Betty Ford dies at 93

BETTY FORD, the American First Lady who made rehab respectable, has died in California aged 93.

Founded in 1982, the Betty Ford Center at Rancho Mirage, Palm Springs, California, was the first licensed addiction hospital in the world.

The 184-bed facility offers detoxification and treatment for all types of chemical dependency.

In 2010, the centre initiated a pain-management course, allowing sufferers of chronic pain to live their lives without relying on addictive opioid analgesics.

Mrs Ford, who had a mastectomy in 1974, was praised for her actions in raising breast cancer awareness.

She is survived by three sons.


"Throughout her long and active life, Elizabeth Anne Ford distinguished herself through her courage and compassion."

~ Barrack Obama.

No, no, no!

THIS is from the Inspectors' Report of behaviour in the dining room at my old boarding school. Just before it got closed down:



Frequently the pupils [those are students to you Americans!]
simply thrust their hands into their plate, fall upon the
common dish, hurriedly stuff their mouths as full as possible
and swallow their food down almost without chewing, or
the spoon is grasped quite lightly with their finger-tips, often
at the extreme end and the handle is used for eating; their
food is invariably stirred about with their forks two or three
times before each mouthful, the vegetables are divided into a
row of equal little heaps, their hands are first wrapped up in
their coats, their nose is stuck into the soup, or there must be
a mouthful drunk between each two mouthfuls of food till
twelve are counted and so on. Others lap the soup like a
dog or pour it with profuse spilling into their mouth without
more ado, press the vegetable dish flat on to their face and
steadily lick it clean. One of the pupils took hold of the
spoon quite correctly with the right hand, but brought it
round her head by the left side to her mouth ; another crept
under the bed cover at meals.


TRAUMATIZED by these horrific schooltime memories, I've been reluctant to go back to instututional life, which is why Rehab has been out of the question.

Nah. Real reason was I couldn't hack the detox. I was out that door quicker than you could say "Giro day!" That's right. Every time I knew more money I was in the bank, there I was in tears of euphoric disappointment, fleeing to the railway station and straight to my dealer, who happened to serve up right behind my local tube station. The celebratory hit was tiny: I divided half a gram in three. I only took 2/3 of my hit and even that knocked the living crap out of me. I remember my friends shaking me awake to say they were leaving me with the TV and purring black cats as they had to do something (probably buy some crack). Y'see contrary to the rumours and lies I tried to disseminate to myself I had actually made a big effort to cut down my using to 12x 30mg DF118s (dihydrocodeine) (4 pills every 4 hours) and one £10 bag of heroin (0.2g) daily. The gear I used that week wasn't the best, but it was my firm intention to cut down, so I saw weak gear as a blessing in disguise. Paid-for willpower, if you will... The morning I left to go to rehab, a friend wanted to see my dealer and gave me either £10 or £20 worth... I can't remember, but it was my Proper Dealer, who served up behind the tube station and his gear blew me away. I was so high on that train journey down to the South Coast, I almost got my head knocked off leaning out the window as we whooshed into various tunnels. I had an entire oldfashioned compartment to myself to smoke cigarettes in. It was a breezy summer's day (very breezy with the window wide open!) I felt wonderful.

I slept like a baby the first night through. I was still high the next day. The doctor said "sometimes the angels are with you" and I thought: wow!

Then, on the evening of my first full day, withdrawal kicked in. I slept barely at all. Or the next. I watched everybody else sprawled unconscious, mouths wide open as if to catch flies (everybody else, who claimed not to sleep a wink. Everybody else who did the best impression of snoring decrepitude I've ever seen!)

The night staff were in no state to talk to me, having worked all day. So I was left alone and tormented by constant suicidal urges in a kitchen full of knives and icepicks (we got through a lot of cold drinks in our tiny smoking area-cum-back yard) and temptingly breakable glasswear and crockery. I had the recurrent urge to gash my throat, cut my wrists, hang myself. And no sleep. Despite everything no, no sleep. It was awful.

Mornings with breakfast TV and then all the crap on BBC1 that reminded me being round my friend's house (where I used to show up like clockwork Monday to Friday waiting for the man)... Midmorning television without the faintest chance of a hit! Intolerable! It was like waiting for a dealer who never came. When eventually I got it, far too late for my ragged system, the meds (dihydrocodeine) did hold me. But by then my resolve was shattered. My mind was firmly tuned to the Using Channel. Would I have to live the entire rest of my life like this? Never feeling any better? Never plunging beautiful gear through a shiny new needle into my glorious veins ever ever again? I just couldn't live like that.

Can't live with gear; can't live without it. Except I could live with it. And for another seven years, I did. I had almost no semblance of a life to speak of, but I did have my glorious, wondrous heroin every single day of every week of every year, year after year. My attempts to stick to methadone during this period were halfhearted to say the least. If they could at least have prescribed it in an injectable form (which private doctors still do in the United Kingdom) it might have soothed the itch to inject at least. As it was, drinking 50 or 60mg (which is all my script was back then) of sticky gloop just didn't cut the mustard when the streets of London were flooded with the cheapest, best quality gear they'd ever seen. At that time a "sixteenth" (of an ounce, which actually weighed a gram and a half) could be had for as little as £45 (in fact, my hazy memory tells me it might have been as low as £40 from one particular bastard I gave thousands to...). That's $60 or so. And a gram was £30 ~ just over $45...

O how vivily I recall the soft aroma of Afghan fields, the golden glow of poppies washing over and through me, making me feel purified and clean. (Heroin doesn't feel rough or jagged or dirty at all, it feels like the softest and most benign of all drugs... until you try to sever relations. Only then does it truly show its ugly side!) The first kiss of the needle ~ and life itself came rushing into my veins. O, how I adored heroin! How could I ever stop it?

Well now I'm old and faded and wearied and grey. I'm looking for a new existence. I'm beginning to think the only way there might be via rehab... Trust me, this is far from a knee-jerk reaction. I have a plethora of issues surrounding rehabs. From the uncomfortable fact that most of them appear to be run to suit the convenience of staff more than "peers" (as they're called in there). To the long night hours of torment as the drugs drain inexorably out of you. No hope of anything exciting to take the pain away. Not now, not ever. I was as galvanized, and resolved; my mind was made up as firmly as it was possible to be when I went before, not once but TWICE. Yet at the first opportunity I ran away and thoroughly enjoyed "relapsing". Drug addiction is the only illness I know of where a relapse is undiluted fun. It certainly was for me. NA's mantra that "one meeting and you'll never be able to use the same way again" (their implication being that you'll be riddled with discomfort and guilt) never washed with me. I understood Recovery and the 12-step process as well as any using addict whose never been able to clean up long enough to actually put the philosophy into practice ever could. And yet I used with gusto. Heroin didn't just feel like life itself, it WAS my life. I've never loved anything or anyone the way I loved heroin. I absolutely adored it. As long as I had it, it never let me down. The problems were invariably caused by dealers, who charged too much, watered it down, didn't come when they said they would... etc etc etc. That's the way I saw it.

Somehow, heroin and I are falling out of love. To be honest, I'm bored of it. When you consider that in actuality the drug is giving you a pleasantly and very slightly comfortably exaggerated version of normality... you might as well learn to live without it and get your normality free of charge from life. Then at least you know your wellbeing is not being held in the hands of ruthless criminals who could snatch it away any time they please (as they did do, last Autumn, when they effectively droughted the entire UK heroin market. There was no good heroin on sale anywhere at all. Only people who had imported their own supply or were personal friends of people who had done, still had gear. The rest of us went without. I didn't even bother touching it for... I can't remember how many weeks. It felt more like a year. I learned to live without heroin. Even though I had the crutch of methadone, I never felt it did very much for me. I'm fed up of methadone more than I'm sick to death of heroin. I don't want either one. I want whatever comes next...

Which might have to be rehab.

I can't stomach a "normal" rehab, it would have to be a place geared to taking on dual diagnosis clients ~ that is, people with "mental health" "issues" alongside their addictions. Every single time I've attempted to come off opiates I've felt like the rug has been pulled from under me. Every single time I had some manner of "breakdown". Every time. No way could I handle losing my marbles in front of a bunch of hatchet-faced crack-addicted housebreakers and prostitutes. Not again. This time, they have to be my kind of addicts: yes, nutter junkies!

I emailed one place yesterday morning and got a reply back saying they could reduce me to 30mg methadone and switch me over from that to Subutex, so I detox from Subutex to nothing. Which is a far brighter move than methadone to nothing. Subutex is very easy to reduce. It's an agonist-antagonist to the brain's opiate receptors, meaning the body is already ready for being clean. Methadone is particularly "sticky", hanging around for far longer than heroin, meaning the withdrawals last considerably longer. In other words, it's harder to come off. Methadone is only prescribed because it's cheap and can be dosed orally once a day. Most opiates require at least twice-daily dosing. A one-a-day hydromorphone (Dilaudid) pill is available for heroin addiction, but it's not given in Britain ~probably on grounds of cost.

Subutex is a different story. You do the nasty suffering when you go ON Subutex. I felt desperately ill. But very rapidly it swooshes into the body, working its own peculiar magic. Best thing about Subutex is, it gave me a euphoric high that I now know was almost certainly a mild bipolar mood swing. It had all the same characteristics: 4 hours sleep a night. Mood most intense in the mid-morning. Constant excited feeling. Music sounding amazing. It only lasted a few days, but it got me through the awkward transition phase, when body and brain acclimatize to a radically different medication, with ease. Tapering off Subutex to nothing, so I'm told, is far easier than methadone discontinuation, so I wouldn't be worried about that.

My email warned me that methadone might be acting as a mood stabilizer, and I can grudgingly accept that it probably does. Heroin stabilizes my mood far more effectively, but methadone probably does do something. So my medication(s) might have to be reassessed prior to and during detox.

Here (really for my information, but I put the list up in case anyone else is looking) are some of the best rehabs I looked up. Castle Craig Hospital in Scotland even do Trotterdonkey Therapy (better known as Equine Therapy)..!

I would quite like to do beekeeping and hamster-keeping. Imagine window set into the wall, viewing right into the buzzing bee colony?! Imagine a big tank of robos pinging around on their wheels atop the rehab telly..? Well here's hoping...

And BTW I go back to Narcotics Anonymous on Monday. I'm still feeling VERY reticent about what I might and might not share. I really found the reaction to my Manic Self rather offputting. But ho-hum. You live and learn...


UK rehab directory
http://www.addictionhelper.com/what-to-expect/9/What-to-Expect:-Dual-Diagnosis-Treatment

Castle Craig Hospital, Scotland
http://www.castlecraig.co.uk

Promis, Kent
http://www.promis.co.uk/enquiries

ANA
http://www.anatreatmentcentres.com/index.html

St James Priory (Walsingham House) dual unit, Bristol
http://www.stjamesprioryproject.org.uk/13.html

Loudon House dual unit, Ayrshire, Scotland
http://www.piramhids.com/case-studies/view-casestudy?resid=674

List of rehabs in Scotland
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2004/11/20231/46408

Park View, Salford, Manchester resiential home (is this ia rehab?)
http://potensial.co.uk/locations/park-view-salford



CAFE DEL MAR: ENERGY 52
classic ibiza trance tune:~

first here's the original tune "3 in 1 version"



OUT OF OFFICE
moi, j'adore cette version; c'est la vraie signification de l'euphorie....


PAUL OAKENFOLD


MICHAEL WOODS
this is the meaning of U4EA

Highway to Methadone

I TOOK A LITTLE BIT OF HEROIN IN THE MORNING, so I failed there. Just as I was about to meet the man another dealer phoned me. He would have bigger, stronger stuff. But I was still intending to give up so I bought the weak stuff anyway. I don't care for gear any more. I wish I had the strength to stop it. Yet my head is telling me tomorrow tomorrow. Tomorrow will be OK because I can go see this other guy, wait in a carpark for an hour. Get a little bag of magic. Not be able to find a vein when I get back. Waste £15. Keep myself mired in active intravenous drug addiction for one day more... See it doesn't seem worth it. But if I don't do that, tomorrow I will have nothing to live for at all.

When I wake up in the morning I lie in bed for over an hour, not wanting to move. Nagging myself that I have to get to the post office to get money to score. Or to the chemist. To get methadone over and done with. When all the time I stink, I'm filthy. My clothes are horrible. I do actually use the shower, but I still feel dirty.

My head is all over the place. I get random thoughts and phrases filtering in, or echoing in the background. This doesn't bother me, but I know it's probably not meant to be good. The pills would stop it happening. The pills are a huge great issue. I don't know what to do about them (risperidone, the antipsychotic). Really I need something that's going to make me less depressed. I need to see that doctor. My worker said he would get me an appointment but I didn't really want to see any dr. But now I need to. On the one hand I don't feel well; on the other I'm not even sure what's wrong; if anything is wrong; what's happening.

I don't want to take methadone either. I looked back and realized the times when I was most paranoid, lost it, felt worst were the times it was methadone I was taking, not heroin.

This isn't my normal gripe about methadone making you feel flat and heroin being an antidepressant... blah blah blah. I'm talking about methadone poisoning my mind. Strange coincidence that it should be government sponsored and a poison. I need to get off it and quick.

For tomorrow I am trying to think out a strategy for how to face the day without scoring. It's actually the ritual of scoring and using that seems to fix me more than the actual drug. The heroin I can barely feel because a lot of it's weak. When it's strong it feels brilliant for all of about five minutes. Then I feel not much better than before. I'm not talking gear sickness wise, I'm talking about mental wellbeing wise. I absolutely have to get the gear into a vein to feel it. The other methods of taking it: subcutaneous or intramuscular injection: I barely feel anything at all. Smoking (running it along foil) has an even weaker effect and chasing brown around foil takes ages, tastes gross and stains the teeth. You can snort heroin but that is weaker still. And it really gets your nose. Ever since I first picked up a needle (which was several months into using every day) I had the so-called needle-fixation. My veins are in truly dire shape; practically all gone.

But there is one alternative. I could get a 2ml barrel with a detachable long blue needle ~ a horror film needle ~ and stick this directly into the crook of my thigh (my femoral my "groin"). The thought of doing this makes me feel sick. A lot of people who inject here get DVTs and even lose legs.

I wouldn't want to give a second wind to my injecting career now when really I want to drop the whole thing.

I remember last time I stopped it I looked at my scar-ridden ankle and my mottled foot and thought "you never have to stick a needle in there again. Ever."

If none of this self-motivation works I'm going to have to do rehab, which I'm terrified of. I'll lose the place I'm in andI will be made homeless. I've never stuck out rehab for more than three or four days. Which had nothing to do with the rehabilitation as such and everything to do with detoxing and not sleeping at all and feeling lousy. Not so much physically, but mentally. I don't want to do rehab.

Which means I have no option but methadone. I don't "think" it is poisoning me by the way, but it is pretty suspicious that whenever I've relied on it more, I've been stabilized less. Why is this? Methadone is supposed to restore sanity and give lives back. You're not supposed to suddenly get tuned into channel 999 and have brains deluged with crap. You're not supposed to feel that life is over. Life is meant to be just beginning, not ending.

So I don't understand all this. I felt before that by sticking to that vile green syrup I had at least crossed one bridge. Because methadone doesn't work well at making you feel OK, I was closer towards being heroin clean, because heroin, which makes you feel fantastic, was out of my body and here was something doing very little crutch wise. All the methadone does for me is stops me being physically sick. I don't understand why it makes me mentally ill (or am I mentally ill? Is it just normality I cannot tolerate?). Whatever's going on, something is wrong and I don't know what.

Well I don't know what I'm banging on about here. I hope this doesn't sound like a load of ranting paranoia because I'm trying to make a serious point. Something isn't right.



PS I do understand the contradiction: "heroin barely does anything"; "heroin makes you feel fantastic". It's done both at different times.

BLACK EYED PEAS: WHERE IS THE LOVE
only song I know of that pleads direct to God "father father ... send some guidance from above..."
i got into this when i was CLEAN, on subutex and super-intense about everything... love this track

Anna Grace You Naughty Girl!

I WROTE SOME BABBLESOME CRAP at 3:30am that even I couldn't understand so I'm leaving it.

My friend Anna Grace "untruthed" about relapsing back on to heroin. That is she said she DID relapse when she DIDN'T.

Somehow I wasn't too surprised and I do believe she's telling the truth now.

I believe her for these reasons:

1. I know Anna pretty well and she glorifies opiates a lot, yet doesn't use them. I know that if she was using over the last 2 years or so it was very light because heroin (or Dilaudid* which she also loves) take your life over completely and that would have shown.

Her reason, she said, for not using was that it upset her parents too much and she's living in their home. I said "if you truly wanted to use heroin, you'd just go out and do it whatever your parents thought".

When I wanted gear, I never gave anybody else's opinion a second thought. Or my own shame for that matter. When I wanted it I went out and got it immediately. Anna didn't do that, which tells me she isn't into it as much as she thinks she is.

2. Anna does have mental health problems very similar to mine but she's no weirdo and it would be very strange to say "I said I was on heroin but I'm actually not I just thought it would make me seem more interesting" and that not to be true.

The "heroin makes me more interesting bit" seems to be the crux of her problem. When she was on heroin, despite the misery and pain and being lost in it all, it probably gave her an Identity (that of the Junkie) and a purpose. It might be a purpose most people can live without ~ a desperate need to get funds, get heroin, get high, get more funds, get more heroin, use again... and so on. But you're always busy and never bored. I think Anna looked back to this time and romanticized it and though she gave up the drug she couldn't give up the fantasy.

She's booked into a Dual Diagnosis Rehab in about 2 weeks where for once she will get mental health treatment and addiction therapy at the same time. Anna is already on Suboxone (glorified Subutex) so she's done the nasty bit in switching on to that stuff (it puts you into withdrawal). Buprenorphine reduction is a walk in the park compared to a rapid methadone taper so she really should not find the detox hard.

Anna's mood issue is currently depression that just does not go away despite mood stabilizer, antipsychotic and antidepressants. I keep telling her that her meds aren't working the way they ought to and I hope this clinic will recognize this and tweak or better still switch them to something better.

She's on nightly sleep meds which I'm sure she'll be allowed to stay on for the sake of her mental stability. The "going 100% clean" thing isn't done in Dual Diagnosis where most patients are expected to be on medication long term if not life-long.

Dual Diagnosis means mental health problems as well as drug addiction. In practical terms this is usually severe depression, bipolar, schizo-affective or schizophrenia. With these conditions you do not play around with medications, so she'll get a much easier ride than she would in a straight rehab where you still find the rather dated attitude that using any psychiatric medication is the same as using heroin and crack when this patently is not true.

The rehabs I've been in were all "regular" ones where the street drug users prevail. There's lots of prison talk, lots of crime talk, everyone's full of front and "we're all in the same boat" (except we weren't: it was me getting the extra meds and endless counselling sessions, nobody else seemed to have a breakdown every time they detoxed...) This isn't the type of place you necessarily want to be if you have mental illness so she's definitely doing the right thing going to a specialist unit.

Good luck Anna!


*Dilaudid is hydromorphone. Diamorphine (pharmaceutical heroin) is banned in America (to back up the American government's fictitious and politically motivated claim that heroin "has no medical use") so hydromorphone, another semisynthetic opiate, is used in its place. Dilaudid is known in America as "hospital heroin". In British hospitals actual heroin is used when a powerful painkiller is required. Heroin is very occasionally prescribed to addicts here, but prescription is so rare you have practically no chance of getting a heroin script, hence the widespread heartache and misery of oral methadone which leaves addicts craving heroin all the time and using on top every single day they can afford it and feeling they have to bullshit the methadone clinic that they're doing really well when all the addicts I knew were doing terribly. For years I told them I was using on top "nearly every day" so when diamorphine therapy did come in I'd be first in line. Then I got a bitch worker who basically put me under blackmail and duress (literally) so I just lied and said I used twice a week. I might use twice a week on Mars, but not in London. Now I use zero times a week because I hate heroin. I'm turning back into my old self from the mid-90s. Someone who actually enjoyed being clean. Wow.

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...

What now?

Part I
GOOD AFTERNOON ALL. The druggie part of today's post lies herebelow in italics. {CORRECTION: IT WILL BE ADDED TOMORROW}... I would strongly advise caution ~ or simply not to read it ~ to anyone in recovery whose poisons were heroin or crack or the so-called speedballing mixture of the two...

I never know quite what to say or what not to say when it comes to my drugs but they are, for better (hey what am I saying: for WORSE!), still the central axis of my life and despite what steps I may have taken away from the most intense times now past, the obsession is very much still there (under, perhaps, an occasional virginally pure-seeming layer of thin snowfall)... very much still my addiction.

Recently I feel I've hardly discussed anything else.

I feel I've come close to, and perhaps have been circling, some kind of turning point or crux.

Remember when I described a day things got so bad I actually felt REVULSION and AVERSION in place of what ordinarily plagues me:~ a near-constant magnetic attraction (for ever there, only to be activated by a simple suggestion, or an image, or a thought. (Hence my warning hereabove to those walking the thorny path to freedom: be careful of part II!)

Looking back over my life ~ the recent years of shadow ~ a shameful near-relentless emotional carcrash of a life plays out before me. Interviews by those who have put out memoirs of their own drinking and/or drugging or the books themselves, have freaked me out. I know it's hardly a competition, but I've reached the stage now where my own experiences are so much darker and more sordid and more despairing than anything these people have seen fit to reveal. Most of them seemed to hit a supposed "rock bottom" (I use inverted commas for I never felt any solidity below my feet there, merely the unbearable crush of the mega-gravity of an emotional black hole where everything's so intense it's become unbearable. I have come time and time again to such states where I just cannot go on. Just want to die. And yet on I have dragged myself ~ on and on in the dark. On despite teh soul-destroying gravity and depravity. And I've carried on using. Barely ever have I denied myself when I really "wanted" to use. I do methadone days now because I cannot bear returning to the chaos of hitting up morning, noon and night, hitting up for breakfast, to eat and to sleep... never feeling any confidence my raging need was going to be fulfilled, never knowing for sure where my next hit was coming from and yet knowing beyond any shadow of doubt that within little more than eight hours of the last one I'd start to need it. I crossed so many barriers and bridges on the Way Down, gave up so completely the remaining semblences of dignity ~ that I just do not know how I can do whatever it takes to fight out of this, get out of this. Break free. I ahd so very many aversions, self-warnings, self-cautions to break down to get here, that once the transgression's accomplished, my only refuge from the shame of knowing how polluted I am has been drugs, more drugs and more of them. I still hate myself even when I'm high. But when I'm low I can't live at all. And I don't live. I barely survive. I need to learn so desperately how...

I need coping mechanisms so bad. One at a time, as I cast the old echoes of my former life off, as I slithered ever lower down the pit, so I lost nearly everything.

Now I just want it back.

What do I do?
I'm asking: does anyone really know?
What ~ please ~ what on earth do I do now?
Somebody help me, please!


Video:
Thorn Birds the love theme as played out on "the beach scene"...

The book was a massive international hit when it came out in the late 1970s. The only romantic novel I have ever managed to read to the end...

Then the TV adaptation starring Richard Chamberlain as the Priestley Lover, was a huge success when broadcast in the early 80s.

How many of you remember this, the Love Theme music...?

All these years later and still it has not gone out of my mind!

Bad Experience at the Bottle Shop

YOU WANNA KNOW WHAT HAPPENED? Well swiftly and in a nutshell I got chucked out of a shop I've frequented (admitedly infrequently) for many years... for being so shaky WITHOUT a drink that I knocked a can I didn't want off the shelf x2 and was UNABLE TO REPLACE IT. How f****d up is THAT??

Yes I DID do those days I said "without" drink but not to put down any illeffects down to the lack of drink. Strangely shakes tends mysteriously to vanish now with even one drink.

I don't want to despair and time is a bit short. I'm emotionally wringed out today having lost it with a friend and ended up crying all over the place (not pretty). Dur! What else? Nothing!

PS: as for rehab - I AM considering it (increasingly)... just don't want to make my previous mistake of going in TWICE IN THE SAME YEAR way way WAY too early for admirable but "wrong" reasons...

Take care: have a charming weekend, I'll try!!

Part 11: From Bad to Worse

THE HABIT TAKES OVER EVERYTHING.
LIBRA AND I remained together for over a year and a half. Which is pretty good-going, considering that, despite my declarations that we could have gone on indefinitely, our relationship was quite obviously (in hindsight) nowehere-bound. But we stayed together, as I say, for the first year and a half of my addiction.

In this time pretty much all aspects of my life began to slide. First went my finances. The next thing to go was my housing.

Now I'd found my room in London thanks to the personal recommendation of a uni friend to a landlord who rented out a great many rooms in house shares across the local area. Not only did he charge a really reasable rent for the area but literally all was included in this - the kitchen was the best I've ever seen in a rented house. We had two bathrooms between seven of us (when he could have converted one into an extra moneyraking bedroom). Whenever anything needed doing, the workman, with whom we were on first name terms, was there usually the same day to fix it. My landlord seemed to specialize in taking in school and university leavers, artists, musicians, people starting out on all manner of careers; people launching themselves into life. In finding this room - a quiet room, one floor up at the back of the house - I had most definitely landed on my feet!

And I'd remained there a long time. I'd already been there four years when I first met Libra. As for the first year of our relationship I managed not even to "perpetuate a facade of respectability", as I was going to put it. Heroin-taking aside, I was indeed respectable. For instance, Libra actually said I was physically the cleanest person she'd ever been with. Which is so ironic considering the future course of things...

As I've said, the habit didn't really "take off" so to speak, until a year into mine and Libra's time together when I went to my family's tried to come off (well did do the entire week's "cold turkey" - only to relapse pretty drastically afterwards.) Then, faced with th eneed to earn my own money I took up begging. Took to IV injecting. Trebled my drug-intake if not immediately my habit within a week.

Of course, it is not possible to beg on the streets a couple of miles from your home without being spotted and news of your situation spreading out far and wide. I knew that all my old friends "knew" about my altered situation. But my old phone had been disconnected (thanks to a £70 bill I couldn't pay). Many had already moved on anyhow. And the rest I purposefully avoided. Financial destitution and heroin addiction and easy friendship no longer seemed to mix. If I did see them, I was convinced I'd end up sooner or later asking for money and this was unthinkable. I cherished all of my friendships. So I made a studied mve deliberately to distance myself from everyone I knew from before. That way, when I came out of what I'd still convinced myself was going to be a shortly-to-end predicament - I could pick up these friendships once more with little or no damage done. All would be fine. Well, that is what I hoped.

So what of ocurse happened was I found myself a whole new crowd on the streets. All of these people were like me. Middle class kids who'd found themselves addicted to heroin, and unwilling to fund the habit via crime, turned to begging - not only to buy our drugs, but also to eat.

I had Libra saying for up to two weeks at a time. Once a month or so I'd go back to hers for a week or so. While we were at mine we spent hours not coming out of my room. It turned into a mini opium den.

Somehow I think I've already mentioned Libra and my parting... but I'll repeat the bare facts. She eventually got "clean" on Subutex (buprenorphine) - the highest dose they'd ever given out at her clinic - so typical of Libra. She got about 28 miligrams which is more than double the dose I was eventually prescribed when I went on it ...

Libra and I inevitably grew apart after this. I suspect that she'd actually found someone else. My every instinct screamed this out at me. But she was in Norfolk; I was in London. I had no proof. The weeks she dumped me I'd been crossing the road when I got hit by a truck. This not only broke my shoulder but clonked me on the side of the head. Which knocked me into a ketamine-like hyperspace. Stcuk in dreams I couldn't break out of, I remember eventually waking puzled not to be in bed but on a roadside with a worried-looking driver breaking out of a phone call to assure me "the ambulance was on its way" ... Try as I might, the dreams snatched me away. And I was in this limbo-state all the way to hospital where amazingly I passed the concussion test and was patched up and discharged. I spent the next week barely knowing where I was and it was in this state that Libra dumped me on the phone.

Now I was alone I let one of my best freinds, who was homeless, come into my room from the streets. My landlord hadn't liked Libra very much but once this new move of mine came to light - harbouring the homeless in a petty bourgeois house! (petty, in so many words being the operative word for that house!)- this was beyond the pale. My days were seriously numbered.

To cut a long story short, my addiction to heroin was eventually well and truly found out and I was chucked out. My landlord's conscience was "clear" because my name was down for rehab at a date soon to come up.

This was a situation I pulled myself out of as soon as I plucked up the courage. And the drugs clinic actually had the cheek to try and bully me back in there! (Unlike in America where rehab does seem to be pretty much forced on certain people, the British attitude is generally that you go for yourself when and only when you are ready. What is the point in tryint to force someone? If their heart's not in it to start with, what hope have they of seeing the course to the end?

So I pulled out of rehab.
The clinic cancelled out all methadone on me.
And I was homeless.
How lovely. All at once. But I was saved from this situation for the first - but by no means the last - time by the kindness of a stranger.

More about that tomorrow ...

Blues II

SO TYPICAL OF ME. To post up. Yesterday. The "story of my day" and yet leave it with the first paragraph running nowhere. So let me correct it. Basically I was trying to say that I'd just come out of that dreaded drugs clinic, having only been 13 minutes late (they've got a real thing about punctuality even though the staff are hardly sticklers themselves. But that's life.) I had been procrastinating after the bad-trip carnival of a crowd I had to put up with last week (schizophrenic guy with saw protruding from backpack who believes his old next door neighbour is his brother ~ and the woman with the arrest story and the cigarette demanding guy. Their memory is still so traumatically ... what? Traumatically irritating, I suppose. Of course years ago I'd have been all ears to talk like that. When it was new to me. Now I'm utterly bored by it. And it was hardly looking forward to returning to the same place to hear more of the same same same. But I forced myself in there. And the rest I did tell yesterday: about how disapointed I was to be told that I cannot, in fact, go straight into rehab the way they kind of implied I might be able to ... which makes sense of the pregnant pauses when I pointed out that upping my methadone and detoxing in rehab were hardly compatible strategies. Their fob-off to me was "well we'll worry about that later, shall we?" Ho-hum.

I slept for six hours yesterday afternoon. Came in here and posted at some time after 11:30 pm. Went back not thinking I'd sleep. I'm afraid I've not been online much but to post. Tried reading various books. Harold Robbins' The Dream Merchants has gone cold on me. He may as well have written a potted history of Hollywood and called it nonfiction, rather than the novel he came out with. Which I suppose is OK in its own way but just fails to grab me now ... I tried two more. Boris Pasternak's Dr Zhivago and Ken Follet's A Dangerous Fortune. The second (though hardly in the same league) is surprisingly easy to dip into (anywhere along the tale) and continue reading... If I were more pretentious I'd of course make out that Dr Zhivago was gonna be my first choice. Actually, you all know I'm going to pay my attention to Ken Follet first. And if that fails to grab me go on to Dr Zhivago ...

So I tried reading these books, swiftly fell asleep. And had a nightmarish (probably psychedelic flashback) of a dream where my consciousness was framed just as mirrors are framed. And reflecting reflections back, I could not for all my striving break out of these frames ... and cannot describe it any better than that, I'm afraid...

I woke up believing I was intoxicated on drugs. And was indeed very heavily dizzy. But this was more likely the mere drunkenness of disturbed sleep ...

And slept again; into dream #2. This ties in with what I said yesterday about rehab and the South Coast... I don't know what I was trying to do, gaining entry to this country from Dover. But rather than real customs officials at the port, the entire workings of this country had been taken over by criminals. We were all queueing up (for what? It was never quite clear.) I suspect we were lining up in these massive long lines for them to thief our baggage off us. So when I tried to escape, by flying (literally floating, as one so often can do in dreams) over the bordering scaffold and over the "customs" mens' heads ... I got spotted and fished down and caught... and was in some outdoor holding area when I eventually woke to find it ten past nine and time to get up and do things.

So that's my night and day.

As for today: all I will say so far is that I really ought to give my "neighbour" Laundretta a lovely big kitchen knife. So she can stab me in the back proper stylee. As she's so adept (not to mention practised) in doing it with her words ...

... And last but not least, continuing my Power Ballad theme, here's today's

Foreigner: I Wanna Know What Love Is ...

Drug Clinic Blues...

JUST COME OUT OF THAT CLINIC. I was only 13 minutes late today. Had been procrastinating after the bad-trip carnival of a crowd I had to put up with last week (schizophrenic guy with saw protruding from backpack who believes his old next door neighbour is his brother ~ still after five years after this guy (another junkie) went to rehab and cleaned up his life by the seaside (most rehabs (and I've no idea why) in this country tend to be by the sea. Which explains why the English south coast is so rife with hard drugs. The market is there ~ made up originally of lapsed addicts who moved there via rehab ...

My feet are horrible so I've smothered them in this German or Austrian "FuBbalsam" ~ foot cream ~ containing "Alpenkraeuter" ~ Alpine herbs. It smells a bit of Tiger Balm or Vicks. A mentholated smell. I wonder if that kills off athelete's foot? Nutnut originally gave it to me (the cream, not the athelete's foot) and she knows about hand and foot stuff. So I'm suspecting it's more effective than the more "pharmaceutical" Glaxo-SmithKlein-Beecham version...

In the clinic I saw the nurse. Who was very kind. She wrote out a list of motivational things for me to do (like cleaning up, sending various letters off; little things...) I didn't want to tell her my ambitions. As I said here, ambitions are to be done. But she did say (and this is what I found depressing) that I'm in no state to go to rehab now because my methadone dose is too high and "we'd have to look at lowering that before they would consider you. Otherwise you wouldn't get the funding. And even if you did go, on a 2-week detox you'd be in torment" oh thanks a lot! Shouldn't shoot the messanger, I know. Actually I'm glad someone told me this stuff straight. She did say I ought to stop worrying so much about what I plan or want or think I ought to do in the future and concentrate more on today. OK I get her point, but I've always been one to set goals. If you never set goals you never score them!

And that's my thought for the day.

Or to put it in the words of an old (possibly Chinese (?)) proverb:

If you reach for the stars you might just catch the moon ...

***

MY OFFICIAL BLOG RECOMMENDATION OF THE DAY:

Kim in Kenya http://kiminkenya.blogspot.com/

***

WILL ANYONE ADMIT TO LIKING the following song?

T'pau's China in Your Hand ..?!? I won't. But if you clickonit you can see the music vid nonetheless ...

My Kate Moss Pete Doherty Dream

PERHAPS THIS WAS SPARKED BY THE CONFIRMATION in today's paper that I got at 7am that they had indeed split ... I knew this already. Don't know how. Somehow I just knew she would only tolerate "romancing" a using junkie for so long. Especially considering those scandals of her own ...

The dream began on a sort of industrial boat with a helecopter port on top. Kate (and I (? I don't recall)) had flown onto the boat by helecopter. We were sailing through some marshy enormous industrial no-man's land like the Hook of Holland with all cranes in the background and sea birds all over the place. Kate Moss was talking to her freind and I was so intrigued I suppose I must have ended up following her.

Next scene is in rehab, where I met Pete Doherty. He was much nicer and "cooler" (by this I mean less arrogant and more together) than he seems in the press. A Jamaican rasta grass dealer appeared with a huge bundle of grass on a dinner plate, offered it to Pete, who said yes and just slid it under his hat!

There was a wasps nest in the corner with wasps the size of budgies constantly coming in and out.

All manner of underhandedness was going on at this rehab. Principally, I suppose, to do with using drugs. But I didn't really want anything to do with it. It was as if I was grabbing hold of the carpet and yet someone was trying to tear it from me.

I remember I had this notebook that was supposedly important to me. One person in particular was trying to be really nice to me to get a look in this book. Then a woman came in, put her hand right up the wasps' nest and produced another notebook. It was Pete Doherty's diary. "Oh! He only had two yesterday!" (Two hits of heroin, I suppose.) "Oooo, bless!"

And that was my Kate Moss Pete Doherty Dream.

Sorry... should I have embroidered it for the reading public? Surely it is bizarre enough...!

Bloody Confessional/Worker Working: Personal Goals ... etc...

WRITING THIS BLOODY CONFESSIONAL tale of my drugs downfall is pretty exhausting I can tell you, honestly. Also I look back and just see the mistakes and bits that could have been phrased better. Loads of bits. Hmmm...

FINALLY I did get to see my worker at the clinic. The interim one I saw last week wanted my lifestory in brief. So I turned up with seven A5 sides of squiggles, saying "don't you want me to boil this down to a bulletpointed sheet of A4?" "No, no~ that's perfect," two of them said, salivating at the prospect of tucking into somebody's personal scandals for photocopied bedtime reading. I supervised the photocopying myself as I didn't want other pages "accidentally" getting copied and spiced all over the internet ... woo~hoo!!

We talked about my personal goals. And she tried to justify the head of department's fascistic decision not to allow people anaesthetic detoxes costing £4000 when actually six weeks in the Maudsley hospital South London might well cost that (as a local council-funded "private" patient, which is where you are with drugs, in a pecuniary no-man's land ...) So we've agreed that next time I return with details of this proposed detox of mine with full pricing. Then at least they can knock me back (as they're surely going to) in the full knowledge of what I actually do propose ...

I'VE NOT TOLD THEM AT THE CLINIC about this blog. That would be taken as evidence of goal-seeking behaviour and seen as a good sign. But it would also tempt them to keep trying different search-terms and urls to read my scandalous revelations and I'm not too keen on that at this point in time. (Not that they don't know the "scandal"~~ it's just kept somehow within a different frame of reference at the drugs clinic; that's all I can say ...

MY EVIL LANDLORD wanted me to produce by midday written proof of my continued extended warranty or whatever they call it~ some silly term like that~ to actually live where I'm living. I said yeah yeah, fully knowing that personal callers are no longer welcomed at the Housing's homelessness services. So he'll just have to telephone them himself or take a fax like other people do. When I left in the morning it was actually to go round the off-licence, collect mail from Mother Hubbs's and do more important things than satisfy his scummy ego.

THIS LIFE STORY, as I said earlier, is really exhausting me and I don't feel it's as well put as it might be. I churned a lot of it out quickly as I could to get the main points covered; there seem to be so many of them it's hard to keep a grip on it all sometimes. Also bear in mind that is a lifestory focused on drugs. If I'd told it via some other viewpoint it might sound very different indeed ...

If you're interested in reading times before that, go see my post From Depressed Acorns Miserable Oak Trees Grow ... (what a self-pitying title!!) ... anyway ... you might like it ... that is the story of my childhood....

OK I'm off to finalize my scribbling of today's magickal instalment of My Life On Drugs ... Coming to your computer screens very soon ...
All the best

Gleds

***

RIGHT, IT'S APPROACHING A QUARTER PAST ELEVEN and I'm just about to tap in the next part of my saga. Should be ready by ten to midnight London time ...

Slippery Saturday; Sullen Sunday

I HATE SUNDAYS! I SURELY DO!! ... So I stayed in bed as late as I possibly could, which involved sleeping about 12 or 13 hours till past two in the afternoon ... I know everyone's dissapointed with me because I "slipped" yesterday ... maybe it says something that I posted it quite unawares of the fact 1. that I had slipped or 2. what anyone would think about it... this situation has been ongoing for such a very long time with so many repetitions that it's no longer any surprise or letdown or shame to me to be doing what I always was doing despite the best intentions (at whatever point in time before hand) to change my ways, to be doing otherwise.

THAT is why they wanted me to think about rehab again. Though I'm not keen on the thought of going somewhere to do what I should be able to do for myself ... if I can't then rehab remains the only option ...

***

DIDN'T really do anything of interest except had Sunday lunch at my friend's house. It's got awfully nondrinking nonsmoking there (but still drugs on occasion, not that they had any there) ... I had to go in the back garden for a simple cigarette... I'd even like to give up those; but one thing at a time. I always thought it was best to give up cigarettes first if I could as I've seen so many clean addicts absolutely chained to the nicotine as their last vice and luxury (though I suppose "luxury" is an odd way of seeing it ...) And what exactly do cigarettes do for anyone anyhow? They're barely mood altering. The tiniest little lift ever accompanies dragging on a cig ... Well stopping is going to get easier as smoking is to be banned practically everywhere from this summer. Even phone boxes have signs in (that I originally took to be a joke) "it is illegal to smoke in these premises" ... (well it will be) ...

ho-hum ...

Whatever I do I will keep you updated ...

Thinking About Tomorrow

REHAB: THE IDEA is still growing on me. After getting up early I nearly ran slap-bang into my loathesome landlord at five past eight this morning. His very presence is so disagreeable that instantly I was set to thinking, "Surely I cannot live out the rest of my life like this here ..." &c, &c, &c ...

Entering rehab just to get away from it all, I think, is a bad idea. Though the idea of retiring from the world seems unbelievably attractive to me at the minute.

If I did begin the process now, I could enter in August-September. And commence 2008 with a genuine fresh start ...

I have indeed been pondering this quite a lot. But I'm not going to make any rash remarks or implied promises here. And the vague idea of entering Treatment means nothing. You must make up your mind precisely WHERE you intend to go. And considering that place becomes home for 3-6 months (or more) an awful lot of seemingly petty things - like House Rules - must be given some thought. More thought than I gave them last time. (Which is why I get annoyed at being told I "think too much". All too frequently I don't!)

I suppose it would also be handy to have at least a vague view of where I want life to take me afterwards. That I can answer in two syllables: abroad. (But where? I don't know.)

OK. Oh well. We'll see ...

***

NO TV FOR A FORTNIGHT! What a terrible punishment. Am I "grounded" as well? I think that's the consequences Paris Hilton expected for driving without a valid licence. Though I hope she is not being abused by fellow inmates (it's not as if their lawyers wouldn't pull all the same stunts if roles were switched - is it?) I still think the message sent out by that soft-headed "Sheriff" was outrageous. Confirming at the highest level that there is indeed one law for the rich in America. The judge did right to overrule him. Justice and injustice should not boil down to how much you can pay. Hardly an original sentiment but I'm stewing like my lamb and margarine dumplings just thinking about it.

Want to see George Bush's phantom wristwatch theft in Albania?
The Evidence!
President Bush's Watch stolen - click here.
President Bush's watch not stolen - click here.

I have not watched any television for over two weeks. And more to the point I've not missed it. Five channels of 24-hour rubbish. Soon to be replaced by thirty for everyone once analogue transmissions are finally terminated in 2009 ... I hope I'm in a place where TV doesn't matter as much by then. Like busy doing something worthwhile!

***

BLAST FROM THE PAST: a book I saw at the clinic two weeks ago was still there last time I called. They can be borrowed by anyone as long as you do bring them back. Don't laugh: it's If Only by Ginger Spice, Geri Halliwell. I don't know how she's viewed elsewhere (if anyone really remembers her) but here she is seen a little bit as an annoying attention-grabber with an empty publicity-seeking existence.

Having said that, she always was my favourite Spice Girl and once she left my interest in them flew to the four winds. Yes - I liked the Spice Girls. As did so many others in this country and across the world in 1997 and 1998. Cast your mind back. They were the biggest pop phenomenon to come out of this country since the Beatles. Easy to turn back and laugh now. But there was a time when "who's your favourite Spice Girl" was on everyone's lips. In a recent poll (about 4 years ago) they got the dubious honour of most unpopular group. The anti-Spice backlash is probably the biggest in popular culture I've ever seen. One moment they were riding high. The next, Geri left, nobody was that interested anymore, the group disbanded and five irritating solo-careers were launched.

I'm just enjoying reading about youth and success and thinking back to a time when things seemed a lot rosier for me as well. In 1998 I wasn't "happy" but was at least doing things ... Sometimes I wish I could get some of my old self back again.

Hmm. I'm shutting up now. As for the future: we shall see ...

Visceral

THAT'S MY FEAR: cutting into me like scissors snagging my soul. I was thinking earlier. I get told - frequently - that I think too much. Those who say that are wrong. I think when I'm told to think. I think when I'm writing. I don't think when I don't have to. Not about what's important. And I thought just now ... if I go through all that clean thing - I WILL LOSE MY MIND.

Already during detoxes last two times I seemed to spend half my stay in the counselling room. Crying. Being put on antidepressants. Blah-dee-blah etcetera. Everyone says they feel the same as me in there. But they don't. Because if they did THEY WOULD BE CRYING TOO. THEY WOULD BE IN THE COUNSELLING ROOM. But they're not. Which pretty much speaks for itself. THEY DO NOT FEEL THE SAME AS ME. And what are my problems with feelings? That usually I do not feel them. And the thoughts associated with such feelings. They have gone UNTHOUGHT for far too long.

THINK TOO MUCH? Maybe I do - but most definitely about the wrong things.

But I felt that fear "viscerally" - fantasized of feeling it. And realized. There is only one way of handling fear. Providing it is standing in the way of something worthwhile you must face up to it. That is the only thing you can do. Only thing I have done all my life to fear. Face it. Because then you defeat it. If you can laugh fear down: well, then; metaphorically (sometimes literally) you are laughing !

But then the more familiar feeling swept over me and stayed, snagged across my soul where those scissors cut me. It's like cheap knitting wool and it's bundled my heart in unfathomable knots. Depression. Sinking. Deep. Derealizing. Depression. The Demon of my life. That is so much harder to face than fear because it does another D to everything: DEVALUES it. And you are what you feel. So if you feel you are and everything else is Devalued than Devalued it's become. Whether you try and think round the fact or not. Facts remain. You are what you feel. You feel what you think.

Why are all my circles so vicious?

Better leave it there: said what happened to me just now. Still I feel put down. But fear is losing out. The more I think about rehab and the more scared I become the more ready I accept I am to go there. So fear: you are fighting a losing battle. You may as well give in now. But I know you won't. You'll always be lurking. Nearby. Trying to drive me crazy.

These are feelings. Opiate addicts are expert at avoiding experiencing feelings of any kind. That is what the addiction's all about.

I was surprised when I switched to Subutex (buprenorphine) that my demons did not come accost me all at once the moment I was "clean" (Subutex clean: you're still addicted to that but it's reversed half the heroin-habit. It's an agonist-antagonist to the opiate receptors in the brain. So the addiction is kind of thrown so totally off kilter that the minute you switch onto this stuff you feel clean and cured. Amazing.

But I cannot go on Subutex until I'm down to about 30mg methadone. Which is a long way to go. If and when I do go to inpatient detox I want to switch to Subutex once I am at 30mg. It will make the process of finally coming off so much simpler. In fact, I won't accept any detox that won't do it that way. It's my way or the highway.

I know it's going to be messy with my feelings. This will be the last time I ever try and stop, so if it fails that's me for life. I can feel already how horrible it's going to be. How messy.

Feelings are just feelings. I can't say they can't hurt you though. Feelings are pain - mentally.

(I WAS BEING SARCASTIC/IRONIC WHEN I WROTE THE ABOVE PARAGRAPH. OF COURSE FEELINGS CAN HURT YOU. PAIN IS A FEELING!)

And here I must wind up. I leave myself ... drifting along the way ... and I'll leave you with this thought:

Feelings! Who'd have them, eh?

Rehab or "Bust"

WHERE DO THE BREASTS COME IN? I asked myself, attempting to rewind mentally to this headline. Victim of my own visual mind I saw boobs in that headline. Hmmm. What's new...?

Rehab...? Having been thrown in with those all the same junkies with their drug-talk, prison-talk, grafting-talk (money-raising techniques) and so on I can confirm they are indeed a drab bunch to be with. All the same, most definitely. And NA say you should focus on the similarities not the differences. The similarities are overridingly impossible to ignore I'm afraid. Junkies are all the bloody same!

My local mental-unit was so much easier going. Not to mention fascinating. One guy, their longest-serving resident (3 years and counting) spoke random phrases from the dictionary, his own verbal fruit-salad. His mind was fractured from the very core, like a hammered mirror. The true meaning of "disorganized schizophrenia".

The manic crew were most egotistical and boring. Full of delusions of grandeur and flagrant lies. E.g. "I wrote that song now playing on the radio. They owe me fifty million pounds in back-royalties etc ..." blah-blah. When they weren't boasting uproariously, the more intelligent maniacs engaged with anyone who would listen (i.e. mostly the nurses) in one-sided metaphysical discussions about the construction of the cosmos and other unforseen queries of universal ponderance (that would be their kind of phrasing, not mine ...)

The depressives were to greater and lesser degrees withdrawn, according to the severity of their illness. One man, put on "one-to-one" care (a humiliating situation where you cannot sleep, go to the toilet or do anything without being in the company of a nurse) seemed like the hollow shell of a human being, the insides having been blasted out. His eyes were dead. But I know from experience that anyone, however far out they have travelled in the realms of insanity can come back again whole. Or even enriched from the experience. Which is impossible to see at the time. In fact reality can't be seen at the time. That's what madness is.

One man, for example was wearing socks on his hands and hitting pool balls with his elbows when I first saw him. He later escaped and reappeared wearing Guantanamo Bay style uniform (this is how the police dress inmates they pick up naked.) When I encountered him a few months later he came up to me, full of conversation. He remembered the time of day I'd given him through all that madness and now he was well again. Quite amazing.

The personality disordered were the strangest bunch. They seemed for the most part totally normal - except for their outbursts. One had cut his arms in symmetrical places with a samurai sword. He spent all day chatting and smiling. And insisting to all who would listen that he wanted to die. He did all he could to stay inside the unit, prolonging his internment voluntarily for several weeks.

I made friends with the randoms and the paranoid bunch. Living with Nutnut, whose psychotic vibes wormed their way into my fragile consciousness eventually nearly flipping me out, I had an understanding of the fragile balance of the human psyche. And how easily one can come under psychic attack from Greater Forces.

Now I'm called a junkie "with low mood". Yesterday's doctor held off on prescribing antidepressants until I've had a full psychiatric assessment. I bumped into a friend this afternoon who's just been through one of these and, on reflection, believe that would be the best way forward. Having abandoned the driving seat a couple of years ago, I must accept that I am steering the course of my own life and nobody else. And if I give up control I become victim to life's every gust and downpour.

So I don't know the way forward. I just know that only I can push myself there. Wherever "there" may be ...

Treatment?

THEY TRIED TO MAKE ME GO TO REHAB: but I said no no no ...

That idea was put to me today. But actually I said I would think about it ...

I have been in treatment twice before within a matter of months. But both times I was out the door within a week ...

Junkies are all boring. They're all the same. And I got fed up of being bundled in with a bunch of people on prison-swerves all muttering about who had done how much time where for doing what. Dull.

The doctor said today that he got the impression I was more intelligent than the average addict. I said (and this made them laugh) that addicts just pretend to be all thick.

Here's the basic rules for being a junkie
- Whatever the local accent is, adopt it, thicken it and make it your own. Speak it in a hoarse rough-sounding rasp. The kind of voice that would scare little children down dark alleys
- An addict cannot be sensitive. Kindness is a weakness. You must be tough and rough. The fact that I'm often taken to be soft annoys me most especially when people have the cheek to turn to me and inform me they're disappointed because I'm hard-centred! Better to be as I am than the weak and common herd, I always think.
- All junkies are thick. Speech must be ungrammatical and full of arcane slang. Thoroughly illiterate except for forging signatures on payment slips and cheques. Innumerate except for calculating bulk discount on multi-bag drugs buys. Conversely criminal "nous" is an utter must. I'm often taken as lacking in both of these things and how I love to ham my dimwittedness up often to much eye-rolling and tilting of heads. Of course my tormentors have always been to thick themselves to realize how neatly the tables have been turned...
- And you get my drift.

I said that I would think about it and I will.

But actually my first thought, on leaving the appointment, was, Will they have internet access?

Man! I am a child of our times ...

They tried to make me go to rehab and I said "maybe maybe maybe" ....

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Two blog recommendations of the day:

Chelle and Chel's Comical Observations

Christiano Ronaldo soccer vids blog

And one performance:

Madonna's Dangerous Liaisons Vogue performance

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O, & one more blog:

The Retrospectoscope - Brit doctor working in the States

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O and finally - I found this at The Disease Republik ...
SPAMMER PUNISHED! (at last!!)
a spammer who sent out 1,200,000 useless emails is to be punished for eleven years by an American court. Which means if he is rich and happens to be a hotel heiress he will get out within eleven days and exchange life in a vulgar sinbin for life locked in a luxury mansion with as much alcohol, drugs, pizza delivery, satellite TV, telephone services and internet as he can handle ... oh sorry that only happens to Paris Hilton. So she's claustrophobic. Should have thought of that before she went out driving while banned.

Everyone else has to ...

Click here for the full story ...

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OK one more blog: go see Kao's cats. The text is in Spanish but it's full of itchy tabbies having entertainment. OK they may not literally be itchy but the stipes kind of itch my brain in a very tabby way~OK??!?