A gaggle of geese, a murder of crows... a donkey derby of pizza boxes.

YES REALLY I'm talking of abortive posts scribbled on old foodcardboard, untapped in, unfinished. Sometimes I accumulate loads of them, but they're always boring (hence unposted).

In days gone by I used to scrawl out man a post in advance... not "man a post" ~ MANY a one! Lately I haven't done this, hence the boring blog and the degeneration into a morass of chinchillas and Japanese inus.

By the way, Morrisons own sweet chili chicken is nothing on Iceland's fiery chicken pizzas, which are proper stonebaked, and far more generously chickensprinkled.

Now talking of donkey derbies I think I need a Narcotics Anonymous sponsor more than I need a Native Japanese or European curlytailed furrydoggie... Also, living in the big bad city I'm scared somebody might burgle my furrydoggie from outside a shop or NA meeting (well I gotta walk the thang ~ mightaswell kill 2 birds 1 stone, ya know...)

And I don't think naming the shiba-inu "Snarler" will necessarily rub off on her character enough to put off local tea leaves.

Which is where sobriety comes in. Sobriety doesn't moult everywhere in spring, never gets bored and tears up the newspapers, will not tip over frying pans full of sausages and run off with them. It doesn't bark at strangers or scurry past park railings and into main roads.

Sobriety is hard-won yet free as a bird. It is guaranteed never to pee on the carpet (and you are less likely to pee on the carpet when you're sober), it does not need an ID-chip and unlike a cute lil dawg, nobody can ever steal it from me.

So sobriety it is.

God, grant me the Serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the Courage to change the things I can ~
and the Wisdom to know the difference!

3 GOOD SONGS ~ or ought I to say "top tunes" to be hip-n-down wid da kidz..?

tHESE ARE BY FAR THE BEST (in my view) OF THE uk TOP 20 ON LAST NIGHT'S TV

#18 PROFESSOR GREEN ~ NEED YOU TONIGHT
Classic tune ~ with that DER-DER-DER from the original.
And rap WITH AN ENGLISH ACCENT ~ very modern & all...



#15 KATE NASH ~ DO WAH DO

Phoney American accents are bang out of fash these days, if you're Brit. And I love the air-hostess stuff, it reminds me of the late Princess Diana's fashion sense...



#1 LADY GAGA FT. BEYONCE ~ TELEPHONE

Musically I don't think Lady Gaga's tunes are that catchy or amazing but I do like this vid featuring Beyoncé ~ Beyoncé who ticks every gorgeous-by-numbers box, yet sexy-on-video she ain't. I think what I've seen of her acting's actually much better than her shrill singing... but anyway.
And doncha think Gaga looks like Aimy Winehouse wid da shark-eye curves?

Tired... and when I rest... Depressed...

TIRED, and when I rest, depressed.
This is what happens. I mean I'm OK. I'm moving forward. but when I stop, I realize things don't feel as well as I'd hoped they would.
I wanted to post this today to mark where I am on My Great Journey.
But it's hard to know what to put.
My goals are clear. They haven't altered since the bleary dawn of my time, which happened around 2006. I'd say that New Era began in earnest when I took up blogging. Blogging gave confidence. Knowing that I'm communicating electronically with ordinary folk around the world gave me far more confidence in my powers to communicate on paper. I was flattered to be told I can write well, because my first perogative has always been to write clearly. If I can express myself clearly and with eloquence, then surely I'm doing good (or well).(!)
My goal now, of course, is to get a book out of my addiction, a book that I hope will be successful enough to let me physically move on from this terrible half-life I'm stuck in now. It would also give me a platform to speak about one of the great social evils of our age ~ an issue that Something needs to be done about, but no-one has the vision or the courage to put a workable solution forward. Somebody needs to stand up and show the way. And if no-one else is going to do it, and I get the chance, I shall make sure that person is me!
My other big goal has always been to depart Britain in favour of more stimulating shores. I don't care where I go just as long as it's different. I'm fed up of this country and the idea of paying taxes to Gordon Brown makes me physically nauseous!
Originally I was thinking Vienna or Berlin or Amsterdam: and I still want to see those places. I also long to see new York. Every time the place comes on telly I feel a yearning... I won't set my heart on any one place though. Just as long as I get out I'll be happy!
You cannot travel with a drug habit. And drug tourism is not my style ~ hiding holed up in foreign hotel rooms trying to convince yourself nobody knows what's going on, too paranoid to venture outside and in terror of the barbaric third world police. No thanks! Travel ought to be about freedom and there's precious little freedom where hard drugs are involved.
I absolutely must clean up before I can do anything.
I successfully dumped crack cocaine at New Year's 2009. I'm not generally into New Year's Resolutions but I made one then and stuck to it ~ with three exceptions in eleven months.
But what I still haven't mastered is the art of living heroin-free. I'm already at the stage where if I take heroin, it doesn't do an awful lot. If I sit still and take it I fall asleep. but if I keep moving most people don't seem to notice anything amiss.
Over and over I've gone round in my head, trying to convince myself that if I can just leave the stuff behind, I'll be free and can move on to some sort of bright future...
In my book, almost inevitably where there is heroin there is scunge and desperation. Real life, straight life, straightforward life is as mysterious to my characters as speaking fluent Japanese. Millions of people in Japan seem to manage it and get along fine. But to them it's so hugely difficult they give it up as impossible...
I refuse to be like these people ~ stuck in their ways. Mired in the constant gloomy rounds of active addiction. Not nice!
When people try to be grown up and mature, they risk falling into the trap of talking about drug addiction as a life choice. Of course the first experimentation is a choice, and a desperate or foolhardy one at that. But to the hardened addict, using drugs is no longer any kind of meaningful "choice" ~ the drugs are used automatically, whatever the circumstances. This is what NA mean by the phrase "powerless over our addiction". The one choice an addict has is NOT to take the drugs.
And that's the choice I want to go for. I keep telling myself that if I will only take this first step, I will walk somewhere wonderful that I can't even conceive of now. I'm telling myself I have to take the step otherwise I might never get anywhere... but I don't. And I don't. And I so much want to break free it hurts...


CARLY SIMON ~ COMING AROUND AGAIN
I love this song. This could be the motto for my life...
Sorry the picture's not too good. The synth sound comes out lovely. Top tune!
I specially like the line:
...Scream the lullaby...
Did you know Carly Simon is daughter of Richard L Simon, co-founder of Simon & Schuster publishing in New York..?




Illustrations: top ~ I wonder what this symbolizes, ahem?!?; New York City ~ wondrous by night; drug tourism ~ not good; crack cocaine ~ successfully knocked on head; drugs are endemic in our society ~ yet that vicious circle must still be smashed!

Yummy Petits Pains

SO I'm trying again ... meanwhile I'm having freshly baked hot bread (that I buy as a risen dough and bung in the oven) ... and lovely coffee ...

And that's about all I have to say today. Cheerio!

Here's Madonna claiming she would have done more for Michael Jackson ... if only ..(??!?) ... do you believe this..??

I mean, what COULD she or "we" have done ..?

Sorry about the spanische Untertitel ...

Stung by the Killer B

YET AGAIN: what's new?

In recent times I have shied away from detailing my drugs use in blow-by-blow type accounts. Or for that matter my endless resolutions to quit ~ and then the inevitable "lapses". They seem to exasperate y'all too much.

In the past I only managed to stop for a few days at a time and I only achieved that by either spending all my money, or keeping it in a post office that closes at 5:30 pm ~ and I don't have a cashcard.

But that method of "quitting" if you want to call it that ~ can only ever score me a few days off.

Because as surely as night follows day Monday morning comes round again. And then the itch to use becomes all-consuming. And heroin always feels better after a few days off, even if I have held myself on a heavy dose of methadone in-between. Despite what the doctors seem to say ~ and I can only speak for myself ~ methadone simply does not sate the old receptor sites anything like as effectively as heroin. Even at doses over 100mg a day. I think if the drugs services and medical profession sincerely wanted to crack heroin addiction (and I'm not convinced they truly do ~ a lot of them are content merely to turn up and get paid...) then they want to look away from methadone-methadone-methadone. Opiate addiction can in theory be treated with any of the scores of opiates and opioids licensed to relieve pain.

Having said that I do feel "OK" on methadone. Just nowhere near as OK as on heroin.

Heroin ~ heroin. A hard nasty drug. I can barely believe I'm writing this.

This morning I was perusing the Oxford University prospectus; this afternoon I took home a "10B" ~ that is, a fifth of a gram, a £10 bag of brown heroin ~ and then spent a good two hours unconscious in a chair. (That's what heroin does to me these days ~ either pretty much nothing, or else I'm knocked out cold ...)

I'm not willing to wait however many years until some miracle treatment makes quitting as easy as a goodly part of my would like it to be. Quitting is always possible if you want it sincerely enough. If you are determined enough. In decades past many people came off cold turkey. It was the only way out available to them.

I tried "'clucking' it out" ~ I did eight days clean, nearly lost my mind (I was acting very out of character ~ and in my parents' house). I'd never willingly do that again ...

But methadone is there for me. I'm already on a script. I'm lucky.

What's that saying? Nothing that's truly worth achieving has ever been easy~? Something like that. I would title the German translation of my still (possibly) forthcoming addict memoirs Mein Kampf ~ which means My Fight ~ for surely giving up hard drugs can only be a fight and a big fight at that ~ even with methadone... if only that title hadn't long ago been appropriated by a certain Herr Hitler ..(!)

So: tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow I pick up more methadone from my friendly pharmacist. Tomorrow I try again.

Illustrated: the evil killer B ("B" means brown heroin); syringe selection (I dread to think what kind of druggie would use the 60ml one to the far left ~ I could fit £20 of drugs into 1ml ...); Oxford Uni logo; "Bridge of Sighs", Hertford College, Oxford; a fight ~ not of the kind I'm destined for ...

A Big Day Out

INSTEAD OF DOING THE USUAL thing I inevitably find myself doing on Monday morning, I got up late and ventured to Central London in a hunt for German magazines.

I got off the tube at St Pancras International, where you get the Eurostar train to Paris and Brussels. St Pancras is surely the most beautiful station building in London if not Britain:



I found Der Spiegel and Stern on a newsstand outside. The hubbub of French voices drew me into the hi-tech inner hall where screens displaying 13:28 Paris Nord set off a frisson of excitement and longing inside me. It's been such a long time since I travelled anywhere at all except just down the road...



The last time I saw a newsstand with a half-decent selection was near Baker Street tube. Baker Street of course being famous for Sherlock Holmes... Madame Tussuad's museum is right by the tube station so the place is thronging with tourists (unlike in this snap!)...



Madame Tussauds is next to the Planetarium:



I picked up a weekly Take-a-Break -style magazine called Freizeit Revue. It is an old woman's magazine but I bought it for the endless crossword puzzles sandwiched next to advertisements for piles ointments and surgical support stockings ...

Then I meandered down to Regents' Park which is a Royal Park and so extremely well manicured.



The houses overlooking the vast greens are pretty impressive too ...



... then it was nearly rush hour so I had to fly home before the trains were too crammed to breathe.

And there we are! My first day out in London-London in over a year!

*******

Have a look at the arrogant French woman in the bottom clip ~ this is absolute classic telly!!

THE LATE, GREAT KEITH FLOYD was one of the most classic TV cooks of all time. There was a retrospective on his life and work on TV last night and these were the best clips shown:

Here from his best series Floyd On France, is his attempt at a mushroom omelette ~ with "angry dragon lady" "simmering" behind ...



And here's the most classic clip of all. This wasn't a set-up ~ the French-Basque lady was for real! "FLOYD CAN'T COOK!"

A Brave New World ...

DRUG-FREE and frightening ...


I am making yet another attempt at living completely heroin-free. I failed before because I didn't know how to do it. Now I have better ideas. For one thing, because I'm miserable without that in my system, no matter how much methadone I take, I came to the conclusion I somehow have to learn to enjoy misery. How on earth I shall manage that I don't know.

I don't want to go on injecting all my life. My veins have run out and unless I want to go in the femoral (crook of the thigh) or jugular (neck) I really have run out of options. Sticking needles in the feet and the veins still blowing is unspeakably horrible. And it makes me feel like a desperate, desperate junkie.

Well I think I passed one test today: as I walked out here I spied a dealer ambulating down the other side of the street. In previous times I'd have called out, coughed up all my money and promised to settle the balance (because I didn't have £10 on me) tomorrow. And I didn't. Of course I was rewinding this over and over my head for the next half hour ... but, y'know... one step at a time ...

PS Tiny trotterdonkeys of the deep... Yesterday's seahorses post now has the videos I omitted to add: see the very end of it.

... But here's perhaps the oddest looking seahorse of them all: the East Asian Dragon Seahorse, filmed here in Singapore Sea Life Centre:



PPS Good luck to all Germans on today's elections. You'll need it...

Methadone Purgatory

I DON'T KNOW WHY IT IS, and I wish I could change my attitude, but every day on methadone is a miserable day. Nothing ever seems to fit, nothing sticks. Nothing's ever right. The only way I manage it is by keeping self and money strictly separate and avoiding venturing anywhere non-essential till after 5:30, by which time the Post Office is closed. I don't keep any money in a cashcard account.

One of the Operatives who run the antidruggie Groups and Workshops and the Operative who interviewed me about my Mental Health History both seem to feel this is some sort of underlying depression manifesting as soon as heroin's not there screening it off.

I used to think it was just that I wanted an excuse to use, that my heart wasn't in the right place and that my attitude was wrong. But now I'm starting to believe perhaps these people have a point ...

It's not like I have nothing to do, but the last 3 days nothing could engage me, nothing distracted me. I was doing "really well". Though I got highly annoyed waking up feeling rattled and slightly nauseous every morning until the methadone came on gradually, like a high tide, hiding the wasteland beach of my despair~(!!)

Heroin's far more efficient. It hits like a tsunami. No messing about there.

Even professional drugs services ~ detox units and the like hate methadone. They advise on the record to avoid methadone as far as possible in the week before Rapid Detox because methadone stays in the body an inordinate length of time and drags out withdrawal symptoms horrifically.

I know one particular individual who was forced to come off methadone in prison some years ago and refuses to touch it to this day, it was such a harrowing experience.

I don't know what I'm going to achieve by saying this but just wanted my say ~ moan moan moan moan moan.

Cheerio now!

Illustration: top right, a model African Pygmy Hedgehog. I just thought I'd distract yous all with something more exciting to you than the predictable methadone-bottle post-illustration ...

Centre: sorry. Methadone clinic, Germany.

Bottom right, for those who missed it in Furry Friday on Saturday, a New Zealand hedgehog. Aren't they the cutest..?!?

MUSIC!
THE CARPENTERS ~ RAINY DAYS AND MONDAYS



~ and here's another!! ~

CARPENTERS ~ WE'VE ONLY JUST BEGUN

A Stab In The Daylight

STEAK-KNIFE IN HAND, my assault on life's possibilities goes on.

Modern and Biblical Hebrew handbooks (and a few other languages besides) tower beside my TV like a modern-day Babel. I have Hebrew CDs coming out of my ears.

Add to this the Yiddish primer I borrowed "out of interest" (bear in mind Yiddish is a Hebrew-lettered Aramaicized offshoot of mediaeval German as spoken in Poland and Eastern Europe through the Ukraine and into Russia and I'm already quite good in German) ~ and this overflow of Hebrew symbols is spilling out my ears together with elementary dialogue about hotel reservations in the Holy Land.

Here's a comparison of Yiddish and German as transliterated:

Yiddish: Zey bleybn nit.
German: Sie bleiben nicht.
("They aren't staying.")

Spanish had to go (temporarily) by the wayside. No I've not given up on it. I've always wanted to speak Spanish and still do. I just had to re-prioritize. The library's restrictions on CD language borrowing put limits on my resources.

(Evidently the idea of studying more than one language at once is beyond their expectations (this is, after all, modern Britain)).

Apart from all this, the furry Mongolian Tubby Bum-Bum ~ aka Spherical Roborovski ~ perks her ears and says "hello!" from her Italian hard cheese tube where she's plonking her newspaper-chewed bedroom. Sometimes she up-ends the entire tube whilst nibbling on it, like a miniature polar bear with trashcan-on-head, which is hilarious to behold ...

All is fine with me, (I should say). But I don't feel very fine. Life feels gapingly void and fruitless. I always feel I'm doing something wrong ~ something ineffable, abstract... something I can never put my finger on.

I want to do things right. For once in my life.

I'm aiming (if I possibly can manage this) to give in a totally clear drugs screen next week. And that means pretty much no heroin between now and then.

And of course, if I could manage it voluntarily (that is, having money to pay for it and yet abstaining ~ that would set a vitally new slant on my entire future ...

Wish me luck!

DRUNK SQUIRREL VIDEO
This one's a classic...
... ever seen a SQUIRREL this rat-arsed? ;->...
... the furry entertainer's been bingeing on autumnally fermenting pumpkins ...

Hard-Won Sobriety: Too Hard to Win?

NOT ENOUGH TIME ~ and far too many things to do in it!

I am very annoyed with "Maple Syrup", my drugs "worker" for nagging at me to go daily antidrug seminars. It's not that EVERY single day there's one she thinks I ought to attend. But two or three times a week there are "relevant" ones on. And she appears to assume I'm doing nothing better so I HAVE to go.

I don't see why I should make excuses for being busy in my OWN LIFE. So I never explain to her why I miss them. Often the reason is I was doing something essential e.g. signing residency documents for where I live now at the council.

I am learning two foreign languages and those alone have me exhausted. Ploughing through that German novel, dictionary in hand, I think: just two more pages. Two more means one more hour. And yet I have to do it. My comprehension has risen from about 90% to over 95% so I know I'm doing something right. Spanish I play on the CDs round and round and yell out the answers: Una cocha para diez dias por favor! et cetera! And Spherical, who I try to address in Spanish thinks I have gone even crazier than before and squeals back to me in her chipmunk tones: ¡Déjame en paz! What do you think that means?

I am also permanently exhausted half the time. This being a medically diagnosed problem they call Chronic Fatigue Syndrome crossed with depression (you see, nobody knows what anything REALLY is... I have symptoms of something like hepatitis C or Lyme disease... though my last hep C test came out totally negative. And I also got tested for other bloodbourne viruses: Hep A, hep B, HIV and syphillis. All negative (thank God).

And of course my crash-course in sobriety (so to speak) has crashed into a wall. And I'm still using. Just a little less obsessively than before. And (somehow) eyeing that goal of CLEAN AND SOBER a little more closely. It seems a little more achievable, despite my having failed yet again to get there.

Am I any nearer? Am I better equipped to reach that sought-after "place"? Am I simply bouncily turgid because more full of bull**** than ever before?

ONLY TIME WILL TELL...

Why I Tread Carefully Around NA...

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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