8:40PM Calm

IT'S MID EVENING. I am trying to remain calm. I know I was ranting like anybody's business this morning and part of this afternoon. Feeling very euphoric and "grandiose"!! Yeah!! Fantastic in other words. Way better than I did any other day. Higher, yet clearer. And less bizzledizzle in the head (I can say that without my head going fizzle dizzle wizzle hizzle) OK it just did, but at a far lower grade. I didn't go into a vector cyclone thing where it takes me off like a helecopter flying into a spiral and out the other side, then touching down on top of all that energy, looking down on everything. On top of the Universe. That feels pretty good.

I'm half tempted to give a list of drugs I didn't take to get there. I do need to make one point clearer. If I mention my experience in terms of drugs or psychedelics, those are merely terms of reference. I never ever was an addict to those substances. I'd done heroin more times in my first month of heavy using (not my first month of using) than I ever did Es, trips and all else in my life. You need to get in perspective the AMOUNT of something taken and the IMPACT it has on you. Heroin has had near-zero impact. It only ever took stuff away. Gave me very little. Psychedelics give. Ecstasy gives. Whether the giving is good I'm not going into here, and I do have a policy of not condoning drug use. Describing, yes, condoning. NO! Live your life, do not use. I cannot think of a single chemical I truly think was "worth it". My biggest recurring dream re drugs was of temazepam, which used to come in yellow (or dark green) eggs full of gel (or liquid). I dreamed of rugby ball (that is an American football) sized yellow ones. I only ever took temazepam in the early 90s that was prescribed to me. So I was dreaming of my own sleep medication which my own doctor, who was the best GP I've ever had (had a rolling once a week appointment with him, that's why I wasn't raving ALL THE TIME back then I was really badly in a mess. The music was a soundtrack, I indulged occasionally, it made a big impression, I indulged again in the late 90s when I was more together, it still made me a mess, I don't do it now) ~ that's me and raving, Eeeeing, clubbing, party drugging. Yes I did it every week for a short while maybe a year or so. So when I feel really good of course I'm going to think of E, the drug which made me feel "like I'd finally found the pot of gold at the rainbow's end". Ecstasy also made me feel lied to. Like nothing else, including heroin, ever has. And I have also spent days lying in bed crying because I felt lied to, let down, and that the people who seemed so nice were themselves on E, I was myself, but we all had issues, sometimes deep-cut horrifying ones and I mean other people, not me that horrified me who didn't need horrifying. And the whole thing turned out into a mess with me hallucinating a good 24 hours after the last pill which MDMA doesn't do, I was scoring the same pills off the same dealer as everyone else. And I wasn't the only one cracking up and not coping come Monday morning. It was horrible to see. When I realized the truth, the real truth about clubbing, beyond the obvious fact that these were young people pretty badly overdoing it in some cases (not mine ~ I was just doing it and the little I did, usually no more than 2 pills... except the very end when it went past 5 then 8... that was over... 4 occasions ie 2, 2.5...2.5 (shit I'm lying I did 1.5 then 1 ie 10 pills=4nights out) ... and I was very well organized re timing etc. When I didn't want to take it I didn't take anything. Or a tiny handful of mushrooms. So few I wasn't "tripping" just had a euphoria you get off a tiny mushroom dose but not acid.

I can't even remember where I was going with this, and Im not spending all evening editing and obsessing. Other people can obsess if/when they want to. I'm not as obsessive as some people seem to think. I have ASPECTS that are.

Hey I found a different tune. It's slow. It kind of makes me want to cry. I don't want to cry about anything. Never cry about myself, it always mystifies me when people cry because they ... whatevered. Tears of giult I can understand. Crying because you hurt someone, I understand. Ha! Do you know what actually healed a lot of my friendships (in retrospect) was me crying when we were yelling at one another. These were friendships/relationships with the opposite sex. Didn't realize at the time they were probably touched.

When my friend Lucky died I felt nothing for a whole month. Didn't go to the funeral. I was in a mess. Had nothing to wear. Didn't want to face people I didn't know who knew her who knew when..? Banging on about her. She fell into frienships with the opposite sex that weren't sexual (or weird) she was nearly 60 they were probably late 20s or in their 30s and they did crack and heroin round at hers. Lucky's flat was a safe, quiet, peaceful place to go. I deliberately kept some distance as her friends seemed to last a certain time then vanish. (She was an addict: an expert at self-confusion.) Then she died, suddenly. It wasn't an overdose, she just dropped down dead, in front of someone else. The paramedics couldn't save her. She always thought she was invincible but I remember myself dragging her from her bathroom after she overdosed. The jolt woke her up, but in those moments she was gone. If you don't take overdose seriously you really are a fool. Anyway a month later I ran into her old friend who showed me the Order of Service from the funeral. I suppose the fact that he was carrying it on him said a lot. And then I cried. And cried and cried and cried and cried. I have never cried so much over anyone I knew. I hope wherever you are you feel flattered Lucky. I cried for you.

I wanna contact the living... not sure I understand this road I've been given...
that's it!



ps if you wonder why the unedited rants, if i tidy up when i'm extreme i'll get lost in the words, if i wait till a time like now: I'll make my own witness statement to myself into a lie, so I can't do it. The "worst" stuff IS who I WAS who I AM who I BECOME when I am like THAT.

Thanks Lizzie. For everything.

A Gun to my Head

I'M IN TROUBLE WITH MY LANDLORD for being too scruffy. At least I think I am. Downstairs told me this. Downstairs and I do not get on. This is the trouble I have and I can tell you but it doesn't make anything any clearer or less How It Is.

Last time I was in trouble with my landlord (my old landlord) basically for living in a mess, for not coping. A way worse mess than this one, the day I had to go down the council to sort out my housing I had this weird feeling, as if someone had put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger. Instead of feeling pain or stress I just felt unreal. I could not engage with anything. I knew what was happening, but it was not real to me.

That is how I feel now. I should be in a frantic scrabble to clear up, but I'm not. In a way I don't care about anything at all. If I get chucked out I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to go on holiday. Or vacation, to you Americans. I will take as much methadone as I can carry. I know where to buy it so I can get a week's supply up front at high doses. This I will cut down drastically on the road. Detoxing makes me hyper. Hyper makes me pace. Pacing is walking. I can get a lot of travelling done by detoxing. If I feel suicidal I'm lucky because there's snow. I need only go to sleep outside and I might be lucky enough to die. But I'm not into dying, as I said I'm going on holiday. I won't say where because people will try and follow me or spy on me. But I'm going.

If I stay here I will turn my home into an operating theatre. But I'm almost hoping to get chucked out. Because I'm fed up of my old life. The problems and non-problems I thought were caused by heroin seemingly aren't. I always knew this was the case. Heroin was only a mask, masking the reality of a person not coping. I don't need heroin to dissociate myself. I don't need heroin as an anaesthetic. I only feel real pain in withdrawal or extreme mood states. My ordinary depression is usually mild enough just to blank me. Most of the time. But I have a nasty tendency to cycle through various mental states and into one when I realize with full weight and intensity What I Have Done. And then I feel very deeply negligent and sorry. Sorry for the hurt I have caused others. And sorry for myself. Usually I don't feel for myself, but sometimes I do, and I hate feeling anything.

So I can live without heroin. Heroin was just a waste of time. I want off these opiates, they're only disabling an already disabled person. The sooner I'm off them the better. If I get made homeless I will have an A1 chance to come off because I will be nowhere near my methadone pharmacy, nowhere near the drug clinic or my "loving mother" who only wants to salve her conscience ~ or the rest of my family who do love me but I pity them for it. I wish I could kill their pain without killing them. (Maybe they would be better off on heroin!)

See I feel sad now because I have written the words of a badly messed up, lost person and I feel that. I can't accept that I am that person. Because if I could I would already be working not to be like that and I cannot do it. I try. I do try, but something invisible and very powerful, like bulletproof glass... something stops me. I wish I had never been born. I hate knowing the World. I don't care what the world knows about me, but I don't want to know the world any more. I never asked to live like this. I never asked to know what I know. I am the sort of idiot who would have bitten that forbidden fruit in Eden. I know. Drugs like Ecstasy, acid, ketamine, mushrooms opened up an understanding of something that is inexplicable to someone who hasn't been there. A kind of knowledge of good. A vision of paradise (on Ecstasy especially). So did heroin: an understanding of Evil. And a desperation you never knew was possible. And feeling it every single day for years on end.

I don't want to know. I don't want to know anything any more. I wish the anaesthesia would come back.

Part 3

LONDON. CITY OF POSSIBILITIES. Arguably it is the Capital of Europe. When I came it was thee place to be in the entire world. London, to turn a phrase dropped by the Americans, was "swinging". Here they called it Cool Britannia.

Only I could play barely any part in this because I was ill. So badly run down I ahd to go to bed after a simple trip to the shops. And I could only buy one bag of shopping at a time, this I had to split in two, half in each hand, for the journey home.

I had a dull routine. As I say, of seemingly daily food shopping ... and that was about it. I did hit the West End a few times. But often, by the time I'd got there (it only took 20 minutes by tube!) I was too knackered out for any adventures or fun.

I battled on nonetheless and didn't even tell a lot of people I had "M.E." as they tehn iked to call it in this country. The M means myalgic ~ muscle pain; the E is encephalomyelitis ~ ie an inflamation ("itis") of the brain and nervous system. Basically it is exhaustion, (mental as well as physical), depression and constant low-grade flu-like symptoms; ie aching muscles, etc. At the worst times the "brain fog" as they call it, was so bad I felt like an old-style television when the aerial lead falls out the back. My brain was hissing with snow and all I could do was lie down, eyes closed, and let it ease up a bit.

Even when people did know (and they didn't really know how I felt. Actually nobody really asked) I rarely made an issue of it. Which caused problems with friendships. I remember someone having a go at me for cancelling a party (the party went on, only without my personal appearance. As if that was so important!) I felt more rough than usual ~ but as I say I was used to feeling rough. Only when I happened to take my temperature and saw it was 102F did I realize not only that I had the real flu but that somehow, on this occasion, my sickness was more justified. Because it was objectively real. Long ago I got my head round the fact that things that happen to me are not real when others fail to understand them. I think that is partially what is meant by the trippers' phrase "concensus reality"...

Anyway I had the flu and was very upset that I was ment to soldier on as I normally did. But when I chose not to a massive issue was made of it. Most people do not have to explain away not doing anything because they have flu. Being ill is enough. But not in my case. I'd handled the situation that badly that somehow my facts would not justify other people's matters.

Over the months I did go on a few big nights out. As I said: I soldiered on, did all I could to appear "normal" (I always thought it a bit sick to get a buzz from identifying oneself "sick" as some sick people seem to do. But that's another issue entirely. I remember being on the dancefloor, standing there as the party kicked off around me. Looking round at my generation ~ young, fit popel having the time of their lives. And yet, as I did so, I could actually feel the life and all my energy draining out of me.

One compliment I do recall receiving (if you want to call it that) was that I had never been seen drunk. Haha!! I always had the will, once I'd started drinking and felt the effects coming on, to check myself: "thus far; no further" and to keep to such self-appraisals. I hated being drunk. Associated it with the Toilet-Duck and crap smells of lavatory bowls as I puked my guts out. No way. Ukk. Drugs, when I took them, were always timed, dosed, planned. I took ecstasy maybe once over my entire first two years in London. Magic mushrooms a few times. Cannabis I vary rarely dabbled in ~ it just did not suit me any more.

This all changed one morning in spring 1998 when I opened the mail to find a free ticket to Escape From Samsara! Samsara means the Buddhist wheel of constant rebirth. But in this case it meant Friday night's trippy trancefest at the massive Fridge nightclub in Brixton, South London. My Australian cousin said she'd come with, couldn't make it; packed me off with a group of her friends anyhow. They were all cool people, my cousin's friends. They say a man (or woman) is known by his or her friends and I must say hers are a true credit to her. Nicest bunch of people I've met anywhere in my life and that's the honest truth ... Anyhow ... We went to this massive noisy cigarette smoke-filled club. I ddi take ecstasy again. Spent nearly the entire night in teh chill-out room feeling fantastic. met a girl called Lola from Melbourne who was about five years younger than me. Lola na dI went out for only ten weeks; but when the crux came ~ did I give up this sparkly new life of joy and celebration and go backwards or did I press on alone. I just resolutely went on. Queueing for massive parties on my own, yet knowing once I got inside there would be five, ten ... eventually twenty or more friends. A whole new life, as I say, but it came at a price. I was pretending to be OK when really I wasn't. When the pills wore off, when the wekend eneded, I'd have to spend days in bed, alone, recouperating. And often depressed and crying. These tears were a big part of the reality of the party life for a lot of people. Somehow they rarely got talked about.

AT EARLY EVENINGS MY LOCAL TUBE STATION became a gathering point for an entire alternative netherworld of crusties, drinkers and the misfits who roamed (and all too often lived on) the streets. Many appeared scruffy and rough yet somehow seemed free of some of society's constraints. They paid for this in poverty and pain. Gradually I got to known them because a prime source of nightly income came from sitting on the station steps and begging used one-day travelcards from the returning rush-hour, then selling these back to evening and night travellers for £1.50 to £2 each, depending on the time (there was an unofficial 9pm "watershed" when the price reduced. After 11pm it went down to £1.)

For one thing, the people I met on the station steps were far more personable than initially expected. Many were artists or "failed" musicians. Some were shockingly intelligent. (One guy in particular had messed up mid-PhD to become a homeless junkie. Drugs can affect anyone. Just don't take them!) I felt I fitted in with this crowd in a way I never had done anywhere else. For one thing I never pretended to be more knowledgeable or experienced in their way of life than I actually was, so they respected, I suppose that at least what they saw with me was what they got. Also it was OK among these people not to be feeling all right and not to be hapy. And yet to be accepted for how you did feel This, somehow, seemed a massive liberation.

I took up drinking on the station steps. At first it was nearly a joke: "I got drunk with the homeless 'crew'" (though I remained averse to actually being so intoxicated I was out of control). I began to dabble in their drugs. Valium, temazepam, the occasional Rohypnol; Dexedrine; crack and heroin. Gradually my useage increased in frequency from once a month or so, totally unplanned, to a couple of times a week. But never every day. And I thought I was being clever by avoiding drugs that were cross-tolerant on consecutive days ~ ie if I had heroin on Monday, Tuesday would be a Valium day ~ and so on. Heroin I was very scared of getting hooked on. Vivid proof of the worst kind was all around me of what the drug could do. One guy had lost one leg and was determinedly injecting right into the enormous rotting open sore on the other. When I first met him I thought he'd had an accident, unable to get to the loo on time because he was on cruches. No. This stench was the putrefaction of his own living flesh. It was disgusting. But once one leg had gone, so did his self-respect. Recently, after an absence of several years, he showed up again in my "manor". His remaining leg is still rotting, though it did used to get cleaned up periodically by doctors. I've not seen him for several months now and I've a nasty feeling he's dead.

As I say, I had reason to fear heroin addiction.

I did take a lot of Valium one long, hot summer. I enjoyed the muscle-relaxing effects they gave me. I was often in low-grade pain from the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Anyway ~

Heroin.

That's what people want to hear about, I guess.

I was daydreaming just now, before I put pen to paper, that if a poll could be gathered of users' private thoughts on first experimenting with heroin, ideas along the lies of "is that it?!?" and "is this what all the fuss is about?!?..." would top the list of reactions.

I felt peaceful, warm and sickly-sweet to the point of nausea. But I managed not to be sick, which was a small triumph. My first time with crack I did have my head down the toilet. You have to persist with these substances. They're not always user-friendly to start off with ...

Heroin is best compared to a big fluffy blanket. At first, because you don't actually need it, you might feel too hot and slightly uncomfortable. But as time goes on and you become inexorably acclimatized to the stuff, you eventually find, on throwing off the blanket, that the freezing cold world is unbearable. You hurry to wrap up warm again. Sometimes, perhaps if you got badly chilled, you might promise never to do without your blanket ever again~ which is what I have done. I'm far better at keeping promises to use than the ones I've made to clean up.

The process of addiction takes time and persistance. No way can anyone get addicted to any drug from one try. Admittedly, to the easily-impresed, the image of the junkie as a kind of anarchist or rebel with a cause (the cause is always to score more gear so you don't get sick!) can be just as intoxicating as the drug.

I am exhausted from scribbling pages and pages of this. It's dark outside and I've all this still to type in ... I do apologize but this will have to continue tomorrow when I can hopefully give at least some meaningful account of precisely what led on to what and how this heroin achieved the iron grip it has over me still to this day ...

Till tomorrow ...