No, no, no!

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



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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which might have to be rehab.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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


PAUL OAKENFOLD


MICHAEL WOODS
this is the meaning of U4EA

Poetry and Truth

DOES ANYONE KNOW A SHOP SELLING HUGE WHITE SMOCK SHIRTS? I have decided to become a poet, you see. So I need one. I already have a fountin pen bought on special offer for 30p. It came with 3 blue cartridges but I need poetical black ones. And thick acid free Sketch 100 paper for manuscripts and lots of lovely red wine to leave poetic winestains all over my poetic manuscripts. I already have a special notebook for copying poems into. Problem is I haven't really written one for 20 years. And I have a halfarsed poetry blog not even I read.

Thing is if someone said "here are some oils, paint a portrait after the manner of Leonardo da Vinci" I'd be stumped. But if someone said "knock out a Spenserean stanza, two sonnets, a Shakespearean and a Petrarchan and ten stanzas in terza rima" I could do it and I've found some of my best stuff (with my habit of copying out other people's work) and wondered who on earth wrote it! It was only fragments so nothing ever got copied up and saved. Only finished stuff is saved.

Once I have the shirt and the wine and a finished opus I'll put a bit online. I have thought up a way of promoting my opus that has never been done before, especially not by a living poet and THAT is how I want my work published. If I give away my idea somebody else shall only take it so I can't tell it till it's done.

I dearly would love to switch on to Subutex but don't want to put myself in a mental hospital thinking I'm being sucked through the vortex of a spiral (ie severely manic) so I'm indulging that idea with great care. Ie doing absolutely nothing about it for the time being.

Beatrix Potter is on my television. I got the Renee Zellwegger DVD. She's just like me.


Shakespeare's Sonnet 73. Isn't this sublime?

My Special Tonkie Plan

I HAVE A SPECIAL PLAN. I'm in a good mood now and planning my future. My DRUG-FREE FUTURE. YES A FUTURE WITH NO MORPHIA, NO METHADONE NO NARCOTIC SUBSTANCES.

See I feel hypomanic enough without needing shitty drugs to bring me up here. Why am I hypomanic? Because I scored methadone on the street a while ago and indulge tonight in an extra dose. [A tiny dreg that I had extra, not a whopping huge dose.] That little bit extra plus lots of sleep, plus depression which cycles anyhow (high and low and I really do mean HIGH at the extreme ~ even higher than crack) so this has switched my mood. I was NOT taking illicit methadone during my most intense mania, I ought to add. If anything I was FORGETTING to take the shit, forgetting until I wasn't too far from having my head down the toilet puking from withdrawal [I felt physically sick and didn't know why]. I was so high I not only went into a literal spiral whirl where my words broke up into noise, a brain full of roaring NOISE without words I was turning into literal pure energy and felt invincible. My friends told me not to fuck off the methadone clinic but that was my plan. To tell them where to go and hike along the high speed rail track to Paris. Knowing that withdrawal perturbs my mood severely I would in this state have probably gone so manic I literally didn't know my own name. I was already out of it enough that I didn't grasp what people meant when they said my name in front of me. I wondered who they were talking about.

This was on NO drugs bar a couple of cyders per day as I'd been drinking for eyars on end without mania, and just enough methadone to survive. No speed, no crack, no E, no psychedelics to put me in this state. This is what I mean when I say my highs are higher than my lows are low. And thank God. I've heard tales of manic people believing they are Emperor of the World or at the very least multi-billionaires. And they very often take other people in and get first class air tickets New York to Paris, leaving chaos in their wake. Because I'm schizoaffective I can barely get it together to keep self, house keys and phone in the same place. In my most severe mania I had no glasses (I just lost them) and no money at all (I lost the card). I was pretty badly disabled and only able to post because I type by touch, have been blogging for years and know the procedure for posting back to front. Otherwise I'd no way be able to put up my experience online as I went. All that weird spelling mistake stuff with U U U A A A, that stuff was literal stream of consciousness. I didn't edit because just as I'd keep my private journal the way it was, so I wanted my blog to caputre the moment. This was like holiday photos from the Light Side of the Moon.

How did I get on to this? Oh yeah because I'm UP and Addressing My Drug Problem.

Here's what I'm doing. I KNOW SOMEONE WHO DEALS IN SUBUTEX OR SUBOXONE.

[They're the same stuff: buprenorphine one has a useless added ingredient so you can't inject but I wouldn't waste a vein on it anyhow. I don't know which he's on now but he sells his script and offered it to me several times.]

I'm willing to switch methadone to heroin for a week to sweep the Mean Green out of my system. If you don't sweep it out you have to be down to 30mg AND do 36 to 48 hours of NO METHADONE which is just not something Im going to do, not something Paddster ever did and he's the man as regards Drug Knowledge. He's now 100% opiate clean ie on NOTHING and he achieved this using the same manner of scheme I came up with. So Im going to clear out evil methadone which is MORE ADDICTIVE, WORSE WITHDRAWALS and ONLY superior to heroin in that it can be dosed orally under supervision once daily. Paradoxically methadone's advantage is key to all its disadvantages. The long half life means it's a slow drug, taking ages to take effect, ages to detox out of the system. Most people agree it is better to die than to detox off methadone. Sorry to be realistic. Life ain't too hot. Life without opiates when you're addicted to them is utterly bleak and meaningless and during detox you feel this in all its realism and intensity.

To any person reading this in a state of withdrawal I urge you to keep hold of how you feel and to make an adult decision. Is this really what you want to be doing with your life? You don't need to commit suicide. You need to come off these drugs that are making life not worth living.

There is no need to suffer unduly.

This is why I choose the Subutex option. You do the suffering BEFORE you come off. The worst suffering occurs during switchover. I'm going to switch over under NO medical supervision. I will wait a couple of hours and use heroin to cover the receptor sites Subutex has left wide open leaving me partially sick. I'll start off on 4mg day one, 8mg day 2, 8mg day 3. I'm not going over 8mg. Then I'll tell the clinic I'm on 8mg Subutex and don't need methadone and they can treat me or not treat me but this is what I'm doing. I MUST switch to heroin first as my methadone dose is way too high it would take months to switch down. I'm doing 18 hours clean before I pop a Subbie. Then I'm crushing up the 8mg pills and reducing by approx a single milligram every couple of days. I've BEEN ON SUBUTEX AND DONE THIS. I felt NOTHING. No withdrawal whatsoever after the 3 days of "suffering".

A lot of people say buprenorphine makes them feel terrible for 3 days but I felt fantastic. I now realize I was hypomanic! Music on TV sounded luscious. My mood was soaring, particularly in the mid-morning. I was sleeping approximately midnight to 4am. On the zopiclone the dr prescribed the next week I got another 2 hours; midnight till 6. The pattern of my moods (the precise swing in intensity; my sleep pattern; the way music sounded so amazing) all this matches the mania I get now which is why I can confidently say I was mildly hypomanic in my first few days on Subutex. I was high enough to feel about 95% physically OK on day 2 but not be AT ALL bothered by these slight withdrawals. On day 3 I was about 98% OK and again simply not bothered by the sweats and shivers I had I was so hyped up. I had all the upsides of hypomania, which is mild mania and all the positive feelings people use cocaine for. Unlike cocaine which makes me feel ragged, brittle, paranoid, anxious, and often extremely jagged this was a wonderful smooth secure feeling. It's more like being a kid excited over Father Xmas than being an adult on drugs.

So I'm switching MYSELF to the substance I wish to use. I'm withdrawing myself far more quickly than the clinic would allow (which is why I'm not telling the clinic till it's done). I know my family will worry but they needn't do. I'm NOT doing this next week I'm keeping myself on the most even keel I can manage for several weeks before I even consider putting myself through this. Eg I had NO DRINK YESTERDAY. Not one single alcoholic unit. I need to get used to being FREE, being EVEN, being SURE OF MYSELF OFF DRUGS. Because for the rest of my days, be they many or few I'M OFF DRUGS FOR GOOD. Once I get off the shit that somebody chose to name after a female hero Heroin, once I get off this, that's us DIVORCED.

TILL DEATH DO US PART?

No darling. You cheated on me, you abused me, you nearly ruined my life. WE ARE THROUGH.


Illustrations: with the obvious exception of the perky-eared tonkie house mouse, I found these by looking through schizoaffective and schizophrenia and they sum up how I feel. The most accurate two are the top two, the red one is me when blurry and the woman is how I feel when I'm crystal clear but "ill" I'm all there, just not there as I was when I was "weller" ....

Rethink (mental health charity) schizoaffective disorder fact sheet.


Lizzy, thanks for this
Radiohead - Street Spirit Funkagenda's Spandex+Ketamine Mix
"ketamine mix"



A little tonkie poem.
Byron: Childe Harold Canto 1; XIX

The horrid crags, by toppling convent crowned;
the cork-trees hoar, that cloathe the shaggy steep,
the mountain moss by scorching skies imbrowned,
the sunken glen, whose sunless shrubs must weep,
the tender azure of the unruffled deep,
the orange tints that gild the greenest bough,
the torrents that from cliff to valley leap,
the vine on high, the willow branch below,
mixed in one mighty scene, with varied beauty glow.

My Story Part 6: Dealers; Libra; Xiasmus of Lives ~ my going down ...

I MAY AS WELL FINISH UP ON THE dealer-customer relationship while I'm here. Basically, the heroin and/or crack dealer ~ unlike the dealer in most other drugs, who tends to be a connoiseur of the substance in question as well as a nominal friend ~ operates under no such pretentions. He makes it quite clear that he is not to be counted among his customers' social groups ~ who would want to be considered a scummy junkie? ~ and often quite openly looks down his nose at his drug-obsessed "punters".

Many are "kids" ~ that is, school leavers with few prospects, who, determined not to get sucked into "straight" employment paying pittance wages, decides instead to run his own business and (pretty frequently) play at being baby-gangsta, hanging out on street-corners or driving beat-up cars with superb sound-systems. You could always tell the dealer's arrival by the BOOMM-shfffft; BOOMM-shffftt basslines of R&B or hiphop swing that emanated pavement-shakingly from their skunk-stinking drugs-mobile. Nearly always full of attitude-laden friends who stare you down. I used to call this the white slave trade. Black kids selling to mostly white junkies, many of whom are old enough to be their parents. Once they get the hang of "powder power" and realize that if the powder is good enough and the deals generous enough, the person will wait, and once the initial buz of driving about the local manor twice an hour, stopping at diverse street-corners, offloading stuff that, to them, is no more exciting than bits of stale cheese (crack) or dried mud (heroin) and returning home with more money than most people would earn fromtwo days' honest labouring, they begin subtly at first, to take the customer for granted. Sometimes they actually seem to feel they own their customers and have the right to pass them back and forth like managers transferring top soccer stars.

Because they do not touch the stuff they deal in, it's allure is utterly lost on them. All they know is, so long as it's apparently decent quality, the customers will come back and back and back and back; sometimes calling several times a day. They have little respect for the junkies they deal with. Though a false display of respect is often given out to favourite customers. How can they respect somone with so little respect for themself? Who dedicates their entire life to toiling for the cash to pay for this stuff that looks like mouldy old crumbs of cheese or dried mud?

There are, of course, as many varieties of drug dealer as there are of people. Some are personable and charming. Others are so loathesome and nasty their very presence is repellant to me. I can think of one guy in particular, who, if he's not serving a long prison sentence for violent crime or murder will be dead by the time he's forty. He's a psychopath with no respect at all for his fellow man. It frightens me just to know that such people walk our streets.

What's most bizarre about the dealer-addict relationship is taht, in the odd snatches of time that I've had to engage in detailed conversation with any of these creatures, all my dealers, without exception, have been supportive of the idea of my going through detox and rehab. It's not as if they rely on my custom to butter their bread. And, as I said, they can respect the notion of my getting clean. The true mystery to them is my addiction to that brown muddy-looking heroin. That they do not comprehend at all ...

*

OK. I'd got to the phase of Libra and me. Libra, the love of my life. Not that I went all soppy over her. We argued frequently. But we were so very laid back and comfy in one another's presence it was clear from the outset that ours was a liaison that could run and run. We were two peas in a pod. And there was no need to "do" anything to impress the other. We were comfortable as ourselves with each other. It was a relationship that could have run and run on for ever.

We planned to get a flat together, but this never happened. Instead, for approaching two years, we conducted a long-distance relationship where I'd come to stay with her for a week or two; then she'd reciprocate by spending a week or ten days at mine. The absences, as the expression goes, only served to make the heart grow fonder and seemed to breathe fresh life into each new encounter.

The saddest thing about my time with Libra ~ and she very much saw it this way ~ was that she, tired of her ten-year habit, took up with me, who was initially, enthrallingly "straight" by the standards of her junkie friends and former lovers. I was full of ambitions and plans and had actually put some of these into motion. For example, I was writing a book. I got us both parts in an arty film a friend was shooting.

Living with six others in an arty, bourgeois, North London terrace in an area famed for its bars, restaurants, Z-list celebrities (EastEnders actors and Men Behaving Badly stars; also Fran from the band Travis) and general up-and-comingness, I revelled in this general atmosphere of optimism and positivity. Every so often I'd get word to watch such and such TV show because some friend of a friend had a bit part, or it was shot in someone I knew's back garden. One of my housemates got calls from Oasis and the Spice Girls' "people" twice in the same week with offers to appear in their videos. Oasis fell through but she's in a special Comic Relief Spice Girls promo that also featured five of the top female comedians of their generation.

I'm not trying to imply that life was in any way grand. As I say, I was at the very edge of the very edge of things "happening". But we all had the sense in that house that destiny might well come knocking to springboard us on to bigger, brighter things. The tragedy of our relationship was that Libra saw me sink from somebody on the brink of so many possibilities ~ down and down into a erson no more "special" than a thousand other junkies she had known.

Our relationship eventually ended when she switched from methadone to buprenorphine ("Subutex") which blockades the brain against opiates making it impossible to use ~ and thus went, and remained, and, to the best of my knowledge remains to this day, "clean". But I, who couldn't cease, simply went on as before and it showed. Badly ... it showed. I got hit by a truck crossing a local road and then Libra dumped me. I had a broken shoulder and concussion severe enough to knock me into perpetual daze all the next week. She told (on the phone) me that unless I could pull myself together she didn't want anything to do with me anymore. I could not pull myself together and she duly had nothing to do with me...

... And everything went downhill from there....