Terrible Sleep

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

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

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

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

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

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


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




HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 1 (TIËSTO)




HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 2

Ordinary People Having Extraordinary Experiences

ECSTASY, as longterm readers of my blog will know, is the only drug I ever considered truly AMAZING. It was the brightest light in a trinity of MDMA, mushrooms and ketamine. But I loved MDMA the most because on MDMA you can dance for hours. Forget the touchy-feely stuff. I danced on E. I had experiences like the one Ruth has here by wandering outside house parties on my own and finding myself in grasslands at dawn, haloed by rainbows. At one such party a white Barbadian girl named Summer Rain was meditating 6 feet high on a wall.



Nate on Ecstasy (screen 2: Nate): yes this is the sort of rubbish I have twaddled too.

I think we all have.

Mania reminded me of ecstasy because of the bright lights, enhanced appreciation of sound and colour, hallucinations (which you get at high doses) and the rushing feeling, leading to "peak experiences". I got higher on E than I ever did on cocaine, including crack. Yes crack was more intense, but Ecstasy was several clouds higher (cloud 9, 10, 11, 12 and counting...) The most intense high known to man is said to be that of heroin and cocaine taken intravenously together, the socalled snowball or speedball. This reminded me of MDMA. On Ecastasy I was frequently the highest person in the room. When I danced I would come out of my trance now and then to realize I was surrounded by people vibing off my energy. On my best nights I was constantly pestered by people wanting to know if I had pills to sell. To use the NA phrase "they wanted what I had".

If you're wondering how Ruth got E'd up on a camping trip and how Nate got there at a family dinner, it's because his brother David idiotically dumped some Ecstasy pills in the aspirin bottle. Excellent TV if not entirely believable.

If I could take ecstasy once more I'd get ten good pills and do a session with my mother.

Clipped Wings (Still)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Notice no Barbra Streisand!



Video version:

I love techno choirs!

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

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

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

Corned Beef Wind-up

3:39AM I HAVE JUST had major hassles from a tin of corned beef. Stupid key drizzled itself less than halfway round one single side out of four before derailing, leaving me with an unopenable tin. My tinopener simply will not cut the bastard thing open. So I was reduced to dipping a pair of scissors into this tin's metalic smile and annoying myself with pitifullly small morsels.

I just wrote another post but it's too annoying for words.

I'm alive! I'm alive again! Depression has melted into the darkness for now at least and my mind is pinging alive like a kitchen running with naughty mice.

I had 3 cups of black coffee a few hours ago and a tin of cyder. I only got the cyder to try and calm myself down. I was pacing everywhere trying to remember what I was doing...

... I was actually collecting clothes to wash in the sink. Well they're marinading nicely in washingup liquid now.

Gone With The Wind is on again. I can't believe I ever thought that was an awful film. It's because it was voted best movie of all time in several polls that put me off it. As was Citizen Kane (where Citizen Kane is #1 Gone with the Wind is #2 and vice versa). And Citizen Kane is incontrovertably boring.

Gone with the Wind was a huge bestseller, the Harry Potter of its time. It sold at least 7 million in hardback in the United States alone, which was good for that time. So there was much talk about who would star in the movie and something akin to a talent competition was put in operation. I kept wondering why they didn't cast Elizabeth Taylor as Scarlett, but she was only 7 or 8 at the time. Eventually an unknown actress from England, Vivienne Leigh, was chosen. I like her spirit. And I love the way she shoots that robbing buffoon on the stairs. I especially like her catchphrase "I'll think about that tomorrow"..! What a way to live life. Not necessarily a good way, but what a way.

When I first saw Rhett I thought "what a smarmy man" but I like his attitude. He is accepting of all people, all things. He even keeps up his good humour in a "horse jail" stable where he is confined prior to his hanging. (He never gets hanged.)

O what am I talking about y'all have probably seen the film more times than I have.

Why do they barely ever put classic films on TV? Are they really so expensive to run?

Well I've got to go. I don't know if I'll be sleeing tonight. I didn't sleep last night either, but I slept all day. Maybe I should stay up till tomorrow night.

I haven't touched any heroin at all since Friday afternoon and I don't intend to touch it again.

Drink: I'd like to give up completely but I tend to cling to it as something to brighten me up when I'm down, something to calm me down when I'm up. I noticed the dr didn't sound at all surprised when I mentioned these effects to him. And he never told me to stop drinking. He wanted me to stop so that alcohol could be ruled out of the diagnostic equation. Well I got diagnosed didn't I. It wasn't exactly the one I would have picked myself, but life isn't a Chinese takeaway menu.

If I could pick any mental illness to have the only one I'd go near would be "constant euphoric unipolar hypomania". That's the only one anyone with half a brain would go near either.

Mania makes me too distractable and unfocused, not to mention highly irritable (as well as euphoric). It's the euphoria I love, the so-called Elevated Mood. Psychosis can be entertaining (lots of hallucinations) but I only say that because it happens anyway and you have to make the best of a bad lot. Depression is vile. What else is there... anxiety? Beyond the pale. I don't really get any other mental disorders so that's it.

What gets me is when I have to do ordinary things yet I feel like I'm on an E and a trip. No way in a million years would I drop acid and ecstasy and then attend some kind of group therapy session like the nutter club. Last time this chic opposite me was banging on about her depression and I just couldn't handle it. I had to leave. This caused some commotion but I ran outside and smoked three cigarettes while fleeing up the high road. Then I nearly had a panic attack in Sainsbury's. There's only so much you can push yourself. I didn't feel like going anyway and I pushed myself too far that day.

And I don't touch acid or ecstasy by the way. I once did, but that was more than a decade ago (ecstasy) and nearly twenty years ago (most of the acid). People seem to get confused by my drug allusions, what I'm often trying to say is I FEEL drugged, not that I AM drugged. You'll know when I am drugged because I'll be talking about having used heroin that day. And you'll know that by reading into my past more than my future. Heroin has no place in my future.

I just wish I could give up drinking that nasty alcohol. I know it's doing me no good even though the consumption is LOW. So low it's practically within the British government's stingy health guidelines.

I just know that alcohol doesn't fit in with the pious health food lifestyle I need to adopt. Good thing I actually LIKE lentil stew isn't it!!

Well I'll leave it there, (as I say at NA). I have clothes to wash and Gone With The Wind to watch. Yet again...


PS I'm not feeling like I'm on an E or a trip now. I only mention that because I did feel that way not long ago and it wasn't condusive to doing things outside the home...


Illustrated: corned beef mayhem; Scarlett O'Hara; white cyder; LSD, yes a "trip" is this tiny. In my day, two of these could blow your head off!

BLACKOUT CREW: BAD BOY (NOT ENOUGH DONK)
This tune is a bit rude, but I like the techno donkdonkdonk bit.
I think it would be better just music, no words...



GOA TRANCE
in Goa, Hilltop nr Vagator/Anjuna





06:21 I just went out, got another tin of corned beef (different make) opened it successfully and ate half (hurrah!) That's all I can manage. A small bowl of curry and rice and half a tin of corned beef. No appetite. I'm going to try and get 2 hours sleep then go to bed at the proper time tomorrow night. It's light already. Wish me luck

My Special Tonkie Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no need to suffer unduly.

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

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

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

TILL DEATH DO US PART?

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


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

Rethink (mental health charity) schizoaffective disorder fact sheet.


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



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

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

Flight of the Blue Tits

DOES ANY OF MY WRITING ACTUALLY MAKE SENSE? Or is it just me reading it back wonky? It seems to be all biddybangingbong: all over the place. I don't judge other people's writing as good or bad; I just read it. Also, my attention span is all over the place. I'm having a bash at reading a fictionalized biog later on; it's in short sections with rotating perspective (ie one person speaks, then another does, so it's easier to stick with). I need to get my attention span back.

And what was I on about earlier? Akh, I was a bit hyper. I was playing the music you see in youtube screens below today's earlier post which brought back memories of love doves and mitsubishi ecstasy. My mood was up so the music took me higher into full-blown "euphoric recall". It was more than the tingly neck you get from dance music once you get into it, it was a reliving of the E-state. I think that's why I'm now called "bipolar".

Akh, how did me and words like bipolar and schizophrenia ever get together? I always knew there was something wrong and that it wasn't plain depression. Those nauseatingly repeated dsm diagnostic criteria that pop up whenever you google "depression" somehow never described me even when I felt hopeless and suicidal. Partly this was depression deluding me, partly it was having got so used to being in a negative mind-state I couldn't see the positive one required to make sense of diagnostic criteria.

I fit the manic ones far more easily than the depressed ones. Ukh. Me? Manic?? A maniac is a crazy person and crazy people are Somebody Else.

I have been trying to read up on my medical condition because apart from knowing what it is I didn't know anything about it. Now I know a little bit about it. The European and American versions of schizoaffective differ. I have the European version that is, in the language of psychiatrists, mood episodes with mood-incongruent psychotic features. I also do have symptoms of schizophrenia but didn't even know it. I never delved into schizophrenia before: you can't know if you've got it. Stuff like obsessive-compulsive or bipolar you could know about because the patterns are really clear. Schizophrenia just feels like extreme dissociation with everything taking huge effort, even simple things. That's schizophrenia. That's why schizophrenics seem lazy, they're actually stressed. It's a big thing to do a little thing. That's why things don't get done. That's why I'm in chaos. Now I get all these people helping me.

Ukh. People helping me. I just want to crawl away and hide.

I want a bird feeder for all these blue tits. I haven't actually seen a blue tit around here. They're so tiny, they're like blue sparrows only slightly smaller (more wren-like) and highly agile. They hang out more at bird-tables and are frequently seen feeding upside down. They form mixed flocks with great tits, according to Wikipedia.

I can't wait for tomorrow because tomorrow I can get some paints. Whether I actually will get them is anyone's guess. Usually I don't do anything I actually plan to. I know I should do it but get lost in the detail. There is too much gory detail in life. There is too much gore. That is why I hate life. That is why I have to win the euromillions lottery. It's £50 million next week. I need enough to get a house with high prison walls to keep the world OUT.

Well I don't feel depressed any more. I felt depressed last night so I took a load of methadone and slept deeply. Then I woke up feeling fine. There are FAR worse things you can get diagnosed with than "elevated mood" (and my mood is elevated far more than it is low) so I'm not complaining. As Serious Illnesses go I think I got just about the best one. I keep hearing about, thinking about, seeing all sorts of physical injury and disease that scares the living shit out of me. Then I'm really glad I don't have to deal with that. I might be thinking that because I'm ill, but at least I am just thinking it not being it. (And I could get lost from here on in, as I get lost in what I think... ukkkk is that why my Dr thinks I'm crazy?)

O I have to go I don't know where I'm going now. Blue tits! There ya go. Left it on a positive note didn't I!!


Illustrated: tiny tits in various positions in British gardens

Ecstasy and Heroin

IT'S 5PM AND I STILL HAVEN'T BEEN TO BED since last night. This was partially deliberate, to reset my sleep cycle. Though sleeping all day avoiding the world is attractive, I'm meant to see Dr Shrinko next week and I'm meant to go to the Nutter Club and I'm meant to go to the Methadone Clinic and I can't be dragging myself there in a state of depressed sleep deprivation. If I get depressed and especially if I sleep twice, when I wake up the second time I feel really lousy. I don't know why that is. Usually when I'm down I sleep for hours and hours, at least 12 hours a day, sometimes a lot longer. If I go a day without sleep I can do 19 hours or longer. The Patronizers at the clinic liked to blame opiates for this. How come it was happening when I worked, a good 6 years before I was addicted to heroin? They never listened. They're actually more obsessed with drugs than most junkies. In fact I have a theory that some of the staff who work in such places are mere junkies by proxy. They want to be around the stuff. The outrageousness and despair. But they're too scared to commit to the needle (or the foil, if you insist). I kind of understand this. But the only thing that kept me taking heroin was what heroin did for me. Nothing to do with being with any group of people. I noticed heroin addicts seemed a lot more open-minded than ordinary folk. Far more accepting of people for who they were with all their faults. The nightclub crowd coudln't tolerate negativity; it killed their buzz. Their negativity happened when the party was over and they were washed up alone in a meaningless world of comedown that magically restored itself by Thursday night. So by Friday or Saturday they were ready to blitz their brains yet again on MDMA. Though I've raved about MDMA, it was, in the end, just a very seductive lie. People who aren't nice except on E just aren't nice people. They might dearly desire to be nice and use that annoying word "fluffy" which to me always meant lacking in substance and many of them appeared to have a complete personality change on E. Suddenly becoming caring, outgoing, considerate and full of time for others. In real life they were sour, grouchy and very sad. The worst cases I met on the club scene were actually more messed up than the heroin addicts. Perhaps heroin was soothing those addicts' ills in a way that Ecstasy cannot. Ecstasy opens up; heroin closes down. Is there any meaning in chemical meaninglessnes? Or are they just two opposing lies?


EIGHTH WONDER: I'M NOT SCARED
Patsy Kensit apparently used to go to Shoom club in a gym in south London. Shoom was the first Acid House party in the UK. She wanted to be "the biggest star in the world". Then she married Liam Gallagher from Oasis and turned down a part in Friends. Now she's in Holby City...



Illustrated: modern-looking ecstasy pills. The "love dove" bird is totally different from the doves I remember in the early 90s, that sat more upright and were stamped deeper. And they were really beautiful ...

MADONNA TRACKS: The following are the best tracks from their respective albums. And neither one was ever released as a single!

MADONNA: THIEF OF HEARTS (Erotica album)



MADONNA: SKIN (Ray of Light album)

Abba to E to Mental Mania

I AM LISTENING TO ABBA. Proof positive if any was required that I am in recovery from SEVERE MENTAL BREAKDOWN. I found Mamma Mia down Morrisons for a few quid. The lurid red heart on the cover made me buy it as a FUCK YOU to sneery supermarket staff, so I made sure I went through the slow isle where a surly person serves you, not self service as I usually do.

The sneery looks make such purchases so much more worthwhile (shame I didn't get one). Same as when I pick up cig ends from the bus stop. It's always better when somebody's watching disapprovingly. One time one Jamaican man had the cheek to inform me "that's disgusting" NOT AS DISGUSTING AS THE EXTORTIONATE NEW LABOUR GOVERNMENT TAX I shot back. He shut his mouth then. He looked like a Labour voter. Sad.

I'm voting Tory next time as long as they lower taxes for the rich. I want to be rich and I want to pay low taxes so I'm voting for whoever lowers them most for Proper People. High taxes for the poor don't bother me at all. We already have them. It's called the Council Tax. The one I'm being sued for not paying. The one my solicitor wants me "severely mentally impaired" for. Now that I'm a hallucinating paranoid mood swing nutter on antipsychotics I might go for it. Unless I'm depressed again, in which case I don't believe I exist, so I don't bother engaging with forms of any description. Mainly because my depressed self believes it's natural and right that I should live on the streets anyhow. And that the answer for just about everything is a flat-fronted commuter train whooshing into London. (Trains going into go faster than out of. Flat fronts are best for maximum fatal head injuries. I was researching this issue that day when the BASTARD DRIVER actually read my mind and knew I wanted to jump. He waved arms at me! I know I've said this before but honestly how did he know??? I wasn't exactly hanging off the end of the platform.

I was blaring out this Mamma Mia movie when Naomi the Nuttery Club lady rang up re my antipsychotic problems. She said "ooh what's that music" I said "do you like Abba?" she said yeah. I said well you can borrow it on Thursday but she's already got it.

I have to say it's a HELL of a lot better than I thought it would be. I LOATHE that Dancing Queen song. The only Abba tunes I really like are Money Money Money (of course) and Take a Chance on Me. And Chickadee Chickadoo whatever it's called. I never actually VIEWED most of the film. Just smoked fags and looked at blogs. I keep forgetting to comment so y'all probably think I'm dead rude, ignoring y'all. I'm not ignoring y'all. I'm just plain rude!

Now it's blasting out at 2 in the morning with German dialogue. I love German dialogue. Double value on all my DVDs. I now have a good 16, purchased in the course of a week. Tomorrow I get Burton/Taylor in Cleopatra. I know it's crap, but I like her look and I Like the scenery. Main reason I watch films: bright colours, nice scenery, nice actresses.

I know I should be gay because I like Madonna and like musicals but seriously do you know what you have to do to be gay? Wear TUCKED IN TEESHIRTS, cut your hair REALLY SHORT. Snogging boys I've done just for the shock value but they're not as nice as girls let's face it women ain't called the Fairer Sex for nothing. So I'm plain old metrosexual. I feel desperately disappointed in this [I meant being straight is boring, but it's not boring, I was just being provocative]. Also gay clubs are FAR too sexual for my taste. I've been to a couple of gay-mixed nights, but didn't really like them. When I was a clubber my Big Thing To Do was go to Trade Club... but it never happened.

Trade Club was THEE best club in London. It ran from about 4am to 4pm Sundays. Heavy heavy banging hypnotic E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E music. Ie absolutely fantastic. But I never went. I went Sunny Side Up instead, which ran from about midday Sunday till around 9pm, meaning you could spend Friday and Saturday night actually having a sleep cycle, then go clubbing Sunday afternoon and be daisy-fresh (well as fresh as anyone on an E comedown can be)... by Monday. E comedown doesn't really hit you till 3 days later hence Friday night high: Tuesday blues. About half the people at Sunnies as they called it were spacefaced nutters who'd been going all weekend and had probably had twelve pills each by this time.


Trancy hard house: what I went there for

The other half were like me: people who appreciated a sleep cycle. The press often compared Sunny Side up to Trade because it was thee most banging hardhouse club I ever went to. But Sunnies was a normal straight club. I never liked gay clubs as I say even though most are actually mixed I didn't like the sexualized vibe. Clubbing is about being free and expressing who you are. When I was persuaded into a gay club, I stood out like a sore thumb with my long hair and non-tucked-in teeshirts and no belt. Let alone one with a huge buckle.

Maybe I should play about with y'all and do a protesting too much thing so y'all think I AM gay. Well I'm hardly out of touch with my feminine side am I.

Everything I tried just led to the usual situation in my personal life. Me in bed. On my own. Crying my heart out because I felt broken, empty, abused, confused and very lonely.

That was the end effect of Ecstasy too. Though I ADORED that drug, because it's not just a high, it's transcendently high. Cloud 9, 10, 11... going up up UP!

Everybody's happy. Everybody's smiley. Everybody free. Everybody E.

Then the E wears off and they become the miserable gits they are in real life. And after the after after after party, no matter what adventures happened between then and then I always ended up in my own bed, eventually (never brought anyone back to mine: ALWAYS went to theirs. I had a thing about other people's beds, other people's showers... much more exciting)... after all this I ended up in bed, alone and crying. Wondering why I had said what I said (E makes me ULTRA frank, to the point of friendship-damage)... why I had done what I'd done. Usually it was just me being a tit, dancing on the stage but on a comedown this feels ridiculously over the top)... most of all I felt let down and lied to. Badly lied to. So I curled up in bed, crying again.

I had been to wonderland. A paradise so high I wasn't even dancing with people, I was dancing with fractals, dancing along a rainbow. I didn't just find the pot of gold at that rainbow's end, I picked it up and showered in stardust.

And then I came down down down and reality was just too much to take.

The last few times a kind of trip kicked in as the E-rush wore off. My books were dancing on the shelves. Everything was pink, blue, pastel coloured dots. Maggots in my contact lens case. I had to put the lenses in with the writhing maggots, telling myself they weren't really there. Telling myself this did nothing to diminish the hallucination. Then I took downers to sleep. I couldn't tolerate the cannabis most people toked to come down. I was on Valium (bought on the street, of course). Then I switched to heroin ~ far naughtier.

The fact that my friends disapproved only made it more attractive. I thought they were really uptight, snorting weak coke, thinking they were it. I scored heroin via dealers I met through the local homeless (my true home crowd: they never judged me, always accepted me. Only true acceptance I ever got was from the crustie junkies. My true crowd. Not the shoplifters or the prozzies. The crusties. And nearly ALL are dead now. The only people who "got" me. All dead. I'm one of very few left. So I took this heroin in secret. Because it was forbidden. Because it worked for me. Because unlike that coke, even the dealer's personal... it was crap. Washed crack cocaine: THAT worked. Heroin worked. In the end I switched drugs totally.

Raving and clubbing burns you out in a way not even crack does. Taking eight ecstasy in a night really does hammer brains and body. I was never into multi-pilling. I did 1.5 say at midnight, so by one I was flying. By two this dose was peaking and it was time for my second dose: one more pill. By three am I felt fantastic. by four everything was going full blast. Most clubs chuck out at six, so my 2.5 pills were coasting down luxuriously from six to eight.

Usually I went to someone or other's house, but was home by eleven when a couple of blue Valium pushed me down enough to get three or four hour's sleep. I never slept dirty. Always showered first. Showering on ecstasy is like that "dancing naked in the rain" song. Showering on ketamine is like showering in a spray of diamonds. Mushrooms added extra sparkle when I wanted it. Those were my holy trinity: ecstasy, mushrooms, ketamine. Ketamine was attractive because though I couldn't tolerate spliff, ketamine was OK to me. And lots of people were scared of it, which only increased its appeal (have you noticed I can be a contrary person?)

I genuinely loved the K trip. It's quiet and sparse. Very sparse compared to acid, which is sensory overload. On ketamine you float through outer space. One time I flew through the thorax of a gigantic metalic insect each rib clang-clang-clanging as I thrummed past it. The vibrations of ketamine (you literally feel a low-pitched vibration) were to me AUM, sacred syllable of the universe.

These drugs were my religion.

But you need to discard any ideas that I was somehow a fucked up acid casualty. I used E ONLY at parties. One per weekend. Any more was just overdoing it too much, you really do fry your brains on too much E. I knew about E, knew the bad brain damage neurotoxicity publicity so I took it with care. Yeah the last couple of times I took 5, then 8 pills but that was just 2 occasions. Through most of my E-phase I was known as somebody who DIDN'T TAKE IT WHEN I DIDN'T WANT IT. Even though I ALWAYS had it on me at a dance party (only the desperate score in the club where prices are more than double what they should be).

Like most drugs, like an empty glass once you fill what's full, what's as high as can be, you don't get any higher, the full glass overflows, the drug overflows sideways. Instead of Eeeing you're tripping. This is the law of diminishing returns. Didn't Jesus counsel "moderation in all things"? I'm sure he didn't have MDMA in mind, but it's good advice. If you WILL take drugs take this advice and TAKE THE VERY MINIMUM NEEDED TO GET THE EFFECT YOU WANT. Taking more is just wasting money, wasting serotonin, dopamine etc; wasting brain cells.

So that's me and E. Me and raving. I adored it while I did it, but eventually it all got too much and I wanted to do other things. I cleared myself out for several months but the mood swings I'd experienced since my early 20s were worse. I felt like the sea. High tide (me buzzing on nothing) meant a low tide was coming (depression). Heroin squashed my moods into a flat line and I thought I was cured of this cyclothymia. Then it came back ON heroin (ie heroin wasn't working any more). And y'all know what happened lately. Those mood swings were severe even by psychiatrists' standards. I know what mild-moderate-severe mean in the context of bipolar. Now I have bipolar symptoms.

The doctor didn't use that word but he did say when handing over the risperidone script "it should damp down these mood problems". What I experienced was definitely bipolar in that I swing between two opposite extremes. Bipolar disorder is another matter and it must be carefully diagnosed. So I don't know what's wrong. But it would be just like me to be a manic-depressive junkie, wouldn't it?

I've gone past wanting an excuse for inexplicable behaviour and self-neglect and neglect of pretty straightforward responsibilities like filling out council tax benefit forms and sending them off. I got to a point where I was engaging with nothing. It all seemed pointless. I felt like an utter waste of space and a fraud. And I was usually able to put on a convincing front which confused friends and drug workers. It was Mother Hubbs, who says she was on lithium before she dropped it in favour of heroin (both are mood stabilizers) who told me I was bipolar ~ years ago. I thought she was exaggerating. Then I asked her more recently, "do you really think I am?" and she said "you know you are".

I don't know what I "know" but I know I'm up against something pretty formidable. More formidable than any drug I've ever tried. I mean this high I had not very long ago, the one that had me posting rubbish for days on end... that literally did feel better than any drug I've ever experienced. Now I'm down towards normality I'm pissed off, to be frank. Well if you got amazing free highs, wouldn't you want to keep them? It was the agitation, volatility, physical exhaustion to the point of nausea (having forgot to eat), utter inability to focus on anything longer than a few seconds, a total lack of judgement ~ not so much regarding should I or should I not do this, but judging what was or was not right for another person... I honestly had no idea... the utter inability to care for myself, the inability to think of anything without the idea popping open like a flower, every petal exploding with streamers and little ducks dancing down these streamers saying "hello! hello! hello!". Utter distraction. It was this. This mess that I could see I was in, yet didn't really care about. That I was hearing walls, cars, ceilings talk to me. I knew I was going crazy but didn't care. Yet I was angry enough at having been ignored, written off, misdiagnosed that when my druggieworker suggested I see a psychiatrist I agreed wholeheartedly. I knew in my heart I wasn't right. The psychiatrists knew where I was coming from. I wasn't complaining of feeling bad. I was telling them I felt EXTREME. And I was going very very fast. so fast I lost touch with my own thought process repeatedly. If I put food in the oven I didn't know it was in there till the smoke alarm reminded me. Well it's past 3am and I've not slept. Sorry to go on about my mental probs yet again. You must understand this is a big deal to me I have to reach some solution, some serenity, some sanity. If sanity is good then I want it. If it's boring: no thanks. I wasn't bored when I was mad. See I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. I've messed myself up so bad I don't even know what "ordinary" or "healthy" or "balanced" really are any more.

I need a Speak and Spell machine. Perhaps then I can phone home. Maybe somebody will rescue me. I'm lonely here. Nobody seems to understand where I have been. I went to wonderful places more beautiful than you can imagine. And I was tripping on my own natural Higher Power. No drugs. If you honestly do still think I'm on drugs then do yourself a favour and stop reading this blog, because you're totally missing my point.

Well this has gone on long enough. From Abba to Ecstasy to me being a nutter. What's new. Take it easy people. Sorry if this is a mess. I'm not editing, else I'll get uptight and won't want it to go. All I'm doing to this is spellchecking, paragraphing it out then BAM! It's yours to skim or pore over or have a good laugh at.

Take care, lots of love

xx

PS I can just tell someone is going to read this and assume I only took heroin to be "naughty" I had many motivations. Its deadliness was a big one. The fact it made me FEEL BETTER was what kept me taking heroin. "Self-medication" as the nurse who never medicated me (did she think heroin was a good thing?) used to spout...

The flakes on the spoon are ketamine, cooked down from medical ketamine for injection into dried ketamine salts, which are snorted up the nose. Ketamine is NOT horse tranquillizer. It's a dissociative agent used for emergency anaesthesia and pain relief where more diamorphine is not appropriate. IF YOU HEAVILY ABUSE KETAMINE WITH HEROIN AND HAVE A BAD ACCIDENT, DOCTORS MAY HAVE GREAT DIFFICULTY ADMINISTERING ADEQUATE PAIN RELIEF... YET ANOTHER REASON TO GO EASY!


MAMMA MIA MOVIE: TAKE A CHANCE ON ME



ABBA: TAKE A CHANCE ON ME
fully original version
don't anna frid and agnetha look a bit like men in drag?...??



MAMA MIA MOVIE: RED NOSE DAY SPOOF



This tune is the kind of stuff I used to go E-E-Eing to. Without the tacky voiceover. And less cheesy eurotrance. More hardhouse with trance on top. Or hard Goa (late 90s Return to the Source type clubs were my favourite parties; tranced-up hardhouse was my favourite music)
shall i add a few more dance musical terms just to confuse you more if you're not into this shit? hardcore-jungle-tekno, drum & bass, speed garage, grime, deep house, trip-hop, amyl house, psy-trance, gabba, acid techno! There ya have it!!