5am Chocolate Recovery

CADBURY'S WHISPA (x2) and Yazoo chocolate milk (x1)... severe chocolate craving. Despite the pill I'm not sleeping, waking up for ages. Been surfing since sometime before 2am, intermittently sleeping, (absolutely impossible to fill out a sleep diary for tonight I haven't the faintest idea how many hours)...

The drinking is around 3 cans per day at 7.5% alcohol in 500ml cans. I'm not "out of it" because I'm "drunk"; "alcohol is a depressant" as they loved to tell me. So not being depressed at all, being the opposite of depressed, I should be able to guzzle as much as I like, shouldn't I??! Or they shouldn't patronize us with such an obvious semantic "terminological inexactitude". Yeah I know I shouldn't drink. If I didn't think that I'd drink a hell of a lot more.

It takes some edge off me. Me who I am supposed to be (at last). You see inside every white mouse is a tigress roaring to get out. That's what my thought pattern was doing yesterday. Not me speaking in my head. Me ROARING in my head. I felt pretty hyped up, pretty good. I'd rather be a tigress than a tiger. You can have cute baby... cubs! That's the word. And aren't tiger cubs the cutest! Also tigresses are fiercer than tigers. What's the metaphor for fierce? Tigress, not tiger.

I've no idea what NA made of yesterday's speech except some scattered titters of laughter at the funny bits. Better than the reaction I got last week when I started ROARING. A jolt went through that room. That's the point, I wasn't "roaring" at all. I use that word in exaggeration and retrospect. I was merely making my point in a restful, easy manner.

But the woman I was next to, a reformed heavy pothead, is one of the kindest, brightest spirits I have met in that association (if I'm any judge of character: we've never conversed; I've only heard her share). I don't want her wary of me.

Now I'm going to have to go round making mental notes of damage to repair. Slight damage. Another way of repairing damage is by having a nice attitude. That one might do more. I say having... attitude rather than "being nice" I don't want merely to be as in being for a moment; I want to BECOME the best person I can be. And being on gear was scuppering that one constantly.

It also totally messed up any attempt at self-help. I mean the type of help discussed in self-help books, which in my view, if taken with a reasonable dose of perspective and moderation can actually help one affect constructive changes in one's life. I saw my existence as a means of change. Never wanted to be the same person at the end of a year as at the beginning. Wanted to be better. Gear messed all that up.

It's hard to say what heroin did to me that was negative, bar the obvious cliches.
What did it do? It blanketed my feelings, which I'm beginning to see might have been more intense than I realized. No not all the time but I look back and see myself at various times and think hmmmmmmm what was going on there? So it was self-medication as the clinic told me (not my expression)
I got heavily addicted. I cannot imagine being more addicted to that drug than I was at the peak. I relied on it utterly, not for happiness so much as bearability through life. To sleep, to get up, to eat I most definitely needed gear. It would feel weird, if I let it, eating without having a hit first.
What else did it do? Well something eroded my self-esteem like nothing else. So badly, at one point I had barely any left
It made me homeless
It killed my friends
The whole situation made me feel hopeless and I had no life to go back to and I hated the world we live in. Not strong ingredients for a good recovery.

Which is one reason I am not giving up on NA. My interpretation of their Ways is given below, one thing I've heard said a few times goes along the lines "my friend hasn't got a programme, but my friend isn't an addict"... in other words the friend is worse off, poorer than the Recovering Addict. Because Recovery means everything else good apart from just not taking drugs. That's what Recovery is. Recovery. It's what I want...

KLF FEATURING TAMMY WYNETTE: JUSTIFIED AND ANCIENT (JAM BY THE JAMS)
...this lot tend to get left out of early 90s compilations, nostalgia etc. theirs was by far the best non-ravey dancey pop of the time.... as an "art experience" they also burned £1,000,000 cash they'd made
A 99 is vanilla ice cream with a stick of chocolate flake shoved in at a jaunty angle...



SCOTT GARCIA: A LONDON THING
the proper video this time, Melody



SCOTT GARCIA: A LONDON THING
this is faster, the much more like original pirate radio mix

Bonjour!

HI FOLKS. I've still got goblins in the broadband so I'm at the internet place round the corner. I tried logging into my neighbour's system, but could't crack their password... Oddly though there are two networks, BTOpenZone and BTHomeFon that will let me, after registration and a costly SMS payment, log in for the princely sum of £3 for an hour, £5 for a day or £39 for a month! So what is this? Broadband for those who can't be bothered to get it installed? I was on mobile broadband before, which worked perfectly until ... GOBLIN ATTACK!
I could also take the computer to the public library, which is wifi'd up, but I'm afraid of getting infections in the machine... is there any risk? If so, what is it..?

WELL IT'S A ROCKY ROAD to recovery of any kind, as I'm discovering. Every time I try, or even think I'm somewhere near level ground some PERSON will appear, ANOTHER PERSON ~ SOMEONE ELSE will come in and throw everything up in the air, like a mad psychiatrist shovellng cows' diarrhoea in his rose-beds.
All I want is to be left alone.
And to feel OK.
My biggest, biggest problem with methadone is how lousy I feel when I wake up in the morning. Unless I can save the entire dose all day and sleep with it next to me,ready to drink at 4am ~ so I can get up before eight with the level in me high ~ then I will wake feeling like a block of ice, unable to get warm (yet sweating heavily if I wrap up) and craving craving heroin out of my mind while the methadone takes its one hour twenty minutes to come on. (Yet another thing I hate about methadone, it takes so very long to kick in, even if you've been sipping it faithfully for years.) You'd think that by the time I feel OK again I AM OK, but that doesn't usually happen. My mind's in so many pieces by this time, it never goes back together all day.
The worst days on methadone are such empty stretches of blank despair the only constructive thing I can do is go back to bed, cursing my body for ever bothering to wake up and wishing I could have some slider switch installed on the back of my head so that when I'm depressed I can sleep for 23.5 hours out of 24. And when I'm not depressed sleep not at all (sleep, after all, is a big waste of time if you have anything to do). When I used to work proper hours I never had any time outside work for anything except jumping in the bath, eating and going back to work. The entire rest of my life was spent working or sleeping.
I didn't have particularly good mental health in this period.
If I had only discovered heroin many years ago, I'd have gone on it then. Back in the days when the only cure I had for depression was cakes and cocoa and lying in my Arabian Nights style bed with about 15 pillows and eight quilts watching telly. I also used to smoke one cigarette a day. Just the one. Which I'd ponce each evening off the mandy secretary downstairs...
Then along came heroin, a far more efficacious painkiller. And life seemed amazing for a while. The first two years of full-on heroin addiction were like Christmas every day. I got to use my drug of choice morning, noon and night.
Of course I had to beg on the street to get the money to score ~ but even that was a novelty. And I was young.
And didn't look like a bloated, puffy old alcoholic ~ which is how I looked at my worst.
Anyway I decided to throw that life in the trashcan of the past. Still everything is going badly. (Actually I don't expect things ever to go well...)
And I must run. Else the goblins in THIS computer will time me out!
See yers all soon :-)

I AM NEVER BUYING VALUE FISH FINGERS AGAIN. I don't know what's in the tasteless white sludge dribbling the soggy batter-scabs that pass as "finger" coating on "Iceland 35 fish fingers. 875g. £2." Octopus suckers, squids' tentacles, lobsters' eye-stalks, mixed mashed fins and generalized factory drain-scrapings would be a first guess.

Never again shall I brave the rigours of "value" comestibles. Though Iceland's fishcakes, £1 for 10, which are 50% mashed potatoes (like my brains!!) go rather nicely with fried rice. As, believe it or not, do Birdseye cod fillet "Omega 6" fingers. Yes: fish fingers and rice. Very Chinese, in a "what the supermarket shoppers of Yunnan Province actually tuck into at home" type way.

Now to my wider "diet" ~ the acetylated extracts of poppies grown in the high valleys of Afghanistan. No more no more no more! If I wrote down every wobble of resolve you'd get travel-sick just reading. Ditching heroin ain't easy. Addiction means can't stop. To speak of using as a "choice" is fundamentally to misunderstand that addiction is where you end up once decision-making has gone out the window. In addiction, drug-use is automatic. Not using: that is now the choice. Easy to make; hard to live by, but a true choice nonetheless. Being on methadone at least makes that choice a viable option I've long had yet somehow never could quite grasp hold of...

So here's my plan. Not a solid plan, but something still resolving, still in formulation, but it goes something like this: I will stop taking heroin again. I will take advantage of being so unexpectedly happy (see yesterday) I suspiciously tried to dig out a "psychiatric" cause. I will go to this dual diagnosis thing I missed last week because nobody wrote it down. I will see whether the persistently tricky low ebb I spend so much time at can be treated. I am, after all, doing my bit by not drinking to excess and abstaining totally from cocaine and crack ~ both of which, I am told, fuel low moods and scupper antidepressants.

My sanity has taken some knocks at times. It feels so good to have it back.

Today I bought a Nokia charger and USB cable for uploading Itchy, Bashful and Spherical Trottester's magnificence to the worldwide web! How exciting!! Who knows we might have Baby Itchy Roborovski starring on Youtube before the day is out!

I hope I haven't bored you too badly...

I Wanna Learn How To Fly!

THIS IS SOMETHING I'VE ALWAYS wanted to do. Apart from potholing and caving the reverse pole of my fascination with has long been an obsession with flying. By flying I mean "proper" flying ~ in the open air. Not hang-gliding, which is, of course, merely gliding, but powered flight in a glorified canoe hanging from a human kite with a giant fan behind. Yes! Microlight! I would seriously like to have a go at this.

Nearest I've ever been to true flight (and I don't count being in the confines of an aeroplane: I wanna feel the wind in my hair, man!) is parakiting. This I have done about five times. Two or three times running behind a jeep in a field (which was the best) and twice on a Scottish loch behind a speedboat. Most people who do this do it behind a boat. Running behind a landrover in a field of cut wheat is far rarer. I was only about nine. Just when you'd expect to get knocked off your feet and dragged at 30mph by the knees, suddenly the knees are trailing in the air and you're 20, 30, 50 feet or more up. I can't remember how high I actually went but it wouldn't have been over 100ft. Of course you stay well away from trees, but I think I'd have been able to look down on the canopy of an English oak... This is one of life's experiences I'm so glad to have had. I was only eight or nine when I first did it and wasn't scared a bit, just excited. I had to wear a crash helmet and do emergency drop-and-roll procedures among the haybails...

The latest I heard about exciting "true flight" was an English road team who are taking a vehicle by road, sea and AIR from England or Scotland, cross Channel to France, down Spain and across to Morocco and on to somewhere near Timbuktu. There in the Sahara, where nobody probably much cares about aerial regulations (or there aren't many/any) they get the true capabilities of their vehicle in action. Basically it's a dune-buggy type thing with a giant fan behind and a parascender's chute on string behind. So, providing they can get going properly without the chute dragging in the ground, theory is they take off and fly (for hundreds of miles, I believe the intention was...) They said they were looking forward to surprising African villages. Surprising!!?! You can say that again. Then again there's no limits to the antics of crazy Englishmen in the minds of most foreigners... What I'd be most cautious about would be landing. I mean: have they had much or any practice? They said restrictions were pretty great against operating said "car" in this country and you need a pilot's licence to do it. They made it sound like they were just going to get to the desert and take off...

... I hope they don't crash into a scorpion... (Hey it might stick them with its tail and puncture their tyres...)

What can compare to drugs? They miserably ask. Well I answer you: extreme sports most certainly can and it's my intention on my multimillion pound novels' royalties to launch myself high up in the air... I'll post photographs and youtubes once I'm up there!

Link: Wikipedia's article on microlight aviation ... (also known as ultralight in the United States and former British colonies)...

VIDEOS

1. This is exciting! (To me... !!) Yeah how, geektastic is this! MICROLIGHT FLIGHT...



2. This is from a brilliant documentary I found called MIRACLES IN BIRDS. Here's part 3 of documentary 2, to see the rest on my "random" blog, click here ...



3. IN THE NEWS: JADE'S WEDDING SMILES

Jade Goody, UK television's biggest reality star by far: made famous by Big Brother and OK Magazine, caused an international incident by going back in the "Celebrity Big Brother" house and doing "racism" on Indian actress Shilpa Shetty... went on Big Brother India only to get dramatically pulled out midway through thanks to unexpected medical test results returning a verdict of TERMINAL CERVICAL CANCER. This is really nasty. The girl whose popularity soared then plumetted is now riding, media profile wise at an all-time high with even the Prime Minister offering her best wishes earlier this week and the Justice Minister overriding her fiancee's post-jail curfew for 24 hours so they can spend their wedding night together click here to see those clips. A on tomorrow's "Wedding of the Year"... poor Jade, who doesn't expect to live out this year, reportedly sees tomorrow as her last chance to wed fiance Jack Tweedy. The £1 million +plus++ she's raising via magazine and TV deals will go in trust for her kids... How very sad this all is. I'm not a huge fan of Jade Goody but I'm gutted for her ...

Fruit Shortcake Biscuits

NOT BECAUSE I'M "NUTTY AS A FRUITCAKE" but because fruit shortcake are my favourite non-"cream" biscuits (I have such babylike taste~ has to be sweet, preferably chocolate, etc...) but these are a grown-up delicacy that go really well with hot, sweet tea. Hot, sweet tea is just about all I've been up to lately because I'm so so ill!

Hmmm... No honestly it's just a "community virus" with exhaustion and depression sequelæ, as over-Latinated physicians like to put. So I believe. And dit-de-dit and dar-de-dar... And so an obsession with Great British Biscuits results.

I know this talk probably annoys you people, but today I am minded yet again to kick off heroin, like an ill-fitting worn-out jackboot into the trailing dust where it belongs. Not to go "cold turkey" mind (I add for those of you not familiar with my meandering, winding go-nowhere life) but merely to bump properly on to the methadone I've been on for years ~ only using still on top. Nowhere near as much as I might use without it, I should add. But still using far too much. Any using at all is too much when heroin is the drug. I am fulsomely bored of it.

Only this afternoon, as I wandered down the high road with my new biscuits, I got to reminiscing about crack and the great whooshing physical rush of the stuff, and the tidal-wave of a high you surf after your brain's recovered from the druggie equivalent of being shut in a microwave on full power for a minute or two. (This being the effect of a big pipe, at least. In the beginning when I used to smoke not realizing most people broke up the rocks into more manageable portions, the sheer intense force of that cocaine rushing my brain all at once used to sweep me utterly away. So as my ears stopped whooshing, my dazzled eyes, no longer snowblind told me I was in a calm, bright place... a place I've been to a lot on drugs. It's like floating in the full power of the sun, serene and not burning... Then I'd come shooting back from this place-non-place back to the "reality" of being 1000ft high and WHHHOOOAAH!!! It's those effects, and the very suddenness of them from unwrapping the crack, to shoving it on the pipe, to slowly burning and breathing steadily in... within half a minute at most I was totally out of it in la-la-land.

So why don't I crave that immense high? Or even miss it? Partially because it's absolutely incompatible with anything resembling an ordinary life.

And yet heroin with its effects so subtle you could easily miss them and feel nothing other than dull and tired. THIS becomes the object of my greatest adoration. Why?

Perhaps there are no answers and I'm not up for wasting the energy to find them. I just want out of this life. At long long last.

Of course this means I will have used within two days (if past form is anything to go by). But I can at least make this affirmation. And at least try...

As NA say, you can only do one day at a time...

A Blast from (our Grandparents') Past

I THOUGHT THIS might entertain y'all... a business letter from my 1929 shorthand manual I decyphered when I could not sleep...

I don't consider myself right-on politically correct but this really made me laugh. By the way you can click here and see the original squiggles under "89: Reading and Dictation Practice" and see how clever I am~ har-har.

Dear Sir:
I have an opening immediately for a man with a
thorough knowledge of French and Spanish to go abroad
with a committee representing the officials of this company. If
present plans are completed the party will leave next
week on the Ile de France and remain overseas
between six and eight months. The officials already
have expressed their opinion that it will be necessary to employ a
college man not over thirty-five of good family.
It will be of special value if he has some knowledge
of finance.

You will readily agree that getting such a
man is no easy task. I feel that since
you know so many college men, as well as your
own fellow classmates you may be able to send one
of them for this job that really has a future in it.

May I ask you to phone my office soon. Yours truly,

Man? Man? Man? Good family? I make no further comment...

Re: yesterday's NA rant, as I said and I must reiterate because I'm not NA-bashing just making an observation on certain (always uncommented on) features that have really niggled: NA does work for those who "work it" (as they say). It has saved countless lives in the most literal sense and in the widest possible sense because nobody was born to be a crackhead or junkie. In the depths of the addiction I lost sight totally of this. I saw my body as nothing but a receptacle for drugs and more drugs (heroin, alcohol, crack in descending order) and began to cuss my disappearing veins. Why else did I have veins, except to spear hypodermics full of gear into them?

Thanks for yesterday's Answers. I wanted to reply to three points:~

Why couldn't I just ask the man who "drug of choice drug of choice drug of choiced"? Well you're allowed no cross-talk which means people talk in turn and if you want to ask a question like that you'd normally do it afterwards in private. And the reason I didn't do that was this bloke was famously curmudgeonly and might well have snapped "mind your own business: if I wanted you to know I'd have shared it"!

Why 12 steps?
Best way I can put it is, they're like the 12 base camp stations on the way up Everest... it's by far too big a thing to take on in one.
I don't know how they came about, but someone somewhere had ever so cleverly picked up every excuse-making, backsliding self-deceptive tendency of the addict (though I believe these 12 steps originated with Alcoholics Anonymous) and constructed a life-encompassing programme of recovery with no excuses, no unfinished business. Hence Step 9 involves making amends to those we've damaged, wherever possible, except when to do so might cause harm (I've puzzled over what type of "amend" might cause harm and what type but drew a blank). Through the Steps you can achieve closure with the past, gain a renewed almost "reborn"-type perspective on life and far from going on just not taking drugs ~ RECOVERY is gradually achieved ~ a state of newness, unity and health I have seen in the spirit of others who have done the programme... and finally learned to live. That, to my understanding, is what Recovery's about.

If the phrases work for some people isn't that OK?
Yes it's fine but they can put off the newcomer and cause confusion and irritation and people first come into NA in extremely vulnerable states. Anything that doesn't help should if possible be avoided.


MUSIC ~ VINCENT
THIS is my favourite Don McLean song. I've heard it sung by Julio Iglesias who may claim to have bedded 2000 (or is it 3000? women) yet so obviously hasn't a clue about the passion this song speaks of...



RIGHT I've got to go I've gone all paranoid about whether I left the cooker on with boil int bag fish... YUUURKS!!

*** "WHERE DID THE 12 STEPS COME FROM?" QUERY ANSWERED ...

Why I Tread Carefully Around NA...

I BOUGHT A CHEESECAKE FROM ICELAND that I don't want to eat till later in the week ~ so I was thinking of stashing it in our front garden under all that snow. Wah-waaah!!

Hey did you know we got supposedly the deepest one-day snowfall in two decades? According to the Metro London newspaper the average depth was eight inches across the capital (no wonder the nasty bendy buses weren't running. The only good thing about them is, the very first time you get on one, riding stood dead central with one foot placed in the front section, the other in the back ~ and ~ woo! ~ feel those corners swing! (little things; little minds..!) Anyway, perhaps I live somewhere unusually warm or weird, because our snowfall was little over four inches (10cm) but hey ~ that's deep enough to bury a roborovski (all manner of bizarre snowy hamster games pop pingingly into my head now: Don't do it! They'll freeze!!)

The following is from a comment I left at L's blog last night... She was talking about having had a drink after two months clean of a heroin/oxy habit:


You're talking about breaking your sobriety 60 days and I get where you're coming from: but ask yourself this, was alcohol a part of your using when you were on the heroin and oxycondom (whatever the stuff's called)~?

I've been to enough NA meetings over the years to get a fair idea of what the Fellowship is about. I have the big Blue Book (their "Basic Text" in hardback ~ got it on tick and still haven't paid the "literature man" from my old "home" meeting back... By the way, in this country hardback and paperback both cost £8.75 so you might as well get the more durable version, because if you ARE going to do NA, you might find yourself turning to it a lot...) I even got myself a sponsor once ~ though THAT all fell through. He kept hammering at me to come off methadone when I'd barely been able to stop taking heroin and crack let alone start reducing the meth to zero. Talk about putting the cart before the horse.

I've noticed NA can attract people who take on it's deliberately simplified, rituatlized, repetitious sayings and customs basically not grasping at all what's behind them. Just parroting all this stuff out. I'm sure you've met folks like that yourself. I find the more catchphrases a person comes out with "God= Group of Druggies; Give up or Die" etc etc the more careful you gotta be of them.

Also this "all using is the same" is SO DANGEROUS. I've seen one guy relapse back to heroin and crack because he'd taken a sleeping pill. Of course 2 years clean was thrown to the wall, he had to hand in his service commitments at NA etc etc, felt he'd lost all he'd gained and BANG!... seriously I think that's such a potentially dangerous viewpoint

Also I get rather peeved by some of the silly phrases people come out with. I don't know if you get the same ones but "in the rooms" is one I hear a lot instead of just "at a meeting". Then they take the anonymity thing so far they can't even bring themselves to say CA or AA they have to say "at another fellowship" ~ I mean come ON! Then there's another guy who gives shares and chairs and goes on and on "drug of choice"... "my drug of choice this... that" without ever naming it. If he's a raving smackhead why can't he just say? So instead of hearing him I spend the entire time trying to figure out what precise drug of choice this might be. The whole meeting through I'm twisting and turning "this sounds like heroin... no he's talking about cocaine... I wonder if he was just snorting it"... etc and the point becomes lost under a welter of wonderings.

Don't get me wrong: I've been to NA enough times and over enough years to see that for those who do the programme ("it works if you work it") and keep coming back those 12 steps can produce wonders. I just believe a step backwards and a dash of circumspection is required at times. And though terminal druggies find it immensely difficult to do anything in moderation (now THAT is definitely part of the illness...) one would be wise to try and keep some sense of perspective, if one can, as one hurtles down the amazing waterslide (well that's how I see it) that is CLEAN and RECOVERING.

Yeah and it's something I ain't done yet that's for certain. C'mon folks: gimme some feedback, please~

Drugs Telesales

THE DEALERS HAVE BEEN HAMMERING at my phone this morning all declaring "mine's pukka ~ proper sizes ~ I've got both ~ etc etc". I get barely half an hour's break before someone else takes up the cause. Already I'm a fifth of a gram heavier and £7.50 lighter. Someone else wanted me to test his batch and give marks out of ten ~ for free, whoopee!! ~ and sounded really put out when I gave it a six. I was being diplomatic: actually it was closer to a four-and-a-half...

I promised myself I would not waste any more time and energy negotiating a drugs drought, which is what appeared to be happening. Though 150kgs, if I got my sums right, would last the UK's estimated 300,000 heroin addicts a mere one or two days. Even if that seizure was bound for London alone (it was discovered in East London: Forest Gate) then London would surely have got through it within a week...

I've a new drug worker whose foreign name I still cannot recall ~ sounds like Maple Syrup or something. Throughout our inaugural chat she kept huffing "you must address this" and "I am not at all happy about that" and "why are you drinking so much again?" (ten cans a week even though they're high alcohol 7.5% cyder hardly makes me alcoholic of the year. I'm not that much outside the recommended units guidelines and at least I was honest enough to fess up. If she's going to jump on everything I say and criticize I'm just going to feed her porkie-pies... which isn't really going to help either of us.

I walked away feeling she was determined to break me. Mild mannered I may be, but anyone who knows me well will agree that I can be extraordinarily stubborn and will not be pushed around by someone who's working for the satisfaction of their own ego (as I began to suspect she might possibly be...) I will not be "broken" by anyone...

Then again, on waking at the lovely sociable hour of 4:30 I got to musing, "maybe I want to be broken just this once..." broken and fixed up again nice and clean and normal and recovered... Perhaps, just perhaps this drugs worker might be able to help me in that. But "at the end of the day" (as the massively over-used saying goes) any change I achieve is going to be all down to me. To sort out. To stick with. And to force through... As an old university friend of mine used to say, who sadly had an eye condition which was going to result in almost certain complete blindness within a matter of years: We're all alone in the dark...

Do you like my new antidrugs videos, kids?

Here's one I got labelled CNN from America...

THIS IS NOT what heroin does to brain and body. How can I say that? Because millions of people have been given heroin ("diamorphine") in British hospitals~ and survived without their shells broken. It's the most effective painkiller there is.

But the rest of this commercial, in my opinion, is pretty much bang-on.



Have a look at my Price of Heroin clip (top of sidebar, can't miss it). Why on earth that girl weighs just over 4 stone I've no idea. Heroin doesn't do that... maybe she's heavily into crack, which really does wipe out the appetite... maybe she's anorexic... maybe she's HIV... maybe all three, who knows. I just know documentary-makers love showing an oversimplified gloss on the subject. But, as the saying goes, if that film keeps just one child away from drugs then it's surely worthwhile...

I found a fascinating documentary about the famous or infamous Golden Triangle opium Lord Khun Sa ~ which means Prince Prosperous. The journalists went right up over the border into the Shan Province where he's de-facto monarch, looking after his people, as he'd put it, with his own 20,000 strong army. I love the sinster Buddhist-chants motif they bring up whenever they want to evoke "scary"! Sorry the twonk who loaded this up specifically had "embedding disabled by request" (why do people do that?) but click here and you can see the half hour Burma-thon in its entirety...

PS I'VE still not given in on my "no more crack" resolution... wahey!!!!

PPS Amazing garden pictures alert. In my bloghop today I encountered this blog with flowery-leafy-traily snaps of the grounds at Whitworth Hall Co Durham...

Serenity

THIS IS MY NEW GOAL: far from being just blank and "clean" (never was sure of the "clean/dirty" terminology) but to strive for the true peace and Serenity (as NA call it) of Recovery.

Recovery is not a mere state of being but a process. As far as I understand it is the process of reconciling oneself with the reasons and forces that led us down Smack Alley to the morass of Addiction and moving on from there to learn how to live without drugs of any kind.

NA put great store on this "avoid all drugs" motto (and I think this is the most dangerous aspect of their thinking). They say that even having a drink is using, even if drinking never formed part of your using. Swapping focus from one drug to another is "like switching seats on the Titanic: you're still going down"...

Yes I can see they have a point. And their point makes doing the NA programme actually harder than living "drug-addiction free" than many normal people do, who might pour out the red wine before dinner, continue quaffing while cooking and finish a bottle a person over food after a hard day's work, then feel entitled to get slaughteringly drunk at the weekend (well: if you're British, Irish or Australian especially) and then in this drunken state perhaps turn to 4am spliffs and perhaps cocaine. Millions of "normal" people with respectable jobs engage in such behaviour on a weekly basis. In my day popping ecstasy pills was the thing. You'd go to the club or rave and take the magic tablet (or one and a half or two)... an hour later you're in a wonderland that, most amazingly you share with everybody there. It felt like the most amazing thing. None of the people engaging in this activity would have called themselves "addicts".

Once you have become a full-blown addict, I suppose you have to recognize that you've messed up brain and body to such a degree that for a very long while drugs of any kind ~ including drink ~ are going to be a no-no, unless you want to risk slipping back into deep waters ...

Having said that, I feel some people at NA take the "all using is relapsing" theme too far. I've heard a few stories about people who "lapse" maybe by popping a sleeping pill or knocking back a Scotch. Next thing anybody knows they're back at the heroin and crack. And in this country the vast majority of NA-members are there for one (or more usually both) of those two drugs.

I don't know why I'm saying all this: to convince myself...? To tell you all I'm convincing myself..? I don't know.

PS IF you want something entertaining, click here for a quick snapshot of my "personality"...

PPS ANSWERS to my Coca Cola quiz are: cans (in reading order zigzagging down) Arabic, Russian, Hebrew; the bottle was ARMENIAN!!!

PPPS I SAID I was going to put up stuff for worried parents. Of course I have not done. But there is one organization called Adfam for the families of addicts and users. Clickonthem for more info. The link I got was British but there are similar organizations internationally.

Frank

No Part II
(Two spitting-image portraits there of イーチーさん (Iichii-san (see below) my tamest hamster...)
YESTERDAY'S POST was scrawled on pizza boxes before I took it in here to tap in... I'm glad now I did not type up part II and was cautioned by my own warning, as I don't see it as anything much better than a bit of "drug porn", the ramblings of a user who is just high and glorifying his cocktail of choice and achieving very little else.

Thanks for the answers yesterday! I did read them but haven't yet at time of writing responded to them.

I keep thinking of rehab. There is a kind of rehabilitation you can do where you go into a mixed house full of people with all manner of life problems. It is called a Therapeutic Community and though "therapeutic community" is so often a mere descriptive term for drug rehab (as opposed to Minnesota Method or 12-step) there are in existence mixed therapeutic communities where not everyone's main problem is drugs and some may not be in for drugs (or even drink) at all. (Anorexia, self-cutting and other life problems are the type of thing that would bring people in there.)

Not knowing really where to look I'm going to have a bit of a search around the www for it. But what tends to come to prominence here are the expensive private ones the State will not fund for the likes of me!

If you're wondering why on earth I would want to engage in "recovery" not in the uniform presence of other drug addicts it's because I've been in detox/rehab twice (for very short times until I checked myself out!) and, in the second place especially, which was a full rehab, found myself outnumbered by folks in legal trouble whose main motivation for being there was for a "jail swerve" (no wonder talk of prison crops up so very much in places like that: even though in the first such place it was expressly against the rules...)

Junkies all tend to be very much the same and I got bored of the same presentation, the same self-deception and emotional constipation. The only apparent difference between me and most other addicts is that I have picked up from years of counselling before the addiction really grasped hold of me, an unusual frankness and an almost complete lack of shame in discussing my emotions. This is so extremely rare in drug addicts, especially common street junkies like me who have taken on their mantle of self-protective manoeuvres many years ago and now find it ever so hard to drop them. It was this quality, rather than anything special about my life story that, I thought, qualified me to pen those memoirs I keep rattling on about. (I'm always going to finish them, but am more minded now to knock out a ficitonal story of drug addiction. The subject crops up so very frequently these days and yet is so seldom written about with any degree of depth or frankness I feel compelled to put the record straight...)

Having said all that, self-deception and emotional constipation are so much the hallmarks of the regular junkie that I'm sure I must have them in spades. Deception, wily as it is, is never going to wave arms yelling "This is me! Here I am! You're doing it this way..."

But I would much rather "recover" as I say among a mixed group rather than boring old addicts. They really do get boring and I get fed up of them. Mental patients, on the other hand, differ even more greatly from one another than ordinary people do; I suppose because mental illness and personality disorders illustrate the extremes of human experience...

Now I won't rattle on about boring self any more.

Though I don't really like modern chicklit, I did used to have a thing for the family saga style epics of the 1970s and 1980s. Belva Plain's Evergreen would be a good case in point. I'm not trying to fess up that I enjoy romantic novels either! The ones I really liked tended to be long and complex tales of money, hatred and revenge! Not love at all!! My present tome is one I've had for donkeys years and somehow picked up in my hurry to flee the last place (where I left more than half of my old possessions behind): Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Woman of Substance. If you like the old television series Upstairs Downstairs (about life, as the title says, amongst the servants and family in an upper-middle class family at the turn of the 20th century (how old I feel having to specify which century I mean!) I think BTB's prose, at its best, is quite luxuriant and elegant (though I have to say she uses twice or three times the space I would to tell the same tale). The only irritating thing about it is a tendency to treble-underline everything in metaphorical red pen: yes we did pick it up first time Barbara you don't have to rub it in! As I say it's not really a love story, more a tale of money, power and business success. One day I'm going to write an historical novel with these ingredients. I already have my characters and theme, I just need to do research first. (And plenty of it.)

The Roborovskis paid a visit in their diggery to Mother Hubbard's house last week. I managed to get Baby Itchy to walk about on her hands. It was funny though, Itchy was far more confident rambling about on me than anyone else (and I had to be ever so careful that she didn't hop off and ping across the floor...) Of all my Trotterovskis, Itchy is the ONLY one who will countenance rambling about my hands, and even that she will only tolerate for five minutes tops until she gets fractious (and has even tried to bite me!)

まだ日本語を勉強します
mada nihongo-o benkyo-shimasu
(I'm still learning Japanese)

I've translated my hammies' names into that mysterious Eastern tongue; they come out as

イーチーさん Iichii-san (Itchy)
バスフルさん Basufuru-san (Bashful)
and
スヘリクルさん Suherikuru-san (Spherical)

and their names come out of the translator as
かゆみを伴う (Itchy) 恥ずかしがり屋 (Bashful) 球状 (Spherical)!
I have to say those "translations" seem suspiciously long-winded to me. Most English words can be expressed in two or three kanji at most (the Chinese-Japanese characters).
I wish I'd remembered to bring my dictionaries with me. Those translators can be fatal and I hesitate to think what I've actually written in The Language of the Rising Sun...



Here's another tune that goes round and round my head. Here, in the original clip from Breakfast at Tiffany's, Audrey Hepburn sings Moon River:~



PS the title Frank was a pun I forgot to elucidate on the former British National Drugs Helpline "Talk to Frank" ~ clickonit to see...

My Name is Gledwood I Am An Addict

I WENT TO NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS again... (hardly my first meeting, I knew someone there from three years ago when bingeing made me want to be clean)...

Usually at such meetings there is a "chair", that is, someone gives their account of what brought them to NA and how they have done since, then whoever wants to speaks (one at a time) either in reaction to the chair or just to say anything they want. This meeting had no chair just a five minute silence for "meditation" (no crossed legs though). Everyone their seemed normal apart from me. Then at the last minute a mad Swedish woman with a Liverpool accent turned up on a bike insisting "look after this! Don't let anyone steal my bike!" and almost wailed in utter despair about being on crack, having CCTV'd up her entire house and still a voice is screaming in her ear (ie she's paranoid) and basically she cannot go on like this any more. I know how she feels (crack made me exactly the same way except I thought other people were spying on ME and nearly electrocuted myself dismantling electrical sockets etc to remove the hidden cameras...)

Do you know I actually (how naive is this?) embarked upon my drugtaking "career" hoping to "find God"..? The ONLY spiritual "personnage" I have encountered along the whole way of chemical "enlightenment" has been the DEVIL!!

What a charming picture of drug abuse I have found. Hmmm someone is smoking hash right behind me. Anyway look at the state of this man's veins he has been digging trenches in his crooks. Mine are way too hammered to inject there (though my arms look "smooth" apart from the giant blister scar on the left one, track marks all down the back of my hands and from my thumbs to my elbows and a gigantic barbiturate burn on the back of my left leg. (The "infection" I had in February.) It WAS almost definitely caused by barbiturated heroin by the way. The fact that a urine test done three days later was barbiturate-clear means it was probably Seconal or something like that (which leaves the body in a day or so). The hospital were flummoxed as to why anyone should have such massive blisters full of brown fluid when not burnt. When I said "could it be barbiturates?" the doctor said "yes that's it!"

You should have seen the look on the nurse's face who'd come in to "aspirate" them (ie pop them and drain out the goo!) when the doctor pretty much introduced me as "the local barbiturate injector". I did protest several times that I've never "seen" a barbiturate in my life (never knowingly bought them) but no-one was listening oh blah blah OK gotta go

Here is the NA Serenity Prayer

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.