Skip paragraph One

Ignore paragraph one in italics if you're fed up of my anti-methadone rants; the post starts in paragraph two:~~~~~~~~~

I WENT TO NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS last night. There was a very manic atmosphere in there. People flying on being clean! I went and told someone my methadone dose and he repeated it out loud several times. I'm not proud of being on over 100mg. In fact I'm ashamed of it. Methadone is the devil's drug. If I won the lottery I'd get a proper morphine sulphate (pills) script. You can't inject the pills by the way; they're deliberately formulated to be sustained release. I've never injected pain pills (oxycodone, hydromorphone (Dilaudid) or morphine in my life. Why bother when street heroin was cheaper and stronger ~ which it was until late last year. Now it's not worth bothering with. I've dabbled twice since officially giving up and the result was so disappointing I didn't even feel like I'd used. Just dirtied myself up test wise and yet stayed effectively clean. Worst of both worlds, in a sense. If I couldn't get morphine pills on prescription I'd go back on street heroin in preference to methadone. That says a LOT about methadone. I'd rather reduce down myself to £1 a day then come off using Subutex. You CAN'T switch from 110mg methadone to Subutex because methadone is such an evil drug. The withdrawals are worse. It's more addictive. Methadone has nothing to recommend it. I can't believe my living mediocrity as a methadone addict. It's too depressing for words.

I washed my clothes today and was hypomanic in the launderette. At first I thought I'd had a drink because I felt drunk. Then I realized I'd drunk nothing and was just in a "mood". My moods have been lunging and plunging all day. I got a new Where To Find and go to my second favourite NA meeting tomorrow night. I have to get there early; I'm fed up of missing the chair ~ that is a recovering addict's life story, the best part of the meeting. I couldn't stay long when I went last time; I was really too manic to sit still. Not to mention too paranoid. This was the meeting where the overwhelming smell of bodily fluids assaulted me so forcefully I fled to the street last time I was there. That was in January, when I was psychotic.

I'm not psychotic any more, so I'm looking forward to staying the entire length of the meeting. Over an hour. Wow!

I told everyone I'd given up drinking and that I felt ill enough to suspect my chemist had been watering my methadoses. I was either in withdrawal or simply sideswiped by an opportunistic infection that synchronized with my giving up drinking. It wasn't hypochondriac; I never realized any connection between no drink and farting like a whizzing balloon until the nurse at the methadone clinic pointed this out, saying I "shouldn't have stopped so abruptly". Well thanks for telling me AFTER the event. All they do is hack away telling you you drink far too much, even though I'd cut down from a peak of 30 units a day to 4 units a day (30 units a day was me bingeing when there was no heroin to buy in the Great Drought of last autumn...) Well I'm really glad not to be poisoned with alcohol any more. I loathed alcohol in my youth. How on earth I ended up drinking the crap I'll never know. Glance along the booze shelves in a supermarket and it all looks really attractive, but that's champagne, Advocaat, Dooleys, Baileys, liquers of all complexions (especially bright blue ones)... and what do people drink? Beer, beer and boring beer. I was always a red wine drinker. Yes I am middle class to my core. I only went on to cheap white cyder when I was already a heroin addict and so permanently short of cash. I only ever started drinking as Dutch courage for begging up change. I only continued drinking because it potentiated heroin. Heroin was my drug of choice. It all revolved round heroin. I only used coke as a "sparkle in my spoon" ~ again to jazz up the heroin. Coke in heroin was like sugar in tea. And like sugar ~ on its own it was pretty gruesome. Valium was taken as a cheap alternative to heroin, when I did take it. Only later did I take it more regularly and that was as an antianxiety/antimanic agent. Sleepers I took strictly to SLEEP. Not to hang off a lamppost on the high road, gurgling inarticulately not noticing the astonished looks of shoppers ~ at 4pm. No, benzos aside ~ and my benzo-popping was no more drug abuse than taking aspirin for a headache is drug "abuse" ~ my drugs all revolved around Heroin, the central point of it all. Some addicts say they were somehow addicts before they ever took drugs. Well I wasn't! I was an addict because I was idiot enough to try heroin. Anyone who persists with heroin becomes a heroin addict. So my addiction says nothing about me but that I was fool enough to kick it off by trying the shit.

In other words just from wondering whether the wedding is on or off ~ a person can develop a COUGH!!

Another highly intellectual song from Babs:
ADELAIDE'S LAMENT



I took your advice earlier and am steeling myself for applying to work in this charity shop by my house. I have NO REFERENCES except the possibility that Deshane could referee for me. I couldn't ask the druggieservice. That would be obscene, having a methadone clinic vouch for me. For one thing if it were a proper service it would be a Heroin Treatment Service, for another thing telling your employer you're a raving methadone-head isn't a good idea. Even if that employer is a volunteer position with old ladies and half missing cruet sets, dinner services with a plate missing, pink stillettos and Ray Charles albums on vinyl peppered with Barbara Taylor Bradford paperbacks...

Right I'm off. Hope you all had a constructive day.

I'm DETERMINED TO SPEAK FLUENT CHINESE IF IT KILLS ME AND IT FEELS LIKE IT IS KILLING ME NOW. I can't say much more than 请坐！"do sit down" and 谢谢你！"thank you". When I finish that one I've only seven languages to go to fulfill my decalinguistic goal... (and my Mum thinks I have no ambitions in life!!)

I love this, where she bellows
why am I FALLING APART??!?
I KNOW HIM SO WELL



http://psychcentral.com/lib/2006/the-two-types-of-bipolar-disorder/all/1/
"True, a chemical storm is raging in the brain, but the analogy to the one taking place in the diabetic’s pancreas is totally misleading. Unlike diabetes and other physical diseases, bipolar defines who we are, from the way we perceive colors and listen to music to how we taste our food. We don’t have bipolar. We are bipolar, for both better and worse."

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!

Clipped Wings

I WANDER ABOUT feeling tired and lost. Like a bird with clipped wings, I should be soaring. Yet all I do is wander lost on the cruel earth.
I know my blog has descended to depths of ridiculous absurdity. I hope you all think I'm one of those who posts what I would have done if only I had the guts. That my blog is not a faithful account of deeds and misdeeds. EXAMPLE: me blaring out Barbra Streisand's Yentl and Chinese lessons first thing in the morning thinking I was following my true spirit, that everyone else was hopelessly uptight and sad for sleeping and not doing as I did. Why do I do these stupid things? Only the week before I had been musing on how calm I felt, how glad I was not to be bipolr anymore. How I enjoyed NOT being manic and on the drugs that were supposed to prevent this.

First sign of anything bar the pissiest weakest elevated mood and the antipsychotics went out the window, as did almost every other shred of common sense and I was ranting, roaring, raging, laughing, and wasting a hell of a lot of energy doing nothing. Thankfully the residual effet of the drugs would have been in me, preventing true mania from taking off. Which was why this attack was what I would have called "piss-weak mania" adding how much "I hate weak things" ~ meaning hypomania as opposed to mania with psychotic features, which is when you really feel wired to the national electricity grid. Fantastic!! And the chaos, like the mania, really is full-blown.

Oh what is wrong with me and why am I so STUPID. It's one thing to have "mental health problems"; quite Another to be STUPID. I wish I had a doctor, which I don't. I want quetiapine (Seroquel). Risperidone is making me excessively anxious and I cannot abide a drug that makes me need Valium on top. That is ridiculous. As for growing women's bressts, I meant what I said about making a fortune in prostitution on the back of them ~ that's exactly what I'd do if I grew tits. Gotta turn lemons to lemonade. Gotta cash in.



I'm sorry to Janice and everyone else I've offended with my suicide talk. Death is what I think of. Wouldn't you, if you were a great loser like me? I wish anonymous would actually shoot me dead not just talk about it. Being as Anonymous is all talk and life is crap I decline to be involved in such sordidness. I don't really want to commit suicide I just wnnt to die when I feel like that. Then I have all the benefits of being dead... I could possibly get off the self-"murder" aspect by claiming to be non-human. Which is quite possibly true. Anyway I'm going to try not to talk about suicide any more, for a month at least. It irritates me probably more than it irritates you. And I feel y'all are very irritated indeed by it.

What would you do if you were me? There's no answer to my problems and I feel I should never have been born. I feel like a post-Hiroshima baby who should have been aborted by nature, yet wasn't... Awful awful awful.



I'm not severely depressed by the way. According to Emil Kraepelin, author of Manic Depressive Insanity and Paranoia I have manic spells going as high as delirious mania (as high as you can go) but the reverse state is little more than morbid moodiness. Not true depression at all. Meaning there's nothing whatever wrong with me.

Videos 1: Coloring book 2: Life Story ~ "your life story began with somebody else" one of my exes once got totally the wrong impression when I wandered about singing this song. Guilty or what?! Hey that's the name of the album ha ha har. Illustrations: birds' clipped wings
Video 3: Hideaway from the "Guilty Too" album; written for Babys by Garry Gibb of the BeeGees.

What I'm trying not to be...

Gott
Oh Gott
Unser himmelischer Vater
Oh Gott
Und mein Vater,
der du ebenfalls in Himmel bist.
Möge das Licht
Dieser flackernden Kerze
Die Nacht erleuchten, so wie dein Geist
Meine Seele erleuchtet
Papa...
Kannst du mich hören?
Papa, kannst du mich sehen?
Papa, kannst du mich des Nachts finden?

Barbra is singing German out of my telly. I am trying not to feel depressed. I'm taking risperidone again. If you read yesterday's dollop you'll know I just found out I'm to grow women's breasts because of the side effects. I just hope they grow by Sunday so I can start out on the game. I really need some cash by the weekend. I'm down to my last £1.

I really wish Anna Grace's Anonymous would send me a gun. Then I would shoot Anonymous then shoot myself, har har. Nah: just kidding. I just made note of my goals: to speak fluent Chinese, Japanese, Cantonese, French, German and Spanish. As well as Greek and Hebrew (to read the Bible in the original). And Latin (to be educated). That makes 10 languages in all including English and I've always wanted to speak 10 languages fluently. I also want to be a bestselling novelist with sales exceeding one billion. I want over £100,000,000 in today's money. I want a house. Or ideally a collection of homes across the world. And I want to get rehoused somewhere posher. And I want £10 to tide me through till Monday. So where do I start?

I looked up Chinese characters last night. I've found a website that teaches the stroke order. Which just to confuse things is slightly different, in some cases, from Japanese. Once you get the hang you know, for example that horizontals tend to come before verticals (so you draw a cross the opposite way round to most Europeans). If you don't bother with stroke order you'll end up with dodgy looking characters.

Oh shit I've cooked sweet chili chicken pizza but forgotten the cloudy lemonade to go with it. Now I've got to blow my last 50p down Morrisons. If I really end up broke I'll have to beg on the streets. Hey they do non-cloudy for 21p. Even chips cost £1.30 a bag. The stingy govt never increased benefits when prices went up. Personally I think the sick and disabled (as well as poor people and unemployed people) should be shot dead to save money for the able bodied. There was some really good dolt on BBC Question Time saying rioters should be thrown out of council accommodation and cut off the dole. Yeah so people who've already demonstrated they're up for theiving and have very little respect for the society they live in ~ they should be made destitute so they're forcedinto thieving off the rest of us. Yeah bright idea. The former chief constable of London pointed out there's already a system where money is taken off benefits it's called a FINE. Fucking idiot people. I think rioters should be pilloried and whipped in minor cases or gassed to death in major ones. If prison is used, nobody should get less than ten years' solitary. And if they run out of cells ~ use London zoo! Prisons should take paying visitors anyhow. Wouldn't YOU have paid £100 to throw sticky buns at child killers like Myra Hindley or nutters like Charles Bronson? Most people would. They could have a torture channel on TV where you bid to be able to remotely operate callipers or red hot pokers on to paedophiles, rapists and especially burglars and muggers.

Do you think I'll get in when I run as Emperor of London? It's my ambition to throw the Queen out of Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle and to live there myself.


I'm not really manic. Like I said I'm trying not to be depressed. My friend Pinky, whose hair I wanted to dye varying shades of blue and green like a rocket lolly, phoned me up just now. She can tell I'm not manic any more. I'm no longer ranting and cackling at every opportunity. I wish I could be manic without the chaos. My house was in such disarray earlier I just wanted to curl up and sleep rather than deal with it all. Whenever I sleep I have nightmares about crackhouses up tower blocks.

OK I'm off to Morrisons for that 20p lemonade.... Please someone send me some money. I'm broke till Monday! And no it didn't go on drugs. I haven't spent ANY of my DSS money on drugs. And I gave up the tiny bit I drink about a week ago (don't know what day, don't wanna know). I just want to be able to go to AA as an EX-drinker. NA-wise I'm still a user, as I'm on methadone, which is more addictive and more evil than heroin. If only I won the lottery I'd go to a private doctor for morphine pills. Failing that I'd go back on street heroin and just reduce myself. Better for the mental health. No wonder I'm falling apart ~ methadone does nobody any good. It's appalling stuff. Well I'm stopping this rant before it starts have a nice day y'all...


THE WAY HE MAKES ME FEEL



MY COLORING BOOK

Riot News... etc

RIOT NEWS: it's all gone back to normal now. It was back to normal last night in fact. All the shops open. Some rumour had gone round the night before that gangs would come and trash the place,
which meant nearly everything was shut. The big 24-hour convenience stores stayed open world war ii style ~ ie you had to squeeze in past 6 East European bouncers, nip into the partially lit shop (blueberry live yogurt was in stock but they always buy far too much of the apple flavour. No British person buys apple flavour yogurt and everyone knows that so why stock up? You can tell a man has done the ordering in these places. They'll have 5 brands of butter all priced the same. No spreadable, no unsalted. As I say EVERYONE knows these places are fronts for drug money. The most obvious ones have partially empty shelves and yet have remained open for years...

The riots have spread to some northern towns but nobody knows what's happening up there, it's too far away. (I mean too far away to know the word on the street.) I can tell the atmosphere here is far more relaxed than 2 days ago and that's about it.

Oh crapping hell the internet connexion keeps going down. I'm using my neighbours' to get Barbra Streisand crooning free of charge. Stingy old T Mobile have stopped letting me watch Youtube all day except between 4pm and midnight after day one when I bust out my data allowance watching documentaries on Hiroshima etc. One big reason I want to speak fluent Japanese is to read some good books on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have a real thing about atom bombs. I also like the poetry of Matsuo Basho.

I'm doing Chinese first because I happen to have the CDs as well as the book. I was too addicted to heroin when I got into Japanese to bother buying the discs as well. A Japanese accent is FAR easier to master than Mandarin Chinese. You do have tones, but only as Yoruba has tones. That is the sentence inflects in a certain way and some words are distinguished by high or low pitched syllables. Just as we say "I record a record" altering tone and pitch to distinguish "record" the verb and "record" the noun. I always had an ambition to learn a language that was as different from English as possible. It absolutely had to be nonIndoEuropean (so Hindi was out). Had to have funky writing. Ideally had to have tones. So I picked Thai and chose to go to Thailand. Then I went to India instead. Long story. I do find it irritating that people go "oh that's such a hard language" and yet expect all the Thais to understand English! It's probably easier for an English person to learn an East Asian language than a person from there to learn English because English has torturous grammar compared to Chinese or Thai, which are like pidgin English "today I go shop buy chicken, go home cook chicken eat dinner!" like that. The words are unchangeable, there are no plurals, no inflected tenses (teach/taught). All is simple. And the lazy English claim such languages are exceedingly difficult, just because they sound a bit like a cat being strangled ~ well they do when I try and pronounce them!

Having these yummy zopiclone pills I now don't need sleep. I'm sleeping like a baby all hours of the day. My mood is still a bit elevated and I'm still very excitable compared to normal but I can sit still and don't find myself pacing endlessly at 3 in the morning. I had horrible nightmares last night about heroin and crack. I am sweating like a swine. I was so disorganized last week my house looks like a bomb's hit it (yet again) all my clothes are dirty. I am living on biscuits because I just cannot bear to eat proper food (can't afford it for that matter). The less I spend on drugs the LESS money I have not more!! I was doing OK on heroin. Now I'm in chaos. I'm really glad I gave up alcohol though. Noxious stuff. I'm not one of those people who turns into a psychopath after half a glass. Or one of those who has one drink then won't stop until the bar is dry. Or they're lying unconscious under the bar. For one thing I never drink in pubs; I hate them. The formula of loud music and lots of young people crammed in never made sense. Nowhere to dance. Wrong drug for dancing (Ecstasy doesn't mix with drink at all and E was the only drug that really made me wanna dance. Drink just makes you sway then fall over.) What I really loathed about pubs was not being able to hear a word anybody said for all the loud music. If you want loud music go clubbing ~ then you can dance and do as you please. Ukh I loathe pubs. I never even liked the taste of booze. What other people call a "warm glow" was to me a burning stomach. Alcohol does not give any kind of high, let's face it. It just blanks bad feelings to an extent. When I was manic I barely felt drink at all. When I was depressed it made me feel better but not better enough. Just because it's a CNS depressant doesn't follow that it exacerbates melancholia. They say IN SOME PEOPLE and I don't think I was one of them. I felt just as depressed off drink as on it and I gave it up for weeks at a time just to prove it. This is years ago, when giving up was easy. I only found it hard more recently because the habit of a can in the morning (first thing) and another in the afternoon was so entrenched. Now I can go in the shop and buy the drinks I used to fantasize about but couldn't afford: Coca Cola/Pepsi, chocolate milk, ginger beer (nonalcoholic). Cloudy lemonade. I far prefer soft drinks to yucky old beer, which I avoided on principal. Uptight men drink it because they're too scared to drink anything else. That's why I drank cyder mixed with fruit juice. The fruit juice made it look like a soft drink for the benefit of people in waiting rooms, on buses etc.

By the way my doctor is MONUMENTALLY FUCKING THICK. What kind of an idiot gives someone they know is bipolar an ANTIDEPRESSANT when they're not sleeping because they're MANIC. Fucking idiot. That's how you put someone in a mental unit. That's more negligent than smoking crack. It makes you higher. She really is stupid. The methadone clinic want an ECG. Some bullshit to do with "prolonged QT-intervals". Dr Schoopid went and filled out a bloods form and said "no we'll order the ECG after these tests come back" so I repeated another three times that the methadone clinic want an ECG because my dose is over 100mg but the silly cow would not listen. How the hell this woman manages to practise medicine without killing her patients I do not understand.

Hang on a minute my dr is foreign. I bet her medical degree is a forgery. Wouldn't surprise me at all.

Maybe I should get her investigated by the general medical council...? She brought up the issue of mirtazapine (Remeron) yet again. Mirtazapine that made me so out of it I was stood outside my house in awe at 3am watching lightning course down the walls constantly then dropped me down so low I was hallucinating dead bodies. That drug. I know what she wanted: to fob me off with that crap instead of a true sleeping pill. I'm getting an Indian male doctor next time. They dish out sleepers like sweets.

I've gone long past that prissy stage of believing sleeping pills are bad. My attitude is if ya can't sleep zonk yerself out or just don't go to bed. But don't complain about it. I only get insomnia when I'm too hyper anyhow. When I'm too depressed I sleep all day and all night!! Which is a good thing. I don't WANT to be awake when I feel like that.

Has this gone all boring? Rant rant rant. How did I get myself such a THICK doctor? She even asked WHY she was prescribing risperidone if I don't hear voices. I said to keep me sane. Fucking idiot. I dont' hear voices all the time, only in phases, which she SHOULD KNOW if she knew anything about psychiatry. My consultant sent her a letter which she obviously didn't bother reading ~ the instruction to set up a rispeidone script would have been enclosed, so she can't claim to have received one and not the other. Silly cow. Right I'm off:~~~~~~~

O man I've really gotta do something about my feet. They smell like a dead toad!

And that reminds me: what do frogs drink?
Croaker-Coala!

LAZY AFTERNOON
this is one of Babbsie's best vocals. and a highly intellectual song about beetlebugs zoomin' and there not being another human in view...



THE LOVE INSIDE
the BeeGees recorded a demo of this song for Barb, ruining it with their horrible voices. Hers is much better; she reaches a high E6 in this song...



Illustrated: zopiclone (Chinese version); eszopiclone (Lunestra) nearest equivalent available in the American market. Eszopiclone was refused a licence in Europe for being too similar to zopiclone which was already there... Zopiclone might have been turned down in America because it does cause memory loss. Eg if someone phones you when you're on it you might tell them you've moving to Holland then forget all about it the next day... LIKE I DID!!

Ill in an ill city

I WAS FEELING TERRIBLY ILL TODAY. I couldn't sleep until well past 6:30am. Woke in terror just after 7, thinking I'd overslept and eeked out my sleep until 9:45. Then I flew up the road, drank my methadone, which frankly doesn't seem to be holding me as I get up feeling like a block of ice every morning and got the bus to the drug clinic. I was dressed in full winter coat and my pajamas (which are a pair of jogging bottoms and a crusty old jumper). No way was I going in a shower the way I felt. I crawled up the road to the clinic with chills, nausea and fatigue. Of course as soon as I started talking my head was going quickly yet again and I was in an "elevated mood" (I'm starting to get sick of that phrase, but it's better than being depressed, hey). It's now 1814 hrs and part of me could sleep now but I don't want to sleep. Considering I didn't get a lot more than 2 hours last night I feel pretty good.

I called in on Valium Marilyn on the way back and was instantly struck with terrible wind. I ran to the toilet. Bullets of constipation came firing out, followed by a slithering serpent of diarrhoea that got sloppier and sloppier until eventually it was like melted chocolate ice cream spraying out of my arse. It got all over the round-the toilet rug, all down my leg. Then I tried to flush the toilet and it blocked nearly spilling my diarrhoea water all over the floor. Valium Marilyn said "aww don't worry about it we all get the shits sometimes" but it was like a scene from a Ben Stiller film. You know where the rodent prevents him flushing the loo or whatever it does.

Tomorrow I'm hitting my dr for sleeping pills. I desperately need some zopiclone 7.5mgs. They are the only sleeping pill I find truly effective ~ equivalent to over 40mg temazepam. Temazepam just makes me watch late night TV feeling relaxed and rubbery. Zopiclone actually makes me drop off just like natural sleep. Within an hour I'm usually out for the count. Even when severely manic I got to sleep within 2 hours of a single pill. I did only sleep 2.5 hours a night but would have stayed awake for days on end without it. That stuff about your body "getting the sleep it needs" is a damn lie. Yes it might be true as regards MILD insomnia, which isn't worth worrying about. But if you're sleeping less than a quarter of your normal ration with no end in sight it just hypes you up more and more and more and causes severe irritation. Actually I have FOUR separate issues for my GP, so I'd better write them down.

Duta my drugs worker laughed aloud when I ranted on about my farts but she said the chills and malaise were probably down to alcohol withdrawal. I haven't drunk anything since Saturday morning latest. Possibly Friday afternoon. (I don't want to know when my last drink was: frankly I don't care). It's true gastrointestinal distress, nausea and diarrhoea, sweating and malaise are symptoms of alcohol withdrawal but I thought you usually got the shakes and I haven't had any shakes... So I don't know. Also I feel worse today than any other day. Yet I'm not craving drink at all. Does this make any sense to anyone out there? Could it be drink withdrawal? I have been drinking fairly heavily for about ten years. Though the consumption was little above the government's recommended limit in the end, I did used to drink three litres of white cyder a day for a long while. At one point my consumption exceeded a bottle of Scotch a day ~ when converted into spirits. That's when I realized I had to stop. I literally could not remember what I had done for days on end. Tiny scraps of memory remained, like a blowtorched photo album.

RIOT NEWS: London's police cells are all FULL. There have been disturbances North, South, East, West and Central. Imagine riots in every borough of New York City, including Manhattan and that's how widespread this trouble has been. Most of it is mass looting but homes and businesses have been burned out. Many attempted carjackings have been reported. I've seen no rioters who looked North European or Asian but you're not allowed to state this obvious fact. Tonight the Met police promise 16,000 officers on the streets ~ most being busssed in from other forces. Though those other forces may soon be needing their personnel as there are copycat events in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool...

The government promise rioters and looters will "face the consequences of their actions". This probably means 50 hours community service each! Construct a mass pillory I say and let the populace get their own revenge with rotten eggs and dogshit!

I'm focusing my attention on learning to speak Chinese. Astonishingly my accent is pretty good ~ considering how different it is from English. I had it blaring through the telly at top volume last night ~ between Amy Winehouse and Yentl ~ and replicated vowels, consonants and tones pretty faithfully. Wow.

Wish me luck at the doctor's tomorrow. If it's not a lack of alcohol I have some weird disease... whatever could it be??

By the way, the BBC are calling the riots "the worst in British history"... ooer!

A CHILD IS BORN
a beautiful song... the visuals are from The Little Mermaid ~ no connexion with the song, which comes from the album Color Me Barbra



This is stuff I keyed in last night:~~~~~~~

ps that Classical Barbra cover (Japanese version) says in katakana: Kurashikaru Baabura ~ that's the nearest the Japanese language comes to it! And her name in Japanese is Baabura Sutoraisando! (the syllables are run very quickly together so it sounds more like Baabra Storaisando. You learn something new every day doncha know!

0352 hrs I cannot sleep. Haven't tried. I feel too hyper. I just did an online entertainment test "are you manic?"; it's supposedly a clinical evaluation. I scored 15 "you are severely manic, see a doctor immediately!" I'm not "severely" anything I'm just a bit manic that's all. Severely manic is when the stairs talk to you as you run down them and nobody can follow what you're saying. That's severe. I'm mild. Bloody internet drs. Get a life!!

RIOT ALERT: the civil unrest has spread to Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol. London is burning North, South, East, West and Central. Nothing like this has ever happened here before. Previous riots were confined to small areas: Brixon (where I used to go clubbing; it also happens to be a notorious centre for hard drugs, which I wasn't into at that time) and Broadwater Farm (very dodgy housing estate where I nearly died ODing on heroin (I was in hospital for 2 or 3 days afterwards). I've been back once since then and it makes my blood run cold...)

Here's some Chinese:
妈骂麻马吗 （ma1 ma4 ma2 ma3 ma) "is mother scolding the hempen horse?"
you just say ma ma ma ma ma ma that is ma with a high tone, ma with a falling tone, ma with a high rising tone, ma with a dipping tone, then ma with no tone ~ it's a kind of Chinese pun. Note every single ma except ma3 (which means "hemp") is written with the horse radical 马. A woman and a horse 妈 means mother (ie sounds like horse, means woman); two mouths over a horse 骂 means "to scold" and a mouth next to a horse 吗 means it's the ma particle, which just means "innit"! See: Chinese is easy. Easier than French or German BY A LONG WAY. And none of that irritating "English with spelling mistakes" phenomenon of European languages. No grammatical info that can only be expressed in tabular form (I loathe that). No verb endings. No plurals as such. The Mandarin accent sounds most peculiar (much more foreign than the Cantonese most people know from Chinese restaurants) with retroflex r (like the American r) and even a retroflex shhh sound. Retroflex means you turn your tongue backwards to pronounce it. I'm getting the accent pretty good now. Having practised via the DVD player and TV at top volume. My housemates already think I'm crazy so I'd rather be thought of as crazy and industrious than plain nuts. Wouldn't you??!?

Lots of things, including an anti-drug rant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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





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




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

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

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

Heroin? TAKE MY ADVICE AND GIVE IT A MISS.

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

STAY AWAY FROM DRUGS! STAY FREE!

✰✰✰✰✰✰✰


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

Sun is shining.... expensive new optical wear required...!

YOU KNOW if I deleted everything that might embarrass me at some time afterwards, I'd barely have any blog left.

What was all this crap about me being pushed into lying in front of a train by the bitchy Buta? Ridiculous!

I was in a right tizzy earlier. Then I spoke to somebody else from the clinic, who calmed me down.

Now my mood has switched and I've been feeling slightly manic all afternoon. And it definitely is mania (or hypomania, to be precise). I feel like I've drunk an enormous amount of black coffee and it's kicked in all at once. Or I've taken a tiny dose of speed and it's there, perking me up all the time like a hamster's perky ears... I'm also having mood swings. One minute I'm high, next I have an unaccountable sinking feeling. Then I'm hyper. Then I want to cry. Exactly what happened before when the mood went UP!

I'm quite happy being UP. It's FAR better than being down. I was reflecting on how this is supposed to be a mental illness and thinking what a crazy place is this world we live in. I hope I stay up like this. I think I deserve it. I've been depressed for far too long. I also want some Transitions or Reactions lenses for my glasses. I didn't want photochromic lenses in my only pair of glasses, as they always darken when you go outside, no matter what the weather and I'd only want that in summertime. So I'm saving another £69 to get the trendy frames everyone says suits me in Reactions brown. To be frank, I prefer grey-black to brown, but my frames are bronze so grey would look like a mistake at the factory. What do YOU think?

I was going to get contact lenses (mostly so I could wear sunglasses) but I'm too old for contacts these days...

Ukh you know what, I wish that Buta woman hadn't put pressure on me the way she did. I'm now fantasizing about going into rehab. And to do that I need the rehab seminar. See this is what happens when you cajole and coerce against people's will. They wont' even do what they WANT to do, because you're forcing the point. I would have thought Buta, being a mental health nurse, would understand that aspect of human nature. But then again, she does seem a bit stupid, so who knows....



20:30 hrs The News of the World, Britain's most salacious tabloid is to go out of production as of next Sunday. The 168 year old publication, which sold 5 million copies in its heyday had become mired in a giant phone hacking scandal. Royals, celebrities and even murder victims' families' mobile phones were hacked into resulting in a scandal so great that the newspaper lost nearly all their advertisers ...

Off... off and away!!!

I HAVE BEEN looking into doing a methadone taper and how steep can I make the taper with any chance of longterm success. The gist of the research seems to say you can reduce in 10% or 10mg steps (whichever is the smaller) in increments lasting one week to ten days. Because scripts are one or two weekly I would opt for weekly steps. Ideally I'd just reduce down by one milligram a day: I can't see that I should feel anything at all reducing like that. You certainly wouldn't feel anything reducing heroin by that amount, but methadone is different, which is why I rant and rage about it being "more addictive" it IS. Which is plain ridiculous and plainly true. My own whingeing and complaining annoys me so much I just want this reduction got on with as fast as possible, so the Whining Junkie Persona can be left in the trashcan of the past, where it belongs.

I'm on over 100mg of methadone a day, by the way so I have to think of the reduction in three phases. Phase One: taking the dose down to anywhere between 90 and 60mg. 70 or 80mg used to be the ordinary highest dose an NHS methadone clinic would allow in days gone by and prescribing practices seem to be reverting back, with people who once were on relatively generous doses complaining the clinic won't reinstate them.

Oral methadone is said to have an equivalence to IV diamorphine of anything from 4 to 1 to 1 to 1. 4-1 meaning that 150mg methadone would cover a habit of 600mg diamorphine ie about a gram and a half of street heroin as it used to be at 40% purity (about a year ago). Since the Great Heroin Drought in this country heroin is only a fraction of its old potency, making methadone very much easier to stomach for me. It holds me way, way better than it ever used to.

Once I get down to Stage 2, which will be hopefully not much more than 60mg, I'll push for them to reduce it at 5mg a week until I'm down to about 30mg.

From 30mg methadone you can in theory transfer over to Subutex or Suboxone (same difference, from what I've heard). I would like to go on Subutex but I'm scared of the upheaval it involves. You have to go days without methadone until you're in pretty florid withdrawal, then switch over to this stuff that made me feel hyper, shrivelled my sleep down to a maximum 4 hours for days on end. Even when it started coming back I was only sleeping 6 hours. I felt so high on days 2 and 3 of Subutex I barely noticed the withdrawals. Looking back I had quite a few symptoms of hypomania during this time. I don't mind being hypomanic but my moods and sleep are so incredibly sensitive to withdrawal it would seem unwise to rock the boat unnecessarily.

From much below 20mg if I stayed on methadone I'd want absolute control of how swiftly and by how much I reduced and if the clinic won't accommodate me, from here on I would just score methadone myself and drink it to suit my own timetable. I don't trust drug clinics. The new one I'm at offered to transfer me to Subutex from over 100mg methadone. Which all sounds very nice but would probably put me in a mental hospital. They don't care. So when I have to, I'm looking after myself. The ONLY reason I'm sticking with an official clinic during the cutdown, apart from the will to save money, is so that if I ever DO end up in a nuthouse I'll get my methadone automatically without having to go through "titration" (chemical torture when they won't give you enough for days on end).

When I'm near 1mg I'm just diluting the stuff in a huge bottle of water and supping it all through the day. I would cut down to zero over several days ending up on microscopic doses so tiny they couldn't possibly be doing anything (why not?)... then finally at some point many months from now... I SHOULD BE CLEAN!!!

BTW I have to be heroin-free for anything bar the very beginning of my taper to be worthwhile. So I count myself off the gear as of now. My methadone dose goes down 10mg as of the middle of next week.

********



Ha! Becha all thought I was going to post exclusively about Anna (again). I have little to say about her. Except that I put her book up here because if she wants attention HERE IT IS. She says she faked her suicide because she wanted to end her blog. The post by a "friend" does echo this:

Anna wanted me to say Good Bye to everyone who reads this blog. She's sorry she couldn't keep it up.

I'm not at all convinced she properly thought out what she was doing or going to do.

On 4 June she mentioned an Hispanic guy named Jose staying at her parents' house. On 14 June 2 news reports appeared about a Jose Machiote, who was in possession of drug paraphernalia, being arrested for armed robbery at a corner shop. Which does chime with Anna's post on 24 June:

That homeless guy I had staying with me ended up sticking up a store and getting caught.

~Fox 11
~Green Bay Press Gazette

So that seems to be true. But...

I really wish she hadn't lied like she did...

...o well.

I feel depressed enough and stressed out enough (about coming off this methadone (and moving house)) as it is. I keep waking up in the middle of the night in horror. My head kind of resonates with stray words in an odd sort of way. The way I wouldn't be surprised if I'd smoked a spliff and it did that, only I don't smoke spliffs at all. And I'm pretty fed up with methadone clinic staff for having lectured me that all my problems would evaporate if only I gave up drugs and they plainly haven't and didn't when I was just on methadone. (My depression was constantly blamed on crack. They no longer lay my moods at alcohol's door, as the amount I drink is so tiny now.) I want off drugs because I'm fed up of them, not because I believe life will be any better. What I want to do most of all is just up and away and get out of the country, which I cannot do on methadone. So that's my goal...

Sleepy Maniac

UKH. MY SLEEP IS ALL OVER THE PLACE. At 8pm I started feeling tired. I realized that, having got up at 1am, it was actually time to sleep. So I slept for one hour. Then I woke up and felt too excited to sleep again until it was light outside. I got to sleep finally at some time around 6, 7 or 8 in the morning. I kept waking up. Then I slept all day and missed my clinic appointment. I didn't have bus fare on me, so would have had to walk all the way down. I wasn't up for this, so I just skipped it. Now I've got to go in tomorrow and do penance in the waiting room.

I slept 6 or 7 or 8 hours and got up some time after 4. I seemed to spend most of the day half awake and smoking. Anyway I realized what I've been doing, instead of spending about 16 hours awake like a normal person, then sleeping 8 and going to bed and getting up at the same time each day, what I've been doing is staying awake longer than 24 hours ~ past the time I last got up ~ staying up staying up somewhere between 30 hours and a day and a half. Then I'm sleeping an average amount of sleep ~ somewhere between 7 and 9 hours. So I think I've slept OK. But I haven't. The spaces between periods of sleep have grown huge.

I wasn't in a good mood today. I still feel kind of hyped up but irritable and tired. The bouncy ball shop was SHUT when I skulked round there with my 50p. I avoided heroin and bought 3 zopiclone sleeping pills instead. These cost me £5. Ripoffsville; but I was desperate for them. I've popped one already. I'd rather sleep now and get up in the early hours. There's a slim chance I might sleep right through but I dunno. Every time I try and sleep I feel like an over-excited child I just cannot wind down. I'm definitely not full-on manic; when I am everything looks bright and luminous and incredibly textured, I feel even more excited (as if I'm on drugs) and when I close my eyes my head is lit up vividly from the inside ~ it's literally like watching a particularly luminous cine film of the most spectacular dream-imagery in the style of Michael Jackson's Leave Me Alone video. So I'm not manic, just a bit hyped up. And I have been hyped up for days. I'm not complaining by the way. Sleep deprivation and agitation aside, it's a million times better than being depressed.

For some stupid reason, instead of buying proper food I went and bought a highly indulgent chocolate cake complete with buttercream filling and heaps of milk, plain and white chocolate shavings on top. And I also think I'm getting crouton poisoning from too much cup-a-soup.

I lost my second worst bouncy ball under a car last night. I was lying on the street with a stick trying to poke it out. Thank God the police didn't drive down the road, I'd have been a gonner!

I really want to speak Japanese (again). I'm so glad I decided my language books are the only ones I'm going to keep. No novels. No crap. I've so many books to get rid of it's unreal. Anyway I have two kanji character dictionaries. One teach yourself Japanese which is falling apart. I don't know whether to buy another copy or switch brands. I need a book and CD compendium. I've got Teach Yourself Mandarin Chinese which I also want to learn, but the pronunciatio's VERY difficult (for me) ~ far harder than Thai ~ and though I do want to learn Chinese, I want to learn Japanese more. In my opinion no person can call himself a citizen of the world without speaking French, Spanish and Chinese fluently. Out of those 3 I only know French of a terrible standard. But good enough to go to Morocco and speak practically no English. African French is way easier to follow than French French.

Enough of this: o yeah German. I've got a real bug to speak perfect German (yet again). When I was at school my teacher used to lend me ancient 1970s copies of Stern magazine, which is like a cross between Time and Newsweek magazines and the best of the Sunday papers rolled into one. O man I vividly recall leafing through longing so badly to understand what was in that magazine. Finally, after doing a year of German at university, dropping out, picking it up again about 18 years later by ploughing through the original text of Christiane F (the true story of a child prostitute and heroin addict ~ which yet again, stemmed from an original report guess where? In Stern magazine! It's also a cult film in the history of heroin cinema, you can watch it here.)

Yeah so that's about that. I hope this isn't too swirly I'm not in the mood for reading back the crap I've written tonight. The Apprentice is on and I must ping and gobble more cake.

Sweet dreams y'all!!!


If you wonder why I rave on about how I love being manic, take a look at this. It's the exact manner of thing that I see when, during a particularly exalted excited episode, I shut my eyes ....

MICHAEL JACKSON: LEAVE ME ALONE