More than half the dealers I know I do not deal with as they fall into that Fast Buck Ignoramus category. It wasn't like this a few years ago. The handful of dealers I kept on my shortlist were with a single exception people I'd known for 5 to 10 years. It always amazes me that someone will whizz past on a mountain bike offering "candy". He can't even specify what type of "candy" is on offer, he wants me to say first so he can say "o yeah I go that" ... as if I don't know a ripoff when I see one. I never ever deal with an unknown (somebody none of my friends can vouch for) without a free sample bag up front. But even when these aren't ripoff merchants they're too stingy to make an investment that costs them a mere £5, which is what a £10 bag costs the dealer. If you treat a good B-punter well you can make hundreds of pounds a month not just from them but from all their friends as well. It was this deteriorating business culture, not to mention the Great Heroin Drought of 2010/2011, not to mention that I was truly and utterly FED UP of the entire thing that finally made me stop. How on earth I was idiot to start again I cannot explain.

As I said, I didn't score yesterday. I did ring the dealer in fury when I realized the Mongolian Chinese was shut, but the "cousin" who answered either didn't know me or affected not to. He wanted me to come ten minutes out of my way, which I did. But he unwittingly did me a huge favour. The road he specified had a Chinese takeaway I had yet to sample. I pinged indoors, grabbing a menu then phoning back saying where I was. He said "Come to the far end of the road." This I did. But then he started asking who I was again. He also claimed not to have the same B which had been good as gear goes these days, but that the new one was "better". Such words would inspire confidence ~ from a dealer I could trust ~ but this snottynosed-sounding kid inspired no such confidence. I pulled the takeaway menu out of my pocket. I had £20 in one hand ~ heroin costs £20 a shot these days. I used to hit up between £6.66 worth (yes highly symbolic, that's a third of £20) and £10. Now it has to be the entire £20 bag in one, else I'm wasting veins on something I can barely feel anyhow. And this guy's gear was described by Mr Public School as "nine out of ten". If that's a nine, I dread to think what a six or a seven might be!

Anyway I glanced over this menu, slavering at the thought of Chicken Curry Mix Vegetable Fry Rice and made a snap decision I'd never in my life done before. I switched off my phone and pinged up the road back to the Chinese where £6.20 bought me something I realized I was craving far more than any heroin. Then I trotted off back home and had a lovely meal with home-made tropical alcopops to boot.

My drinking's slowly reducing itself too, but I'm NOT obsessively counting cans, bottles, units. OK I know I'm drinking generally 3xhalf-litre cans of white cyder at 7.5% ABV. This is more than I ought to be drinking but with drugs out of the picture what's left. As I said before, and I wasn't pulling a "poor me" I was merely being factual. Heroin always held me together into one coherent person. Before heroin I was being told by my counsellor and my GP that I "needed more help than they could give me" that is the help of a psychiatrist. My previous experiences with psychiatrists had been disastrous. When he prescribed Haloperidol I was told the pills "might cause some muscle stiffness". Next morning as I was ambling up the road to my counselling appointment I suddenly became unable to walk. I made it across the road to a pharmacy where I explained what I'd been prescribed. The pharmacist rang an ambulance at once. I was carted into Accident and Emergency writhing in agony with "a severe dystonic reaction" (in other words, parkinsonian symptoms) and given intavenous procyclidine, an anti-parkinson's drug and a stern note to the psychiatrist reprehending him never again to prescribe such noxious substances. The psychiatrist addressed me with a blank look (no apology) and wrote out a script for something with fewer "extrapyramidal side-effects". For a long while before the opiate habit got me, I realized I felt like a jigsaw puzzle with a piece missing. Sometimes the missing piece reappeared only for another to go astray. I could never put my finger on what was happening. This seemed to be a problem; because of it, I was never able to get my life together.

Without heroin I become incoherent once more. Regular readers will remember my posting on this topic some days ago. I got a comment from an Anonymous suggesting (as I saw it) that a little too much self-pitying navel-gazing was going on. But this is to miss my very point. There's little if any point in the kind of solipsistic self-analysis of which I felt accused if "you", whoever "you" are, will never add up as a complete person. I don't mind this. It doesn't hurt as such. But it does cause a lot of issues coping with life on life's terms. What an irony that heroin, widely labelled the most destructive of all drugs, actually kept me together so well that in my long and involved psych assessment with the nurse I barely mentioned this, believing it had been a youthful phase I'd simply grown out of. How wrong I was!

If you want to criticize me, you want to read my actual words. Where do I once claim unhappiness or suffering? What I'm saying is that without gear I'm fractured. I don't add up. I feel like a jigsaw with different pieces missing every day. I don't feel terrible, except when I'm depressed and I've been depressed for a few days but mildly enough to act my way out of the blank meaninglessness of it all. If that sounds self-dramatizing then you don't know depression. Figures vary but it's believed only one person in twenty ever becomes clinically depressed to a moderate or severe degree, so if you're one of the 95% who never experience this please don't judge me, you have no idea how it feels to be so incapacitated you can barely move your body, let alone think clearly, make rational decisions or lead any kind of meaningful life. I've been lucky, these severe spells have been mercifully brief. And I'm grateful to them for removing the desire to use, the desire to commit suicide (nearly all depressed people feel suicidal, and those who don't tend to obsess about death). Depression is a dreadful state to be in. I'm not claiming to be at the extremes. My principal problem as I see it now is one of ongoing heroin addiction.

Yes I did score. At 4:30am I telephoned my best three dealers in descending order of preference. Mr Idiot man ignored my call. Mr Orange Juice Gear With Black Bits On Top was fast asleep, Mr formerly the most generous dealer on the block, knocking out 0.6, 0.7, 0.8g for £20 pre-drought met me at 5am at the bottom of his road.
£15 changed hands for 0.4g of brown. I cooked the entire lot up and fixed it all at once, miraculously locating an active vein in my right arm. So I've used yet again, but I'm still wide awake. All the way there I was obsessing about whether or not to ask for "one and one" that is one gear, one crack because I used to love crack so very much and as I say if I can destabilize my mind I know from experience I won't want heroin any more. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Just thinking over what I put makes me feel very sad. That I'd be willing to jeapordize my sanity. Sanity, which is something to be prized. Just for the sake of escaping this terrible addiction that has eaten me alive all these years. So yeah, maybe I am self-pitying. But if I don't pity myself, who else will. If I don't pity myself, don't respect myself, don't love myself enough, I'll never break free of this destructive cycle that has become the only way of life I know. Only I can help myself. And that's the problem. I just don't know how to do that.

If anyone has any ideas, please let me know. Meanwhile it's 8:58. I've been tapping this for an hour and three quarters. I hope I'm making sense. Please no judgemental comments I'm not up to handling them today.
I need constructive advice. I want to know what I can do. Can anybody help me help myself. Yes I know it's all down to me that's what's so frightening. My life is like a truck ride with a three year old child at the wheels.

But I'm a 38 year old man. In not too long I'll be 39. That 3-year-old is only an aspect of me. An "avatar" as they might like to say these days. It's up to me to take back control, to do what I have to do. That's what I've longed for, for such a long time.

To be able to know that for once in my life I am Doing The Right Thing. So there you have it. That's what I want. I just wish I knew how to get it...

Illustrated: Mongolian lady outside her yurt; pet tubby Syrian hamster; highly social, pingponball-sized roborovski hamsters rambling together on wheel; Syrian hamster in "wild" (ie probably somebody's back garden!); getting caned in Malaysia doesn't mean taking loads of really good gear it means being beaten on the bum with a soggy broom handle ~ they should bring this to the UK for dealers who sell rubbishy heroin; yummy Chinese food; mobile phone; depression ~ in in the eye of the sufferer; toking on a crack bottle (exactly the same type I used to use); prison ~ way out required.

AUSTEN POWERS: HARD KNOCK LIFE
Anthem to my existence in all its absurdity...

Still on drugs. And ashamed.

I SCORED HEROIN YET AGAIN THIS EVENING. I wasn't intending to do it. But I did. I used. I bumped into a posh boy who grew up with every advantage in life. Privately educated. The whole shebang. He should be married by now with a trophy wife, lovely posh kids who call her Mammar and him Pappar. A job in the city (if he feels the need for a job). His wife would probably be in PR, events planning (setting up stuff like Cartier Polo) or jewellery design. I believe (or suspect) that his family have cut him off. Smart move on somebody who grew up totally dependent on the family's money and status. No wonder he's in and out of prison. Thievery is the only way he knows how to make ends meet with a raving heroin and crack habit.

He scored me a lovely £20 bag of gear. Nothing is as it was before the extreme heroin drought that thwarted supplies, reduced purity to a minuscule fraction of what it had previously been, and left multiple thousands of addicts in constant withdrawal sickness. Even now in the new year things are a mere shadow of their former selves. I used to fix up a £20 bag (0.4, 0.5g) in two or three hits. In my recent binge I've done it in one. I seriously doubt the situation will ever go back to how it was pre-drought, not for many, many months indeed.

I can't believe I've let this relapse go on and on for as long as it has done. I'm beginning to feel desperate. When I did give up heroin I was lucky. I had a psychotic episode that threw me so far off centre that gear was the last thing on my mind.

So I'm now musing on whether or not I ought to score cannabis and smoke it heavily. Cannabis makes me psychotic. My last highly "enjoyable" (not!) experience involved heavy paranoia and voices from the sky yelling down at me. I don't want paranoid psychosis, but if it stops me being a heroin addict, it's surely worthwhile. And the druggieclinic don't mind anyone smoking "dope" as it's naïvely labelled here. (Doesn't "dope" mean "heroin" in the USA? The Americans have the right idea, as in most things.)

David Chaytor, Member of Parliament is being severely punished for swizzling Us the People of fraudulent expenses claims to the tune of over £20,000, that's more than $30,000.
He will be punished in prison for a mere nine months of his poxy 18-month sentence before the idiotic justice system lets him out on licence. Unfortunately because he's not in Malaysia or Singapore he won't be whipped on the bare buttocks until they explode and blood pools round his feet. You can see the photographs here. I'm hoping the one featuring quasi-medical treatment involves rubbing sharp rock salt crystals into the rapist's broken bum. A more severe whipping ought to have been imposed on that MP. That would make those bastards think again before claiming OUR money for duck pond islands, moat cleaning and castillation repairs on their castles. Whipping should be brought back for housebreaking (definitely ~ domestic burglars are the lowest form of scumbags and I'd be well up for rubbing rocksalt into THEIR wounds), muggers, loan sharks, cannabis dealers and most especially corrupt policemen. The ones who spray CS gas into "suspects'" eyes at point blank range. The ones who perjure themselves in court. The ones who beat up "suspects" in the cells. These should be whipped without mercy.

If you want to watch a celebratory 20-cut spanking on a Malaysian rapist, click here. Be warned there is blood. But who cares what happens to a sex offender? The only disappointing thing is he doesn't scream enough.

When I was about nine years old some pleasant young man tried to pick me up from our local railway station. This bastard KNEW MY NAME. Despite the fact that I'd never knowingly set eyes on this character in my entire life, he KNEW MY NAME and insisted he was here to pick me up, and I was to come with him.

I wasn't at the main part of the station, I was on the footbridge, where I waved a 1977 Silver Jubilee Union Flag at the express trains as they trundled past. This made them honk-honk! To my juvenile mind this made it all worthwhile.

Of course when he said are you Gledwood? I'm here to collect you I said, "No that's not me," and this threw him. The fact that we were on the bridge made things, to my present recollection dodgier still. Less chance of genuine mistaken identity. More chance of a pervert willfully picking me up for God knows what. I wish he had got caught and spanked.

In my view paedophiles ought to be shot by firing squad. And none of this pussyminded crap about loading only one gun. Every single gun but one should be fully stocked with bullets. And I'm talking machine guns here. No crappo rifles. Death should be swift and merciful. Put the bastards out of their misery. I feel sorry for them. Remember I'm a drug addict. I know how it feels to have an addiction disapproved of by society. So kill the bastards. If the death penalty seems too harsh, institute a voluntary one. How many prisoners attempt suicide? Many, many thousands. All they need do is get them to fill out a little pink form, then within five minutes the firing squad is assembled and BANG! The bastard is dead!

I don't know what to do about this ongoing addiction of mine. Should I take up cannabis? Surely it's better to be crazy than addicted to heroin. Committing suicide is immoral so I can't do that. That's why I believe drug addicts should get the voluntary firing squad too. I'd have signed up for that years ago.

Happy new year everyone. The bastard from the council had the cheek to inform me my living conditions are of a reprehensibly low standard. Well he can go piss himself. It's my life. If I want to sleep in a nest of quilts like a tubby grizzly, that's what I shall do. He should FCK OFF and be soundly spanked. Or better still hanged.

How do I give up this terrible habit? I purchased some diazepam blues (Valium 10mg). They make me feel rubbery and nice. But nothing makes me feel nice enough. Is it really wrong to want to die? I never asked to live. Now people want to convince me that it's my duty to suffer. Why should this be so...?

I'm putting down my name for the Hospice Work I was talking about. It might take some time to get through the process of Reference Approval. I have no references, but the Druggie Agency ought to provide some. They are there, after all, to set druggie idiots back on the straight and narrow.

So wish me luck, please, and if you've any ideas, please pass them on. Click on "Answers" below ....

JOKE!

What do people call it when you talk to God?
Prayer.
What do people call it when God talks to you?
Psychosis.
What do you call somebody who thinks he IS God?
A psychiatrist.


HM Prison "Service" website. (A "service" most "service users" could well do without!)

Spanking in Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei

Illustrated: evil cannabis spliff; idiotic cannabis man; rapist's bum after 20 strokes of the cane; another criminal's bum after a good whipping ~ this is what they should have done to those corrupt MPs; Her Majesty's Prison Wormwood Scrubs where £20,000 fraudster MP will be punished but unfortunately not soundly caned.

£9.30 takeaway

Tonight I had balti chicken with nan bread, yogurt dips and a green salad for the princely sum of £9.30. Well it's not going on heroin, I reasoned. Heroin is a thing of the past, yet again. I can't believe I ever went back to it. And with that friend who tempted me I am highly annoyed. I have had enough of people. People bring nothing but confusion. They mess up my existence. No thanks.

I felt so stupid wielding that needle around hands and feet and legs. Over the time I'd stopped I'd grown totally unfamiliar with the process of banging up the Z-grade narcotics found on Britain's streets.

I wasted more than £80 chasing a high from rubbish that was never going to do anything for me. £80, £90... nearly £100. The binge went on for four days. I call it a binge because compared to not using at all for weeks on end, that's what it was. A huge waste of time and money. I only had the money because I'd NOT been blowing it all on piss-weak "heroin". And what did heroin ever do for me anyhow?

Nothing. It only ever was a massive waste of time.

True, very briefly the drug put me back together again at a time when I felt I needed to be together, to function, to get things done.

But the upshot of heroin use after years is the very opposite effect: protracted apathy, low-grade misery. A wasted life. I never really needed heroin then. I certainly don't need it now.

Medicinal Heroin Binge

TO ANYONE WHO PERUSED my last-but-one post, "in answer to some comments" I'd first like to point out my rantings were not a personal attack on any friends or commenters. Not a direct attack; not a sideways swipe. Passive aggression (where you express anger obliquely, then deny you're doing it) is not my style. If I have a problem with someone I tell that person ~ it's the only way of doing it. Some of your comments did touch a raw nerve and that is what I was responding to. The fact that I'm me... not me... who am I?

The crux problem I had with heroin was that, apart from killing my pain, it held me very much together as a person. On gear I felt whole. The way other people seemingly feel.

Without gear I am Consciousness Aware of Passing Impressions. I'm expected to behave like and vouch for being "Somebody" but I do not feel like somebody. I feel many things at many times. I don't add them up. Somebody else might try to. Sometimes I have to account for whoever that person supposedly was, what happened to them. That's when it gets confusing. You see that's outward pressure to account for myself, to explain the inexplicable. It causes untold stress.

People seem to read into my words what they perhaps might feel had the words been their own. You need to be careful of doing this. Oftentimes I am comfortably numb. I never needed heroin to induce this and that puzzles me.

What heroin did do was give a certain confidence and a togetherness I had never in my adult life. That's why gear was so addictive. Whenever I tried to give it up, I (unwittingly) gave up my whole life also.

Far from over-analysing or ponderously dwelling on the issue of my life and feelings and future (the way many have assumed I do, probably due to my question-answering style)~ I realized in rehab that I actually hadn't the faintest clue what on EARTH I was going to do afterwards.

I was jumping blindfold into icewater! No wonder I ran out the door within half a week both times ~ despite immense preparation in the form of regimented drug-reduction, especially the second time. Despite what I'd assumed was motivation enough, I simply was not ready. Not the way I needed to be. I just did not know what I was doing.

You might also bear in mind that when I write, I use a naturally analytical style. This doesn't mean that I spend hours pondering myself in this way too!

People sometimes assume that because I write a certain way I must inevitably spend hours picking over my life in this manner too. That simply is not true. If I say I feel lost, I'm expressing a feeling. I don't wander about telling myself "I'm lost I'm lost I'm lost". I only say "I'm lost" when I talk to you.

At the extremes of experience I've found myself thinking far too quickly to ponder anything much. (That "breakdown" not long ago was like a tornado. Some of you read my words and appeared to assume I was more grounded than I really was. I was whirling a good one hundred times faster than usual ~ literally! It felt fantastic! But is not too conducive to self-examination.)

At the other extreme I slowed down and barely thought at all. My writing style cannot not reflect my minute by minute thinking style, unless I was willing to post near-blank pages or ones full of badddadah-dah-DING! Which is what my mind started doing when I was a little over-"manic". Perhaps that's my problem: if anything I ought to engage my brain MORE, not less!

On Sunday afternoon when I was tripping (on nothing; I've not taken psychedelic drugs in about a decade) and the Scouse of the South came blaring out a broken intercom I finally got fed up of people thinking I had DTs or needed Lithium. I popped some Librium which didn't really do much. My so-called Friend put pressure on me to find heroin. This was impossible, I said: it would be tiny, weak, money down the drain. He didn't care. Eventually to great irritation, which spilled into a dur euphoria (because I'm me and I am dur) heroin arrived. I took heroin. It was rubbish. I scored more that night and that was OK. Then I scored again and again and so I've done a lovely heroin binge.

And do you know what? The voices that were chattering away at night have vanished. (So much for drug-induced psychosis. If you wanna use the dreaded psycho-word this is a drug-REMOVED phenomenon. So the psychiatric industry can shove that in their crack-pipes and smoke it! Suddenly I feel put together and sturdy and strong again. All the reasons I got into gear to start with are revalidated.

Mental health nurses at the clinic will limply coo "ooo you're self-medicating" ~ yet they NEVER offer any alternative course of treatment or action. When I got into telling something particularly involved they crossed legs, leaned forward with a look in their eyes as if something really good was playing out on television. That's all I ever was to those people. Free entertainment.

Though I am supremely annoyed at this "Friend" for pushing me in that direction and will lance hi with expressions like "No ******g respect for MY feelings or MY sobriety," next time we meet, I am not "going back on gear" for anybody's sake. I took what was left tonight. I made sure I used it all. When it's gone ~ that's it.

I got a fantastic practical boost from heroin: it put me together enough to clean and tidy my living space back to the bounds of normality. Without it one disparate aspect of me nags "You've got to clear up" yet the other is not listening. I went on nagging myself this way for days, weeks, months with little-to-no avail. I could tell Mental Health Staff and this would provoke loads of engaged scribbling. With no benefit whatsoever to me. I don't care any more about my convoluted notes. I want RESULTS. Doesn't it come to something when only heroin will fix me?

Yes I could have not taken it. And I'd still be in a mess. I wouldn't have slept (I didn't sleep before). Less than a third as much would have been done (that's what happened last time). And my fractured less-than-self would watch caring-uncaring. Who cares anyhow? All I need do is get this task done. It's done enough now that I never need repeat that pharmaceutical relapse. I'm not offering an excuse for having used. I'm merely telling how using helped me. I only took heroin at all because it helped me a lot.

I was no longer crying. On heroin I was a whole person.

I'm willing to fracture up again, that's the inevitable result of pulling the plug on diamorphine. Please don't assume I'm telling you I suffer horribly. I feel nasty when I'm depressed, that much is true. But did you know, when I'm severely depressed it actually feels, in a paradoxical way, not as bad as moderate depression? Moderate depression, to me, involves constant impulses to suicide. In severe depression the suicidal idea is gone because there is no Life. Life is finished. I'm Finished. It's all over. "Rock Bottom" ~ if you want to use that phrase (personally I detest it). In this state I never even saw myself as depressed until afterwards. To me, I was in spiritual crisis. I'm no longer scared of going there because there are plus-points. While desire has gone, so has any sense of life. So I no longer desired to use. At long last I was free. The blackest stormclouds have a silvery lining. There's something to be gained from everything everything. Severe depression freed me from the constant craving to use ~ and for that I shall for ever be grateful.

Which is why I'm not scared. My life is a journey and I'm not even half done. This I am well aware of.

Just because my life is coloured in different hues to yours doesn't make me ill. I know that doctors could well see some of my experience as a mental sickness, but you need to throw out of your mind the idea that I suffer more than anyone else. I really don't think this is necessarily true. As mentioned earlier, I believe some of what's uniquely me is just a nonstandard coping mechanism. I don't walk about telling myself I'm ill. I only feel ill inasmuch as stuff has needed doing for a long long while, yet hasn't been done. No matter how hard I've tried to engage I've so far failed. The room-cleaning was a big one. If I can get this done, I'll be OK. A pigfull of meat shall slither off my shoulders. Then some other person can bring home the bacon.

You see it's not "feelings" that bother me, it's DOING. There's so very much I need to DO DO DO! Time is running out.

So that's my new question: how do I engage a disengaged person without using heroin in the process...? Surely there's some magical method? Some shortcut. Some effective way?

I very much appreciate the Answers I got back on Happiness. Thanks to Akelamalu and others, I made a decision to take a volunteer position at a Hospice. I have never in my life set foot in a hospice, but I believe passionately in what these organizations do. When people are terminally ill there comes a time when Doctors ought to just leave well alone. Stop their needlesticking, blood-letting, scanning, operating, endless interfering. Stop the painful tests, painful chemo, burning radiotherapy. Stop tormenting the dying and leave them in peace ~ dosed up on painkillers, tranquillized and happy as the chemicals can make them. I'd want this for myself. I'd want it for my friends. I'd want it for my loved ones.

I always donate to the hospice charity first when I'm giving away clothes etc (I find vast amounts of clothing on the street that doesn't fit me, so it's always trotting into that shop). I'd love to see how a hospice is actually run. Surely it's a privilege to spend the last days and hours with people who are dying. There's nothing maudlin or morbid in this. To be able to bring comfort ~ or even joy ~ to anybody's final moments would be a great honour.

So these are my feelings on feeling and not feeling, and on gear. As I said, yesterday's post was not a personal attack on anybody who commented, it was merely inspired by your remarks, so please, Syd and others don't be offended. No offence was ever intended.


PEACE, LOVE AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!

LINKS: HEROIN AND METHADONE AS ANTIPSYCHOTICS AND MOOD STABILIZERS

1: Methadone reduces the need for antipsychotic and antimanic agents in heroin addicts hospitalized for manic and/or acute psychotic episodes

2: Use of methadone in the treatment of psychotic patients with heroin dependence (abstract)

3: Heroin and psychosis (antipsychotic effects)

4: Heroin improves negative symptoms of schizophrenia

5: Methadone as a mood stabilizer in bipolar disorder

6: High dose methadone as antidepressant and anti-anxiety agent

7: Heroin reduces auditory hallucinations/80mg methadone prescribed as sole antipsychotic


GOOD NEWS: MELODY LEE IS BACK!
If you don't know Melody, she's one of the best junkie-bloggers out there. So read her stuff!

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COLDPLAY: FIX YOU
This video and the Madonna Hung Up Video both seem to have been filmed in the same place the Warp Club happened ~ inside the most enormous railway arch club, just round from the London Dungeon and London Bridge Station ...

This is for Anna Grace especially ...