Terrible Sleep

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

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

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

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

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

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


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




HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 1 (TIËSTO)




HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 2

A Morning of Domesticity

(THAT MEANS SCURRYING ROUND THE KITCHEN like a blue-arsed fly, cleaning up to you!) yes I turned up the radio to top volume (I don't know why but I nearly always listen to talk stations) so Radio 4 Extra was blaring out The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe with Lucy meeting Mr Tumnuss under the snowy lamppost... then a boring phone-in without Vanessa Feltz on BBC London and then stuff to do with people being at risk of 20 years in a labour camp for not crying hard enough over the death of the aptly named "Kim Jong ILL" in North Korea. Over this time I filled an entire black sack with rubbish including at least five nearly-full cartons of milk and cleared a table top of paperclips, women's eye makeup, Vaseline lip gel and glass ashtrays. I was about to wipe it down with newspapers to clean it when I found a picture of Sunshine or Sweetie, one of the pair of Chinese pandas that have been lent to a Scottish zoo for 17 years, the tubby furry had a stick of bamboo in its mouth and just made you want to poke it in the tummy and twist those black ears round and round!

I'm so glad the "festive tide" is past us. Now it's New Year's Eve, which I haven't done for 9 or 10 years and only ever enjoyed when I was high on Ecstasy which says a lot about New Years if you require mindbending drugs to enjoy it. Then again I was at a psychedelic trance party and you require mindbending drugs to get into the groove there too so... ho-humm. All this was so very many years ago. I just wish I could kick the drugs I still occasionally take now. Even Valium is bad. I know it's nowhere near as bad as taking heroin, but I'd rather take neither. Do you know the one decent Valium dealer I know of via a friend (I also happen to know his mother) sells a minimum £20 bag. Just like a lot of heroin dealers! 20 blue (10mg) Valium for £20. The only drugs I have clinical need of are the occasional sleeping pill ~ as longterm readers will know I go through periods where I simply do not sleep. Usually I am manic and high or manic and exhausted at these times. I also get occasional panic so I started taking Valium for that over the summer. I had a near panic-attack at the Nutter Club (dual diagnosis drugs and mental illness meeting) I used to go to (where nearly everyone was bipolar, I might add and 50% of bipolars admit to their doctors to indulging in illegal drugs which means the number actually having used them must be far higher. Interestingly nearly all the street drugs tweak the same three chemicals ~ serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline aka norepinephrine ~ that are activated in manic episodes, are known to go haywire in psychosis and are probably at low levels in depresssion which is why antidepressants are occasionally categorized according to which of these three chemicals they tweak. Antidepressants can actually precipitate mania in susceptible individuals, which is why when I took Prozac I was constantly being told to calm down. One girl, who had a manic-depressive mother and sister said I was acting "manic". I did calm down... about four weeks later. And took Prozac very irregularly after that as it just made me so agitated sometimes I literally could not even sit in a chair I had to pace pace pace. This is the start of my bipolar symptoms, back in my mid 20s when my diagnosis was actually chronic fatigue syndrome. I heard a fascinating description of that condition on television last week when a former sufferer said it's due to the brain being over-activated, hence the extreme tiredness yet inability to sleep at night. I definitely had CFS and wouldn't wish it on anyone. In a way it's worse than severe depression because severe depression is taken seriously by psychiatrists whereas a person cabbaged by "M.E." (as CFS used to be known) would probably still to this day be treated as a neurotic by certain members of the medical profession. One characteristic CFS sufferers are said to have in common is a tendency to push themselves past the point of exhaustion even BEFORE they become ill. They work hard and play hard. They are not the type of people who lie down to take rests before an afternoon of activity. Yet when you have this horrible condition you absolutely have to spend your energy like a person spends money on a tight budget and you have to lie down and close your eyes and it actually gets so bad you can't even watch television because it's all there in your face. This terrible world. Glaring at you. That's what they call photophobia. Oh those were the days. My early twenties. Totally messed up by an illness many people don't even believe exists. Not even I believed it existed because it was me and I had no rights to be ill. I still had to push push push even though I'd already pushed so hard I'd broken. Not one of my friends ever truly gave any support. Except perhaps one, who did it in a subtle way. Then one day someone I'd only just met, who'd asked me about myself ~ and we were on Ecstasy after a huge party and so talking intently ~ said to me Your life has been ruined by this thing. And I cried because that was the one person. The one single person who ever listened to me, understood me and belived me.

Now I have a new idea for the future. Something I'm going to do that I could make good money out of. But it's a business requiring start up investment. I would need £5-10,000 so how I'm going to make that I've no idea. Maybe I should get writing the children's books. I know it's not the gateway to a fortune but I heard you get about £3000 in advance per book. So if I wrote 4, I'd have my money. Oh yeah but there's tax, agent's fees and VAT. OK maybe if I wrote ten books I'd have my money. But I'm determined to do this business idea. It's a magazine I want to publish and I'm sure people would buy it. So that's my wish that can and will come true. My family will remember that as I grew up I'd run to my parents with "business ideas". I was full of them. I even daydreamed of becoming a property developer. Aged 10. People don't understand me. Just because in the illegal world of drugs I'm unwilling to get deeply involved, they think I'm either soft or stupid. I'm just the type of person who likes to do things above board and to know that what's mine is mine and that the Proceeds of Crime Act ain't gonna take my plasma TV away. Know what I'm saying?

Well I'll leave y'all on that note. Have a very Happy New Year everyone. Here's to a fantabulous 2012!!




Illustrated: I love pandas and Freesat is coming! (Without the Plasma TV (for now)).


HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 5

Many A Topic

IN WHICH GLEDWOOD talks on many a topic in a far happier way than yesterday... Then Barbra sings "Memory"...

I DIDN'T GO to the brainwashing meeting. I only rant, interrupt and express my wonderful opinions when I'm manic. Then I come down and can't face the meeting again. So I'm too depressed and paranoid to go. So I stayed in bed all day and got up at 4pm. I wasn't lying there skulking by the way, I was fast asleep and ignoring my phone. I've learned to ignore it's chirps over the few days I've had it. This phone has the loudest ring of any phone I've ever had. But it's a flip phone AND you have to press the button to pick it up. So I miss loads of calls just by fumbling with it. And I'm too stingy to ring anyone back. Or in too much of a bad mood (today).

I have to go down Morrisons to get a 54p 2-litre bottle of cloudy lemonade. It's what I'm drinking these days instead of alcohol. I did have yet another black cherry flavour cyder today. That makes 2 drinks in 2 weeks ~ oooh. Yeah so I had this drink. The cherry flavour was my attempt at switching from strong drink to soft drink. It was meant to be a crossover. Unfortunately I loved the taste so much I think I was addicted to that more than the alcohol. So now I'm on cloudy lemonade. The acidity of the lemons matches the acidity of cyder. So my teeth don't miss out on being rotted through the lack of drink.

I'm really pissed off with Buta my old drugs worker. Buta was the titration nurse. Titration is chemical torture where they "cautiously" give doses far too small and leave you in withdrawal for days on end at the beginning of your script. Methadone takes three days to reach a therapeutic level (meaning that your blood level is twice as high on day three despite no elevation of the dose) ~ this is yet another bad thing about methadone. It takes days to "go in". But it also takes days to come out again. Making it far, far harder to detox from. Now if heroin is notoriously hard to come off, why on earth give heroin addicts methadone which is EVEN HARDER to detox from? Somehow I get the feeling nobody cares at all for drug addicts. Soon as I can I'm going on Subutex. But yet again we have a problem, because methadone is too "sticky" to transfer over from without doing two days methadone-free ~ ie two days climbing the walls. With heroin you just need 18 hours clean. Everybody who has done it says you basically go on heroin for four days and switch off that. The only other option is dihydrocodeine (DFs), which is so weak it must be dosed four-hourly. I've found a source of dihydrocodeine, so I'll get enough pills for four days and use those. Why on earth the clinic won't switch you to dihydrocodeine I have never understood. But it's just more proof that they don't give a damn about their clients. They only care for their own jobs. I already have two copies of the "how to make a complaint" leaflet. The way things are going, that formal complaint will go out sooner rather than later.

So I'm depressed today. I think sleeping has a lot to do with it. As soon as I heard that loss of sleep is a "symptom and a cause of mania" and that excessive sleep counts the same for depression, I have been sleeping as little as I possibly can, so I can be happy. Also sleeping is the biggest waste of time out there. I was hong-donging to Chinese until the early hours. I've learned to tell the time. I do know the numbers, but I hardly know them fluently. And they're not pronounced the way their transliterated. Yī 一 one is pronounced "ee", wǔ 五 five is actually "oo", qī 七 seven is "chi"... Surprisingly I managed to follow Mrs Li telling me the time on CD. I was really shocked. I was so depressed when I listened to it this evening. I must have felt how "normal" people feel, who don't truly believe they'll ever get far, when hearing a person blabbering on a Teach Yourself Foreign CD. Utterly hopeless. I'm only abnormal because I believe in myself, at least as far as picking up blabbery foreign tongues is concerned. Like I said, intelligence doesn't come into language acquisition; perseverence does. Half a BILLION Chinese speak Mandarin as their second language and they learn it through immersion. If immersion isn't possible, persistence will pay.

Anyway they say you learn a language by it being babbled out around you, but I grew up in Welsh Wales and got nowhere with Welsh ~ mainly because the teachers at school had never learned a langauge in their lives; they merely grew up speaking Welsh from the cradle. So we were never told "this is a feminine noun; that is an irregular verb" just "it goes like this". Which is like teaching mechanics without ever naming parts of the car! Teach Yourself Living Welsh (as it was called) explained all this to me and I got an A grade at GCSE. Had I relied on our teacher I doubt I'd have got better than a C. It was always my ambition to join the mother tongue set in Welsh but I never managed it. I was too thick.

The beginnings of my decline set in when I was doing my A Levels at school. These are the exams you take age 18. GCSEs are usually age 16. I did try and concentrate but my language skills were awful. Essays riddled with mistakes. Years of "tuition" and yet I still couldn't remember which words were masculine, feminine or neuter. In English I did OK essays on the "texts" we studied, but it was only poetry I was truly any good at critiquing. Already I was getting depressed in this period. During term time I felt fairly OK; it was during the holidays that it hit me. Every exam I took I got a grade lower than predicted. Then I took a year out. Rather, wasted a year out. Was more depressed then. And when I did finally go to uni, I was very quickly depressed out of my mind. The shrink I ended up seeing asked me constantly whether I was hearing voices. That should give you some idea of the impression I made on people, because I wasn't going into that office trying to create any kind of impression good or bad. What he saw was what everyone saw. I felt so dire when on my own that I ended up sitting in other people's rooms. I had nothing at all to say. My presence was only accepted because as soon as I got into cannabis (which happened very quickly) I brought a lump of hash with me everywhere so everyone got a smoke. That didn't make anybody like me, but they at least tolerated me.

It took twenty years from first seeing a psychiatrist to getting full bipolar symptoms. In the beginning I only got depressions. Then I started over-reacting to antidepressants, so I got called "manic" by somebody with two manic-depressive relatives. Eventually my mood started swinging on its own. Only the depressive swings were vicious. The highs were really nice. But then I went on heroin, which blanketed my mood to a flat-line so I thought my depression was cured. Then I went on methadone. But the methadone days were so intolerably low I continued using heroin for years while being scripted methadone. Eventually mania did break through so voraciously that heroin would no longer stabilize me. (Though I have to say this only began when there was a drought in the heroin supply and so no chance of scoring anyhow.) Ever since I went manic last December my moods have been all over the place. Deshane says I have the so-called "negative symptoms" of schizoaffective. It means I just cannot engage myself with many aspects of life. Yes I can do Chinese obsessively. I can do things obsessively. ButI cannot do many things normally. As a plate-spinner I'd have one plate going better than anyone else. But the other six spinners wouldn't even have plates on. Let alone wobbly ones. So this is how I run, or rather don't run my life. It's still in utter chaos but I won't go on about that. How did I get back on to mental health? Oh yeah because the clinic are trying to damage it by forcing me into abusive coercive brainwashing bullshit groups. Well I'm not going. Bar one next week which comes directly after my appointment I've had it with their punishment group.

Buta did tell me there was a way I could go to rehab for stabilization, not detox. Which means I could cut down my dose down to 70mls in about two weeks. I'd be up for that. In order to do this I would need to do their rehab group. I don't mind the idea of that one. Hopefully it wouldn't be full of people on a prison-swerve. The bog-standard group I was pushed into attending was for people who had been caught shoplifting. They only went under duress, because if they failed to attend more than a couple they'd get chucked in prison. Well they're lucky. I'd rather go to prison than do those groups. But what option do I have? The ways things are going I'm going to end up in the nuthouse anyhow. Guess what that CRAP they were prescribing me was actually CAUSING my anxiety. The anxiety I took street-bought Valium for. (Very infrequently, it has to be said; but one pill dirties up the test for two weeks.) So I'm OFF the pills and paranoid and depressed as a result. ALL I NEED IS A DOCTOR TO PRESCRIBE THE QUETIAPINE I WANT. But the NHS has let me down yet again. I don't even have a psychiatrist. They have transferred me from a consultant I knew and respected to no-body. My paperwork appears to have fallen down a black hole. So I'll probably only get quetiapine in the nuthouse. I could do with a break anyhow.

Why they just won't prescribe it to me I have no idea. Oh yeah because I used to have a doctor and now I don't. Will someone explain that to me please.

Well I've got to go. EastEnders is on. And they're doing prison scenes on Coronation Street. I love women's prison dramas. Why on earth did they cancel Bad Girls. When I lived with Lona, who kind of had mental health "issues" of her own, the two programmes we watched together (apart from EastEnders) were Bad Girls and Footballer's Wives. Footballer's Wives eventually got Joan Collins then they cancelled the entire show! It was the only thing about football (apart from the World Cup final) I've ever enjoyed watching. And the world cup final was more entertaining for France getting boo'd and Italy getting cheered. Because the French and the Brits hate each other ~ in a loving sort of way. Britain and France have almost equal populations. They have about five times more land. We have a superior language. They have high taxes for the rich, spectacular natural scenery and far better food. We have London. They have Paris. The best parts of London are far superior to Paris. They have Galleries LaFayette (all perfume and women's clothes). We have Harrods which sells just about everything. Harrods' pets department sells axotlotls and fishtanks connected by swim-through tubes. Their hifi department is amazing. It's the stuff you'd buy naturally if you had a proper income.

Did South Africa win the last world cup? I thought the African teams were only in there to make up numbers. World football is usually Europe vs South America. I feel sorry for Americans having to watch American football (a very camp version of rugby) and baseball (glorified rounders). Football is more versatile than American football because it can be played on just about any bit of flat ground with a ball. No special equipment required. I was actually quite good at football. When I troubled to make an effort at playing. Which I did about three times in my life. The main reason I hated it was that I was "supposed" to like it. Also I loathed all team sports in childhood. And I hated ballgames. Rounders/baseball is the worst. You're supposed to hit the stupid thing with a glorified pea-stick! No wonder I always missed. Most exciting thing about playing football at school was deliberately running to the opposite side of the pitch and avoiding the ball at all costs. The only sport I enjoyed was crosscountry walking (though we were supposedly running). The only sports I was any good at were the hundred metres sprint, the high jump, long jump and triple jump. Everything else I was crap at.

I can't remember where this post was going. Why am I watching Coronation Street? Oh yeah because of the women's prison. Best women's prison drama of all time was Prisoner Cell Block H (known by other titles in other countries; it's the 80s Aussie drama by Grundy Television). My favourite episodes were when Meg Morris (formerly Meg Jackson, until her husband was murdered with a pair of scissors by Chrissie Latham) and the governor (both the kindly witch old one Mrs Davidson and the lesbian gym mistress type... Ann Reynolds (not that I just looked that up on Wikipedia).

Oh cripes it's late I've got to go. Dà hǔ tóu fēng 大虎頭蜂！

(Say that to a Chinese person, I dare you. They'll laugh aloud. It means "giant tiger head wasp!")


Illustrated: beautiful sleep; "green" ~ yucky noxious methadone; the Welsh language; not tits and bums but manic-depressive mood swings; Joan Collins and Zoë Lucker in Footballers' Wives; cockney Chrissie Latham from Prisoner


MEMORY

I'm not sure, but this might actually be a real Barbra Streisand pop video...
Barbra's vocal knocks Elaine Page's effort out the window!



HOT NEWS! DANCE DRUG ECSTASY TO BE USED AS CANCER THERAPY!

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.

Photophobia

20:14 HRS and I'm sat here with dark glasses on because of the GLARE. Bloody hell. Why do I have to go and catch photophobia now? I could turn the blinkin' light off and open the curtain actually.... There that's better. I'm not taking the shades off. I like to look cool when I'm blogging.

Barbra is crooning tunes from Broadway over my TV. I always play CDs through the television: the sound's way better than the £17.99 stereos I buy. Why a woman with a voice like that wasted years recording middle of the road pop, true with the odd gem thrown in, and only late in her career recorded the stuff everyone wanted to hear, I do not understand. That's why I don't count myself as a fan of Babs; she is too annoying. I'd better watch what I say as I'm still hoping for an invitation for dinner round at hers before I die. Knockout tunes with a knockout voice. Inspirational! Latitudinal! Roses!! There Barbra. Can I live in your house please, so you can sing me lullabyes when I can't sleep? Also can you leave me your house after you die? I need a house desperately. That's my new goal: to get several million pounds and a house. You need millions just to buy Tescos Finest basic necessities in today's world...

Well I spent most of today sleeping in my chair like a pensioner. Then I had to go out, do someone a favour. That made me all excitable again and my head was racing. Then I started getting tired again.

I have to say when I woke up this evening I wandered about wondering what the hell I have been doing the past week. I remember feeling incredibly euphoric and pacing back and forth at 4am. I remember deliberately putting Barbra Streisand and Chinese lessons on my telly at top volume at 5am. I remember becoming furiously angry over nothing several times. Luckily when I'm with other people I generally calm down because I have some focus for my energies. They just find it disconcerting that I hate sitting still and would rather wander about babbling than be all boring, like I normally am. I wasn't into rioting, strangely. You'd think a manic person would be well up for smashing up a few shops, but I never knew where the riot would be as I'm not a gang member or Blackberry owner. Also I'm way too paranoid to indulge in crime. I think fingerprints, CCTV, DNA. I'm prone to paranoia as it is; I don't need to fuel that fire, I really don't. Anyway I don't approve of mass shoplifting and certainly don't approve of arson. As for attacking the police, well I do understand that one I won't lie there. The police are 2'-faced bastards. Sometimes they're so kind it would make you cry. Other times they basically break the laws they're meant to uphold just to secure convictions. They don't care. On the morning I went up to have a good poke through the wreckage, I was quite tempted to crawl through HMV's window in Wood Green. I doubt the looters would have cleared out the Barbra Streisand section so it was all waiting for me. If I'd got caught I'd just have claimed squatters rights and declared I intended to live there. Now this rioting just makes me feel sick. I'm glad I didn't feel much at the time, it would have sent me off on one bigtime.

Well I don't recall what the hell it was I intended to say here. Oh yeah! Anna Grace and I got a comment telling us both to commit suicide! I love these:

you and gledwood so do yourselves a favor and both fucking shoot each other in the heads at the same time. you are both fucking lame-ass losers who seem to have nothing better to do than write about thier sorry ass lives on a computer and also lie about them. oh boo hoo my life sux and I am bored and I am high...got news for you, your life doesn't suc, you have no fucking life so you may as well just kill each other and make the world a brighter place LOSERS

It's more sorry ass to read that crap than write it. If I kept a journal I'd just lose it, that's why I post it online instead. Anyway I've come too far to stop now. And why do those comments always come to Anna's blog and not mine? Do they see her as a softer target? She barely ever answers back. I directed that commenter in Melody's direction. Melody loves haters. She says she enjoys people obsessing over her life.

As I told Anonymous, my life is pretty perfect at the moment. I'm off drugs, off drink and I feel spectacular. I'm certainly not depressed. I only felt ill because I caught some diarrhoearal disease. Also I think I might have expended too much energy being manic or hypomanic. Whichever it was.

Right that's it I'm off.

PS I just found out risperidone could give me woman's breasts. In which case I hope I geat great pendulous knockers so I can get a job as a tranny prostitute. I desperately need something to bring the money in. I know a heroin addict who did that and bought a pretty nice flat with the proceeds! WHILE using gear every day!!

I'm thinking of getting my meds changed to quetiapine (Seroquel) it's meant to knock you out way better. I don't know whether to take the risperidone again as I stopped it as soon as I started getting manic, in order to become as manic as humanly possible, which I thoroughly enjoy and revel in, in case you didn't notice, because mania just means being your natural self without restraint. So should I take these pills or those pills and GIMME A DOCTOR BACK I don't even have a shrink!! Thanks a lot XXX healthcare trust for shafting me yet again.

WHY DID I CHOOSE YOU?



I HAVE DREAMED/WE KISS IN A SHADOW/SOMETHING WONDERFUL

Tell Me What A Soul Is For?

STREISAND: WHERE IS IT WRITTEN? (YENTL)



this is a really good tune. i'm not fulminating with rage this morning i slept from 1am till at least 4:30 so i'm doing really good i don't WANT to sleep any longer it will only bring me down.

Here is significance:~

There's not a morning I begin without
A thousand questions running through my mind,
That I don't try to find the reason
And the logic in the world that God designed.
The reason why
A bird was given wings,
If not to fly
And praise the sky
With ev'ry song it sings.
What's right or wrong.
Where I belong
Within the scheme of things.

And why have eyes that see and arms that reach
Unless you're meant to know there's something more?
If not to hunger for the meaning of it all.
Then tell me what a soul is for?
Why have the wings unless you're meant to fly?
And tell me please, why have a mind
If not to question why?


You see, I spent years killing my life-force, never succeeding and now this: it comes back with vengeance. Every problem in my life boils down to energy. Too little, too much. Or self-esteem: too little/too much. You may not know this about me but I know it: if I'd had money success and power at a young age I would have turned into a monster of arrogance.

I do not understand life. Why is everything, EVERY SINGLE THING that seems good or alluring or exciting, why does all of it turn to shit in my hands? I can't even be in a good mood without a doctor saying it's mania. And why when I truly felt higher than high, why then was my mind run away like quicksilver, like a beautiful starburst. Why did I have to be raving mad when all I thought I was was happy. Happy. For once in my life happy. You know I have been unhappy ever since my parents divorced when I was 8. It was that moment when my Dad told me he and my Mum were no longer together I felt darkness fall across the world. The sun never rose again. I have only ever felt happiness from drugs or mental illness. That's why I like being mentally ill. Wouldn't you rather be insane than live with the reality the utter unbearable horror of this world? It's not fair; I never asked to be born and I'm lumbered with the responsibility of staying alive and for what? If I thought it would help I would kill my family to spare them the pain. If I didn't know that was a sin I would do it. Those lost souls who kill their young children are not motivated by viciousness but mercy: they are sparing innocent lives the sadness to come. Multiple sadness, disappointment, heartache, unspeakable horror and pain. Why must we be born into this world to see these things? There is not a single thing worth seeing that would be better left unseen; there is nothing worth living, nothing worth surviving that would not be better unsurvived. King Solomon once said the happiest people are babies who never were born. Vanity vanity vanity. All is in vain.

In which Gledwood reveals a true Treasury of Secrets ha ha ha!

I CAN'T SLEEP. I was so fucked up earlier from not sleeping or eating properly (I'm in an "elevated mood" so sleep quite frankly is a waste of time. I never worry about sleeping at the best of times.
Years of insomnia have taught me if you cannot sleep DO NOT LIE IN BED. EVER. GET UP AND PLAY LOUD MUSIC; WATCH DVDs DO SOMETHING CONSTRUCTIVE. It is ATROCIOUS sleep hygeine to lie in bed awake not sleeping or shagging all the doctors say this anyway if you're properly tired you can sleep sitting up. I never go to bed until I'm nodding off in my chair first. All day I have craved sleep then I walk about and WHOOSH! up goes the mood. I had such an energy surge in the library earlier I had to restrain myself from sprinting back and forth in reference and throwing books up in the air I really went hyper. Pinky won't talk to me any more because I want to die her hair bright blue. Hey you know that really perceptive and insightful amazing post I slapped up on Thursday (wrote it bang like that ~ no editing ~ in a fit of inspiration. I was going to go shopping for food with my second last tenner then I saw Yentl the DVD for £7 in HMV so I got that and ate chips instead. That film has the best score of any musical. Barbra Streisand has the best voice in the world I watched it twice on top volume, first in English then in German. "Where Is It Written?" and "The Way He Makes Me Feel" are probably the 2 best. And I love the performance of Papa Can You Hear Me by that rough kid, Bart's bully whose dad's in prison. I searched and searched for the Youtube to entertain y'all but it is nowhere to be found. Hey I just realized Barbra Streisand and short hair ~ means I must be bent as a £9 note. I used to love pretending to be gay when I was younger. Gets you all the girls does that one. There ain't nothing more alluring than something you think you can't have. I also used to like pretending to be a virgin but everyone could tell somehow I wasn't. No idea how. Actually how CAN you tell if someone's a virgin? I'm a bit old to be a virgin now I'm nearly 40. I can't really be gay BTW.Reason: no belt with huge buckle or tucked in teeshirt also I don't buy cut flowers or rate Kylie Minogue. I did buy some artificial red blooms in my last manic episode but that was just me bieng fl0ral o yeah my cactus is doing really well since I removed his TOTALLY FLASE TOOTHPICK CACTUS-INJURING FAKE FLOWERS. Loads of new growth and I've only watered him once in 3 months. Hey I was thinking of opening a torture parlour as that makes the most money out of every kind of whorehouse does anyone want to dress up in batman masks and spank high court judges members of parliament and top lawyers for £250 a pop? I fucking do, I could really do with a £500 an hour job (you only get £250 as half goes to the house and I will own the house, or rather dank cellar with plasterless walls resounding with the screams of the freshly whipped bourgeoisie. You don't have to touch the bastard clients just lock them in a cupboard. When I found out you could get paid for locking someone in a cupboard I realized I was barking up the wrong tree with my twee career ambitions I'm doing that instead. Melody Lee from New Mexico does Home Invasion rape and torture fantasies on a hardcore sex line so I'm offering her a British visa to be my best pro. She's so pretty, why she didn't get a job as a supermodel, movie star or pop princess I've no idea. I would if I looked like that. O yeah being as I'm all disinhibited and talking about pervy shit let me drop in a teaser: if I get six INTERESTING comments I'll spill FULL DETAILS about my friend masterbating when the window cleaner came round. Ha ha! True story too! And this was a girl with male eyes upon her most intimate orifices. Wobbling atop a ladder. Imagine that! He didn't have to imagine a thing, he saw everything!!! By theway I HAVE GIVEN UP DRINKING 100% why fucking waste time on alcohol when you feel better than drunk, drink only makes you slow and woozy and i'm on a far better buzz than drudgeful old drink could ever invoke I DON'T NEED DRINK. I can't wait to tell Luta duta Puta Muta the motor Scooter (my druggieowrker) I'm off the drink they ALWAYS assume I'm drunk in that place my last breathometer reading was 0.9 which is a QUARTER of the UK drink drive limit ie practically zilch (considering I'd knocked back 6 units that morning) those clinics are so narrow minded. The dr always thinks I'm hypomanic and Buta always seems to think I'm stoned! There is such a thing as a NATURAL HIGH. I'm milking my elevated mood for all it is worth: meaning CEASING ALL DRUG CONSUMPTOIN FOR GOOD AND NEVER DRINKING AGAIN I dont' need any shitty chemicals any more. Only "drugs" I'm ever taking from now on are benzos and I need them to sleep and if anyone thinks the odd benzo is a sin just you try riding the bipolar wave and not popping pills you'l end up with your head in the oven quicker than me I can promise you. I'm asking my dr for 20 diazepam 10s and 7 zopiclone 7.5s per month PRN as I need them. Think of the injustice. Taking diazzies for anxiety is no more drug abuse than popping aspirin for a headache. Yet I'm scoring mine off a scumbag on the street while other people who PRETEND to need the Vals are fucking selling them on the side that is totally corupt. Now tomorrow I'm getting chicken with babycorn with curry sauce and mix vegetable fry rice the Chinese I go to does mangetout in their fry rice it's gorgeous somehow the dryness of the beans sets of the yumminess of the rice. Would you believe it I found an MSG-free Chinese takeaway last time I was hyper I could not believe the travesty Chinese food without monosodium glutamate is like sugar-free chocolate. Or a gay man without a tucked in teeshirt. Utter beyond the pale vulgarity. Like heroin that's not china white. Dealers who sell brown heroin should get death by 1000 cuts in my humble view whereas china white dealers should get a gold medal. Shit I'm still nurturing that inner drug snob addict aren't I. BTW someone once had a go at me for proclaiming the superiority of H4 (heroin hydrochloride salts) over water-insoluble H3 heroin smoking base that's not snobbery that's called RESPECTING YOUR BODY. H4 dissolves cold in water. In Australia where street purity of China White exceeded 70% at times it's not unknown for addicts with 5 year habits not to move beyond the crooks of their arms, the gear is that good. I lost the crooks (that's my "mainlines" to those of you not into heroin) within 3 months because BROWN HEROIN IS SHIT. It's meant for smoking not injecting and no I don't have a downer on heroin smokers it's envy not derision I wish I could have smoked my gear but once I got on the needle that was me lost to 2 vices: heroin and injecting. You honestly do not know how ASHAMED I am even to have had one conversation with my father about my heroin-injecting proclivities. Honestly the looks on my parents' faces when I told them I was acting like a cat on hot bricks in their house for 3 days straight with no end in sight was because I was detoxing off heroin... fucking hell that was an alltime low. I remember pleading with one family member "not to look so desperate" as my poor brother looked on bewilderedly it was absolutely horrible the worst of the pits. After that I took to begging, trebled my habit overnight (£30 a day minimum up from a mere £10) ~ started mainlining a gram a day because I knew I was a junkie and as far as I knew would die one. yes I had a genuine death wish. Genuine. I know I have exasperated people with suicide talk and no action but trust me if I play suicide again nobody's getting any chance to save me. I'm gone. So I keep myself safe. I will go in the nuthouse before I kill myself. I just cannot understand how being in a good mood can be "illness" how fucking shit does life have to be when you have to check yourself every time you fucking laugh because when I do laugh my head off several times a day for no real reason yes it does mean I'm going manic and I'm a manic-depressive junkie how lower can you go than that. Ha! Actually I'm kinda proud of being lowest of the low like that. Right it's 00:20 hrs I've got to piss off and TRY to get some sleep I'm due up in the morning some "lovely BASTARDLY SHITHEAD WHO BORROWED £25 I REALLY COULD NOT AFFORD TO LEND WHO NEARLY HAD ME EAETING OUT OF BINS I WAS THAT FUCKED BECAUSE OF HIM THIS CUNT IS FINALLY PAYING ME BACK AND I'M RELISHING GOING ABSOLUTELY BALISTIC ON THIS FUCKER TOMORROW MORNING HE HAS HIV WELL I HAD PSYCHOTIC MANIA AND I FUCKING HELPED HIM OUT WHEN I SHOULD HAVE BEEN IN A MENTAL UNIT I WAS AT MY LOWEST POINT IN 10 YEARS AND I FUCKING DID HIM A MASSIVE FAVOUR A FEW MONTHS AGO AND HE TREATS ME LIKE THIS IN FACT IF HE DOESN'T GROVEL I'M JUST GONNA LAMP THE FUCKER HE DESERVES IT THAT IS ABSOLUTELY DISPICABLE SWINDLING MONEY FROM THE SICK LIKE THAT
well I won't tell you I'll tell him. That "person" won't know what's hit him I'm giving full vent to my fury and I tell you I am seething with rage if I was more nasty I would stab him over this he fucking deserves it taking the piss like that who the fuck does he think I am. A piece of shit that's what. Well tomorow the ROBOROVSKI ROARS HA HA HA!
night night everyone and don't worry i promise to treat my friend with dignity and respect as i blow my top which i will more i think about it more furious i am i will talk all nicey nicey lure the fucker here then give it with both barrels
see that's what people do: mistake kindness for weakness well not me mate. never again

AMY WINEHOUSE: WAKE UP ALONE

Sanity

I DIDN'T POST EARLIER because nothing was new and I don't feel well. I've scrapped two long posts because there was too much telling going on. I woke up at 4am going nuts and have since calmed down. The 1959 film starring Audrey Hepburn, Nun's Story, helped calm me. I was getting very manic, and yet still depressed. And paranoid to boot. I only went outside to clear my head out. I am getting free broadband from the library. My trainers have worn through at the soles, letting rain in. Now they smell like camping material that has been stored in a damp barn all winter. They need burning.

I don't know where I am going or what is happening. I am not well. Hey but I'm well enough not to do crack. Somebody offered me crack yesterday and I got more of a buzz knowing I could watch it and smell it being smoked right in front of me and not still not want the shit.

My biggest disappointment is that it has taken me so long to truly realize that heroin, far from helping me in any way, has only ever been one gigantic con. I cannot think of one single example of anybody whose life has been improved by the use of street heroin. I think the gear has just made me sicker than I would have been, because it's become a crutch. So I'm weaker, more vulnerable and more impressionable on a psychic level and that's what psychosis is: psychic overdrive.

I can never know what I would or would not be doing now without the "helping hand" of heroin but I don't think my existence would be the mess it has become on gear, I just don't.

So there's some sanity for you. I've put the rest of what I wrote this morning in cold storage because it's just more mad ranting and I'm fed up of being that way. I cannot tell what is and is not relevant in that state so I just say everything and edit nothing. Hence the literary mess that is me in a full-flown "flight of ideas" (as the doctors call it).

I hope y'all are well!


To those of you on far-flung shores, trainers are sneakers ~ and mine look a bit like this...


HUMATE: LOVE SIMULATION (PAUL VAN DYK LOVE MIX)



DJ TIËSTO: SUBURBAN TRAIN



ASTRAL PROJECTION: AURORA BOREALIS

Glasses Alert

HEY! I'VE FOUND A PICTURE OF MY NEW GLASSES. These are exactly the pair that really suits me. Won't they look amazing in light brown tint??! And can't you see now why I'm so irritated at having to wait TWO AND A HALF WEEKS for this sheer trendiness to be perched on the bridge of my nose in a with snazzy amber lenses? I want to know what y'all think of my excellent taste. Frank opinions only, please!

Nah! Just kidding. Those are the horror glasses I had when I was at school. Note I say "had" not "wore". I hated them so much I'd glance at something important then, in the blink of a myopic eye they'd been snatched away to spare my dignity. Everyone wore glasses like this in the 80s. Everyone who excelled in science subjects. Or had poor social skills. Or a face full of boils. And they made most of us look like multiple child killers who spoke English as a second language. Actually what am I saying. No nation bar Britain would ever countenance such execrable eyewear.

My current specs are the only pair I've ever had that I actually like wearing. Which either says a lot about glasses or it says a lot about Specsavers' range. I've only ever shopped at Specsavers. They do live up to their name. But their staff are offhand and they take AGES to process a simple order for photochromic lenses.

They look like this:I used to have such a thing about eyewear when I was younger (contact lenses not glasses) that my parents got me a job interview at the opticians (gotta work with something you love). Never got the job. That was the old me: so tremulous, I was bleating like a lamb.

I remember when my housemates went on holiday to Mororcco. All I could think on viewing their photos was how their fly-eye shades were so two years ago. This was 1999 so you'll all know what I'm saying.

Now I've got to go. I've a haircut to think about. My friend Pinky says I should go for shaved sides and a bit longer at the top. What do y'all think? I'm neutral. I hate haircuts, just as I hate choosing spectacle frames. Any enforced gawping at my ugly mug in the mirror does my brains in.

If I do get a decent haircut I'm dying my hair too. I used to dye my hair all the time using that Sun-in bleach. I only stopped doing it when my friend Lona took me to a student-run trainee salon where a scarlet-faced, trembling 16 year old scurried back to inform me quavery-voiced, that my strand test not only MELTED under their dye, but started curling out whisps of SMOKE. The schoolmarmish supervisor strode up and demanded to know what on earth I had been putting on my hair. When I said Sun-in with a hairdryer she rolled her eyes and ordered me never to use that product again.

My hair is naturally the colour of dust from a burst vacuum cleaner bag. So what colour should I turn it? Reason I always used peroxide was that it rapidly goes the colour of spun gold with no need for any additional chemicals or colouring. And I've never used those packets of dye meant for middle aged women covering their greys. What do I do? Could my hair turn to jelly and melt? Would I be able to light cigarettes off it? I'd need a ciggie if it melted.

Well that's about all appearance-wise. I'm trying to get some self-esteeem back you see. Y'all have to bear in mind that basically the day I went on heroin was the day I gave up ever shopping for anything bar absolute essentials. Since then I literally have not bought ANY clothes, bar socks and undies. The day things really went tits up and I could no longer afford heroin was the day I turned into a street beggar, with the look to match. Teeshirts, tops, jeans etc were all donated, found on the street or fished out of bins. My footwear came from the boxes people leave behind when they buy new trainers. I used to wear army surplus. Now I just look like a street drinker on my worst days, a down-at-heel student on my better ones.

Another thing: I urgently need a dental scale and polish. My teeth are so badly stained from chain-smoking that there's pretty much no point poshing myself up until a hygenist has given me a white smile again. That service used to be free. Now it's £40 ~ NHS or not. My teeth are so rotten I fully suspect most of them to be HOLLOW. The last dentist ~ who did the emergency extraction on that molar that had rotted all the way up the root ~ was compelled to take an x-ray and read out the state of my gnashers to his surly nurse and I'm sure I heard the word "extraction" at least three times. I only had one hit of heroin and one drink before I came into that shithole of a surgery and yet he treated me like scum of the earth. I lied on the "medications taken" question. No way was I telling that bastard I was on 140mg of methadone!

OK so what should I do with this hair of mine? Ideas please. At the moment it looks like a grey mop and I hate it. I hate long hair. It's long because it hasn't been cut. Fashion doesn't come in to it. (When does fashion ever come into long hair for men?) Last time I cut it I did what I'd long fantasized about: grabbed scissors and literlaly hacked away until only a centimetre length remained. I thought it was OK. Partly because I'd recently had a psycho flare-up; mostly because I'd done 2 £20 bags of heroin before the haircut. Over the following weeks I kept finding long bits, ridiculously short bits. I looked like a fledgling bird with schizophrenia.

Branzie, my stepdad did buy me hairclippers but I'm scared of getting that ex convict look. I won't look hard with that kind of cut. I'll look like Sinead O'Connor crossed with a Red Army Faction terrorist.

So come on. Advice. Needed. DESPERATELY.

Should I shave my head grade 5, or what? Should I hand in my glasses and demand an exchange for the stylish pair up top? Should I take a mood stabilizer to stop me very nearly walking out of petshops with exotic singing finches? My life is a mess and I'm on methadone. Please help me!!




★★★★★★★★★★★★


PS don't forget today's other posts:
Furry Friday on Saturday: Shetland Ponies
Betty Ford Dead at 93
Watch the Birdie (about me nearly purchasing a singing finch for £35 + £12 for the cage)

Fireworks

This is a picture inside my manic brain.







I'm feeling a little manic as we speak. I love the spectacular energy. The razzle-dazzle. The excitement.




My life is like a work of art.

I am a work of art.

I love living like this.

Here you see the meaning of life ~ which is but a dream... Truly wondrous, astonishing, a neverending phantasmagoria of amazingness...

I hope life is beautiful to you, too...

Bitch Worker II

ME AND BUTA MY NEW DRUGGIEWORER DO NOT HIT IF OFF. She's cut from the same cloth as Maple Syrup ~ bitch-faced drug worker of yore who I fired. Does not listen. (Yet accused me of not listening to HER! So much for being client-centred!)
All she did was bang on about these amazing groups and how I need to go into a detox unit. I told her I've been in detox twice and had a terrible time. But already she wasn't listening. She grabbed the Group Therapy Timetable, cicrled three: alcohol, detox/rehab and "stabilization". She absolutely insists that I go.

Until she said that I was quite open to going. Now I don't want to go at all. I'm not bothering with the alcohol group on the basis that I'm drinking 28 units per week. This is within the UK government's health guidelines and hence I have no need to sit in a room full of drinkers lying about their consumption because they're under the clinic's roof and know anything they do say might get back to their worker.

I said I would go to the detox/rehab group because you can't knock something until you've tried it. I have no intention whatsoever of going into inpatient detox because they cut you down too quickly. My plan always has to be to taper my methadone "in the community". The end of the taper will be very drawn-out indeed. I don't really care what the clinic thinks about my plan because by the time I'm on 10mg, I'd just buy spare methadone on the street as an when it was required. I'd only consider detox/rehab if I were unable to go on taking methadone "in the community" without using on top of it. My resolve is far stronger now than it's been for a while. So I don't think I'll have that problem.

As for stabilization: I'm fully intending to pee out heroin-free piss next week, which means I will be stabilized. I'm looking forward to this group the most because I know most "clients" will be lying through their teeth about how stable they actually are and how much drugs they use. I envisage lots of opportunity for being mischievous and truthful at the same time. So I'm really looing forward to that one.

So I'm going to these two groups and won't be bullied into any more NHS-run groups again. Difference between these groups and NA is that NA has an atmosphere of Recovery. Most NA members are drug-free (that means methadone-free too). Whereas the addicts at these clinic-run events are almost all still using and trapped in the mentality of a crackhead looking forward to their next pipe. That's why I found the last lot of group therapy so insufferable.

I don't forsee any improvement in mine and Buta's "relationship". She seems to think I'm mentally retarded and speaks to me like a 3 year old. Because I don't feel "well" I am not engaging with anything or anyone very much. I'm not putting on a nicey-nicey happy-smiley act for someone who doesn't respect me. I know the woman's problem: she doesn't know how to handle me, so she patronizes.

One big advantage of attending those awful groups is that you get to know other members of staff. Once I have found an ally I will put my complaint forward, the same way I complained about Maple Syrup. I was rid of old Maple that very morning.

So that's that.

I have heard nothing from this supposedly amazingly integrated mental health care approach team plan malarky. As I write, I have a risperidone pill lying on top of my coleslaw pot. Yes I am going to submit to the chemical cosh once more. I've taken a Valium in readiness. Antipsychotics are so rough you NEED Valium to take the edge off the concussion-like effects of them. I am supposedly meant to continue with these pills, even though they're "antimanic" agents, when I'm depressed. But really I need some kind of antidepressant. I know they won't want to give that, so it'll have to be a dreaded mood stabilizer. Part of me would really like a bit of Elevated Mood. What I could do without is my my mind going into such overdrive I'm falling to pieces. It took weeks and weeks to recouperate from the last "episode".

When depression goes away the worst I've been left with has been some lingering self-esteem issues and occasional automatic depressive thoughts. Mania on the other hand put my brains into meltdown. I couldn't remember simple things. Words. Names. Appointments. I lost the ability to do multitask completely. I even had trouble typing. Words consistently appeared backwards. Occasionally I could glance at a page of text and see meaningless wiggles ~ what an illiterate tribesman would see. Nothing seemed to make sense any more. I didn't know where I was going or what I wanted from life. My attention span was so fractured I had to watch DVDs 5, 6, 7, 8 or more times to get the gist. So that's about all I did. Watched endless DVDs. Because my mood was elevated, not depressed, I felt OK. Like a car crash victim, stoked up to the eyes on morphine feels OK. Totally disabled but not too bothered about it. Every evening I felt a distinct rise in mood as the last pill wore off. On a couple of occasions I went into full-blown mania before I took the antimanic pill. Then I'd potter about totally lost in my flight of ideas and racing thougts, unable to sleep because of the cinematic images I saw whenever I closed my eyes. Sometime in the early hours my energy would briefly lull and then I'd run to the bathroom cabinet and knock back the pill.

Those days are gone now. I need some of that energy back.

Only good news is, my methadone has been dropped another 10mg. I knew they wouldn't countenance 1mg a day.

And now I have this bitch-features hacking away at my mental health. I don't now whether she's trying to give me another breakdown, but that's where I'm heading.

By the way, 豚 Buta is the Japanese word for "pig".

Hammy's Ramblings

ANNA GRACE YOUNG'S book has come out! It's called I Hate Myself And I Want To Die. It's available from the publishers now; from Barnes and Noble and Amazon next week.

I've found a website that shows the stroke-order of Chinese characters. The one we see here says mouse, rat or rodent.

Japanese writing link.


Prescription Heroin in the UK: an addict's success story. (Erin O'Mara, editor of Black Poppy magazine.) Annie read this: the first heroin script she mentions came from the Chelsea and Westminster where they had the 210mg limit.

With British heroin having a supposed 40% average purity, that would be about half a gram a day: the very bare minimum I was ever able to get away with when I really had a habit.

(I've still got a habit now; a methadone habit!)

Last night I slept "only" 10 hours; I remember thinking, as I realized Iceland have terminated their £1.50 sweet chili chicken pizzas (grrr!) "that's good" only to find myself dozing to oblivion in front of Midsomer Murders, crawling to bed and sleeping flat out from 4:30 to 11:30pm, making 15 hours in the last 24, which is not at all good.

Last time I started sleeping a lot less I went a bit manic. That was about 2 weeks ago. I scored 17 on the Young Mania Rating Scale, using it very conservatively a fortnight after the fact. Really I should probably have scored more. Example: uproarious laughter gives you a 3 or a 4, depending on whether it is or is not "appropriate" (how am I meant to know that?) but I only scored myself a 2, because my mood was definitely higher than the bassline. In fact if I hadn't done so much laughing I think I'd probably not have noticed the other "symptoms" and would have considered myself an insomniac not a maniac. I still find it very odd that there can be a supposed "mental illness" where you're TOO happy and TOO excited. (And TOO IRRITABLE: that's the downside.) ... I have just pondered whether or not my laughter was appropriate and at the peak it was not. I ended up walking the streets at 2 or 3 in the morning laughing my head off for no particular reason. And feeling uncomfortably paranoid whenever anybody passed me by. I never noticed them till they were right there which made me jump out of my skin.

I did some pondering on "what situation am I meant to be in? I don't know" because I'm meant to have schizoaffective disorder and yet I've gone mostly sane. Well I think I'm sane. I know I still have experiences that are considered symptoms eg I woke up only yesterday with words surrounding me in the air, which is the lightest version I know of "hearing voices". But none of this really bothers me. But the upshot is even if I prove to the doctors and the world that I'm sane and "normal" I cannot wriggle out of a diagnosis of bipolar I disorder, because I had one full-blown manic episode. That alone is enough to saddle me with a lifelong diagnosis of bipolar, whether or not I ever go full-on manic ever again. (I wouldn't mind being a bit manic though.) Then there's the uncomfortable fact that whether or not I would be miserable enough to get granted access to a Victorian lunatic asylum, I most definitely do get depressed quite a lot and have been depressed to a greater or lesser extent for years and years. Even my Mum said to me "I know why you took heroin: it's because the antidepressants didn't work".

This is Emil Kraepelin's description of "delusional mania". I was never delusional, apart from when I became convinced people were coming round to kidnap me (it was then that I decided to walk to France). I didn't walk anywhere but thought if I posted online that I'd gone outside that would be enough to put the fearsome kidnappers off! Though I was only raving mad for about 5 days, the mania took weeks and weeks to wear off. And I still get low grade hallucinations.

His surroundings appear to the
patient to be changed ; he sees St Augustine, Joseph with the
shepherd's crook, the angel Gabriel, apostles, the Kaiser,
spirits, God, the Virgin Mary. Statues salute him by
nodding ; the moon falls down from the sky ; the trumpets
of the day of judgment are sounding. He hears the voice of
Jesus, speaks with God and the poor souls, is called by God
dear son. There are voices in his ears ; the creaking of the
floor, the sound of the bells take on the form of words. The
patient has telepathic connection with an aristocratic fiancee,
feels the electric current in the walls, feels himself
hypnotized ; transference of thought takes place.

This is "delirious mania", where you go at the very peak of the attack. It becomes very hard to make sense. People complained about how difficult I was to understand, seemingly unaware THEY were talking more crap than I ever did!

Their linguistic
utterances alternate between inarticulate sounds, praying,
abusing, entreating, stammering, disconnected talk, in which
clang-associations, senseless rhyming, diversion by external
impressions, persistence of individual phrases, are recognised.
Other patients only display a slight restlessness, whisper
flights of ideas to themselves, when addressed look up
astonished and without comprehension, obey simple requests,
give irrelevant answers, smile, weep, cling to people, suddenly
begin to sing a song or scream. A female patient called
out abruptly,

"I am justice ; do not touch me ; I am
omniscient ; away from me !"

Waxy flexibihty, echolalia,
or echopraxis can be demonstrated frequently.

These extracts are from Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia by Emil Kraepelin. It's by far the best book on bipolar disorder and recurrent depression I've ever come across. The modern resources tend to use one another as references, so they all write the same thing, referring back constantly to the DSM IV diagnostic criteria which never were meant to be a description of the condition, merely a device by which all psychiatrists might diagnose the same conditions in the same patients. Grrr.

How paradoxical that a book last published in 1921 should bring to life the experience of bipolar mood swings so very much more vividly than anything written since!

Extraordinary Distractibility of Attention certainly
plays an essential part in defective perception. The
patients gradually lose the capacity for the choice and
arrangement of impressions ; each striking sense-stimulus
obtrudes itself on them with a certain force, so that they
usually attend to it at once. Accordingly, if their attention
can for the most part be quickly attracted by the exhibition
of objects or by the calling out of words, yet it digresses
again with uncommon case to any fresh stimulus. The
picture of their surroundings and of events remains, therefore,
for them more disconnected and more incomplete than it
would be, if it suffered merely from encroachment on the
process of perception.

The outside world appears slowed down while the thought process speeds up. So that life becomes a series of disconnected impressions, like a mixed-up slide show.

I want to take drug addiction and write a text as groundbreaking as Emil Kraepelin's. That's quite a high ambition. I don't know how successful I'll be; but I will try...

I've just discovered a celebratory methadone bottle. One I forgot to drink. Which explains why I felt so ILL yesterday: dur! Well I drank it about 20 hours too late and I feel perfect now. The sweats have gone.

If I can stomach it, I'm thinking of posting something on the benefits of prescription heroin for addicts. I won't go on, but will clear up a few myths here and now:

1. if you give addicts heroin they'll just use more and more of it, not less and less not true. providing the dose is high enough, you don't WANT more once you've had a certain amount ~ If this were true then methadone users would want more and more, people on opiate bachache tablets would take them more and more and cancer patients couldn't be trusted with their own morphine (which they are: they take it home in a massive bottle of linctus)

2. people on a prescription heroin programme will just go on and on using street heroin on top and you won't be able to test for this (because it's all heroin). Pharmaceutical heroin comes in freeze-dried ampoules containing 100% pure diamorphine hydrochloride; street heroin always contains other opium alkaloids: thebaine, codeine, narcotine etc. Testing for these will reveal whether somebody has used "on top" of their script. In official trials conducted in the UK just under 80% of patients managed to stop using ANY drugs on top of their script ~ not just heroin

3. prescription heroin will just get "diverted" to the illicit market. This happend in the 1960s, when a small number of private drs prescribed heroin over-liberally to anybody claiming to be an addict. Most schemes today insist that the empty ampoules are handed back to the clinic, thus limiting the chances of "diversion".

OK those are the 3 main points covered. If only I'd been given a script that WORKED FOR ME I might have cleaned myself up years ago. Until very recently I just couldn't handle the depressed mood methadone left me in. I was a raging needle freak, so drinking a bottle of gloop just didn't satisfy me. I only managed to stick to methadone for weeks on end because I was in a manic state of elevated mood and thought heroin would bring this down. In fact I can only tolerate methadone now because something seems to have changed in me. I still feel depressed, but heroin seems not to make the difference it once did...

... I don't believe prescribed heroin would be a solution for everyone, I just believe it should be an option for everyone. Subutex is an amazing drug ~ far more appropriate for most people intent on detoxing. As I said I WOULD have wanted prescription diamorphine, if only it had been available. Now I'm more intent on getting myself CLEAN. I find taking methadone very depressing because on methadone I'm dirtier than I am on heroin! (Methadone is more toxic than heroin by a long way.) If anything has changed for me, it's probably more that heroin has stopped working than methadone has started working. When I stuck to methadone for weeks on end I was in no way more "together" than I'd been on heroin ~ probably a lot less so. My clothes were dirty and I couldn't face the procedure of washing them because I was hallucinating in the laundrette. I ate the same food for days on end and just did not engage with life the way you're seemingly supposed miraculously to do as soon as you stick to your methadone. I've heard that when you do clean up off opiates the feelings you've damped down leap up vividly. My ex said she used to watch nature programmes and cry. She was a lot less whimsical over furry animals than I. Lots of people at NA say in the first year off heroin you feel shit. The rehab I emailed told me the methadone I'm on may well be acting as a mood stabilizer. So the best result I can expect from going Clean would be a really Elevated Mood. I feel I've been depressed enough On Opiates (even though I was using them as antidepressants) so I'm hoping going clean might kick some life into me.

My big project while I'm still on methadone has to be to write this book about drug addiction. Strangely my motivation has changed from making loads of money (I probably won't make anything) to Explaining Myself. It's not what I did I want to tell the world, it's WHY. Now that might be helpful.

Is this post really badly written. Probably. Am I gonna post it? Definitely.

HAMMY GOES FISHING
I just love the way he can't resist nibbling his fishing rod, the furry swine!



THE WORLD'S GONE MAD
This has been on my random blog for some time. Listen closely to what Peter is saying. He makes about as much sense as YOU all did when I was supposedly "mad"!!!
Anna said this is what some of my comments sounded like at the time. You wonder why I have the troubles I do? My mind somehow got really addled! I don't know how, but it most certainly did....