中文小毛足鼠 Chinese Roborovskis (etc)...

HERE ARE SOME OF THE ANIMALS IN CHINESE:

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

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

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

A dog is a quǎn 犬

A cat is onomatapoeically a māo 猫

A xióng 熊 is a bear.

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

A fish is a yú 鱼

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

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

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

A hornet is a mǎ fēng 马蜂 "horse bee"!

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

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

Zàijiàn 再见！ (GOODBYE!)

*******

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

Little Furry Animal Aspiration

IT'S 2:30 AM and I'm in a "mood" ...



... I just want OFF methadone...



... OFF all drugs ...



... no longer to be a pariah ...



... no longer at odds with society ...



... maybe a chance to be happy ... ? ...


?

Ideas

I SLEPT AND SLEPT and slept and slept and slept in really lake, till past 3pm. My phone was chirping and chirrupping like crazy, but I turned it down so I could dream some more. I dreamt I was on a long train journey, where I accidentally dropped my methadone bottle down the side where it smashed; then I was up in the woods with exotic birds hopping towards me; then I woke up and supped cup-a-soup in front of the telly, wondering how I was ever going to engage with the day.

I made such a hash of trying to explain why I wanted to write my memoir didn't I? All I was trying to say was the idea came to me when I was feeling really negative; but I still wanted to go for it. Making lemons into lemonade type of thing.

I need to keep my story as short and sweet as I possibly can. Apart from Anna Grace's, the only drug memoir I know is Kate Holden's In My Skin. The tale of a middle class girl, very similar to me, who gets drawn into the seedy world of heroin, eventually takes to prostitution to fund her habit. Rather than feeling exploited, she talks about prostitution as a process of self-realization. I never went that route; I begged money off strangers. Heroin was a lot cheaper in London than Sydney so you could fund a habit of over a gram a day on £30 or £40. That's $48 to $64 a day in American money.

I've decided to continue with the NA. They talk about the same issues that bugged me: resentment at life not being set up to cater for the needs of the opiate addict. Which makes me want to throw in the towel all together. I don't think there's anything wrong with taking heroin, but I'm fed up of going against the flow. Something's making me want to stop. I cannot put my finger one what it is, but whatever it is, it niggles and niggles away and now I want out.

If I did get any money from my memoirs, I want to use it to clean myself up and leave the country. Burma, the most fascinating foreign land on earth for their mysterious beautifully scripted language, fried hornet cuisine and opium farming tradition is of course completely out of the window. Burma is the world's foremost supplier of high grade 97% purity white heroin. So I can't go there. Fortunately I've had a fascination for all things Japanese for about as long as I can remember, so I would go there instead. Japan is really expensive travel-wise, so I'd need an international bestseller to afford a trip there.

The other country I can see myself visiting is Morocco, where I've been before. It's like an African India. Very exotic. Very cheap. Yes they do happen to be one of the world's foremost producers of hashish, but I loathe cannabis more than any other psychotropic substance, so that's no temptation. I'd use Morocco as my personal alternative to rehab. Instead of talk talk talking about drugs I'm no longer taking, I'd take the opposite tack and let my wounds heal by leaving alone. I do think excessive counselling can be a psychological equivalent of scab-picking. Not good for you. There's research that shows that disaster victims who go in for talk therapies are more likely to suffer from post traumatic stress disorder and to suffer worse than people who are allowed to heal in quiet. "Least said, soonest mended." This is why I want to write my story BEFORE I leave the drugs behind. And to me, methadone is every bit as much a drug as heroin. It might be legal, but it's more addictive and less effectual. And I just want away from it. If they're going to insist on giving that to addicts they should at least give injectable amps. But you need a private doctor to get those. So a private doctor is what I intend to get. I'd need to write a book to pay for one.

My head has gone resonant yet again. That means I'm hearing words in the air. Not voices as such, but psychic emanations. This gives me a fear of going mad abroad. I need to make my own money so I can get away from mental health services. No travel insurance I know of covers mental health. If I had to pay doctors' bills myself I just wouldn't see any doctors. So that's nice and straightforward.

Hey this naturalist on the telly has picked up a tubby little vole. It's rambling about on his hand. Fully wild, yet strangely tame. Tamer than a roborovski hamster, that's for sure. Now some naughty baby short-eared owls are gobbling dead voles. They're on the island of Skomer in Wales.

Well I'd better go; it's nearly half past nine already...

TALES OF THE RIVERBANK

THE RIVERBANK CLOCK
"What can Hammy and Roderick possibly be doing?" asks Johnny Morris, the narrator. As Hammy patently obviously sits there washing his ears (again...!)



HAMMY THE FLYING POSTMAN
A terrible thing has happened; the post-boat has sunk. And now Hammy is trying to get the letters back... in the diving bell.
Then Hammy goes flying. And looks really entertaining doing it...

IT'S HALF PAST SIX. I'm about to go out to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. First one in nearly 2 weeks.

Buggalugz sent me a wondrous Tales of the Riverbank link. Tales of the Riverbank is about a hamster, a rat and a guinea swine who go on adventures by the riverbank where they live.

I particularly like Hammy's scenes in the diving bell and the toy aeroplane they ride in.

You can see two episodes if you scroll down to yesterday. Am I the only person having problems watching Youtube screens I've already embedded? When they don't play you can click the lower righthand corner and bring them up on a separate page; then they tend to play.

Last night I was in bed by 6pm; I slept right through and woke up in a bad mood, having forgotten to take methadone. So I took it and spent two hours feeling like a manic-depressive ice-block as I irritably waited for it to take its tardy effect. Then I went down the Post Office, got out some money and crowded home and watched Jeremy Kyle. By 10am I was so miserable I only wanted to go back to bed, so I took off my trainers and went to bed with coat and hat still on, where I stayed until 2. Deshane came round but I had no idea who was ringing the door-buzzer so I paranoidly declined to answer. I thought it was the council calling by to persecute me.

At 2:30 I got a call from my friend Pinky (Perky's ex) who wanted to borrow £20. So I lent her £20 and got her to score for me, which she did. The gear she was buying sounded crap and I would have cancelled the order if only she'd described in advance how lousy it was.

Anyway I took it home and banged up in my foot and now I'm in a better mood than before. I'm still going to NA. Everyone who has any association with AA or NA assumes I'm a terminal drunk when I reveal to them that I'm still drinking and that I drink every day and that I can't stop. By "can't stop" I mean I can't go a day without a single drink. I don't mean that once I start I continue knocking it back until I collapse in a cataleptic stupor. I had drink when I woke up this morning, but aside from one single swig, I couldn't face imbibing anything bar chicken and vegetable cup-a-soup (with croutons).

Because Pinky has the most miserable and upsetting life-story I've ever heard I offered to write it up as a book for her ~ and to my surprise she said yes. I'm also penning my own life story. Not because I think it's at all interesting, but because I want my family to profit from my misery when I die. I only had the idea in a fit of suicidal angst and thought the coroner's report would make a fantastic epilogue to my life. Maybe I shouldn't be saying this but I've told you everything else. I don't really like analysing what I did when and why, which is of course what you have to do to write a memoir. That's the stumbling block I encountered last time I tried. But if I don't write it and I die, my life will have been in vain. I want my family to profit from my death. And if I don't die and it does come out in print, I'd use the cash to get a private script for injectable methadone and morphine pills. Oral morphine is used as a private treatment for those who don't respond well to methadone (like me). The sustained release tablets need only be taken twice a day and would make you feel as though you'd hit up heroin at some indistinct time earlier. Rather than the spurious hold methadone has over you (complete with sweats, mood swings and hallucinations) morphine is well known to give addicts "a better quality of life" than rubbishy old methadone. I'd only ask for methadone because when prescribed privately you can ask for injectable 50mg/1ml amps which are of course far more likely to quench the urge to use on top as you've already had a hit. The NHS used to give out injectable methadone to intractable cases such as mine, but as my worker confirmed, nowhere in London does nowadays. In this day and age you're only allowed a chance if you go private, so it seems.

I don't mind methadone triggering mood swings, by the way: just as long as they're manic ones not depressive ones. Or that I don't get too manic, or too irritable. That's the only bad thing about mania: it's too unpredictable and uncontrollable. It isn't happiness (a good mood, versus a depressive bad mood) ~ it's excitement and excitement doesn't always feel great. I'd still rather be manic than depressed. Only a week or so ago I was so hyped up I was laughing uncontrollably at every opportunity. And there seemed endless opportunities for laughter. Now there are none at all and I fear over and over again that I'll have to give in and submit to mood stabilizers.

I can't read or watch or think about anything to do with ordinary life because everything makes me irritable or angry. Because it's not done right. The only things I can stand to occupy me are the Japanese language and hamsters. Everything else annoys me. So if I carry on in this bad mood I should be fluent in Japanese in no time at all.

I finally found a proper textbook (typically no accompanying CDs are available) that teaches the language from scatch in its proper script: that is, in standard Japanese orthography: kanji with hiragana and katakaa as appropriate. Not all in kana, like some Japanese textbooks. It's called Japanese for Everyone by Susumu Nagara and I found it here.

I also wanted to order Electroboy by Andy Behrman and The Quiet Room by Lori Schiller while I was at it. Both are psychiatric memoirs. Electroboy is about bipolar mania; The Quiet room is about schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (nobody appears to understand which). Probably I shouldn't be reading stuff like that, but I thought it might inspire my own drugs memoir. Electroboy has two covers: an electric yellow one, with the title in huge capitals, which I really like; and a really soppy arty one. If I wrote a book like that and had another manic episode I coudln't promise not to turn up at the publishers and shoot whoever OK'd that ridiculous cover between the eyes. It shows a really stupid face wearing a black hat, which is supposed to represent a the electric couplers on ECT machines. (ECT being a treatment for acute mania as well as depression; hence the title.) Poxy book covers are, in my opinion, an even worse crime against nature than cup-a-soup without croutons.

By the way the author of Electroboy claims to have taken huge amounts of cocaine while manic. How the hell he was able to do this and engage with life in even the most desultory way I cannot understand. One day when I was hyper I drank five cups of coffee in a row (I thougt I was tired). I then spent what felt like several days roaring like a wild animal, so deranged I had lost the ability to think in English. If I had taken coke in that state I doubt I'd ever have come back down to earth. (Some might say I still haven't.)

Well I'd better go. I have an NA group to attend and a memoir to ponder over (lots of thinking, no writing; that would be me). I've decided to write it as quickly as humanly possible just to get it over and done with. Apart from the money I'm only writing it as a cautionary tale to put the impressionable and destitute off ever experimenting with drugs the way I did. I don't think my life is fascinating and I don't think it's unusual. I just think I could tell the story well. If I set my mind to it. Pinky's story is far more interesting than mine. I'm really surprised she said she didn't mind her real name going against it. I'm not putting my real name on mine!


TALES OF THE RIVERBANK

THE DROUGHT
Hammy gets rained on and looks really cute



SAY CHEESE!
GP, the guinea swine makes a camera and a white guinea swine in a top hat takes everyone's picture...
ps has anyone noticed how Hammy looks like he's about to keel over from sheer exhaustion at any moment?
Hamsters are nocturnal and this was shot by the glaring light of day...

I'll tell you a secret...

LET ME REVEAL to you my most embarrassing of secrets. It happened when I was 16 and staying on a campsite in Belgium. This Lithuanian gypsy girl who looked "like Madonna" (Madonna was a huge star at the time)... anyway THAT should be enough to sucker anyone who follows me into logging in for a good read.

Now on to the real business. Heroin! Please somebody help me start this heroin production line of mine. I need (off the top of my head) lots of charcoal biscuits, ether, acetone, ethyl alcohol, hydrochloric acid, calcium carbonate and of course acetic anhydride. And I want lessons in how to turn opium paste into high grade white heroin hydrohloride (no brown junk, please) and how to do it in my own back yard using portable camping stoves for heat. I know you simmer the morphine base in acetic anhydride at approx 85C for 5 hours... what then? The H3 to H4 bit I know in principle... advice please. And can anybody arrange for me 50 tonnes of H4 white on tick? I'm good to repay and don't care about getting gunned down.

Well my mediation vacation is going swimmingly. Only people who meet me think something is wrong so I'm writing as rationally as possible to fool y'all. I'm not hearing voices today. My mood is barely hypomanic. OK: slightly hypomanic, as we speak. Hypomania is MILD mania. Full-on mania is like being in an explosion of colours, sound and impressions. Exhilarating! Hypomania is like a few lines of coke.

I had a beautiful Natural Cocaine binge all last night. I was bingeing on my own free neurotransmitters by not taking medication and it felt wonderful. I slept 5 hours this afternoon (fitfully, it has to be said). I love sleeping, even for a few hours. The night before I slept over 11 and didn't want to be moved.

My mood is "cycling" that is I get mood swings lasting very approximately 24 hours to 7 days. High and low. The highs are like free cocaine as I say so no complaints there. They only get acid-trippy on the very extreme high. Naomi from the Dual Club says "you might be right" when I bitterly told her my symptoms get "severe" (by psyh standards: normal standards mean nothing, by normal standards I'm a huge fuck up anyhow so I don't bother with normality).

I went to Nutter Club but had to leave early due to a near panic attack. I really was not up for handling other people's negativity. So I got up abruptly said I needed fresh air and pinged out. Now Naomi is really worried about me. I was in dire straits yesterday and that was ON meds. Severe manic symptoms dampened weirdly down with weird repetitive voices in my head. I nearly had a panic attack in Sainsbury's. (No wonder you might say if you know Sainsbury's. A supermarket.) Yeah Naomi rang me for half an hour. She is very good. Never puts a foot wrong. Knows how to handle people in really precarious mental states. She was wonderful when I came in on full-on mania laughing my head off hysterically. Unable to string words together. Somehow through the clipped-up slideshow of the day, she shines out as a beacon of sense. I was too out of it on mania to follow what anyone said once they veered off the obvious. I was interrupting everyone all the time with my own thoughts and opinions.

Apart from Nutter Club what have I done?... Not a lot. Planning my Heroin Empire, mainly. I'm in a really good mood so I have energy for important stuff like international drug importation and production. I want to PRODUCE my product. The brand name is going to be WHITE TIGER with 100% written underneath and loads of shit in Burmese, Chinese and Thai hong-donging down the side. And before anyone DARES imply I'm raist let's have a Chinese and Thai language competition, you and me, and see who wins. Least I studied them. Bet you didn't.

PLEASE EVERYBODY HAVE A GO ON THE PERSONALITY PERCENTAGES DISORDER TEST. The link is here
http://www.similarminds.com/personality_disorder.html I gave my results in the post below. I score highest on schizotypal (eccentric), schizoid (don't need friends), borderline (over-emotional) and paranoid. The paranoia is definitely down to illness, I just do not have the unforgiving nature required for a "paranoid personality disorder" y'know?!

I'm v grateful that personality disorders shit is out of my life. I mean as if! I might have a bit of a schizzy personality but that only means I keep myself to myself and my primary motivation is not other's approval and that I do my own thing. That's all.

They thought I might have one because I basically had mental illness I had successfully semi-medicated away, creating a confusing clinical picture. My heroin worked about as well as risperidone as an antipsychotic mood stabilizer. It definitely worked. And no I do not suggest anyone try the same thing, I mean look what happened to me. I'm lucky to be nuts, means I get kid-glove treatment at that clinic now. If they mess me around I will show them 2 fingers and just score on the street. It's more a "when" than an "if". I was all for giving them the elbow when "severely manic" last month but everyone told me not to. I told a few people I had "anxiety and depression" and they believed me! "Not depressed now, are you!" said one as I burbled deliriously away. It was SUCH GOOD FUN whizzing around in the back of a car scoring heroin not using the dullardly heroin [they scored it; I didn't even know that dealer] (it reduces mania so why take something to get LESS high? Dur!) I was out of my box. Thinking we were off to some magnificent party, then remembering we weren't. Thinking all manner of things very rapidly it was fantastic.

This is what I love about being "mentally ill" the candy-colored hilarity of it all. It's much much better than any physical illness I can think of. I can't think of many physical illnesses that make you feel Better Than Well like manic bipolar does. Fair dos it can get ultra-ultra super concnetrated like whooshing into the centre of a spiral. Which is why Stephen Fry annoys me for making flip comments about a condition (bipola i) he doesn't have. He has bipolar ii which is quite different. The heritability of bipolar i is quite clear; bipolar ii is a mystery. Bipolar i comes in families with a clear history of depression, bipolar or schizophrenia. Bipolar ii doesn't. Bipolar i has funky bits (psychosis) bipolar ii doesn't. Bipolar i typically has 3 parts depression to 1 mania (time-wise); bipolar ii is 37:1. Different illnesses.

Sorry Baino to go on and on about my issues YET AGAIN but I'm confused about everything. I don't even know what schizoaffective really means apart from it being the luuuurve baby of manic depression and schizophrenia and being "more serious than bipolar disorder" and "less serious than schizophrenia". I heard the manic type has a better outlook for recovery than the depressive type. Stress makes me manic. So even if I'm depressed, when I have a psych appointment I'm ALWAYS hypomanic in there and that is not acting. I act exactly as I am in those interviews Im too sick and tired of mind games to do any different. Sometimes I wish I'd said YES to going into hospital, because Id probably be in there now if I did.

That is what I hate most about the mental health system I actually got desperate enough at one point to try "showing what they needed to see" which I thought was depression. So I never dared crack a smile, initiate any conversation or basically do anything except answer what wa put before me and get the hell out and quick. I also noticed I was getting asked a set of questions that didn't even apply to me. When I didn't hear voices I got asked all the time whether I did. Then once I did nobody ever asked about them! I felt like such a fraudster thanks to those DSM diagnostic criteria which are frankly nonsensical to anyone with depression lower than the higher end of "moderate". Moderate depression means the absolute fucking pits of suicidal hell. The top end of severe is staring into space for hours yet being able to break out of it and do things; the lower end means staring into space and only able to stop with egreat difficulty. You'll end up in the middle of the room, frozen, wondering how you got there and where you're going. Not through memory loss; through lack of motivation. Very severe depression is a complete stupor where you literally cannotmove or speak at all. It has nothing to do with playing a game or acting or resisting attention, you literally have nothing to say and so cannot move your lips to say this nothingness. Everything is utterly invalid, incomplete, inconsequential. As in mania where all is equally good, equally valid and you can go with anything, in depression I frequently end up in shops stuck. Not wanting to go home. Not wanting to buy anything. Not knowing what to buy. So I just do the bare essentials and get the hell out and go straight home and curl up in a ball again, like a little hammy in a nest. Hamter are schizzy and very spirited, jut don't cross one they get into raging fury and do bite. Pandable was my best hammy and he threatened to bite me every time I woke him up during the day. Only when he knew for sure it was my hand and me did he calm down and sniff around it (after food, the tubby swine!)

Now I can't recall where this was going. Tubby swines. Hammies. Good a place as any to stop.
I'm taking my meds tonight; I feel qutie confused wtihout them and my mood cycles fast, on a 24 hour cycle a in one day up one down; one up one down etc etc

EVERYBODY PLEASE DO MY PERSONALITY DIOSRDERS QUIZ AND LEAVE RESULTS IN COMMENTS!
http://www.similarminds.com/personality_disorder.html

Tut mir leid: I don't recall what I put in this post, I can't spend all night fretting over wordings, so it's going IN. Sorry if it's boring....

Schizotypal personality disorder link:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0002493

Schizotypal wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypal_personality_disorder

(I'm supposedly schizotypal; though on the friendship side I'm not SCARED of people, I just don't NEED them there. I do like people I just don't NEED them the way some other people seem to need companionship. So in that aspect I'm schizoid rather than schizotypal. Now come on somebody else take the test please y'all are pretty normal, I'd like to see how you come out of it!

Furry Friday on Saturday

Hamsters remind me of....

Fur-balls!


WISHING Y'ALL A FANTASTICAL WEEKEND!

Just another Anic Monday

ANIC SHAMANIC. NO PANIC. NOT MANIC.

I slept for hours and hours till 3am then answered Buggalugz'z commment. Buggalugz has hammies. Robohammies, like I used to until they died and went into a cardboard box.

I slept for hours and hours got up 10:41 can't tell how many hours as kept waking up when it was dark, raving in my sleep, waking up again, feeling like I was on an adventure holiday, acheing all over wondering if I'd fallen off a horse, gone skiiing where did I get all these aches and pains? What have I been doing. Oh yeah I'm "ill" people who are "sick" lie in bed so that's what I did lay in my huge hammynest.

Then I got up fully engergized so energized I couldn't keep still at the pharmacy, had to walk half a mile and come back because Methadone Bird was being slow slow. Where did I go? Alcohol shop. Then I went home. Washed me. O yeah that was before the methadone. I did the hot moving bowl of water by the door thing. Space by the door. Slow slow careful wash of entire body head to toes. I know it's not as good as showering but there is no bath and a bath gets you clean when you lie there an hour and towel down all that skin comes off. Never happens in a shower. Showers make me so bright red from all the scrubbing then it hurts. Prefer a bath, me. So I washed, did that, then DOWN THE NEEDLE EXCHANGE with one black sack full of crapparse tiny sinbins and another bag with a tower-block shaped yellow one. No-one paying attention. One pharmacist talking crap about grams and drams someone else taking a shelf apart. Spare me. I left them at the till and vanished. So done that. Needles gone. Wahay!!!

I saw Valium Marilyn as she's intent upon obtaining Valium, I said I only wanted zopiclone. I am prescribed zopiclone. Zopiclone makes me sleep. I don't WANT to abuse drugs, why the hell should i?

I felt better today than any other day. Finally I am at a level. Although my head WAS bingbongtingtonging I was able to play with it and not get sucked into it, the way it does when foot is on the accelerator: instead of wind in the hair it's into a sound-vortex. Ultra-intense. Now I'm flying high and clear. Way better than before. My body is sore but I don't care for a body.

I gotta clean something up for someone else. Doing it in my own time, not out of time. Wednesday is a big day. Wednesday I'm going away to a psycho doctor and a psycho headshrinking thing. That's my big day. Tomorrow is Clean Day.

And I'm fine. I don't want to come down down down I will only frown frown frown and be a total waste of space. Waste of time. Why don't the government kill addicts and mentally ill people? They could save a fortune in taxes? I'd vote for myself to be killed. Never mind generalizations, I'm talking about me here. I'd vote for that. Would have voted for it over methadone, any day of the week. Less EXTENDED TORMENT involved. Ah! But they want us alive and suffering, so we do ourselves. That's probably it. I'm glad the Tories are in, at least I can call them Tory Bastards, even though I HATE LABOUR MORE and would NEVER IN A ZILLION YEARS VOTE LIBDEM. I hate all politicians. I'm the archetypal floating voter. Too central. Love saying "Tory BASTARDS" not voting. If forced to I vote green (who I loathe, when I look at their jealous, sour policies whether or not they're out for saving the planets they hate people who want to be Rich and Behind High Walls (only point I can see of being rich: cut yourself off from the world). So that's my views on politics. Be rich. Pay low taxes. Give money to charity. Choose your own charity and do not be taxed. And have an NHS that is the national health service, free for all.

{If I were actually tied down and forced to vote I'd give 3 Xs before I voted green, green is a v distant "if I absolutely have to" choice politicians deserve... lots of things I won't mention here... They SHOULD INSTITUTE THE UNIVERSAL PRESCRIPITON OF INJECTABLE DIAMORPHINE TO ADDICTS for one thing...}

That's it bye!!

Music comes later.

Illustrated: tiny furry robo (roborovski) hammy; tired yawning tiger; psychedelic psycho-tiger ~ this one forgot its methadone and the pharmacy's pretending to be closed. Note the missing bottom right tooth.

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...

Dank

I CANNOT SLEEP PROPERLY. Last night I thought I'd take a sleeping pill (temazepam 20mg), to set my sleep cycle earlier. So much for good intentions: it only made me high. As good a high as heroin. (And very much an acquired taste. Nobody but a junkie could ever feel the blurry, rubbery feeling of benzodiazepines as a "high".)

Still I didn't sleep. I found myself online in a blur. Eventually I got pill number two. I felt rubbery and dizzy and hazy ("high") as I stumbled up to get it. So I decided to be all responsible and bit it in half. The extra 10mg only took over as the previous 20 peaked and faded. An hour or two later I took the other half. Still wide awake, but in bed. If I'd have slept I'd have slept with the computer in my arms, like an electronic baby. At some point I took a third pill, a whole 20mg. My thought process had gone haywire by this time as I left a garbled comment on my own blog (yesterday). At least in my jumbled-up state I had sanity enough to clarify this is what part of me thinks...

Last thing I remember was realizing it was 6am and being distinctly displeased about that. Then I slept through past 4:30. Got up at 5. Ran down the chemist with an hour to spare.

People kept calling me this morning on withheld numbers. I suspect 2 different callers as the pattern of rings before hangup was different. The dealer usually rings a long long time, leaves it then rings an hour later. This person rang and rang a few rings over and over. I wish people wouldn't withhold. When I find out who it was (if it was my friend) I have to explain NOT to do that. The dealer will ask me to jump through a hoop, expecting me to wag my tail and enthusiastically woof "how high, master?!" He wants me to test a piteously small amount of free gear, knowing this would (ordinarily) prompt a phone call within 30 mins asking for a £20 bag if not a gram. This one charges £40 on the gram (too much). A weighed gram always used to be £30. Or £35 tops as 2x0.5g £20s. (2x20=no more than 35 in addict maths!)

In the last few years I noticed the price sneaking higher. I had only one dealer who did giant bags, weighing 0.6 or 0.7g for £20. These were full of B (brown heroin) and packed with lovely benzos as well. It was a £10 hit on one of these that made me miss my friend's funeral. I woke 2 hours later realizing I'd missed it. Then I slept for 12 hours straight. This gear was beige but went midnight black in the works. I tested benzo-positive on a test-card I obtained, hadn't been at the Valium or any other pills. So I knew it was dodgy B setting this off.

Checking my text messages set off the craving that inspired all this junkie information you just read. I got 2 offering 4 bags for £25. Another one saying great new stuff. All this from "Mr 0.6". He's just round the corner. He's also the one who sold me the very last lot of gear I ever took, 3 weeks ago yesterday. £15 bought what looked like 0.4g of crushed paracetamol, cooked up without any vit C and contained a yellowy heroin solution full of mindblowingly potent downers. These downers wiped more than a week, maybe 2 weeks from my memory.

So I could have run round the corner and scored. Instead I glugged my methadone, which was due anyhow (strange how a due methadone dose and heroin-craving coincide, even though methadone's not on my mind). I also popped a temazepam. Well it is Xmas!

What is this? Yet another day without the Killer B? I can't believe it.

I don't exactly feel marvellous, but I am surviving. Just. In a blank, disengaged, not happy way. I'm still here. I only wonder how I will ever move from here somewhere better.

Now the drugs are climbing on I don't want gear so much. Drink, temazepam, methadone. I'm still an addict to my core. An addict who doesn't use Heroin is like a bird that can't fly. I think I'll turn into a furry animal instead. A tubby great hamster, curled in a ball down its burrow, sleeping, slumbering, drowsing all day long.

Pets, past and future ~

These are some pets I'd most like to have... and actually have had.

FURRY FRIDAY ON SATURDAY


Akitas are one of the oldest pure-breeds of dog in the world. The American Akita was taken back from Japan by American troops after World War II. It is bigger and furrier than its Japanese counterpart. Whenever I see one down the local park, I want to kidnap it. One came up and stared me right in the eyes. I was down on the grass, so we were eye to eye. She just stared into me. Very intense. Akitas are loyal and dignified and very Japanese. Similar in character to Alsatians or Rottweilers. They are used in Japan as police dogs. I have never heard one bark.


An idea of their size!


The puppies are well known for being savage and wild. This is pretty obvious when you take a look at one:


My favourite little dogs are Norwich terriers. If I got a small dog I wouldn't care too much about breed. The type I'm on about tends to show up in Rescue Home catalogues named "Scruffy". If you've seen "Scruffy", you know the dog I want. Every animal shelter has a Scruffy.


Chinchillas look like rabbits from Mars. They need a big cage, a huge wheel and a "marble", that is, a stone slab you can stick in the freezer for them to lie on in summer. Chinchillas come from the high Andes and do not enjoy temperatures much above 75F, 25C.


The best pets I ever had were roborovski hamsters. These come from Mongolia. They're a totally different breed to ordinary hamsters (2in/5cm fully grown, pingpong ball-sized when curled up). They are the smallest and fastest hammies in the world.


Unlike ordinary hamsters, which fight when kept together, robos are highly social. They sleep in a heap:


They do everything together. But they're easily startled, don't tame at all easily and don't like being handled. They ping off on the floor at the first opportunity, have taken me 2-4 days to recapture. Imagine a wild house mouse on speed and you're still not close! Aren't they cute ...

WISHING Y'ALL A CHARMING WEEKEND. IF IT CAN'T BE CHARMING, THEN MAY IT BE TOLERABLE.