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....

I love myself and I want to live ...

EARLY TO BED EARLY TO RISE makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise! I got up nice and early today and now I'm feeling healthy.

Didn't I go into a right downer yesterday? While I was actually posting it as well.

Today I went to my methadone chemist then got waylaid seeking out good misery memoirs. WH Smiths has a stingy selection of books at best, so expecting them to stock what I want is like expecting an industrial chain-pub to serve up Real Ale They just won't do it.

I searched the charity shops for The Quiet Room by Lori Schiller and Andy Behrman's Electroboy. I couldn't help wondering how on earth anybody managed not only to take crystal meth and cocaine but to nose them up in copious amounts during repeated bipolar manic episodes. When I was manic a mere couple of mugs o black cofee appeared to amp up my racing mind so very fast that my flimsy thoughts fractured and fell apart as they streamed letter by exploding letter into the warp-speed vortex of my delirium. During the peak of it all I don't think I was in any state to take an international flight, let alone set up and run businesses in art forgery the way Andy Behrman says he did. I have this suspicion that if he was compulsively drugging all the time then his mania might well be as much a drug-induced high as a natural one. What I remember of mania is not NEEDING drugs ~I felt high enough anyhow! Different strokes for different folks. I always had a wonky tolerance to uppers.

My friend Pinky (Perky's ex) still wants me to write her life for her. She says she's gone as low as you can do in depression and this is most definitely true. She spent weeks on end withdrawn into a catatonic stupor unable to speak or even move without prompting. I'm not surprised she has "mental health difficulties" considering the life she's had. Her story is the saddest life story I have ever heard. I don't know how she survived it. The last blow was when her best friend went and committed suicide last year ~ that was Perky. Perky had been messing about with that 4-methylmethcathinone crap. Its street names are mepherdrone and meow.

Pinky tells me I'm crazy because I once kept my washing up in the shower for 6 months showering it instead of wiping it clean. And she describes me as "excitable". Bloody hell. I don't think she's ever seen me in a true state of excitement. I did go a bit manic a couple of weeks ago and find myself cackling uncontrollably down the phone. This was around the same time I ended up running around in circles in the middle of the night laughing. I was bouncig those bouncy balls like crazy! Then the lovely hypomania wore off and I was all boringly depressed again I only knew I was manic because if, say, I glanced at a book which said "house" on the cover, I'd start seeing words following on from house that weren't actually there: housekeeping, house work, housewives, full house, house of ill repute... &c, &c, &c! Even today just now my brainbox was picking random words out of the air. I don't know whether that "means" anything. My own book was supposed to be a search for meaning in a morass of self-induced confusion. More to the point, it was supposed to explain why I did what I did. Which would explain how I got where I am today.

In the library I had a good flick through a Mental Misery Memoir titled Sectioned. I know the nomenclature varies around the world: being sectioned here means being placed under involuntary commitment ~ banged up in a nuthouse! The publishers don't even mention what manner of madness he suffered from, which is rather remiss in this day and age of cod psychiatry. I soon figured out he was manic-depressive. He was orphaned at 14, ECTd at 16. But his life seems to be a blur. Maybe I was flicking through it far too fast, maybe he just doesn't want to remember. He talks of a "delusional mist". But there's nothing misty about delusions, which aren't just false beliefs ~ they have a brilliant, compelling quality. The only thing indistinct about such a state would be one's memory of it afterwards. With time, the bright swirl of the moment does fade into the mists.

My favourite drug memoir, by the way, is Anna Grace's I Hate Myself And I Want To Die. Gone is the bleary mush you come to expect of such books. Her writing is crystal-sharp and focused. She thinks her writing isn't good enough, but I tell her again and again it's not about being clever, it's about putting your point across. Which she does perfectly. Which is why she is so readable. Authors who spend more energy trying to be witty and itelligent than telling a rattling good read... I'm sure y'all have encountered that type of tome. As far as the drugs go, of course my own misery was self-inflicted, though it doesn't feel that way at the time. Addiction isn't self-inflicted in the ordinary sense of the word, because addicts take drugs automatically. I once heard a lady police officer saying "nobody puts a gun to their head and forces them to take heroin". But that's the point: they do! She phrased it perfectly: heroin IS a chemical gun to the head! It that forces you to use it more and more ~ and if you don't you'll pay for it. Of course you pay a heavy price to use the drug as well, and that's the main reason addiction is such a misery. Marianne Faithfull once said you only stop using when the pain of being on drugs exceeds the pain of being clean. I'm not sure that's exactly true. Pain has never ever made me want to stop taking the world's best painkiller. What does make me wanna stop is being fed up a substance that never made me feel good enough for long enough, has never been strong enough for long enough. One that seemed to make me feel better but in the end probably made me feel worse. I've grown tired and intolerant of the whole scene. All the best people have died. I can't stand the baby gangsters who deal in the stuff. I feel old and tired. I never intended to be the heroin addict I turned into. I only continued taking heroin because I felt a lot worse off it than on it. But I'm now getting to the stage where I want more from life. I don't know what more is on offer, but I'm willing to give it a try. In a way I don't care how much life without heroin might hurt, because the life I had on it was intolerable too. I feel like I'm on a ride to nowhere. If there is some point to it all, I'm sure I'll find it sooner if not later.

Of course, drug addiction is a type of self-inflicted misery, but I was miserable before I ever took drugs. Mood-altering substances were especially tempting when your mood is so low. Even when I didn't think moods were the root of my difficulties I've had counsellors telling me to see doctors, and doctors telling me I was depressed. Only when I got addicted to heroin, strangely enough, did my drug habit become a be-all and end-all in the eyes of the medical "experts". My own drug addiction has been a gigantic exercise in self-harm. I never managed to die. So the issue now is learning how to live. I wonder I wonder what life has in store next. I'm bored sick of life lived between methadone and heroin. Now I want to see what's next...



6:54pm I've run out of online Tales of the Riverbank, so here's the Russian version of the Canadian original, Hammy Hamster



Escaping hamster.
This one's obviously well practised in the art of getting out of a boring plastic tank:~

Back from NA (ears open)

NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS was packed out. I kept my ears open and my mouth shut. I heard a lot about Resentments. I have realized from reading the AA Big Book that I'm full of Resentment. The more depressed I feel, the angrier I feel; the more resentful I feel towards nearly everything. Then I start to wonder whether I'm clinically depressed at all and not just a plain old Junkie, mired in self-deception, overflowing with Resentment in all directions. Now I realize I'm probably resentful and depressed at the same time. If I am self-deluded, I cannot by definition know that, can I?

What Resentment do drug addicts cultivate? Resentment at not being able to live life on life's terms. That phrase came up a lot tonight. Life on life's terms. Not something I'm at all good at.

One reason I'm keeping my mouth shut at meetings is that I'm afraid that anything I do say may be half listened to and used against me.

Example: self-medication.

Warning: to avoid yet another Junkie Rant, skip the italicized section... If it seems badly written, btw, it's because not even I am willing to read it back. So it stays as it was...

On a bad week people will assume I'm on drugs when I'm not. Then when I do use, they would seem pretty taken in if I claimed to be drug-free. Because when I use heroin I feel happier, calmer, less paranoid and my mood doesn't swing all over the place quite so much. To me this is the meaning of self-medication. It means using nonprescribed drugs as medication. It doesn't mean using drugs to chase a euphoria; it means using drugs to cope. Totally different thing. When I mentioned self-medication, a concept I took a long time to accept, at Intuitive Recovery, the group leader said "yeah I self-medicated with crack after my sister died". And that annoyed me. I've never ever seen anybody self-medicate with crack because crack doesn't have the effect of any medication. People who abuse uppers tend to burn themselves out pretty early. What goes up must come down; so they're chasing an impossibility, and most addicts realize this pretty quickly. Heroin always made me feel better all day, even when I just took a tiny bit on top of my methadone. It stabilized my mood for a long time. It doesn't seem to do that any more, which is why I think I'm wasting my time by taking it. There's a mood stabiizer called lamotrigine (Lamictal) which works better against depression than mania. That's the one I'd be willing to try. A mild state of mania isn't a mental illness at all. I need the energy of mania without psychosis or uncontrollable excitement it gets to at its extreme. Then I'd be OK.

The phrase "self-medication" by the way came from the same nut-nut-nurse who seemed to think I had some sort of personality disorder. I told her, eventually, how lousy I felt on methadone and she said "maybe you're self-medicating" ~ then did absolutely nothing to try and rectify the problem. The way she nurtured the idea I was somehow an anxious-avoidant or dependent personality is ridiculous. That's mistaking me for somebody who gives a shit. People with those types of personality tend to be unduly hung up on others' view of them. If I were like that, I'd hardly be keeping a blog like this now, would I?

I'm still in 2 minds whether or not to write an autobiography. I never wanted to be a memoirist. I don't really want my experience published. I suppose I'd be willing to prostitute myself in a literary way for the money. And to put into the world a cautionary tale that might hopefully put off at least one impressionable unhappy person from ever following in my footsteps. It's true the idea only came to me in a fit of despair. I wanted to leave behind a suicide note that might make my family some cash, and of course if I were to die, the manuscript would be many times more saleable. If I don't die [oh bloody hell shut up will you. I'm not intending to die! I won't die. I won't!} then I'll use any cash I get to pay for private treatment. That means an injectable script, tapering down down down to Subutex. I wouldn't go to rehab, I'd go travelling instead. I'm not at all convinced that whittering on and on about my drugs problem is any way of staying clean (which is why I'd write the memoir while still dirty (methadone-dirty, at least). If I did ever manage to come off all opiates I think once I got 100% clean, I would want to stay as far away from them as possible ~ in thought as well as deed. Anyway maybe I should write my own misery memoir: I can't think of any other constructive thing to do...

Another reason I want to write my own memoir: I'm not convinced there are that many good ones. Certainly not drug-memoirs. I couldn't sell mine on the strength of my nutter credentials because my nutter-credentials are weak. While there's no question I'm a full-blown heroin addict I barely score a 2 on the nut-nut richter scale. I think in publishers' terms (and publishers do like to put things in categories) I'm more of a drug-addicted lost soul than a proper madman.

I did have all manner of ideas of how to promote my book, which I can't give away here because nobody's ever done them. But couldn't do them now. Because if I did try and publish my story I'd most definitely want to remain anonymous. Some of the worst details are just too awful to put my name to. I mean, at one point I just gave up on life so completely I was like a walking shadow. All I wished for was that I might die in the night, and I never did. Which angers me to this day when I think about it. There's so much that I don't want to think about that I'm going to have to, simply to be able to put it down in roughly chronological order, one self-inflicted misery and misfortune flowing from the next. But I'm willing to torture myself if I can get some cash out of it. I honestly can't see what proper job I'm ever going to be fit enough to do. So I'm willing to try my hand at writing. I always wanted to be a novelist when I was younger. Maybe I should write Valerie's memoirs too... Now we come back to the issue of drugs. I don't want to make a name for myself as a drug author or drug addict. Which is why I think I'd wish to remain anonymous. For a long time I didn't want to write a drug-memoir at all... Then I realized I wanted to leave behind at least one thing after I died... So maybe I should just write the fucking thing and leave the reasoning-out till afterwards.

Well I've gotta go. It's late.

Electroboy review. Knowing the outline of the book, despite not having read it, this review encapsulates many of my own reservations about Andy Behrman's story... Is he really a manic-depressive, or just a drug addict?
http://www.amazon.com/review/R3UX8FSBM70MWR/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#R3UX8FSBM70MWR


TALES OF THE RIVERBANK
To any of you of Christian bent, I do apologize for the Drought story yesterday btw, in which Hammy consults a wicked guinea pig witch in order to bring downpour to the riverbank....

LITTER BUGS
A hamster, a rat and a guinea swine go off in a hot air balloon...



GP'S MEDICINE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


TALES OF THE RIVERBANK

THE DROUGHT
Hammy gets rained on and looks really cute



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

Taking Notes

THAT'S ALL I'VE BEEN DOING... all night... (somehow it feels real meaningful, staying up most of the night doing something ~~ dunno precisely why!) Making copious "notes" re this erstwhile book of mine. Or: put another way ~ huge sections of upcoming chapters written out in the wrong order ahead of time so I'm going to have to fiddle to fit them in. Annoying, but less annoying than not knowing what to say when the time comes to complete my "tome". I feel constipated with bestselling fiction. If I don't get it out of me, I'll die. I can't go on like this. Everything has to be finished, so everything can change. That's all I'm focusing on. Even Maple Syrup can see the change in me. She agrees that if you can't give up heroin you can never move forward. I'm preparing the place to move to when I am totally clean. Just bear in mind I was sick both mentally and physically for years before heroin addiction totally waylaid everything about me. In American terms, if my life is a car-crash, then I'm "totalled". And I've had enough of all this. Had enough and want out. And I'm NOT moving on into a blank void, not if I can possibly help it. All I ever wanted to do in life was be a writer of novels. I mean since childhood. Yes there have been other ambitions and distractions but in truth writing is all I really wanted to do. So I reason: if I can do that, I have my distraction from drugs already up and running. I've already noticed I write much better on methadone than heroin. I don't need to take the drug to write the lifestyle. I lost more than a decade "researching" that one... My unabridged flirtations with drugs now go back about eighteen years. That particular chapter of my life has run on far too long and needs bringing to closure ASAP.
And I don't know how to end this post, except by saying: and that's that!

Illustrated: coloured notes, as illustrated at Mouserunner.Com; the so-called Fleetwood Diary, as penned by Christian Fleetwood in 1964...

Robbie Williams & Some Very Fast Trains ...

ROBBIE WILLIAMS: SHE'S THE ONE
Live at Knebworth

Knebworth was just up the road from Hatfield, where I grew up on a tiny housing estate that seems now like a childhood dreamland of Scandinavian-style townhouses in rolling Teletubby-style parkland. Anyway, our house was built on land still leaseheld by the Marquess of Salisbury who still lives in Hatfield House, which is sometimes called a twin of the stately home at Knebworth ...

This is sweet. I saw this on telly last night. He picks out a couple from the audience to talk to, sings them a love song and she cries and it's all very cool. I was amazed to find out Robbie Williams, who hid in Los Angeles for years where "nobody knows who he is" ~ or he gets mistaken for the Dead Poets Society actor...(!) has even had a gold disc in America. Surely he's the most successful "not that popular in America" male solo artist of all time...



Something stupid. With Nicole Kidman. I love this song anyway. And hasn't she got a good voice?



C S LEWIS: The Magician's Nephew. Such a shame the Chronicles of Narnia films got hijacked by manic "Christian" brigades in the States (and over here) jumping up and down all over the "Christian" metaphors of the books so much they squashed them... Still, the Narnia series is absolutely enchanting. And it was set in that dreamy Edwardian age that has been described as a "long golden afternoon", the end of an era that remains planted in the hearts of British children to this day... where everyone was upper-middle class, educaated at fearsome "public" (ie private) schools... had a cook and went to the country for "hols".

WHEN I WAS LITTLE, as well as an "author" I wanted to be an engine driver (really I did!) I'd have wanted either to drive slow ones like this one with feet up on dashboard (if trains have dashboards) nibbling smoked salmon and dill sandwiches as we trundled the rusting rails of semi-disused branchlines into weed-ridden industrial landscapes.



Hang on, forget that sedate nonsense. Really I'd wanna drive a mega-fast one like this, a Japanese 新幹線 bullet train:



This is amazing. A French TGV with extra-big specially fitted wheels breaking the world speed record on rails. 574kph is over 350 miles an hour! This record, incidentally is not even 10kph slower than the fastest train ride of all time ~ which was done on a hi-tech hovering maglev track.



I always wondered whether maglev tracks can cross each other or go through junctions as ordinary railways do. And if so how would it work?



The Wikipedia article on high speed rail is quite fascinating ...

Even America, land of the old-fashioned looking double-decker, ultra-chunky slow-running train that doesn't have a locomotive on the back (just like the diesel trains of my childhood) and I know this is true because I've seen them on television is planning a high speed line between San Fransisco and LA! The trains will look like this. Not very American though ~ are they?



This photo courtesy of the LA Visions blog, many thanks!

460 New Words

Ich habe nun viel mehr Flüssigkeit auf Deutsch aufgebaut. (If you can "build up" something as swooshy and pouring as fluency, that statement has to be true.)~ And did I make a mistake in that sentence? I wouldn't dare post up anything longer because I surely would. I did German A-level nearly 20 years ago, so I think I can be forgiven for having to look up such elementary terms as "suddenly" and even "actually" in the dictionary. Having said that, I worked out that I have a 93% comprehension rate of the German I am reading. That is: (after flying through the entire book without dictionary) I have ploughed through 25 pages at approx. 360 words per page, ie about 5400 words and looked up and listed 20 pages full at 23 lines to the notebook page of definitions. Ie there were 460 out of 5400 no! 9000 words! I did not understand. Giving me a comprehension rate of about 95%.

The book in question, in case you have not been reading is called Christiane F: story of a child prostitute and heroin addict. I found it very depressing first time round. The book is made up of tape recordings by two Stern journalists who found out about the then-15-year-old heroin addict after she was prosecuted for three cases of drug-possession. "We the children of Berlin Zoo" (the main railway station and hence a meeting place for junkies) was such a successful series of articles in 1977 that a full version, published in book form became a popular bestseller. The centre pages are full of pictures of very young kids, most of whom say they started fixing between 13 and 15 (younger for girls). Page 186, next to a picture of a girl who resembles a tall china doll, says: Livia S began using at 15 and died aged 18 in the public toilets in Hansaplatz. In her pocket was a letter to the Social Welfare Office pleading for a place in rehab. "Could you please find me a place as soon as possible. One extra day out here could cost me my life. With your help I could turn into a healthy, employable person again." And page 187 shows her dead body, laid out in the toilet cubicle with what appears to be a drugs works and a packet of something beside the corpse.

The bit I'm still on is about an idealized childhood of a country girl who couldn't understand why in Berlin you weren't allowed to play on the grass. Now I know all the words for metal grille, barbed wire, giant sign, concrete bunker and so on ... It takes such a long time looking all these up and writing them down (I have to write them down: otherwise I can't read the book back with a list of every word I don't know in order of appearance). I started starring every word I've consulted in the dictionary. My memory is so bad there are some I end up looking up five or six times ...

Well I have to go. Time is vanishing quickly. Hope y'all had a nice weekend ...

Illustrations: Langenscheid and Oxford-Duden, 2 of best German dictionaries; "works" ~ when I first moved to London I used to think people had dropped very narrow number-decorated pencils on the road; Gropiusstadt ~ Berlin suburb by Neuköln, where Christiane F grew up (and you're surprised she ended up on heroin~??..)

Christiane F

FINALLY THE BOOK I'VE WANTED FOR AGES CAME TODAY!

Christiane F: Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo.

real name Christiane Felscherinow.

It is the story of a girl from a middle-class house who likes to sneak out to discos at night time. There among the bright lights she discovers heroin and life takes a downward slide. She finds herself leading a double life: going to school by day and sneaking out at night to Bahnhof Zoo (Berlin's equivalent of Kings Cross station) and prostituting herself for heroin money. And it takes her mother two years to realize what is wrong!

The book was a big bestseller in Germany. I heard it is (or was) a set text in German schools.

It WAS translated into English, published by Transworld in the UK but is now out of print. I doubt it has ever gone out of print in German.

In the English-speaking world the film Christiane F (with soundtrack by David Bowie) is of course far more famous. What's remarkable (for a film) is that the on-screen Christiane and her boyfriend Detlef really do look like the real-life pair.

Not much is known about what became of the real Christiane F. She gave an interview in her early 20s (link below) ~ when she had just been busted for heroin possession again. I heard that she has died ...

This was Christiane Felscherinow towards the end:





Christiane F age 23 ~ interview

Amazon Review:

I borrowed this book from one of my German school-exchange partners & although had just taken my GCSE at the time, I found I could understand the vast majority of the book, as it was written by a teenager and therefore doesn't contain many complicated words!
I have tried to buy this book several times in the *cough* 13 years *cough* since I read it, but always found it was out of print. So when I found out a couple of years ago that this book had come back into print I just had to buy it.

Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo really is one of the most powerful books I have ever read, if you are a parent of German speaking children I would thoroughly reccommend you give them this to read when they are about 14 or 15. I'm sure it will definately make them think twice about taking drugs!

Like all the best books I have ever read the 'characters' in the book really do leep out at you, you can just imagine being in 1970's Berlin alongside these teenagers.

I think that this book is so powerful that if it were ever translated into English (& why I ask hasn't it been already???) it should be taught in our schools.

Here's the Christiane F filmclip formerly on my sidebar:

Christiane F
("Wir Kinder vom Bahnhoff Zoo")
Berlin has long been a centre of "alternative" living, attracting the artistic and dejected. And of course heroin rushes into such a void:



You can see the film in its entirety on my random blog by clicking HERE.

No Rest For The Wicked...

CLICHE, cliché, cliché... and yet how very true... who on earth thought up the saying deserves a pat on the back or a knee in the ..**** (well that's wicked)...

I never feel I've gained sufficient rest for the "demands" of my jam-packed soul-empty days...

Suffice it to say I feel exhausted; I won't go on about that...

More to say I have THREE potential writer's projects about to go. OK one, my memoirs is "going" except, as you may well have surmised, it really has stopped. Autobiographical writing is so very much harder than fiction, I can tell you...

Picking over any modern novel you'll soon realize there's a certain strict protocol to constructing a scene and it pretty much works out as a third/a third/a third. That is, almost any chapter of fiction will tend to break down into a third dialogue, a third description of action and a third character-introspection or explanation. That's very roughly so, but speaking from experience when I have written fiction before, once you get the knack of the protocol of telling a tale (and I can only speak for myself): it comes very easy.

The memoir writing did not. Partly because I refused to "novelize" my own experiences: that is construct long-past events into neat scenes (which nearly always involves conflating experiences together, simply for the sake of neatness), then re-inventing dialogue to fit. And slotting the whole lot together into a fast-flowing narrative. In the novels I've attempted yes there were times I feel I managed this. But the memoirs are naturalistically told, ie raconteured in a more blog-like fashion, so what I recall I write, what's less relevant I race through and what's sticky and tricky I attempt to explain. Still, well over 25,000 words in (a good minimum third of a book) I don't feel I truly have the hang of that manner of writing... And I'm still not 100% sure I'm into the whole business of self-exposure on that potential scale ~ my whole life to the "whole world"... So I don't know.

As for the other two projects one is a historical tale so unready I can't tell you what it's about. And it would obviously require much research. The last is my fictitious tale of junkies and addicts, the one with that great mythic hellhound Gwendolina, still locked up in the kitchen to this day for her doll-chewing misbehaviour ~ and baying at the striplight. The rule is ~ most especially for the new and inexperienced writer and this is how I count myself ~ write what you know. This is what I know, and if it comes easy, it's surely what I ought to be writing.

I have one draft of such a book already done but it has such glaring flaws ~ not on a line by line basis, but inherent in the plot itself ~ that the entire tale requires rewriting. What I actually did in my first draft was to break that cardinal rule write what you know, spin off into other areas not adequately researched, and came unstuck.

So I do have things brewing up my sleeve (my sleeves are always smouldering, always festering, always seething out smoke; always have been. Sometimes they fulminate so vigorously they emit volcanic lava...)

So that's me. And as for yesterday, that was another thing I have to contact someone else to be able to do ~ someone I don't actually know. But if they like my idea they should hopefully let me do it. I hate posting "oo, it's secret" but none of this stuff should remain secret in the long run. Unless I garden-out or whatever the expression is. Veg out? Lunch out. That's it. I'm thinking rocket salad here...

Righto I'd better go and squander yet another afternoon... my attempts at room reorganization have turned neat stacks of things into a pigsty explosion of upended furniture upon tartan-bagged robos and falling piles of paperbacks etc...

So I'd better go. In answer to some queries of a few days ago, my robos are fine. They have ceased squabbling, thanks to living again in the same lightbulb box. They trot around quite happily at random times of day and night (seemingly no rhyme nor reason to when...) And they still love me (more to the point seem intrigued by me) at some times; flee in utter terror at others! And that's about THAT...

So bye for now!

Memoir Monday

WRITING... my passion all het up got me back to WRITING AGAIN... Yeah! Back to memoirs! (Not an autobiography; a memoir. An autobiography is (supposedly, though most authors pick and mix the truth to a shameful degree (I get the impression) a tale of one's entire life from birth to the point of writing. Mine being a drug memoir races through childhood and adolescence to my first encounter with drugs and yarns the tale from there.) My only departure from "truth" in the strictest sense comes by my renaming all my friends (as I do here: do you really think I know someone called "Laundretta"~??!?) and the necessity to briefen many secondary incidents in the interest of keeping the flow. All this and well over 100 pages handwritten (that has to be at least 25,000 words) and STILL I've not come to heroinsville! The story is "told with warmth and wit": I hope a reviewer will be able to say. And humour. Nobody wants a tale of misery from beginning to end and mine certainly isn't...

I did about TWO WHOLE PAGES last night... slept and was so whacked out I dozed all the way through my favourite radio show: Vanessa's programme on BBC London. Great literature is exhausting!

OK there's little other news. Except that I put in my red fireglow light last night. Within five minutes Bashful, my first gremlin emerged from the lightbulb box where they now sleep. Twenty minutes later saw Itchy make an appearance. Pinging all over the shot (or is it shop?) and gnawing on yellow pepper pumblechooks (y'know: the inside bits with stalk and seeds)... and at longest last Spherical stuck her moose-head outside: plaque-on-wall-style (which always looks hilarious) and lumbered out. Did a wee. Got on wheel and thundered ever onwards throwing the other two roborovskis off in varying directions; occasionally keeping one snaggled on flashing Daz-white undercarriage round and round and round. Spherical, being, well: almost Spherical and twice as heavy as Itchy is top peck. And what Spherical says in roboland GOES!

Happy Confectionary Monday to y'all!

Video: Duck Raids Campsite

Chilly!

IT'S BEEN A VERY COLD DAY! Here in damp old London (London is meant to be a damp city: in the 1950s fog used to combine with coal smoke from a million plus chimneys to swirl into those famous "pea soupers" a kind of 1950s supersmog. Some evenings it was so bad they had to have the sighted led out of tube stations toward the trolleybus (tram) stops ~ by the blind! Maybe the fog was another reason for the enduring popularity of the trolleybus (which is a doubledecker tram*: ie like a double decker bus but powered from overhead electricity. For some reason they never tagged two or three together; which I always thought the entire point of trams: that they're longer and can go on-street then flume down underground suddenly to reappear in celestial rosegardens ... (sorry imagination took control of me for a sec). Yeah anyway does anyone know why they got rid of the trolleybus?

*no it was not! I just put up the trolleybus picture above (from South Africa) you'll see that one (and every trolleybus I googled) ran on TYRES not on street-embedded rails... why on earth would you want that? All the disadvantages of being tied to electric power and yet the possibility of taking a wrong turn and wrenching yourself free of the electricity!

I do apologize about my earlier post on books. The post is an extension of a telephone conversation. Or to put it another way: I wanted to put the idea of e-publishing to YOU the e-reader. And it all got a bit vehement. My vehemence is now dispersed.

Anyway now it's up to me to FINISH the bloody thing. E-book, selfpublished book or massmarketed book. Aaargh!!

I spent all day asleep. I don't know what got me. Something to do with not having slept more than a couple of hours a night for several days in a row. And suddenly I'm slaughtered!

Yeargkkh! I just realized Easter CONTINUES tomorrow into Monday. Why an Easter Monday? What's that all to do with? Eggs? Did you know in the Chandogya Upanishad the entire world is born from an egg? See: these myths were interwoven at the misty dawn of time...

Sorry not Chandogya: Katharudra Upanishad see verse 20 all gods and demons in the cosmic egg...

Music:
Taffy: I Love My Radio

Shiny Sunday

SHINY SUNDAY... it's been the earliest ~ and coldest ~ Easter in nearly 100 years. I say "shiny" ~ really it's a bright white day. Much of London (apparently) had snow yesterday, though none settled. We've not had serious, Christmas-card style snow to the best of my memory, since 1981. I remember tobogganing down the middle of the road (cars slippin' and slidin' all over so no chance of gettin' mown down and this was on a hill with a dead end up top) aged nine and drest in my first pair of jeans. (I'd been a couldroy kid up till then ~ how very 1970s!)

I went through a memoirs brainstorming session with a close friend last night. And emerged from it feeling less conclusive than ever before...

Also I was advised to publish electronically, online. The thought of selfpublishing memoirs or fiction, either e-wise or on paper, I have to say, leaves me utterly cold. Since starting this blog I have realized the essential paradox of the net: that with well over 100 million potential readers (in English) and all the clamour and confusion for attention, it really is hard to get noticed... without paying massive pounds-per-click to Google to get toplisted... I get only 80 hits ~ and that's on a good day.

I think a blog like mine with its sometimes challenging subject matter demands a level of ongoing emotional investment that most people feel unable to give. A book of memoirs requries such investment for only days... and then you move on. Far more attractive!

If my blog stuggles to make 80 hits, how on earth would I sell a book of 100,000 words ~ and CHARGE FOR IT (because that was the suggestion) and make anything like enough income for a 7-storey double-fronted house off Sloane Square with basement swimming pool? I really don't see this internet publishing thing working.

People go online for FREE information. They go to a bookshop to pay. Books are selling better than ever before (unlike newspapers, which are sinking Titanic-like into the meery gloom...)

Seeing new readers appear on my blog who might have spent two hours or more a day for several days in a row perusing my blabberings... then they mostly vanish. This convinced me that some people were reading my blog like a book anyhow.

But surely most people are still like me. They want a book they can take on the train to work each morning, eat sandwiches over at lunch, take into the bath and curl up with at night before dropping off. It becomes part of them for a week; then goes to a friend, or to the bookshelf.

In these days of pain, the socalled Misery Memoir has become a topselling category on any general publisher's list. These books sell. And I have a story to tell. If it's worth telling, it's worth selling.

My "dream", if you want to call it that, has always been to snag a top agent who will make a deal with a large conglomerate publisher with the power to orchestrate international publicity etc and get my book into every bookshop, airport, railway station etc the world over. I would be willing to play my part and go out promote promote promote on radio, on television (if they'd have me ~ ha!) and in print. Because that's the game, these days more than ever...

Books are showing no sign of any decline in sales in this so-called electronic age. It is worth bearing in mind that of all the massmedia: films, records etc, the printed word is by far the oldest and most enduring. In the last decade the highest sellers have sold higher than ever before ~ 50 million plus on seven Harry Potters and The Da Vinci Code. Distribution systems are more sophisticated than ever before. My blog gets only 20% of its readers from the UK. In other words 80% are scattered worldwide. How can I possibly selfpublish in volume format and arrange anything like such international distribution? Or even worse, e-publish and convince anyone to pay? Be honest: have ANY of you EVER paid any money for an online text-only product? I'd love to hear from you if you have.

First rule of business, as I see it ~ the customer is set in his ways. No matter how good my book might be I honestly don't see that I'd get anything like optimum revenue by putting it online and expecting people to pay ~ when there are reams upon reams of websites offering information on the same subject whether or not it's worse-written ~ for FREE.

Also, no traditional publisher would go anywhere near my work after I'd done this. When blogs have been "published", it's nearly always been on the understanding that the author adds at least 50% in fresh material.

A recent radio documentary on the future of the book surprised me in that even young children, the socalled Harry Potter Generation STILL preferred printed volumes to e-books or reading onscreen or scratting through nasty old print-outs.

I'm not against selfpublishing when it comes to roborovski books and other sideprojects. But I'm looking for a career. And I intend to make one by crafting memoirs and fiction: and by getting well paid for it!

Nobody seems to get it. I don't WANT to be a publisher. I want to be an author. Publishing is a business; authorship an art or craft. And as I said before, my ambition has always been to be an authro of heatwrenching bestsellers and to sell enough books to stretch end on end to the moon and back. Harper Collins or Random House could do this for me. I couldn't do it on my own!

Perhaps this soudns arrogant. To me it's just ambition. As the saying goes: reach for the stars and you might just catch the moon.

*

EAster has so far passed me by with nary a chocolate egg. All my talk of "trotters" and I've had a dose of the trots myself (yeah: you really wanted to hear that!)

If you're enduring fractious relatives after a ten hour road trip you have my sympathy.

It's a bleary day here. What do people actually do for Easter? I've no idea. I've never done it.

OK: bleary day; cheery day. It's what you make it. I hope all goes well with you.

***

Easter Bunny Doggie...

*

Music of the Day:
The Specials: Ghost Town

*

Hey! Spherical did a furry entertainment yesterday, when she poked her head from the teabox where they all sleep again... the hole is only JUST gnawed big enough to let a tubby robo in or out... so her head, protruding from this teabox, looked moosehead-on-plaque just like a bizarre piece of weary Victoriana ~ she was so entertaining

Radio Interview

I PHONED THE RADIO AND GAVE AN INTERVIEW about being an addict... it gave me inspiration to carry on writing (which has stalled. I mean: stopped completely)... I lost all enthusiasm for it. But now I'm carrying on.

As for the radio; I'd called up seemingly hours earlier... then the phone rings when I'm fast asleep and I had to compose myself and just talk. The host structured what I said by asking questions (precisely the right ones, too) which is why I call it an "interview", as that's how it felt...

So these are three resolutions:
1. complete these dreaded memoirs. they've been going on for ages
2. cease using the words "tubby" and "trotters". what on earth someone coming here for the first time would think of my blog i shudder to think
3. keep self and living conditions in tip-top form. evilstein is on at me again (nosey old git: admitted to poking round in there under pretences of "spraying for cockroaches" (so why did I spot at least three last night? he sprayed nothing. just intruded where he is not welcome)

And that's that. Now I have to go. I dunno why but I cannot sleep properly still. so i've been listening to the radio all night (there's some very good stuff on)

and on and on i go... hey it's "Good" Friday tomorrow so have a happy pagan time all you who somehow manage to associate eggs and bunnies with Jesus Christ becoming Saviour to humankind...

*

THIS is one of the finest photoblogs I think I've ever come across:~
Betwixpix2...

Grey Skies

REPOSING HOME ALONE of a weary Wednesday afternoon... white-grey skies slowly shifting, stark light floods my double-glazed top window (bottom section blanked), the radio prattles on subdued volume; every now and then the front door goes banging, letting some busybody personnage in. Busy body: I am all but busy. I feel like those clouds: ever so distant, drear and insubstantial. Just like the weather, my heart feels chilled.

"Time goes by so slowly for those who wait," says Madonna.

But what about me, waiting for nothing? Time goes terminally slow.

Of course I must fabricate my own future. And that's what's new, I realized in my despair. I'm one of the people who's forever waiting for my boat to come in.

In lifetime past I was, of course, accustomed to sending out many little boats. All the time, on a frequent basis. Even though they usually were the tiniest of boats, out they got sent; and many did come back in...

For instance, I used to send off my answers on a postcard (remember those competitions? Before the blanket predominance of email and premium phone numbers?) By selecting prize draws with care (e.g. from trendy magazines whose readers mostly considered themselves above such trivia) I won all manner of nicknacks: guides to snowboarding, manga anime videos and so on...

And I had an endless stack of eyecatchingly funky specimens from the "please take a postcard" racks in trendy bars. I collected hundreds. These eyecatching postcards definitely helped me win...

I also applied myself to writing (unpublished) fiction, poems and other "works" I don't feel I wasted any time in so doing: firstly, writing is way more satisfying than timewasting old crosswords, sodoku and so on... and second, you actually have something to show for your efforts. As the only worthwhile author of writers' how-to guides, Dianne Doubtfire, pointed out; nobody expects to perform other acts of craftsmanship such as banging together furniture, or etching glass vases without first completing a rigorous apprenticeship. And so it is with writing. So none of my time or efforts have been wasted. I try to approach my memoirs etc with a sense of mellowness... Well I do try...

I was watching Trotters TV last night (ie handfeeding bits of bread etc: and they were so funny. I only gave one blob of wholemeal bread roll and Spherical grabbed it, who is top peck. Bashful immediately took up nibbling the other side, but Spherical reared up into wrestling position. Then Itchy's ears went up as she finally realized food was in the offing and it was right beside her... She stuck her nose out... till she realized Spherical was playing top peck, and didn't even attempt to have a nibble. Off she slunk to the wheel and let Spherical, now alone and relaxed, finish her top peck meal in peace...

Watching them I realized suddenly how very tiny they actually are. And why I gravitated towards such tiny trotters in the first place. They're just like kittens or puppies at two to three weeks; yet you know they will never pass the "tiny enough to sit on your palm" phase. Plus they do trot round and round like a furry horse race at times of tubby excitement.

(And I'd promised myself no robo-rants today. Sorry!)

And last but not least MORE legal news:

The Express Newspaper Group has reached a $1.1 million out-of-court settlement with the parents of missing toddler Madeleine McCann, who was apparently snatched from a holiday apartment in Praia de Luz in the Algarve, Southern Portugal, last September.

The Daily Express and Star newspapers had libellously suggested that the little girl's parents had something to do with her disappearance, which I'm sure most reasonable people consider to be absolute rubbish just as I do.

As part of the settlement the Express newspapers' legal team made an apology before the judge in open court, and more to the point were compelled to publish grovelling FRONT PAGE apologies in both national titles this morning. The Daily Express and the Star have a combined daily circulation of 1,400,000 and a readership of over three million.

Click here for the Independent newspaper's report on the matter... (The Daily Express and Star are mysteriously not googlable this evening...) I got the article from the Express online via msn; but on further clicking "the article ... may have been deleted"...

OK post over. I'm off to SLEEP... I've not slept properly since Sunday...

GOOD NEWS for an Australian lady in Hanoi, Vietnam. She got caught with about 3kg of heroin in her shoes (must have had a very funny walk; you imagine 3 bags of sugar in YOUR shoes...) a high court has downgraded the life sentence she was inconveniently awarded into a sentence of death... why on earth people think life is "merciful" but death "cruel" I fail to comprehend... the British prison service are especially pervy... keeping double child killer Ian Huntley alive after two (rather pathetic, it has to be said) suicide attempts... if death is so against "human rights" why not have an elective death penalty? Where anyone sentenced to life can make the decision to die at any point during their sentence and be permanently out cold within the hour? Now THAT is civilized for ya...

BEES BLOG

MOUNTAINOUS COUNTRY... lack of recent peace... taken over so many say by a country soon to have Olympics, though the country soon to have Olympics has, so I hear always thought of the mountainous land as an annexe... to see recent pixx click here

Plotting... (& "only" $50million!)

NOT MY WIZZY NEW NOVEL, I'm afraid; though I wish it was. I've been plotting the course of what might eventually become part of another book (if it gets into my memoirs)... And that is: my FUTURE.

I sat up for what seemed like hours last night, penning all manner of conceptions to paper...

I would particularly like to set up a Gledwood podcast. Surely that's the way forward for "freestyling" radio these days rather than taking the hospital or pirate radio route...

(Just what would I cast about? Not more hamsters and heroin; it has to be grown-up stuff...)

Well that's about it. No point telling ideas before they're done. That's called "fiction" or, to put it perhaps more kindly; tends to turn into "plans never executed"... I'm only into planning the future present. The only kind of planning worth doing!

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AND I NEARLY FORGOT! LEGAL EVENT OF THE YEAR: Heather Mills McCartney yesterday obtained a £24.3 million (ie $50 million give or take a couple of months' interest) divorce settlement from Sir Paul.

The press have had a field day baring all of Miss Mills's "porno past" etc. Even the judge insisted on taking the slightly unusual step of making his decision public... his judgement branded her an "unreliable witness"... and awarded her a fifth of the alleged £125/$250million she had claimed from Sir Paul's £400/$800 fortune (though the press have claimed he is worth double that...)

Poor Heather Mills. Though I'm hardly her biggest fan I don't hate her as the tabloid press do... If you click on this link the full tabloid post mortem plus some lovely photos should pop up, showing her seemingly utterly deranged. The press are so clever at getting these. My diagnosis is of a single-minded lady of great determination whose mind has become focused on this divorce to the exclusion of nearly all else: which has led her to become over-wrought... so over-wrought, in fact that as soon as the case was over she allegedly ran up to Sir Paul's lawyer and doused her over the head with mineral water (it was a posh brand though).

Hopefully Miss Mills and her $50million can now move on to fresh pastures and poor Sir Paul can retire in peace to his Scottish hideaway and live out the rest of his days $50million poorer, but with $750million still intact...

BLOGTHING OF THE DAY:
American "high end" motorhomes (poshest personal coaches I've ever seen: these are fantastic... if you could get one shipped over you could have SUCH a lark driving around Europe in one... (so much more glamorous, as I said in their comments than camping in the awning of a shivery 1960s Dormabile!!!)

BLOG II Spanish-seeming person's Wales-looking photos...

PS why are Chinese and Japanese schoolgirls into such candy-coloured kitch like this..?

Radio Gledwood¬!

PHONE CALL FROM THE RADIO TODAY offering free red wine if I come in with other prized telephone contributors to go under the mic and testify how wonderful we find the show!!

I took the call in full chirping enthusiasm, saying how much I loved the presenter in question etc, not realizing at the time how every statement I made was a tick tick tick (that's a "check" to you Americans) in the mental boxes of "valued contribution-worthy listener"... I was actually being upbeat in case I'd won a million-pound cash prize. Sadly not. but I claimed I was all up for meeting with other listeners, big fat microphones and some of "the team" at such and such a time on WEDNESDAY. Which doesn't give me too much time to fret about which pair of diarrhoea-stained jeans and smelly holey socks I'm going to wear...

My initial reaction was "I CAN'T GO!" Even when I try and clean myself up I look... well I look like what I am. No contact lenses and lgasses on the skew like a walking %percentage%-sign...

Then I thought why NOT? Obviously make the effort but come as you are.

Then I thought HEY ~ hang on, I could apply for a work experience/internship here. I don't know how to explain a TWELVE YEAR GAP in my employment history ~ except by declaring the truth: that years of illness (depression and chronic fatigue syndrome CFS topped with drug addiction) threw me off course.

Maybe I could vanilla it all out, make it all anodyne and acceptable. But then I thought: hang on, talk radio is about human situations. If I'm used to life on the frontline ~ people ill, diseased, abused, uncared-for, insulted and injured and dying ~ and can meet their tales with empathy and warmth, why should I lie on my CV or resume or application?

As a writer of memoirs, I can hardly reveal all in print, yet lie on my CV and on air, can I? In the end, there can only be one truth, and as the (Biblical, I'm pretty sure,) saying goes: Be sure your sins will find you out!

Perhaps I seem a bit glib at times, a little too ready to spout out all about my disgusting injecting heroin habit. But I'm not proud of it at all. I merely made my decision, many moons ago, to be straight with people online and on this blog... otherwise imagine how it might go? Me making friends the world over under totally false pretences... I'd be leading a double life even more than usual.

Like a house of cards, such fragile situations are apt to come tumbling down at the very first sneeze...

In real life, people see me and know that something ~ they may not grasp precisely what ~ but they realize something's up, not right, quite frankly all wrong... Online I might prattle about hamsters, homes, politics, etc: nobody would be any the wiser. And yet friendships might grow, relationships be cherished... and all under totally false pretences.

If I can possibly avoid it, I'm really not one for living out a lie.

OK tangent over.

Back to the radio. What should I do? Do I turn up to this drinks and "recording how brilliant I think the show is" soundbite evening?

And do I apply for this internship? And if so, how do I handle my past?

Please: I need some experienced advice!


Song of the Day:
Captain Sensible: Glad It's All Over

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21:16hrs COLD FEET!
I'M TOO SCARED TO GO! I DON'T WANT TO SET A BAD IMPRESSION. I don't have nice clothes (really don't)... no confidence at ALL in my appearance. My hair needs cutting. I desperately need (a) contact lenses or (b) a proper pair of glasses that don't need a hat to sit vaguely straight on my head (that's how bashed up my current glasses are ...) I only TOOK to wearing glasses because of rock-bottom self-esteeem (I feel about 10% as good in them as I do in contacts)... it all feels too rushed, too early. The internship/work experience is a totally different issue: I've obviously set a good enough impression on air; I really feel (no exaggeration) that I would destroy this if I admitted who I was in person and I won't meet the producer tomorrow but some other person.

The two issues:
A) recording praise and
B) applying for work experience
are totally separate. The latter is my focus.
You're all sure I should be 100% frank? I could fudge my career "gap" by saying I'd been travelling and working fleamarkets in Goa and Thailand and no-one could prove otherwise; but as I said earlier, I'm writing memoirs that will tell everything. In the long run I don't see any gain from lying (and hate doing it)... my bad experiences might stand me in good stead

aargh I don't know what to do I'm not dying of pressure to turn up tomorrow (it IS just a thing to record listener soundbites that is ALL) I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know aaarghkkkhhh! Maybe I will bring Baby Itchy in my pocket. She can bite me for good luck...

Authorship: Harvest Mouse Ship!

PEEPING IN AT MY HAMMIES on Sunday afternoon, imagine my surprise ~ between the two Parmesan tubes ~ to spot a gargantuan ball of fur with three faces. Yes! The tiny trotters had set up a nest out in broad daylight. Between those twin bed-come-"toilet" tubes; right underneath the waterbottle. All three in a row, blinking dumbly at me in late afternoon's sheer sunshine; Itchy, perhaps, might take to licking at the bottle. Bashful, by natural instinct, joins in. They look so funny there, a symmetrical pair of robbies licking simultaneusly at their mouse-bottle. Then Spherical really does clamber across the room for a poopoo and climbs straight back home on top of the other two... The tubby pair just close eyes as pink paws tread over ~ they're quite used to this. And so my furry pyramid, eyes open, ears pricked up alertly up top, two thirds slumbers, one third washes self. Looking so entertaining, it's a strain not to laugh in their treble-faces. (See top photo to see how their sleepy pile appears...) Such cackles must be restrained, else my tiny tubbies can get offended and scared.

What they do like is a poke from a fried-ricey chopstick-end. Unlike Naughty - my rottweilerien former snow white Campbells Condensed Russian hamster, who used to grab said stick with arms and jaws and perform a trick by allowing self to be picked up and waved around the room as he savaged into the hapless wood with assertive teeth... These present whiskery gremlins grab half-heartedly, or stare in asonishment and the MSG-and-eggs ponging end and nibble as it comes close enough... And of course, now and then take horror and ping off in astonishment to tentatively sniff out of hidey-toilet-tubes with quivery fat pink noses. The swines!

And how am I? Thankful for the interminable weekend's eventual end. Druing which I ran so totally out of money I didn't even have the other 30p to add to 29p to purchase cyder not-on-tick yesterday...

On Satruday nite I was happy since I found a clingfilmed lump ~ a £10 deal of crack! ~ on our front doorstep! That really made my night.

I scrawled out a single halfbaked stanza, a "quatrain" ~ four lines of a 14-line attempted sonnet about heroin adiction. On reperusal next night I found it wasn't actually so very terrible. So I'm sticking with the attempted poetry. Because I love poetry. I think I have an ear for it @ a real ear for it; a facility @ and not so very many people do. Poetry is a high art. And merifully compact enough for me; hopefully ~ eventually ~ to churn out & be able to declare: look! A polished, all-completed Work of Art. By me!! What a blast THAT would be!

I haven't pushed any further with my book of memoirs yet, however. I had riginally hoped to have completed draft one by now: I can't though. I need to finish my book. I see it as my passport out of this drudgesome morass of a cess-heap ruined, bombed-out, self-destructed void of a life...

When done; once out there, my book shall declare:~

1. that I have talent enough to warrant taking seriously as an Artist in the Literary Sphere, and

2. it shall hopefully accrue me advance finances enough to pay my way through express detox (which costs several thousand pounds) ~ plus buy me a multimedia Apple laptop and all the facilities I need not only to wordprocess, but to document my life in audiovisual clips. These I would collect either to youtube or to put towards a wizzy selfmade documentary of myself or both. Or summut like... and... be able to pay rent on at least a 1-bed preferably (bc I could do with the space) 2-bed flat ... (or even better get a £5 million advance and be able to buy a pokey flat outright (well that's all you get for £5 million in London these days...)...


3. most obviously, basically of all ~ authorship sets me, at long last, on the road to a proper and fulfilling career...! (Yes it does!)

TA-daa! And now I must go! I do hope y'all loved Saturday's harvest mouse montage. MICROMYS MINUTUS ~ I love that Latin! ~ a very teeny-tiny-mini-mousie... how can you get cuter than that~?!?

PS How's everybody like my new "avatar"... I got fed up with tiny nervous roborovsky baby on hand; I tried to be tubby old "I ran 10,k00 miles/16,000 kilometres ~ as far as Paris to New Delhi in my 3.5 human years/120 hamster years too-brief-lifetime Pandable! But poor Pandable wouldn't take... so I'm a tiny gingery harvest mouse instead ...


ps Take a peek at the top pic to see how the dismantled pile of mass-groomers appears ... don't the robos look gremlin-like..??

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this is a really good photoblog: joannwalraven.blogspot.com