Midwinter Feeling

IT IS ICE COLD here in London. The weather forecast said "normal weather for January". It feels a lot colder than normal. I sleep under four layers, I'm so cold. You can see passers by's breath as they go past.

I had a bad reaction to some tea I drank the other day. Four cups over the course of an afternoon was enough to put me on a high then a down. The up and the down turbulently mixed together and I felt very paranoid and weird. I think I'm hypersensitive to caffeine. Two cups of strong tea in the morning seems to be OK. I've had one today to see if I feel any better than on two. I might have to cut out tea and caffeine altogether. It never made me feel "high" until I got a manic "high" last year. But it did used to make me anxious, which made me give it up for a few years, and the anxiety flew away.

I have been feeling mentally wobbly for a while and had a really crap day yesterday. Paranoia and depression with anxiety: but paranoid, depressed and anxious about nothing at all and everything simultaneously.

If I wasn't on antipsychotics I think I'd be having a really bad time.

I was going to talk about tiny tits in the trees but I haven't seen any. Blue tits that is. When we had a birdfeeder when I was a child, our garden seemed to be full of them and great tits, which are slightly bigger.

I hope you all are feeling OK.

I finally get paid tomorrow which is a relief as I got the current non-lot of money early because of the new year. Which means it's gone quicker. I've had to borrow £15 just to survive. I must have spent it carefully as I still had £5 yesterday...

My foot is slowly healing. Maybe the vitamins from the salads help with it..? Who knows. I know that eating salad is meant to be better than not eating it. I know it's not very wintery but it's the only veg I can stomach at the moment (apart from baked beans which allegedly count towards the 5 portions a day recommended by The Government.

And last but not least my methadone has finally gone down to 55mg and is going down to 35mg over the next ten weeks. It's all planned out so no need for doctors' appointments between now and then. I can't wait to get OFF the stuff completely. Really can't wait! If all it's going to do is make me feel "normal" why not feel normal on nothing? I'm taking the last bit slowly though. Don't want to be one of those people who goes running back screaming on to it again. I know a LOT of people are said to do that. I can think of two off the top of my head. Well time's ticking must go... see ya next week.



Illustrated: a blue tit in the snow

A Morning of Domesticity

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

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

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

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




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


HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 5

No Free Cable But Freesat Is A-Coming

I TOOK MY CABLE BOX to my friend Valium Marilyn's, unplugged hers, plugged mine in and hacked and hacked away trying to get a free signal. She even produced two free viewing cards that had been lying amongst a pile of junk mail but the cable somehow knew the serial numbers of the cards were mis-synchronized with my digibox. "Aren't they crafty bastards," said Valium Marilyn. It took over ten minutes to get her TV working again, then we watched Australian customs undercover on channel 100-and-something. Both of us were glued to the screen as some Vietnamese lollypops were slit open to reveal high grade white powder. We were slavering at the screen thinking "China white heroin!" But it was boring old coke. Cocaine from Vietnam. Whatever next. Even the customs inspector looked secretly disappointed.

I'm supposedly getting Freesat TV within the next month and a half at the longest. I'm hoping to get someone else's cancellation. I can no longer bear living with four channels of snow and endless trails for things on BBC3 and E4 and other channels everyone else seems to get in Britain apart from me.

Of course I am also supposedly moving house imminently. Which is what got me so het up about signing up for satellite television. If I get that installed surely sod's law shall come into play making me have to move out before I get my hands on at least 83 channels of free entertainment plus supposedly another 200 that I can tune in manually. You even get a horror film channel. So I'm doing what's known as Tempting Fate. Plunking down £67 on something that will really brighten my life, when my life is due to be brightened immeasurably more by this forthcoming move. True, everyone at the new house will be recovering from severe nervous breakdowns but so am I. Only a few months ago I was hearing voices every day and getting funny looks in shops. I still have to take medication and when I don't my mood plummets and sometimes I get quite paranoid. People on the street seem to be talking about me. So I take my medication albeit grudgingly. And look forward to moving house. Or satellite TV.

The pest controller came round today as we still have roaches marching around our kitchens. I showed him the Mount Everest of unsorted belongings on my double bed. We pretty much agreed it's Priority Number One that as much of these unwanted books, records, DVDs, classical albums on vinyl etc which includes at least one carrier bag full of WOMEN's clothes must go down the charity shop forthwith so that's what I'm doing. Also I HAVE to get my house tidy for the Freesat man. Otherwise I will die of shame.

My methadone is down to 70mg as of tomorrow, which I'm really pleased about. 70 mils! Wow. Never thought I'd see that day. I might actually be on less methadone now than Anna Grace out in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Now that would be one up the spout for her!

My newest to-do thing, apart from not use heroin on top of my increasingly lowly methadose, and to clear clear clear the rubble off my bed, is to GET MY COMPUTER REPAIRED. I found out if I move house I can get 30 (gigabyte(?)) broadband plus a landline phone plus 75 TV channels all for about £30 a month so I might go for that one. IF and when I move.

Well Xmas is a-coming, the geese are getting fat. Please put £20 in the drug addict's hat!

That's a traditional rhyme here in Britain. I'm not into begging up change any more. I even found a dropped purse, with money inside, on Morrison's floor. And instantly returned it. See, a change in lifestyle is possible... I just wish I could change quicker. And cut out all illicit druggie-use ALTOGETHER...

Well there we are then, as they say in Wales. I'll have to ping or else I'll get terminated!

Dentists Done

SORRY I HAVE BEEN AWAY. My computer got briefly restored, then fused. So it's totally dead now and has to go in the repair shop down the road.

I have been feeling very depressed. I was hypomanic for just two days. Of course the second of these had to be when I was seeing the doctor at the druggie service plus my worker. My worker was visually backing off from me, I was talking so much and probably too loudly about the ins and outs of my long term heroin addiction in the waiting room. Then the next day I crashed!

I have been tempted to use heroin but only through sheer desperation. When I was still in a good mood I bought three good films in French, German and Spanish: La Vie En Rose; The Baader Meinhof Complex and Dark Habits by Pedro Amodovar (whatever his name is). La Vie En Rose, which is the life story of Edith Piaf, who grew up between a brothel and a circus, earned a living busking and was discovered by a nightclub owner named Louis Leplée. I love that film so much I have seen it four or five times already. It has been the only thing that brought meaning to my last days that have been so miserable.

I did see my Mum yesterday and I wrote her a letter explaining the past. I don't know if she liked what she read. I was beating myself up afterwards for being too frank. I didn't look at the letter in the five days between writing it and handing it over. I think I have a problem with over-frankness, the opposite of most people. I felt ill all day though it was really nice to see her. By ill I mean like a crotchety 108 year old who can't do anything without getting tired easily. My Mum seemed OK I hope she didn't notice my poor health. I really feel ill and I'm only calling it "depression" because I know from experience that's what it probably is, but I've been feeling physically sick, exhausted and as if my life is over.

I went to the dentist today for the second of two appointments and got my upper teeth cleaned (the lower ones were done last week) and had two fillings. The lignocaine took over twenty minutes to work and had to be injected twice into my lower gums until it froze me up so good I can still barely speak!

I think/hope I am starting to feel better. I am dreading next having to see a psychiatrist (whenever I get one) and having to explain my dreadful mental health. Ukh. Oh well not worth worrying about now. I have to ping off as I'm about to be terminated I will try and get in touch with some of you tomorrow.

I have to go; I'm feeling bad already.

Thanks Bimbimbie

THIS PICTURE is courtesy of my Aussie friend Bimbimbie, whose name means "birdie-wirdie" or "place of the birds" in the local aboriginal dialect. She knows red king parrots or "king reds" as I call them are my favourites and this is what flapped down from the trees only a few hours ago.

If you go to Bimbimbie's blog you'll find endless snapshots of rainbow lorrikeets, sulphur-crested cockatoos and other delicacies direct from her garden.

So this is my feathery Friday on Saturday. Thanks Bimbimbie!

As y'all may have noticed I have been feeling down and flat for nearly a month now. I'm hoping the mood swing is petering out. Because that's all it is, a mood swing. Just as my OTT excitements are mood swings too. It's hard to accept that how I feel is labelled and illness. The "sickness" part lies not in the undulations but in the extremity of the the highs and lows. I have been "high" enough to be hallucinating voices from the walls, have seen spirals everywhere, especially in ceilings, which I stared at a lot, seeeing as I was going "up". I once saw a purple face appear in a man's neck at the Nutter Club I used to attend before it was disbanded due to lack of funding (my one lifeline snatched from me ~ thanks NHS) so I have had extremes. I've also had weird ideas when I was low but am too paranoid to describe them in any detail. Not because they're real to me now. More that they're too embarrassingly nutty.

Well I wanted to ask y'all who've followed this space for a long time, do I really seem nuttier now than I was before the last year when I knew I was labelled "schizoaffective"? I'm not sure I'm any madder than I ever was (between the extremes). Just that there's a name to it. I am, I believe, what is known as a cyclothymic personality. That just means someone whose moods swing up and down, in and out, like high and low tides. You could say we're all cyclothymic then, but it's a matter of degree. I'm rarely on a truly even keel for very much more than a week. In bad periods I seem to have been up down left and right all the time for weeks and weeks on end. I am not claiming to have been at the very extreme of how up down left right it is possible to be. Merely that I was to some degree in some such direction.

Well this is solipsistic twaddle yet again. I am trying to heal. I am doing my Spanish every single day for at least half an hour if not 90 minutes or more. Every single day. Without fail. Everything else has been half-cocked as my sleep has increased in line with my depressed mood and low energy. I think some days I must have been sleeping 16 hours. Not in one single go, but endless dozes, then ultra long periods in bed. I haven't timed myself as i'm no longer interested.

There was a time when I knew something was wrong, didn't know what it was, knew most of the doctors were barking up the wrong tree by calling it depression triggered by drug abuse (when actually I abused heroin because I never felt truly well and heroin did make me feel truly well. At least for the first couple of years. Thereafter I was truly addicted. So take from that what you will but don't take this as my blessing that anybody young, lost and vulnerable ought to experiment with hard drugs. I would be horrified if anybody got themselves a habit because of me. I'm anti drugs yet still a drug addict (on 99% methadone; 1% heroin ~ it's that 1% I'm fighting against). Hence the shifting sands of viewpoint you'll encounter here.

Now I must go it's getting late. Have a marvellous weekend everybody thanks again Bimbimbie, and don't get pecked by a king red!

8 Days a Week

I JUST REALIZED it's been over a week since I posted. In that week I have been eating, sleeping and feeling down. Today I went to the clinic where I was supposed to see a doctor. I would have given in a dirty test, like an idiot and the dr wasn't around. So I asked my worker, can't I come in this time next week when I'll be clean and he said OK. My dose is going down by 5mg. I have to come in on Thursday to collect the reduced script.

A friend lent me a the Three Colours movie trilogy. It's in French so I thought I might better myself by watching it.

I'm still learning Spanish every day. Playing those CDs over and over. £35 for 2400 words vocab is not at all bad. 2400 words is enough to start leafing through magazines and simple books. I've always wanted to speak Spanish, since childhood. I haven't dropped my Oriental goals, I just got fed up of substandard teaching materials eg books that printed Chinese characters in such heavy type you could not work out what on earth was there.

Well that's me for this week. Boring as ever. I hope you all are OK and better than I am.

I wonder how Anna Grace is out there in Wisconsin. Been a LONG time since that one commented here....

Not Feeling Well

I DON'T FEEL AT ALL WELL. I think a doctor would call it "depression" but it feels like so much more. Like something's gone badly wrong; that something is about to go wrong. That I can do nothing about it. I'm back on my meds, even though I hate them, even though I want to change tablets yet haven't a doctor who will do this for me because only a psychiatrist is willing to take responsibility and I'm between psychiatrists. I need a psychiatrist. I'm on page 315 of the book I'm reading or rather skimming through in French noting down unfamiliar words. Only another 50 pages to go then I'll be lost because "reading" this book is all I've done for the past week. It takes away the pain. I'm not sure I would have the verve to focus on a book in English. Not without whizzing through it on fastforward; the exact opposite to what I'm doing in French. Once I finish the present volume I'm meant to read it slowly from page one, homemade glossary in one hand explaining to me each and every single expression I do not know; but I don't know if I'm up to it. I can but try I suppose. I have to go now; I'm still computerless. I hope you all are OK. Don't worry about me I'm not doing or about to do crack; that was a complete abbarration. I actually enjoy being clean nowadays. More than I ever enjoyed being on drugs. In some strange sort of way. If that makes sense. More than anything I long for the end of my script; for the day when I'm finally methadone-free and everything-free and can tell myself that nightmare, 11 years and counting of constant opiate addiction is finally and at long, long last... OVER. OVER AND DONE WITH.

Wednesday

I WENT TO the damn group yesterday but it was no good, so I left. My shiny new worker did say if it's not for you it's not for you. I'm not up for talking to a room full of people I don't know. In NA you can say your piece or not say your piece, you can wander in and out as you please, you can arrive late and leave early if you like. And most NA meetings seem to be candle-lit these days. This group by contrast is glaringly lit, everyone is in a circle, so people can look you up and down. You have to "check in" (that is introduce yourself). Then they wanted us to speak again! I was not up for that, really not. There's no atmosphere of recovery in the clinic's own group. In NA I'm the dirtiest person in there. In this other group I was pretty much the cleanest. I don't need to be dragged down. I want pulling UP.

I'm taking that risperidone because weirdly I do feel better on it than off it. It's not like antidepressants that take a week or more for even the first stirrings of a mood change. I always responded to antidepressants quickly. That was the trouble. Within 2 weeks I was often high. Not normal but high. I loved this so much I kept it quiet from doctors for years, knowing it probably meant "bipolar". I was terrified of the word "bipolar" so I suffered depression using nothing but heroin. Heroin seemed to work at the time, though I suspect it counteracted depression in the short term and definitely stopped me cycling, it actually kept me in the depressed mood state. I'm now very cynical about what "benefits" heroin might have brought me. I am sure I would be better off if I'd never tried it. Schizoaffective by the way means bipolar that gets psychotic enough to count as schizophrenia. So I think of myself as manic-depressive. There's another type of schizoaffective that only involves depression and that's said to be more severe. The mania actually counteracts some of the schizophrenia, because schizophrenia makes you very apathetic, disorganized and withdrawn. I'm withdrawn in that I hardly socialize. Professionals I have talked to in the past have been fooled because I was more articulate than a person with my problems is expected to be.

Today I have to clear out my rubbish yet again. I was doing OK until I went hyper, then gave up on the idea. Not by thinking "I can't be bothered" more by thinking of 10,000,000 other things that were more fun. Any elevated mood stronger than just borderline actually makes me more disorganized not less. Though I have tons of enthusiasm for many things, it mostly seems to dissipate ~ like spectacular fireworks ~ before anything ever gets DONE.

Script error on this page yet again. I think this computer has it in for me. My own machine is in hiding, waiting on a miniature screwdriver that I can't afford till Friday.

O by the way I tried drinking and I tried using gear on Monday, the day I felt worst. The gear did nothing to me and only after 3 drinks did I feel better. I'm not going back down that route. To alcohol and drug addiction. No thanks. So yesterday and today I'm clean.

Many A Topic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


MEMORY

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



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

Clipped Wings

I WANDER ABOUT feeling tired and lost. Like a bird with clipped wings, I should be soaring. Yet all I do is wander lost on the cruel earth.
I know my blog has descended to depths of ridiculous absurdity. I hope you all think I'm one of those who posts what I would have done if only I had the guts. That my blog is not a faithful account of deeds and misdeeds. EXAMPLE: me blaring out Barbra Streisand's Yentl and Chinese lessons first thing in the morning thinking I was following my true spirit, that everyone else was hopelessly uptight and sad for sleeping and not doing as I did. Why do I do these stupid things? Only the week before I had been musing on how calm I felt, how glad I was not to be bipolr anymore. How I enjoyed NOT being manic and on the drugs that were supposed to prevent this.

First sign of anything bar the pissiest weakest elevated mood and the antipsychotics went out the window, as did almost every other shred of common sense and I was ranting, roaring, raging, laughing, and wasting a hell of a lot of energy doing nothing. Thankfully the residual effet of the drugs would have been in me, preventing true mania from taking off. Which was why this attack was what I would have called "piss-weak mania" adding how much "I hate weak things" ~ meaning hypomania as opposed to mania with psychotic features, which is when you really feel wired to the national electricity grid. Fantastic!! And the chaos, like the mania, really is full-blown.

Oh what is wrong with me and why am I so STUPID. It's one thing to have "mental health problems"; quite Another to be STUPID. I wish I had a doctor, which I don't. I want quetiapine (Seroquel). Risperidone is making me excessively anxious and I cannot abide a drug that makes me need Valium on top. That is ridiculous. As for growing women's bressts, I meant what I said about making a fortune in prostitution on the back of them ~ that's exactly what I'd do if I grew tits. Gotta turn lemons to lemonade. Gotta cash in.



I'm sorry to Janice and everyone else I've offended with my suicide talk. Death is what I think of. Wouldn't you, if you were a great loser like me? I wish anonymous would actually shoot me dead not just talk about it. Being as Anonymous is all talk and life is crap I decline to be involved in such sordidness. I don't really want to commit suicide I just wnnt to die when I feel like that. Then I have all the benefits of being dead... I could possibly get off the self-"murder" aspect by claiming to be non-human. Which is quite possibly true. Anyway I'm going to try not to talk about suicide any more, for a month at least. It irritates me probably more than it irritates you. And I feel y'all are very irritated indeed by it.

What would you do if you were me? There's no answer to my problems and I feel I should never have been born. I feel like a post-Hiroshima baby who should have been aborted by nature, yet wasn't... Awful awful awful.



I'm not severely depressed by the way. According to Emil Kraepelin, author of Manic Depressive Insanity and Paranoia I have manic spells going as high as delirious mania (as high as you can go) but the reverse state is little more than morbid moodiness. Not true depression at all. Meaning there's nothing whatever wrong with me.

Videos 1: Coloring book 2: Life Story ~ "your life story began with somebody else" one of my exes once got totally the wrong impression when I wandered about singing this song. Guilty or what?! Hey that's the name of the album ha ha har. Illustrations: birds' clipped wings
Video 3: Hideaway from the "Guilty Too" album; written for Babys by Garry Gibb of the BeeGees.

Valium Marilyn and the Miaos in Laos

VALIUM MARILYN noticed I was very nervous today. She somehow can tell the difference between manic and nervous, which I'm not sure most people could because both make me hyperkinetic. Difference being I keep blanking out in nervousness. Manic goes on and on and on. So I'm not a maniac any more. I keep getting letters from bailiffs trying to push me into suicide. I haven't opened a single one by the way but I know their attitude. They try and hack and hack away at you until you give in and do one. Ingredients: antiemetics, a bellyfull of medication (which won't kill you, just knock you out) and a swirling river or violent, lonely stretch of sea. Or a plain old railway. Or a posh clinic in Switzerland. I don't want to commit suicide I want to become a children's author instead. If only I could marshall my thoughts into a book. I did write a short story but stories start and stop too quickly. I prefer novels, which gain momentum from themselves. I have written 3 in my time. 3 buckets of pigshit, but 3 done. I only know where the last one is. I know what's gonna happen: still I will have the council tax on my back even after one billion sales. Agatha Christie had tax problems her entire life. Something to do with having been resident in the USA and no treaties against double-taxation in her day. Which meant she sold rights to half her income to Booker for not much more than one million in today's money. Which cleared the debt. She lived in a very nice house near the sea. I would quite like to live in the 1930s with parlour maids and skullery maids and butlers. If you want to know about that world, read A Woman Of Substance by Barbara Taylor Bradford. The first half of that book is exceptionally well written. In the second half the heroine somehow goes from servant to multimillionairess department store mogul without ever borrowing money, losing money or having the slightest glitch in her glittering business success. Barbara Taylor Bradford should do The Apprentice. With business acumen like hers she'd be bound to win.



Why do they always put Barbra's voice too far back in the mix? I would have been 3 when she made this performance. And I don't drink alcohol any more!!

You know how I stopped? Same way I always used to give up cigarettes. Just remind myself of everything I loathe about alcohol. And there's a lot to loathe. That technique never worked on heroin as I loved the image, loved the drug, adored everything about heroin. That's me and heroin. Not heroin that kills kids in magazine articles. I mean heroin that made me beautiful inside. Heroin that made the lassitude and meaninglessness of life melt away. Heroin my lovely lovely heroin.

Now I think of old junkies and me not coping. I think I got mentally ill because heroin gives you a stress-free life. Making you more susceptible to stress. Making me get sideswiped by psychosis or bipolar or whatever it is. I no longer care for the title: it's not like a diagnosis makes me Duke of Norfolk now, is it? Or that the title distinguishes me from a mere marquess? I never did understand people who wear mental diagnostics round their necks like Olympic gold medals. What for? Probably to justify living on DLA for ever and not committing suicide.

Oh I was going to say something about suicide YET AGAIN but notice how in that clip Barbra Streisand gets such an ovation ~ and that early in her career.

By the way Valium Marilyn is dying her hair exactly the same shade as mine. Schwarzkopf 00A or A00 Absolute Platinum. Still photographs the colour of nicotine stains even though it looks near-white under stark light. I'm leaving it on longer next time. My hair looks crap now with horrible roots lurking near halfway along it. I thought that look might look superior, but I don't really like it. I'm buying another pack next week. Schwarzkopf do a tomato red which I was thinking of saving for a manic episode. If I died it that colour normally I'd just wear a hat until it grew out. If I was manic I'd thoroughly enjoy striding about looking like a lightbulb in a brothel.



This song is awful, so awful it makes me laugh out loud "Extra extra! I'm in luuurve... I gotta thank my lucky stars a-ah-buuurve! Hurreh, hurreh don't be late!" Funny grandma is throwing a partay...



What actually are bluebirds? Are they like the tiny tits we get in European gardens? (Bluetits?)

Yellowbridge Chinese dictionary: http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/wordsearch.php?searchMode=P&word=zuo&dialect=M&select=whole

Valium Marilyn was pilled out this afternoon. Bloody hell. I slept for hours on end when I got back. Like an old pensioner. I'm too tired nowadays. Hey you know those photochromic glasses I got, they only darken properly in the sun. Not like the old Reactolite Rapides that went dark the minute you stepped into daylight, whatever the weather...

I think I should get a job as a poet. I wanna be the Barbra Streisand of literature. Not perfect, but unequalled. Yes I hear you yelling WRITE WRITE WRITE but I can't even clean my house. How can I write. And bailiffs wanna take away my computer, the bastards. Then I will HAVE to commit suicide. Even though I shouldn't be PAYING the council tax. I'm thinking of going to my member of parliament. Then he/she can straighten this out. I bet my local MP is a tory. Tories should be shot between the eyes (I say even though if I were tied down and forced to vote I'd vote tory ahead of Labour any day! In America I would probably be a death-penalty loving Democrat. It's easier in America as everyone appears to be pro-rich and pro-low taxes. I want to be rich and pay low taxes, y'see, so that's my one political view. Low taxes for the rich and for me. Especially once my fortune surpasses one hundred million...)

the end of the world is coming, which means a lot of us may never die because we will live through the end of the old world into the birth of the new one...

Marilyn was laughing when I tried pronouncing Chinese down the pub garden. She said "is that what you do in your room" I said "yeah at top volume" that made her laugh even more. And do an impression of a cat being strangled. Which reminds me: did you know there's a group called the Miao-Yao languages? Which made me want to go and see the Miaos in Laos. Unfortunately Laos was the original source of Double UO Globe heroin, best in the world. So I can't EVER go there...

It's 2:02am I have to go... cheerybye...

Illustrated: bluetit; baby bluetits; bluebird; Chinese ethnic Yaos

PS Miao-Yao languages are also known as the Hmong-Mien group

Riot News... etc

RIOT NEWS: it's all gone back to normal now. It was back to normal last night in fact. All the shops open. Some rumour had gone round the night before that gangs would come and trash the place,
which meant nearly everything was shut. The big 24-hour convenience stores stayed open world war ii style ~ ie you had to squeeze in past 6 East European bouncers, nip into the partially lit shop (blueberry live yogurt was in stock but they always buy far too much of the apple flavour. No British person buys apple flavour yogurt and everyone knows that so why stock up? You can tell a man has done the ordering in these places. They'll have 5 brands of butter all priced the same. No spreadable, no unsalted. As I say EVERYONE knows these places are fronts for drug money. The most obvious ones have partially empty shelves and yet have remained open for years...

The riots have spread to some northern towns but nobody knows what's happening up there, it's too far away. (I mean too far away to know the word on the street.) I can tell the atmosphere here is far more relaxed than 2 days ago and that's about it.

Oh crapping hell the internet connexion keeps going down. I'm using my neighbours' to get Barbra Streisand crooning free of charge. Stingy old T Mobile have stopped letting me watch Youtube all day except between 4pm and midnight after day one when I bust out my data allowance watching documentaries on Hiroshima etc. One big reason I want to speak fluent Japanese is to read some good books on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have a real thing about atom bombs. I also like the poetry of Matsuo Basho.

I'm doing Chinese first because I happen to have the CDs as well as the book. I was too addicted to heroin when I got into Japanese to bother buying the discs as well. A Japanese accent is FAR easier to master than Mandarin Chinese. You do have tones, but only as Yoruba has tones. That is the sentence inflects in a certain way and some words are distinguished by high or low pitched syllables. Just as we say "I record a record" altering tone and pitch to distinguish "record" the verb and "record" the noun. I always had an ambition to learn a language that was as different from English as possible. It absolutely had to be nonIndoEuropean (so Hindi was out). Had to have funky writing. Ideally had to have tones. So I picked Thai and chose to go to Thailand. Then I went to India instead. Long story. I do find it irritating that people go "oh that's such a hard language" and yet expect all the Thais to understand English! It's probably easier for an English person to learn an East Asian language than a person from there to learn English because English has torturous grammar compared to Chinese or Thai, which are like pidgin English "today I go shop buy chicken, go home cook chicken eat dinner!" like that. The words are unchangeable, there are no plurals, no inflected tenses (teach/taught). All is simple. And the lazy English claim such languages are exceedingly difficult, just because they sound a bit like a cat being strangled ~ well they do when I try and pronounce them!

Having these yummy zopiclone pills I now don't need sleep. I'm sleeping like a baby all hours of the day. My mood is still a bit elevated and I'm still very excitable compared to normal but I can sit still and don't find myself pacing endlessly at 3 in the morning. I had horrible nightmares last night about heroin and crack. I am sweating like a swine. I was so disorganized last week my house looks like a bomb's hit it (yet again) all my clothes are dirty. I am living on biscuits because I just cannot bear to eat proper food (can't afford it for that matter). The less I spend on drugs the LESS money I have not more!! I was doing OK on heroin. Now I'm in chaos. I'm really glad I gave up alcohol though. Noxious stuff. I'm not one of those people who turns into a psychopath after half a glass. Or one of those who has one drink then won't stop until the bar is dry. Or they're lying unconscious under the bar. For one thing I never drink in pubs; I hate them. The formula of loud music and lots of young people crammed in never made sense. Nowhere to dance. Wrong drug for dancing (Ecstasy doesn't mix with drink at all and E was the only drug that really made me wanna dance. Drink just makes you sway then fall over.) What I really loathed about pubs was not being able to hear a word anybody said for all the loud music. If you want loud music go clubbing ~ then you can dance and do as you please. Ukh I loathe pubs. I never even liked the taste of booze. What other people call a "warm glow" was to me a burning stomach. Alcohol does not give any kind of high, let's face it. It just blanks bad feelings to an extent. When I was manic I barely felt drink at all. When I was depressed it made me feel better but not better enough. Just because it's a CNS depressant doesn't follow that it exacerbates melancholia. They say IN SOME PEOPLE and I don't think I was one of them. I felt just as depressed off drink as on it and I gave it up for weeks at a time just to prove it. This is years ago, when giving up was easy. I only found it hard more recently because the habit of a can in the morning (first thing) and another in the afternoon was so entrenched. Now I can go in the shop and buy the drinks I used to fantasize about but couldn't afford: Coca Cola/Pepsi, chocolate milk, ginger beer (nonalcoholic). Cloudy lemonade. I far prefer soft drinks to yucky old beer, which I avoided on principal. Uptight men drink it because they're too scared to drink anything else. That's why I drank cyder mixed with fruit juice. The fruit juice made it look like a soft drink for the benefit of people in waiting rooms, on buses etc.

By the way my doctor is MONUMENTALLY FUCKING THICK. What kind of an idiot gives someone they know is bipolar an ANTIDEPRESSANT when they're not sleeping because they're MANIC. Fucking idiot. That's how you put someone in a mental unit. That's more negligent than smoking crack. It makes you higher. She really is stupid. The methadone clinic want an ECG. Some bullshit to do with "prolonged QT-intervals". Dr Schoopid went and filled out a bloods form and said "no we'll order the ECG after these tests come back" so I repeated another three times that the methadone clinic want an ECG because my dose is over 100mg but the silly cow would not listen. How the hell this woman manages to practise medicine without killing her patients I do not understand.

Hang on a minute my dr is foreign. I bet her medical degree is a forgery. Wouldn't surprise me at all.

Maybe I should get her investigated by the general medical council...? She brought up the issue of mirtazapine (Remeron) yet again. Mirtazapine that made me so out of it I was stood outside my house in awe at 3am watching lightning course down the walls constantly then dropped me down so low I was hallucinating dead bodies. That drug. I know what she wanted: to fob me off with that crap instead of a true sleeping pill. I'm getting an Indian male doctor next time. They dish out sleepers like sweets.

I've gone long past that prissy stage of believing sleeping pills are bad. My attitude is if ya can't sleep zonk yerself out or just don't go to bed. But don't complain about it. I only get insomnia when I'm too hyper anyhow. When I'm too depressed I sleep all day and all night!! Which is a good thing. I don't WANT to be awake when I feel like that.

Has this gone all boring? Rant rant rant. How did I get myself such a THICK doctor? She even asked WHY she was prescribing risperidone if I don't hear voices. I said to keep me sane. Fucking idiot. I dont' hear voices all the time, only in phases, which she SHOULD KNOW if she knew anything about psychiatry. My consultant sent her a letter which she obviously didn't bother reading ~ the instruction to set up a rispeidone script would have been enclosed, so she can't claim to have received one and not the other. Silly cow. Right I'm off:~~~~~~~

O man I've really gotta do something about my feet. They smell like a dead toad!

And that reminds me: what do frogs drink?
Croaker-Coala!

LAZY AFTERNOON
this is one of Babbsie's best vocals. and a highly intellectual song about beetlebugs zoomin' and there not being another human in view...



THE LOVE INSIDE
the BeeGees recorded a demo of this song for Barb, ruining it with their horrible voices. Hers is much better; she reaches a high E6 in this song...



Illustrated: zopiclone (Chinese version); eszopiclone (Lunestra) nearest equivalent available in the American market. Eszopiclone was refused a licence in Europe for being too similar to zopiclone which was already there... Zopiclone might have been turned down in America because it does cause memory loss. Eg if someone phones you when you're on it you might tell them you've moving to Holland then forget all about it the next day... LIKE I DID!!

Sanity

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

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

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

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

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

I hope y'all are well!


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


HUMATE: LOVE SIMULATION (PAUL VAN DYK LOVE MIX)



DJ TIËSTO: SUBURBAN TRAIN



ASTRAL PROJECTION: AURORA BOREALIS

In which Gledwood prattles on numerous topics...

IT IS RAINING. NOT JUST CATS AND DOGS BUT ENORMOUS ONES: WOLVES AND TIGERS. I’ve just braved the downpour to get cigarettes and some strange type of Turkish pizza bread. Not lahmacun. This one’s covered in what appears to be a mix of chilified red peppers maybe with a bit of onion thrown in for good measure. Oh I don’t know what it is but it looks a bit like minced beef, but it’s not. Soon as I was too far from my house to make it turning back a sensible option, it really started chucking it down. I was so glad of my five year old girl’s multicoloured jiggly-face-handled brolly. Two old slappers fagging away outside the local pub burst into uproarious laughter at the sight of me. Least I think they did. Who can distinguish paranoia attacks from reality. I can’t. Well I can: I just tell myself nothing is real which makes life very Strawberry Fields indeed.

I am highly annoyed with Specsavers Opticians for taking ANOTHER TEN DAYS to get one simple pair of psychotic-stalker amber Reactions lenses ready for me. In ten days’ time summer shall be over! I’m getting fed up of walking into buildings sunglassered up and having to decide whether to look like a poser yet see my surroundings in crystal clarity. Or to take off the shades and see a glaring montage of blurs. WHICH IS WHY I ORDERED PHOTOCHROMIC GLASSES TO START WITH BLOODY IDIOT COMPANY. How can it possibly take three weeks to slam a pair of specs together? I have to hand it to them they ARE WAY cheaper than Vision Express, Boots or Dolland and Aitcheson. These other companies have somehow got by charging £300 for one pair of glasses. Specsavers do two for £69 all-in. You can get both pairs tinted if you like. Which is how I ended up with black prescription sunglasses. I’m now bored bored bored of my tiny collection of eyewear. I want my old sunglasses collection back. I had five pairs alone with lenses in varying shades of blue. I specially went in for that semi-mirrored look that opticians don’t do. Do you understand why I need to be a multimillionaire now? I want to get my eyes lasered for one thing. And I’d like a few homes. One in London, one in Switzerland, where I’ll live if I don’t live in Monaco. One in Manhattan (but of course). Though I’m enough of an antisnob to live in Brooklyn just to perplex my Manhattanite friends. Where else would I like to live? O yeah Tokyo. And everywhere else I might consider renting. The whole point of having lots of money in my opinion is to make pots and pots more, so all my houses would be up for rent when I was out of residence. At $10-20,000 per week. That kind of figure. I would also make pots of cash bagging finder’s fees for people seeking the discreet disposal of private jets, yachts, fine jewellery, paintings and other trinkets. You have to do what you love and I love paintings, jewellery, aeroplanes and boats with more cabin room than a small apartment building. I was surprised nobody went for Saddam Hussein’s former yacht. For a mere $15 million you got a boat with submarine docking station and every facility down to an operating theatre. I couldn’t help wondering whether that operating theatre was fully stocked… y’know. Just out of professional interest and all.

When I was growing up I considered rich people to be normal and poor people to be weird. It was only life’s tapestry of bitterness that taught me any different. Ever since I was little I have wanted to be rich. I certainly never envisaged a life of idleness and I fully intended to work for my money, not to marry it, inherit it (no chance of that anyhow) or win it. My ideal job (apart from bestselling writer with aggregate sales in excess of one billion) would be media tycoon in the mould of Rupert Murdoch. I always thought Murdoch was eminently superior to that scabies-infested mongoose Robert Maxwell he seemed permanently to be feuding with in the 1980s. Murdoch owned (and still does down) Britain’s brightest daily tabloid, the right-leaning Sun newspaper. Maxwell owned the left-of-centre Daily Mirror. I’ve never understood champagne socialism. I’m a capitalist. I believe in low taxes for the rich, so I can pay low taxes when I’m rich. High taxation kills aspiration and moves enterprise across borders. Did you know British writers have to pay Value Added Tax ~ that is, the supposedly “luxury” sales tax imposed on just about everything that’s bought and sold in this country except food (and books, as it goes). So on top of agent’s fees reaching 20% for foreign markets I’m going to have to pay VAT at 20% and that New Labour government’s ridiculous 50% top rate of income tax. And y’all wonder why I want to live abroad. I once got a comment accusing me of ungratefulness to the country that had brought me up and nurtured me. Well I’m also a victim of Britain’s regressive prescribing to addicts. If they’d only issued me with diamorphine on prescription many years ago, I might be off all drugs by now. Instead it was ineffectual methadone and sort yourself out. As Shane in France says, the street dealer is the addict’s friend far more than a druggie clinic will ever be. Those clinic staff don’t give a rat’s arse about your welfare or my welfare. Everything is streamlined, categorized, prioritized. Which is where ridiculous exclamations: “and he even injects!” come from. If you can convince your worker you’ve ceased injecting they get a tick against their name. It’s all about coercing patients into treatments they do not want. The main reason I’m not into rehab is that most of the people there don’t truly want to be there. They want a life on drugs without the problems drugs have brought them. Fuck “consequences”. Consequences are society’s way of heaping persecution upon the misery of its most vulnerable members. Most of the “consequences” of heroin addiction are the direct result of prohibition. Just as people were blinded and killed by bootleg alcohol in 1920s America, so addicts overdose and die on clandestinely manufactured heroin of unknown purity. Even the British Government admit that the main risk posed by heroin to a healthy person is the risk of dependency! Dependency is slavery. Which is why I want out. Only when you see your addiction as chemical slavery will you have a chance of escape.

They say you should only give up heroin for yourself. That no other reason is good enough. No partner. Not even your own dear child is enough of a reason to quit taking the drug that makes you feel better than anything else.

10PM JUST GOT BACK FROM NA. I told them I used today and yesterday. They of all people won’t judge me for using. I know they probably judged me as being a bit all over the place because I’d used. In reality I feel my energy coming back; I feel an interlacing of moods. A good mood taking over from the bad one, and I hope it stays. I still have to fight to wade through the mud now and then, but the mud seems thinner, shallower. I hope this is a real change and not just something heroin has brought on. Heroin can be extremely deceptive. It had me fooled for years. A lot of you probably think I’m still conned by it now, the way I talk about it.

Many years ago I made a decision that I was going near no prison cell. Reason: I could not bear for me and my beloved gear to be parted. I know heroin is available in prisons ~ especially British prisons. (Britain, with its population less than a quarter of the size of the United States by official estimates uses nearly TWICE as much heroin as America! I’m not sure that figure is true, but it does say what a bunch of smackheads us British are.) So yes there’s ample supply of gear in prison for those willing to pay for it. I hate being beholden to dealers at the best of times. I just cannot bear even the thought of the indignity of having to pay ten pounds for less than one pound worth of gear. When something’s really tiny people say “it was like a prison bag”. No way man. No way. So I made this decision that me and my beloved gear would never be separated, even if this meant having to settle for using a lot less I was happy to be using a lot more constantly. I’ve seen how much crack some of the more successful shoplifters get through. I spent three hours in a flat one night watching this man pipe constantly, then phone up for more! Crack has all the allure to me of dogshit, so I wasn’t tempted. I made it clear I was only into the brown. There was a drought on the “B” at the time. Hence my presence at this flat. I got a very good deal for my £10 because I also found a vein on the back of this shoplifter’s left leg. I might have found it; he injected there. I’d never inject another with class A’s. That would be illegal!

So I made my money by milder means (begging) and stuck to gear in preference to crack. I call myself an ex crack addict because I did have a compulsion to use coke ~ specifically to add what I would call “a little sparkle” to my spoon. Coke in heroin is like sugar in tea. Once you get habituated it’s very hard to go without. It took me over two years from really trying to give up crack, which, as I say, I was mostly speedballing, to actually achieving my aim. For maybe a year I was using exclusively on Mondays. One single £10 rock one day a week. I knew I’d crossed a bridge when money came my way unexpectedly on a Thursday and I still didn’t score. Then, at New Year’s Eve 2008 going into 2009 I finally kissed crack goodbye and I didn’t use it one last time. Yes on a handful of occasions I have touched coke since then. Tiny bits. Not even full pipes most of them. Contrary to the received wisdom no craving was reignited. On the contrary I felt that by usingI’d got the desire to use out of my system. Reminded myself why I wasn’t into that crap any more. It might make you high but crack also makes you feel jagged and wiry. In bipolar terms ~ because crack cocaine with its mad highs, paranoia and crashes is the nearest drug I know to bipolar disorder ~ crack doesn’t usually induce a true high but a mixed state. A high with far too much anxiety, agitation ~ and often paranoia ~ thrown in. I knew I was in trouble earlier this year when my natural high surpassed the high of crack in intensity, euphoria and sheer craziness. Me and crack are well and truly over. Finito. I do not miss coke.

When you take cocaine, you’re paying for something any healthy person can experience without drug-enhancement or inducement. You don’t need excitement or wellbeing in the form of white rocks or powder. Coke wears off so quickly it was easy to reason around it: “in an hour’s time I’ll feel the same as I do now, if not worse and the £10 will be gone”. Heroin was very much more seductive. I knew that £10 of decent gear would make me feel better not just all afternoon but all day. It always seemed worth buying heroin. Even with methadone, heroin was the only thing that made life tolerable. I feel let down by a system that did not address some pretty blatant mental health issues of mine. I told the doctor “unless I address this mood problem I’m not going to get the drugs under control” this was said to a doctor and more than once. Still they did nothing. Not until I was manic, depressed, paranoid, grandiose and suicidal and hallucinating vividly was I ever taken seriously. To this day I don’t think my mental state is being addressed because methadone patently does not give mental stability. Whether this is a case of heroin stabilizing and methadone doing nothing or methadone actively destabilizing, I have no idea. But if I were a doctor I’d consider it malpractice to prescribe methadone to a person like me. I want MSTs*, DFs**, anything else but methadone and tomorrow I’m asking for it. I am considering putting my request in writing with a reasoned argument. I’ve had enough of methadone. I don’t care too much about the whats whys or wherefores of detoxifying just as long as I get off methadone and off all drugs as quickly as possible because I’ve had enough of them. The slower the detox the more depressing it’s going to be, because I’m not going to feel I’m getting anywhere fast enough. What I really would like is a reduction of 1mg per day, every single day. My last request for this was turned down flat. Because “we don’t do that”. And I thought they had a client-centred approach, tailoring psychosocial and pharmacological interventions to the need of each service-user! Yeah, I can speak Bullshit, too.

Well it’s now a quarter to eleven and my local broadband provider has yet to switch on. I’ve found a link that’s only usually strong enough after dark when radio waves flow better, but I think they’re on to the fact that somebody else is piggybacking on their broadband. If I had a car I’d drive the streets until I found free access. You’re sure to find it somewhere… know what I mean. This might have to wait till tomorrow morning for posting. I’m trying not to sleep too long at night. They say that cutting down the number of hours slept can snap one out of depression… It’s worth trying. When I want to wind down I’ve taken to putting on dark glasses and I really do think they tell the body to shut down and sleep. It’s interesting that firelight and most electric light is heavy on yellow and red; sunshine appears starker because it’s bluer and of course it contains ultra-violet which we cannot see. But that doesn’t mean it’s not affecting us. Hamsters cannot see by red light, so under a fireglow bulb they’ll ping about like nobody’s business. A side-effect of this bulb was that I felt drowsy. My housemate Laundrette who, ironically enough had worked for years in the red light district, said red light did the same to her. A long time later I discovered the science behind this: as far as they know it’s the lack of blue in a fireglow light. Blue wavelengths perk us up, yet make hammies want to sleep! So they say if you suffer from insomnia, amber-brown shades are the best to go for. They also believe that sunglasses might actually cause sunburn, tricking your brain into believing conditions are subdued and dark and switching off some hitherto unknown protective mechanism…

By the same token, they believe that artificial sweeteners may actually cause the body to put ON weight by tricking it into thinking calories are being consumed, scrambling the metabolism and defeating the object of these nasty artificial chemicals.

Does anybody know the specific health benefits of live yogurt and probiotic drinks by the way? I’ve found a shop stocking Polish ones that are very much cheaper than the British brands. I found out the Polish for “live bacterial culture”; it’s “zywe kultury bakterii”. Only problem is, I love yogurt so much I can easily eat an entire 500g tub, then drink 300mls of strawberry flavoured lactobacillus casei. I do believe lactobacillus casei shirota is the active ingredient in Yakult, which comes in tiny bottles. This stuff is huge. If it’s equipotent on a millilitre per millilitre basis I’m getting about five times the dose of Yakult for a tiny fraction of the price. For 29p a bottle they do 250ml “lassi” which comes in the original salt flavour. Because I don’t actually like this taste at all, I might stock up on the lassi because £2.90 will give me 10 days’ guaranteed supply. I drank lassi every day for over a month in India and the black shadows that have been under my eyes since childhood (they’re there whether or not I’m on drugs; drugs just make them very much worse)… these shadows vanished. The live yogurt in Indian (banana) lassi is the only lifestyle difference I can put the change down to. Other differences were swimming in the sea (daily). Catching giardia, a type of stomach bug midway between typhoid and dysentery in severity (I was so dehydrated I was hallucinating on this giardia. I started behaving very strangely. When I eventually got hold of oral rehydration salts, the sudden restoration in electrolyte balance made me so high that one of our friends was convinced I’d taken E, speed or coke. I might add that throughout this trip I was sleeping less and experiencing constant mood swings that got so bad I seriously considered buying 500 sleeping pills, climbing across the rocks at the end of the bay after midnight and drowning myself where there was no coastguard, no ambulance service. We didn’t even know where to find a doctor (you just went down the pharmacy, told them what you wanted: antibiotics, sleeping pills, anything up to and including ketamine and they’d just hand it over; the girl I was with was using grams and grams of ketamine. I indulged but rapidly got bored of it. It’s not really a horse tranquillizer by the way, it’s a general anaesthetic used in roadside situations and on battlefields. As you slip under, part of your mind stays very much wide awake and a vivid waking dream state occurs. To me it was tripping without the horror of having to deal with keys, money and friendship, all of which become very bizarre in the paisley-patterned cartoon world of LSD. Ketamine actually does what I’d imagined LSD would do before I took it. Produces a true immersive fantasy “trip” where you literally feel you’ve left your body and visited other places, possibly other dimensions even in space and time. Nobody I knew ever had a “bad trip” after the fashion of a negative LSD experience, but in the words of one nightclubber I knew, on a big blast of ketamine (which is usually snorted up the nose) you literally do sometimes feel like you’re hanging off the very edge of the universe into the Realness of Unreality (very Buddhist!) Or to put it another way, you’re fully conscious as you hover over the precipice of full clinical anaesthesia.

I took ketamine perhaps a hundred times. I very much liked the dissociative effect it produced and the dream-state, totally divorced from the here-now world. Ketamine is so powerful you lose all sense of ego and self. Re-emerging back into the world is like gathering, bit by bit, an identity of a person you used to be, with a life you suddenly remember although you’re millions of miles away. You turn from nothing and nobody back into who you Are. What I really couldn’t handle about acid tripping was the fact that you’re totally off your head, everything feels utterly unreal and yet you know, you absolutely must not follow any urge to set fire to anything, to jump from a hight, to stand in the middle of a road gazing at the amazing crystalline rainbow prisming of birdsong. All this beauty and all this potency was mixed together with a reality I could no longer handle. Keys, money, people. People are thinking about me. What are they thinking. I remember laughing and laughing watching somebody smoking a spliff. The spliff, held at a 45 degree angle kept turning into a miniature escalator, moving up. And this was the milder part of the trip. The peaks were so mindblowingly intense they defy description. Eventually I just took the spliff out of his hand and started smoking away nonchalantly. This person, who was (to put it kindly) an egotistical wanker, was so gobsmacked he just let me do it. I felt a bristling go around the room very acutely and said oh sorry and went into such paroxisms of laughter I had to go in the back garden to cool down.

I fried my brains on acid, I’m afraid. Although I probably only had three trips that were of truly mindblowing potency, they probably did blow my mind. To give an example, in one trip I was in seven dimensions of reality at once. If you can imagine different films projected on to screens and being able to switch between screens and yet experiencing every reality at once… I was flying on a magic carpet in my friend’s room (his rug). Looking down through the rug I clearly saw clouds and snowy mountain tops. An entire universe of civilizations throughout all ages was nestled in the palm of my hand. I was in the past, present and future all at once. I had 360 degree vision. I could see Stonehendge through the back of my head. When I was really tripping I could see birdsong as rainbows. It was truly spectacular. These are the mere bits I remember. Strong acid is so intense you might not understand a word anybody is saying. You might not know who you are or where you are, what is happening or why. And yet you are walking about in the real world knowing there are real consequences to your actions. And that’s what I couldn’t think out of. Knowing something bad could happen in a trip that wasn’t just a bad trip but a real Bad Thing. That’s what I couldn’t get my head round. I remember walking across the footbridge over the main road feeling my brains smeared out on the path behind me, like a snail’s trail. Then we found ourselves in a multi-storey carpark in the rain, which was like the sound of pixies singing. I hugged a tree in the pitch blackness of a wet park and a giant caterpillar devoured my brain. This is what acid did to me. I haven’t tripped like that for about 20 years and yet I recall it as if it all happened yesterday.

And this is why I get offended at the implication that I will abuse any drug that can be abused: for years afterwards I’d stop myself periodically throughout the day and think, “I’m glad I’m not tripping”. And I seriously was genuinely glad to be sober and straight and in my right mind. I appreciated my sanity. Y’all wonder why I got so upset at being told I had schizoaffective disorder? The more impressionable among you might have suspected that all the talk of acid and ecstasy during my manic episode meant I was using those substances again. Mania is well known to induce “enhanced perception of sound, colour and texture” ~ just as LSD and Ecstasy do. Mania induces an elevated Ecstatic mood, just like E does. Mania makes the mind race with spectacular velocity ~ just as LSD induces a constantly renewing kaleidoscope of form and colour, so mania turns the action of simple thought into something resembling a firework display. LSD can cause illusions (faces in the floor) ~ so does mania. LSD can make you hear voices (though it’s rare) mania does so very commonly. You can have full-blown hallucinatory visions in mania, just as you can on LSD. That’s why my sudden revival of 1991 and 1992 hardcore rave music. I experienced feelings I never thought I would feel again except this time I was in a far more positive frame of mind. There are accounts of mania published 90 years ago that bear out everything I say if you don’t believe me. Of course I used the vocabulary of raving, clubbing, Ecstasy and psychedelia because it was the only vocabulary I had. I haven’t touched E in 10 years. I took a tiny dose of acid 10 years ago but I hadn’t used it for a full 10 years before that. When I did take magic mushrooms I took little more than a threshold dose ~ enough to bring on the psilocybin euphoria, to make the world surreal. But not to be tripping on anything like the same magnitude as I tripped on LSD.

To anyone who will insist on trying psychedelic drugs, which I do not recommend, you would at least have some idea of the strength of a mushroom trip simply by weighing or counting the mushroom material. British liberty caps have a very distinctive appearance. There are about six signs that distinguish true magic mushrooms from their nearest clones and every single one must match. The red and white fly agaric mushrooms apparently cause a weird type of trip but they’re very different to true “magic” mushrooms.

By the way it is not unknown for common household mushrooms to be cut up, dried up and dropped with LSD. So make sure you know the person you’re getting these from. And if you’re picking your own make sure you check PROPERLY. True psilocybin mushrooms bruise a dark blue colour when fresh. They lose something like a third of their potency on drying. 25 dry liberty caps are enough to induce laughter and surrealness. I very rarely took more than this. On 50 (British) mushrooms you’ll be getting the full effects of a trip. Bright colours, intricate animated designs viewed with eyes closed (on a higher dose you might well see these eyes OPEN!) 200 liberty caps will produce a full-blown trip. Having already experienced this from acid I felt no need to go here with mushrooms, even though I found the mushroom spirit far kinder than the acid goblin. Sometimes we did have a strange feeling of angels inside our heads. My best friend got this too. I wonder how his mental health is today…?

Most people who experiment with psychedelic drugs are fine afterwards. By far the most common adverse effect is anxiety. Doctors have never believed psychedelics to cause psychosis. The theory has always been that people who go mad after tripping probably would have gone mad anyhow. What they have done is pulled the trigger on an already loaded gun.

There was a ten-year gap between my taking psychedelic substances of any kind and going mad. Though I don’t doubt the psychedelics helped bend and blend my mind I don’t think what I had was “drug psychosis”. Naomi, the dual diagnosis lady, who I had spoken to a lot BEFORE I went mad (because I had been hearing voices, having mood swings in a more minor way for years) once said to me “I know and you know this wasn’t brought on by the drugs…” which stuck with me, because at the time I wasn’t at all sure that it wasn’t the drugs. Now I think back and think WHAT drugs? The mania went on and on and on for weeks on end. Having seen me three times in a row with a markedly elevated mood on each occasion my shrink eventually diagnosed me with manic depression and schizophrenia. I was very upset about this. It’s the only time I’ve ever come back from a doctor and cried. Even though I was “high” I cried the tears of a crazyman. They mingled with the dirt on my bathroom floor.

By the way I’m having serious trouble remembering how long I have or haven’t gone between doses of heroin. This is because I don’t WANT to remember. Don’t want to do it again. Don’t want to know. If it’s “just for today” then surely what happened yesterday doesn’t count. So I’m focused on today and tomorrow and not using. Ever again. I want the nightmare of heroin over with because that’s all it was. A nightmare. What good memories am I left with.

I remember meeting a couple I knew at three o’clock in the morning. He was stomping solidly ahead. Probably eager to get to some crackhouse or other. She was bent double in the street, like a person trying to impersonate a capital A. I remember her saying “Aww I’ve ‘ad a fifteen pound ‘it. I’m ‘avin’ so much fun.” And even then, junkie that I was, I clearly recall thinking ARE YOU? Didn’t look like fun to me. Wouldn’t have felt like fun to me. I’ve often wondered whether I was lacking some heroin pleasure receptor gene, because I know if I was in a state like that I’d just feel like I was fighting for consciousness through something very heavy and gloopy. Like a man drowning in methadone! Yes heroin gave me some sort of high but it’s so very subtle it took me literally years to appreciate that it was there. In the years before I finally twigged what was what: what was opiated, what was “real”, I was constantly complaining that heroin didn’t work for me. That’s because no matter how much you take (or I take) heroin has never ever felt more than a 4 out of 10 strength-wise. Not in niceness. In niceness it scores at least 9. (Ecstasy would be 10). In strength, heroin never feels strong. I nearly killed myself with an overdose once and that was only a 4 out of 10. Laundretta pointed out that the junkie who feels “not stoned” is like the alcoholic who slurs “I’m not drunk”… Laundretta WAS an alcoholic, as well as a heroin and crack addict, only her drugs took exactly reverse order of preference to mine (I was heroin first, alcohol second, crack third). She was the type of person who would smoke one £10 rock, then instantly be talking about scoring another. And I’d be claiming to be out of money. I was never like that with crack. Apart from one binge I went on, when I decided to smoke and speedball as much as I pleased until the money ran out, I only once bought a second rock after doing the first. This is because crack gave me an intense craving for heroin. Mostly to take away the negative after-effects of the crack. When I think about the nastiness I’ve been involved in I’m disgusted. I don’t want ever to be involved in hard drugs again. Because soft drugs don’t appeal to me (cannabis being just about the most unpleasant experience short of actual torture, I can envisage)… being off hard drugs will mean being off all drugs. None of the drugs I used to take tempt me today. If only if only if only I could be in an Elevated enough mood to kiss goodbye to my beloved heroin for ever. I’m bored of heroin. Fed up of chemical slavery. And I’ve had enough enough enough of the crappy life that came with the stuff.

This is what I gain from NA. A sense of reality from people who are deceived no more. My feelings about the politics of heroin prescribing evaporate as I walk through the doors of NA. I’m no longer interested in prescription heroin. I just want a prescription to be DRUG-FREE, CLEAN, SERENE.

I WANT A LIFE BACK.


☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆




CHOICE: ACID EIFFEL



HYBRID: SYMPHONY



PUSH: STRANGE WORLD