Drugs Course

YESTERDAY I WOKE UP feeling like a block of ice. I had two hours until I was due at my antidrugs appointment. This is an intuitive recovery course that'ssuposed to teach you a way of changing your thinking to dump drugs for good.

I drank my methadone, saved from the previous day so I had it when I needed it, namely first thing in the morning when craving is at its strongest. It took me over an hour to thaw out.

Since the "hot weather" ~ since it's been sunny ~ whoever lives in the room with the boiler has decided to turn off our heating. Well thanks very much. Our house is now icy.

All the normal thoughts went through my head re this course. Not today, please. Not right now. Some other day. I do want to do it, just not right this minute.

My landlord was messing around in another room. The mere sight of his van outside was doing my head in, so I left a half hour early and went down to the Shoplifting Therapy office where the course is held, grabbing a Cherry Fizz cyder on the way.

When I got there a crowd of druggielooking people was clustered by the gate. I skulked in through the other entrance, gave my name and left. I was 25 minutes early. So I went down the park and smoked three Sterling Superkings (I love long ciggies: you break the ends off and roll them separately when the main smokes have gone.)

Then we did the course. The lady in charge was letting a trainee commandeer most of the instruction and he was reading the guidebook aloud. I could have read it myself in a fifth of the time.

The other people were OK but full of swagger and shit and there was me at the back with barely any life in me, fighting to stay awake because I'd had barely any sleep.

Rather than making me more resolved to stay clean, all the drug talk just made me want to use. Trust me I came in there with all the best intentions. I was more excited about this course than I've been about anything and I was so disappointed. I couldn't snap out of my own sour mood, I just wanted to get out of there.

And I couldn't help noticing I almost certainly had the longest drug history of anyone in that room. See: feeling like an old junkie again. Doesn't do much for the self esteem.

I got home exhausted. Gave someone money to score. Someone I knew and should have known better and he ripped me off. So now I have to torture him. I popped a Valium and slept from late afternoon through to four thirty am. And I woke up feeling dire. The drugs I had paid for would have been all gone by now anyhow so I'm not bitter about that. When I see this guy I'm going to be real nicey nicey. I'll say "Was that shit as good as you said it was? I got stop and searched, threw it on the ground and couldn't find it again." And I'll reel him in that way. And I will get my refund.

My problem now is the same problem I had yesterday, the day before and every day since my mood levels crashed. I'm down and nothing will raise me up. Heroin makes an OK antidepressant while it works. Crack is out of the question. It makes me jagged, wiry, paranoid and in bipolar terms manic and depressed at the same time. I don't need a substance that does that to me. But heroin is a different matter. Heroin was my medicine for years, and it did what I paid for. Took the edge, and often a lot more than the edge off my despair. It's for that reason that I found methadone days unbearable. On methadone I had nothing insultating me from brain-numbing despair.

Now I have to find something that's going to help me but what? Mood stabilizers will prevent me being manic ever again. Despite the chaos I miss that high. The manic high I was on at the beginning of the year took me higher than any drug has ever done. That's how I want to live. I don't care whether I'm crazy. This world is crazier than I've ever been. Anyone who wants to live in this world straight is in my opinion crazier even than the world.

Don't misread me, I'm not saying I want a high off drugs. I'm saying I want my own natural high back. The name of that high is mania. So I'm bipolar, so what? Schizoaffective if you prefer. Bipolar and schizoaffective are different flavours of the same thing. Schizoaffective just means you're whackier than bipolar. I'm off my antipsychotics because I thought they were bringing me down, and I'm not psychotic again am I? I'm just depressed. Depressed like I have been, to a greater or lesser extent, for nearly all of my adult life. When I wasn't depressed I was high: on a drug high or (during my drug holidays) the natural high when your mind cycles between high and low.

All my mood swings say to me is that I'm more of a person than somebody without such extremes. The narrower your emotional range, the narrower you are as a person. So I'm a very wide person. Heaven and hell are inside me. Why should I medicate myself away on toxic metal (lithium) that will only make me less of a person?

I don't care any more for other people's standards. All I need to do is come off methadone because that is the State's control over me. Without that I can turn into who I truly am. I don't know where this story is going. But before you judge me, ask yourself, where are you going? We think we know. We would like to know. But we don't know really. We don't know nothing.

Broadband

HEY I GOT MY BROADBAND BACK! So I can read your book, Anna! And I can answer your blogs, y'all.

I've been pretty down as you all might know. Not drowning in depression but up to my neck. And I can't climb out. I'm still sleeping twelve hours' straight and that's without the wonders of valium (thank you Valium Marilyn).

I decided to give up drinking cold on Saturday night. so I drank nothing at all yesterday. In the evening I had a Valium as benzos are given in drying-out clinics to alleviate alcohol withdrawals ~ anything from craving to the shakes to fullblown DTs are treate by benodiazepines. I think the one they usually use is Librium because that is metabolized without passing through the liver, unlike Valium which is. The liver of course is compromised in nearly all heavy drinkers so librium is given in preference. But it's not as strong as Valium. Whoever wrote those benzo equivalence tables needs their head testing. Same as the person who assumed that an extra £10 a day street heroin usage on top of say a 50mg methadone script, will be adequately provided for by 10mg oral methadone. And they don't even take into account the enormous difference in bioavailability (the amount of drug actually hitting the brain copared to the amount taken) between IVing gear the way I do, compared to incinerating it on the end of a crackpipe. I know the crackhead method barely touches those who use it. I used to share a house (a crackhouse) with crackheads who smoked their heroin in this way and I never once saw them look even mildly intoxicated on heroin. Their habits were purely psychological. One day Matran (the rat man) was acting like a real baby crying sick. Dealer eventually comes by, he puts about 50p worth of heroin on the crack pipe and is saying "yeah man that's it whoeah!" etc etc 50p worth of gear. Then there's me hitting up £10 bags whole for breakfast, lunch and dinner (and ideally one for the middle of the night). This heroin was going straight in my veins and my habit was such it usually just straightened me out (in the nicest possible way). Yet the clinic was prescribing to both of us as if our habits were the same. The idiots. I want off this methadone rubbish as quickly as possible.

I blew some money on gear this morning. I had two hits of 0.4g each and they barely touched me. The drought is still raging. The guy who bought the second lot (because it was from our local guy I don't bother dealing with) said it was "really good" man it was as average as average can be. I'm so unimpressed by other people's abysmally low standards and I don't like thinking of myself as fussy. I'm not fusssy, I just have standards.

And I only used because I was so miserable I couldn't think of what else to do.

I HAD to go to the laundrette because I'm booked into an antidrugs course tomorrow that is said to be revolutionary but I couldn't face this ordeal of clothes washing. The last couple of times I went into that place (between just washing my own clothes myself in the sink) I was paranoid, manic, psychotic and hearing voices and everybody seemed to be staring at me. This time, at least, it was calm and I read a Jehovah's Witness magazine about what I'd call Arabian Donkeys (racehorses). And my clothes slowly went through their cycles.

Then I went down town to buy this 3-month broadband stick and saw The Wire season one ~ 775 mins of DVD entertainment ~ for £22 so I thought fuck buying more drugs or drink and I got a bigger thrill watching the American police surveilling Baltimore drug dealers.

I don't know what I'm going to do about this no drinking. Alcohol has me in its grip more tightly than I'd care to admit. I calculated my drink intake. It's no more than 3 cans a day and these are usually cherry Fizz cyder, which is 4.5% ABV. So I'm drinking 1.5 litres a day, which is just over 6.5 units. If you add it up and factor in the days I only drink two so that's about 40 units max a week. The government's recommended maximum is 28 units per week for a man, 21 units for a woman. A unit is 10mls neat alcohol so it's easy to calculate how many you're drinking once you know how.

I bought soluble orange flavour multivitamins this morning, £4.50 for 20. They're intensely orangey and actually make a good alternative to my orangey cyder coctails I drink when I'm not on cherry flavour. The soft drink quotient is supposed to help wean me off, but it tastes so yummy some days I just wanna drink more!

I'm off to Narcotics Anonymous later. And I'm doing the whole meeting. Because I'm not manic, just depressed, I have ten times the attention span I had during my mania-induced antidrugs crusade. That is I am going to NA if I can tear myselfaway from The Wire. It is fairy addictive. I hope y'all are having a nice day. Take care y'all...

I FOUND A 6ft long little trotter horse narrow cardboard tube ideal for tubby roborovski hamsters to ping along. It's lying up my street as we speak.

In the shop I purchased a Cadbury's Praline Flake bar and no cyder. I'm giving giving up alcohol a bash and I'm doing it cold turkey. Fed up of messing around. I calculated I was on just over 40 units of alcohol ~ that is 400 mls or 320 grams of neat alcohol ~ per week or three half-litre cans of cherry Fizz per week. I'm fed up of drinking alcohol. As my family put it, I know alcohol is not helping my depression at all. I know alcohol worsens bipolar, even in the relative moderation I drink it in... I know if it wasn't a problem there'd be no trouble giving it up for a year, so that's what I intend to do. A year on Pepsi Cola and tea and chocolate milk.

I'm still sleeping far too long. My head to my dreams dreams 12 hours to 16 hours a night and that's too long. I'm blushing like a babboon's backside over this embarrassment.

If I give up all illicit drugs I may be lucky enough to have a Positive Mood Swing (going UP) but there seems fat chance of that, I feel so sluggish and shamed.

Now I must ping off before this computer really starts misbehaving on me. Good luck to y'all and have a great weekend. And I'm sorry I couldn't find anything furry to post up!

XXXXXXX

Sleep sleep yet there's too much sleep!

I SLEPT 17 HOURS STRAIGHT LAST NIGHT. I went to the nut-nut clinic. Everybody in the waiting room looked quite sane and well put together. Then I shambled in, sat by the leaflets, took 10 and spent half an hour flicking through stuff about giving up smoking, taking up a positive lifestyle etc. I'm into all that crap now.

Then an accusatory nurse ushered me into a tiny room. No padding on the walls, though I did notice what looked like a straitjacket thrown over the back of a chair by the window. Then he demanded to know how paranoid I was and why I was there and whether I was there for a mood stabilizer (which I told him I don't want). Then he said "I'll make an appointment for you to see a doctor". I told him I'm exhausted and sleeping too long and I can't stop being depressed. Slightly depressed, not very depressed. And that was that.

On the way back I walked to Valium Marilyn's house. She has just been let out of hospital having had her gallstones pulverized inside her.

I passed this amazing pond. It was a concrete pond and very big. It wasn't connected to any river and yet it was swarming with these tiny fishies. Little green ones that glint brightly in the sun. They loved the weeds in that pool. I so wished I had a giant net to catch some to take home as pets. But as it is my pet fish still live in this public pool. I spent ages staring at them. I didn't go too near the edge in case some babboon appeared from the trees and pushed me in.

Valium Marilyn has lost weight, she looks emaciated in fact. Then I weighed myself on her bathroom scales. She had to keep banging them to make them reset to zero because they're digital. I came in at 14 stone and a quarter pound, three times in a row, then 14 stone 1 twice in a row. There are 14 pounds in a stone so that's (14x14)+1 which is 193 pounds if my maths are correct. No it's not it's 197 pounds because I was 201 before and lost 4 which makes sense. Yeah so I lost weight. Somehow.

Then she wanted to score some "blues" which are 10mg Valiums she bought 40 of them and gave me 5. I pretended to take 4 at once, like she did, but really I took one.

Then we went shopping all veering all over the place. She comes over all chirpy on Valium so kept haranguing the foreigh shopkeepers for British foods like Angel Delight which they won't stock (butterscotch Angel delight is the best, with lots of milk (unlike most products which are best stronger, angel delight is best slightly weaker than the packet instructions)).

Then I fell asleep from 5pm until TEN IN THE MORNING which means I was out cold for 17 hours!

Then I got up all clucking and had to go to the chemists sick which I hate. I was only slightly sick. All sweating and cold, it was disgusting. So I got the juice and knocked a good bit back in a phone box, like a real junkie. I actually used to get a secret thrill from hitting up gear in public toilets and especially phone boxes I just loved the scumminess of it all (being solidly middle class it was a novelty for me)... then I went in the library and read this book about brain surgery. Then I went home and slept AGAIN. FIVE HOURS out cold. I sleep sleep sleep. I'm hardly in the lower depths of depression but I don't feel all right at all. I'm having a hep C test just so they can't keep blaming that. I never had hep C before, I don't think I've got it now.

Now I've got to run I'm too cold. Did you know the bit of the brain they impose a lesion upon in psychosurgery is called something like the anterior cingulate gyrus. Something like that. This poor woman was a GP yet so depressed she was under compulsory detainment for a year (that is a "section" in British language). Then she had to be transported from Southampton or somewhere like that to DUNDEE in Scotland to have her brain butchered. Reading this did nothing to improve my mood.

But I did have a quality moment with those fishes so all is not bad. I hope y'all have a good weekend. If I can think up something furry I'll post it otherwise I'll be back Monday.


Illustrated: I do believe these green fish have been genetically engineered. Mine weren't QUITE so bright. But does anyone know what they're called. They were about one inch long, able to live in British waters (ie extremely hardy) and pretty quick, compared to the dopey aquarium fish you get they moved about as fast as minnows but I don't think they were minnows...

Bedlam Nutters Unearthed in London Rail Link

KENNY THE CACTUS is sitting happily on the TV in Donkey Ward at St Spiny's Cactus Hospital. He is looking forward to being transferred to Horse Ward next week... All is cool here; we had excellent weather. I say cool ~ I actually think I was a bit drug sick this morning. I felt freezing cold then boiling hot, then drank some methadone then felt OK. Then I realized I was a bit tired. Then I cleaned up a tiny bit. Then I realized I was exhausted. Then realized I was a bit depressed still. I can't snap out of the scrag-end of this depression. My sleep is still far too long for my liking. A good twelve hours per day still, which is too long, considering spring is popping like a champagne cork all around us, Kenny cactus is recovering from his cruel toothpick-inflicted wounds and everyone else seems to be happy. They're all raving about this amazing weather only I can't feel it. Except I feel sweaty, that's about it. And I want to feel normal. I'm tempted to stop taking my antipsychotic to see if I get more energy back, but know I shouldn't really do it. I don't know... I met Paddy Daddy Daddster today he was talking about being prescribed diamorphine, as our mutual friend was for many years (I saw the dry-amps). And he was talking about how the youngsters today don't inject, they smoke it. And I said it's a North-South thing. The Londoners always tended to be more prone to injecting because Britain's heroin habit started in earnest in the early 80s when it hit the housing estates across the North, and it was smokeable middle-eastern "brown". Before that heroin was Chinese "white" that was carefully prepared to injection quality. But brown was cheaper, less adulterated and imported in huge quantities and that's when Britain's first heroin epidemic kicked off. The next wave of addiction crashed across Britain in the mid-late 90s as the rave generation, used to dabbling in new drugs, had a collective comedown from all the uppers they'd experimented with in the late 80s/early 90s. I got caught up in this second wave. The price of street heroin had just halved when I started to take it. You could now get 0.4g for £20, instead of 0.2. By the early 2000s it wasn't unusual to get 0.6g or more for £20 and a weighed gram was £30. This was the cheapest heroin has ever been and the street purity passed an average 50% at one point. This was my heroin heyday. It was like Christmas every day, and though I had my down days, most of the time I loved being addicted to heroin, because it meant I "had" to take heroin, which I loved. Perfect excuse to carry on using. After the first couple of years of daily use, I gave up on the idea of giving up. And then I came to an acceptance with myself. Since I've been blogging y'all have seen my desire to stop using grow. I took some today, and it was good. But it never hits the spot it used to hit, so I'm wasting my time. Please remind me that what I take it for I never get now. Heroin has only ever been a waste of time, now it actually feels like a waste of time.. And I don't know what else to say about it now.

I think one reason I was so addicted to it was that heroin had a lithium-like effect on me, noticably flattening my mood swings. Every single time I've tried to swap (or even switched meds, eg going on Subutex) I've had a noticable mood swing either up or down. I think now at last the doctors will take me seriously when I say this. But before I think they just thought I was digging up excuses. I used to get mental health treatment totally separately from methadone, so nothing ever threaded together or added up.

I'm just dreading this Madness Assessment I have tomorrow. Last time I was in a mental health waiting room this man sauntered up to me with a birthday cake on his head, asking for a light for his candles! OK slight exaggeration but I'm scared of leaving the building in a straitjacket...

Speaking of which some dead mad people were dug up in the street today in London when they excavated the former graveyard to Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam, in the City of London. They're digging a new rail route named Crossrail and these corpses were dug up in what's shortly to be a ticket hall. I wondered what lives these people had met. People who had schizophrenia and manic depression in the 17th century. People whom the chattering classes used to pay a penny to go see as an amusement and chuck sticky buns at. What lives they must have lead...

... Oh well I have to go. Wish me luck tomorrow. I hope I don't get diagnosed clinically insane. Then I'll be able to go home again :-)

BBC link: archaeologists unearth Bedlam skeletons

Positive and Negative Symptoms

IS IT BAD for my cactus to live by the window?

I wanted him to get early morning dew ~ the condensation from the window. But won't this give the poor swine frostbite? The poor thing is recovering slowly from his spikey false flower wounds.

He has scabbing around the dots at the top of his trunks where the "floral toothpicks" skewered cruelly in. I have the tiny trotterdonkey fake flowers on my Boogie Nights DVD. The staves are covered in dried dark green cactus-scabbing-juice where hte evil florists pricked them nastily in. I have named the Cactus Kenny.

As we speak, Kenny is still on Donkey Ward in the Cactus Hospital. When he gets better he will be transferred to Horse prior to discharge. If he gets worse and the withered top banana spreads to other bananas causing a Withering Disease, he will get emergency therapy on Ass Ward. When he does make a full recovery he's still due to come in for outpatients appointments at Clopper House, our state of the art Cactus and Succulent Aftercare Building.

Because I am a schizoaffective schizophrenic I have a follow-up appointment on Thursday to be queried and probed to see how mad I am. Dr McGuinness, the Psychiatrist who tells me not to drink (wah wah!) has passed me along to a home help team thing where I get tested to see how schizo I am. Plus how affective.

My affect has actually gone to normal. I know they probably all think I'm hypomanic when in fact I'm NORMAL but that's the thing about psychiatry ~ there is no "normal". I'm secretly hoping to go a bit hypomanic because an "attack" of hypomania feels "like free coke" ~ of the sparkly variety (sparkly and white not sparkling and black!!) Did you iknow btw, that individuals in the 3rd world think Coca Cola's ickky because it's fizzy and BLACK as you'd think no "natural" drink would be... This is actually counterintuitive as Coke's formulation has barely changed in over 100 years and its ingredients are indeed 100% natural!

Anyway I'm quite OK today and very glad of it.

The mood has gone UP to normal.

I perused some fascinating books earlier in the public library, including one by a woman who was a GP who got so depressed she actually had to go for psychosurgery, which is the modern-day counterpart (involving a tiny tiny degree of actual surgery, compared to the old technique, which basically involved shearing the brain in half) ~~ to lobotomy.

I once saw a TV documentary on modern-day psychosurgery which is only performed on sufferers of treatment-resistant depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Which fascainted me, because after I got depressed in childhood, the symptoms faded into OCD.

Two bipolar sufferers who had been stuck in depression for over a decade apiece ~ and a lady who couldn't stop counting backwards, she had OCD so badly... all three had precisely the same brain operation. And in all three cases precisely the same area of brain tissue was lasered.

They had this operation and every one of them got better. One of the bipolars had to come back for more, but he was fine afterwards and back doing his art. Brain operations for depression. How amazing is that!

*******

4pm and I've just finished a sinkfull of clothes washing. I am fully into keeping clothes clean myself.

Deshane, my care coordination type person says I have low self-care. That's why he wants me moving into a mental health house.

It makes me feel weird knowing people ~ Professionals ~ sit about talking about me as having mental health problems. What I had called Plain Old Laziness is what Naomi, the Dual Diagnosis Drugs and Mental Health Lady calls "negative symptoms".

Negative Symptoms are what you do get in schizoaffective and don't get in bipolar (despite the name).

Negative Symptoms means you keep yourself to yourself, avoiding others; it means you feel flat, even when not clinically depressed; and that you just cannot get yourself together. Naomi says it's this that keeps me "ill" even when I feel relatively fine. And no medication can treat it. The positive symptoms of Hearing Voices, rapid mood swings and paranoia have mostly gone. I did get some really weird abstract thoughts in my head in a bush this morning (where I was going for a wee). Most of the Positive Symptoms have been banished by risperidone, but the Negative ones remain...

... So that's what I'm fighting against. Even when not depressed I have these things that are symptoms but they don't "feel" like them. They are called Negative or Deficit Symptoms because they mean something isn't there that should be there, as opposed to a Positive Symptom like a delusion or a hallucination, which is something that is there that "shouldn't be". So I'm fighting against this feeling of apathy which is a part of this illness. I don't know whether I'll actually beat it, but I'm trying.

Well I have to go now. I jotted most of this in my notebook earlier, so I hope my half hour is long enough to clatter it into the "system".

Kenny the Cactus passes on his finest regards to you all ...

(Can anybody tell me what species of Banana Cactus he might be ..?)

SEE YERS ALL LATER! :-)

The Fake Flowers Scandal

I PULLED ALL THE FLOWERS out of my cactus last night (it is a cactus not a succulent; it has carefully hidden spines...)... and found every little scarlet flower was on the end of a scarlet toothpick! It was my family who told me this might be the case, so I yanked at one and a one-inch wooden stave came out after it. So my poor cactus is in cactus-hospital with inch-deep wounds where these fake flowers used to be!

I found one that looks something like mine, but mine has more banana-shaped "leaves" and the trunks they grow out of aren't tiny stems like this one, but great tubby trunks with white furry patches where the bananas have rubbed against the plants in adjoining pots and fallen out...

The bananas are pointier and less bulbous than these, but they also turn red (though less strikingly so) at the end.

DOES ANYBODY KNOW THE NAME OF MY CACTUS?

And will it ever get flowers? And what do they look like. Please tell me they're not scarlet ones that come on giant toothpicks!

Succulent

I BOUGHT A RED-FLOWERING (green coloured) succulent today. It looks beautiful, with things that look like green bananas growing out of tubby tree trunks and the tiniest round red flowers popping out the top.

I've looked for a photo of one like it but can't find one.

I spoke to my Mum because it's mothers' day (and I didn't even know till it was too late to send a card). I think she was afraid of me moving into a care home because she thought it was a cop out. Or more to the point that I would find it hard to adapt to. (I actually found moving into a "normal" home hard to adapt to, believe it or not. That was four or five or more years ago and I'm doing no better now than when I moved in...)

She says sending cards is "just a waste of money". She always says that. I would have given her the plant if I'd seen her. She says she has Killer Fingers (or a killer thumb, to you Americans) that is the opposite of green fingers or a green thumb. She kills houseplants dead. I always preferred buying plants that were growing, it seems a shame to buy cut when you can buy a growing houseplant. Which is where I thought this "cactus" as the florists called it, would come in. I only hope I don't kill it now. I watered it for about a second under the running tap and was going to repeat that once weekly. Surely that won't be too much..?

OK I'm off now, I'm going to try and hunt for a picture that matches it but if I don't find one I hope y'all are having a nice weekend!

No Broadband Still

MAYBE NOT HAVING BROADBAND has turned out to be a good thing; it means I'm overflowing with Things To Do for when I get it back. Reading Anna's book MS being the top priority. Anna wrote an entire book about her life. She has a doggie called Eleanor Rigby who appears in the coke binge. I'm not giving anything away Anna: that is the bit that came out on your blog, remember.

I keep hoping I'm in a better mood. E.g. when I woke up this morning splayed out backwards in an armchair I thought I was fine. Then I went out, got my methadone juice ~ back back BACK. Back to being tired. So it's three steps forward, two steps back.

I have been watching films on the German language setting to try and give myself an educational time. Night at the Museum II is good. Boogie Nights in German is classic. It reminds me of a film my exhousemate was watching once when we came round. That was called Total Anal 2 and featured some German dialogue. The word "ficken" came up a lot... And when I asked whether he'd seen Total Anal 1 he said no. I said won't that spoil the plot and he said "what plot!"

I keep thinking about crack cocaine. Crack, the scummiest drug on earth. Maybe it's because crack makes you REALLY high and I want to be high. Only problem with coke is, it's so jagged. Watching them snort away on Boogie nights you'd think it was some sort of Elixir of the Gods, not some horrible wiry uptight clenched in psychostimulant that just makes you extremely paranoid in the end. There were times on crack when I literally thought people were climbing the walls of my building to get in. No, I want a natural high (man).

Soon as I get broadband back I'll get back to everyone properly. Sorry if these posts have been unendingly dull for the past however long. Wasn't I more interesting ON drugs than off? See why I wasn't so much into stopping them? I felt like a black hole. Nothing there. That's why I pussyfooted around the issue of ever stopping heroin. There seemed nothing to stop FOR. Now I'm cleaner than I ever was before and more boring. And y'all wonder what I saw in heroin! It was the only thing that made life make sense. (How sad is that.) Then again if you think Life in this World is wonderful and you're not a heroin addict or certifiably insane, I think you SHOULD be certified ~ there surely is something wrong with you!

Well I have to go now, else I'll get terminated. Wishing y'all a cheery weekend :-)


Illustrated: this is allegedly a lorryload of cocaine!

Ukh. Blur.

I AM SAT HERE IN A BAD MOOD. There's drink in me, so I feel in a good mood. A good bad mood. Or a bad good mood. Whichever. I keep hoping the mood will switch UP. I'm not on a mood stabilizer and don't want one. That will leave me in an eternal twilight state of numbness (won't it?) I went in the library yesterday and read a book called Living Well With Depression and Bipolar by John McManemy he is the guy who does McManWeb, one of the best bipolar sites. He had pretty full-on bipolar by the sound of it. The only thing I wasn't impressed about was his description of schizoaffective, which I supposedly have, as some kind of ultra-florid psychotic mania. I was only like that literally for a few days. Those were the days I was ranting and burbling and I never spoke to my family (thank God). Which is why both sides seem to think I'm OK when I'm not and not OK when I'm fine! They haven't actually seen me in any of these states (bar depression) which might be where the confusion comes in. When I say I don't sleep anything but 2.5 hours a day that's literally what I do. Not exactly house-guest friendly behaviour.

OK I've got to go an annoying person (ie a good friend) is at my house. And I'm not at my house. So I must run.

I hope everyone is all right.

I am clearing my house of ALL junk/rubbish/sundry bluh. It all must go. I probably will not get rehoused as that will be a good thing (ie it won't happen). But I have to pretend I will. To get rid of the rubbish.

OK have a good weekend y'all....

Mean Green Dull Machine

IT IS A WARM AND SUNNY AFTERNOON. I just got Night at the Museum 1 & 2 on DVD for £5. Try and cheery myself up. I have taken no heroin today and don't intend to. I bought a litre of hazelnut flavour Baileys instead. I might go out and get some coffee to put the Baileys in. Coffee and Baileys is really good.

Now I despair of ever feeling proper again. My friend Pinky says my moods are never normal, always up or down. She is probably right. They do go normal for a day or two but most of the time I feel noticably up or down. Of course I probably seem "normal" in anything bar an extreme extreme. Actually I don't know how I seem to others. Just thinking about that makes me paranoid.

I would spend ages down the park because fresh air is supposed to be good for you but it's just depressing. My Mum sent me a letter which is well meaning but talks about me getting chucked out on the street. (For not keeping my house in order.) I don't think she realizes I do know it would be more natural to be off meds and on the street. And it was WAY easier to live when it happened. No complications, that's for sure. I ate peanuts and corned beef and drank white cyder. I managed to do three days in a row on Valium and methadone with no heroin while I was homeless so homeless can't be that bad.

I have just collected my Mean Green Dull Machine (methadone). I'm on my way home. I'm not doing gear. Gear is a waste of time. Why was I taking it when it didn't work even when it was good. Buggerlugz said maybe it had sleepers in it, not to hit the spot but still make me unconscious. No what I meant was I felt the heroin in it, very heroiny. It stank of brown, too. It reeked when I cooked it up. There was brown in it. But it still doesn't make me happy so I give up.

Talking of giving up I really need to keep my drink in check. I'm not "drunk" by any stretch of the imagination. Or "a drunk". I just drink every day. Strangely I crave alcohol more in the morning than the evening. My evenings are mostly dry; my mornings aren't.

I should go to NA but can't face the thought of people laughing at me in there. I've turned up in some states and couldn't handle feeling boxed in by chairs, people sitting next to me, people looking at me etc etc. In other words I was paranoid. Now I feel depressed but am too paranoid to share it, in case someone finds it amusing.

Now I have to go I'll get cut off in a minute. I hope y'all are all right.


For Anna's prostitution in Hawaii blog post, click here.

The needle and the damage done

ANNA has emailed me her book which makes me really want to get broadband back so I can read it properly.

I was so exhausted today I couldn't do anything afater sleeping 10pm to 8am. I had to sleep again from 2pm till 7pm. That makes 15 hours' sleep! Too many hours in my view. I have to go clean my house. It's in a real mess.

There's not much more to tell these days except how boring and down things have gone. I woke up this evening wondering what I am doing with my life. This is a thing I think surprisingly un-often.

I bought heroin and it was rubbish. Bought some more, a bit better. None of it stopped me feeling depressed. Even when I feel relatively OK the heroin doesn't hit the spot it used to. Even when it's strong enough to knock me out with an opiate knockout punch it STILL leaves me feeling it could have been better. Which probably means what I was looking for I would never have found in heroin anyway...

Sunny Day

IT'S DEFINITELY SPRING WEATHER. The leaves are on all the trees. The birds chirp their heads off "of" a morning...

I woke up so irritated today with Vanessa Feltz taking calls about heroin and people speaking of brick dust and bleach in it. Only journalists who are taken as idiots are sold "heroin" with brick dust or bleach in it. Brick dust will filter out, leaving red mess behind in the spoon or on the foil. Bleach being alkaline would react with the citric acid our heroin needs to break down for injection either foaming wildly or just buggering up the injection so bad it wouldn't ever cook up. Which is why you DON'T get brick dust or bleach as common ingredients in street heroin.

I was depressed and exhausted all day and cold but it seems to have got hotter as the day wore on. I have nothing inspiring to say I'm afraid.

I should have been tidying up yesterday but I did nothing I was too tired. Last night I went to bed late and haven't slept in the afternoon and I don't feel quite as bad as yeasterday so it might be lifting.

I saw a thing about cancer on children's TV. BBC children's TV shows a remarkably wide range of topics for the underage and I was surprised at how grown up these little people were. Talking about fighting for their young lives, talking about losing parents. Very stoical.

Now I have to go before I get terminated again. I'm too uninspired to write much. I hope y'all are OK.


Illustrated: cherry blossom ~ this certain sign of springtime is a Japanese symbol for the transient, passing nature of all life into death...

Down and not out (yet)

NOTHING EXCITING TO SAY. I've run out of broadband and I'm exhausted all the time. I sleep all night into the midmorning then most of the afternoon. I wouldn't count the hours as they'd add up to a dispicable number.

So there's no news. Sorry.

Other stuff: the weather is nice, but it doesn't make me happy. I think I'm turning into a Goth: I'm happier in winter.

Sorry nothing else to say. I will try posting something tomorrow.

Boogie Nights

I WROTE PAGES AND PAGES last night because I went "up" (on nothing) now I'm down to "normal" I feel like a human rollercoaster. Or more to the point, like a beach with constant tides grinding me into sand.

The weather has been beautiful. I wasn't sync'd in with the sunshine yesterday, so I didn't appreciate it.

Then I watched Boogie Nights which is about a waiter/kitchen assistant with an abmormally large xxxx who gets a job acting in porn. And he changes his name to Dirk Diggler. It's really funny. What I remember was my [2 female] friends watching it and coming back telling me about the cocaine! They loved cocaine. Barely ever took it, loved leeching off a man for the night being called "Princess" when they did. One of their cousins owned a West London very posh nightclub so she'd go up every now and then to be called Princess and get free coke. So I watched this film and I'm waiting on a refill of my medication anyway so I had none, so my mood soared quite nicely and I couldn't sleep, so I watched the film again in German! It's really funny watching tacky porn actresses doing coke and yelling at one another in German!

Then they go nuts on the coke and decide to rob someone by selling him a half key of baking soda for $5000 (was it really so cheap back then?) He's freebasing and letting off firecrackers in his house it's mental.

So I watched all these mentalists going mental on drugs and wasn't impressed by any of it. I hate drugs now. They steal happiness away and leave misery, emptiness and destruction behind them. Often when that seems not to be the case, it's just that you don't know the case well enough to comment.

So that was me yesterday now I have to ping off before I get terminated. I get an internet refill on Monday. If not then, then Tuesday. Wahey!!

Good Mood

I WAS IN A SOUR MOOD EARLIER; I'M IN A FAR BETTER ONE NOW. I was so exhausted I went back to bed. I'd woken up at five freezing cold and longing for heroin (such cold reminds me of withdrawals). I took no heroin, only methadone, and I'm feeling OK now. Ma Famille phoned me up and cheered me up earlier. See my instinct that outside things like swimming and comedy work for depression is absolutely right. My family say I should focus on positives and that my talk has somehow become full of psychobabble like "coping mechanism"; stuff that I didn't previously used to come out with. Then again coping mechanisms are things I need (though that's not to say I need be aware of them). I think my schizziness is a coping mechanism. It might be an "illness" but it's a way of coping too. Personally I think anyone who manages to live in today's diseased world without being on hard drugs or crazy or both either has something wrong with them (or is just kidding themself)... Or is such a remarkable person I want to meet them.

Everyone thinks my swimming idea is a good one. Hey I found my swimming trunks earlier; the baggy ones I actually want to wear.

I weigh 14 stone 4 3/4 ie 14 st 5 lbs. I have no idea how many pounds that is... oh yes I do I just looked it up there are 14 lbs in a stone so that's 201 pounds I weigh. That's heavy man! And it's very approximately 95 kgs. I wanna go down to 11 stone (77kg).

Now I have to buzz off I'm at an internet cafe; my broadband stick has run out and I thought it might be an exercise in interestingness, putting off posting to the evenings anyhow. (I felt so sour earlier I truly thought I was going to post nothing at all!) Well I'm better now and I get a new £40 stick next week...

I have the film Boogie Nights and some donuts to cheer myself up. Nobody tell me please Boogie Nights is no good; I spent £3 on the DVD!

Like a Duck to Water

DO YOU LIKE the duck picture? That is supposed to be me in a swimming pool. Do you know that I was forced into weekly swimming lessons by my Mum aged six. I hated them so much I spent entire sessions in tears. So I must like swimming to even be considering it now. Swimming is the only sport I genuinely love. I'm still looking for swimming trunks I know I've got. One pair is baggy, the other is 1910 style, kind of like cycling shorts. I'm too tubby for the close-fitting ones. They only work when you're doing the swimming strictly as recreation, which I'm not. I'm swimming for thinning. The major reason for doing it is in order to be Calm and Stress-Free. I get very stressed very easily. And I don't think it is "anxiety" as such, it's more Stress than Anxiety. I don't have the cognitive style anxious people have, turning things over and over in their heads. I tend not to think about things, or to think about them so distantly they're vaguely real. But I've heard sports are like a drug. And being as I'm hell-bent on leaving a life of drugs Behind Me I need any new drug I can try. I have to wait till next week when the DSS deign to pay me. This getting money every 2 weeks instead of weekly thing they want us to do is not working for me. It means I keep running out of money now and I don't have the £5 spare swimming requires. And I'm not feeling fit enough (yet) to walk four miles there and back. Which I will do when I get on a roll. Keeps you even fitter walking an hour and a bit there and back!

And how was your day?!

Sundry Talk

THIS IS the molecule of the designer drug "meow" (also stupidly called mephedrone) 4-methylmethcathinone. I tried it once. Somebody gave me a free sample and expected me to ask for more. I didn't. He said it had no comedown, which is true, it didn't have any comedown effect on mood (which is basically chemical depression; very similar to the down I get naturally). This stuff was like Ecstasy with cocaine on top. Except the cocaine lasted about three hours instead of half an hour. Just reading the wikipedia mephedrone article made my nose hurt in "euphoric" recall. (As NA call it.)

I know two people who died after taking mephedrone. The first one (who triggered the second suicide) was floridly psychotic from taking the stuff. He had a borderline personality disorder and he took mephedrone and became psychotic. She took it increasingly after his death. Then mephedrone was made illegal and she wouldn't have known where to get it on the black market (because it's taken by clubbers, not heroin addicts ~ two totally divergent scenes). At the end of the day you're just paying to be "moderately manic" when you take stuff like that. Though I'm distantly tempted to induce the state (because it did feel really really nice being manic). If I truly wanted to go "high" I could just stop taking my risperidone. Which I don't want to do. There's no guarantee I'd go up and I feel weird enough as it is ON antipsychotic; without it I know Id be hearing voices etc etc.

Warning: 3 mental paragraphs follow, so skip it if you're tired of mad-talk:~

Eg today I was tired, so I retreated to a park bench where I drank cherry flavoured Latvian cyder named Fizzzz (I love cherry Fizz!) during the course of this decampment I saw the concrete path before me turn into a grey river. If my feet hadn't been on the concrete, so I knew it was not liquid I might have gone into one on this bench, believing I was stranded in a boat in water. I never used to see the path turn into water before I was "mentally ill". It was heroin that kept me sane. How ironic is that. Heroin blocked mood cycles (though it kept me depressed) I barely got manic on heroin. I got manic enough to be horrified at the wikipedia article on "racing thoughts" in bipolar disorder. It was a portrait of my experience when I used to go off on one in my house, long before I got called "schizoaffective". Bipolar symptoms a couple of years ago, and I wasn't on crack.

So I'm tired today; I never seemed to get enough sleep. I'm sleeping OK. I'm not under sleeping nor over (well, not much over) but my sleep is all over the place. I sleep at night then I don't sleep at night. Then I sleep by day and at night. Then I feel tired then I feel weird. Then I do feel depressed. Then I just feel flat. Then I feel odd again. It's all like the "depression" I had for years on end, only punctuated by little blips of hyped up high (kind of bipolar). The only full mania I've had was recently. It cycled constantly back and forth between higher and lower levels of mania and mania and a sour mood then back to mania. I got very very high on this mania. Higher than I've ever been low. I started going higher than I have even heard described and I knew what bipolar did. I've read An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison. I know you see Death and blood goes everywhere! I didn't see death I just turned into a roaring noise. See this is what happens when I go mad. Now I have something to be frightened of, because I lost my sanity to a Noise. All thought turned into this nosie and I was yelling and screaming enough that I can see everyone in my house now thinks I'm not just a junkie but a nutter-junkie too. See, if I think about this I'm scared and not scared. This clanging thing happened intensely every day and in the end instead of backing off from it I went through it and stood on top of the cyclone and that meant a feeling of standing on top of the universe.

I saw that Trisch Goes Nuts video the other day and was horrified to read underneath that I thought she was "just a bit manic" ("moderately manic" was the wording). When I actually was hyper I thought that video was so hilarious, that's why it's up there. But bloody hell if that's moderate then what is severe? I know I went severe I just don't like to think of what I looked like.

I am watching some Japanese children on TV. One just found her school bag in the wreckage of her tsunami-flattened house. She said (defiantly, I thought, or bravely): "but I like living by the sea" and I thought "that's my girl".

Speaking of the news: what the hell are we doing in Libya. Is it just so we can have cheap petrol (that's gasoline to you Americans)..? I'm sure it has far more to do with that than protecting Arabs' liberties. The liberty protection is just the excuse. They did nothing when Mugabe went totally nuts in Zimbabwe, did they? And what's the difference between Zimbabwe and Libya? More elephants, less oil!

Now I must go I hope this isn't too much of a mess. I am washing clothes in the sink then going to sleep. I'm exhausted.

Illustrated: meow-molecule; a funky blue walled bathroom. I want walls this colour and will have them soon...

Lime Cordial

I SPENT A LOT OF THE DAY ASLEEP having slept terribly last night. I ran into someone I used to know in the corner shop when I was buying cyder and a bouncy ball. I collect bouncy balls. I'm always bouncing them. This one was transparent with Spider Man in the middle.

I drank too much, took heroin, fell asleep. It is all depressing to look back on. Just a social waste of time. No offence to this guy the time spent was very nice that is the point. It is just afterwards I look back and see drinking and drugtaking, and see it isn't good like it seemed; and I don't want to be doing that any more.

Then I felt up; now I feel empty and down.

I had some lime juice just now. You mix it with water and sugar. It mixes up something lovely. Like a very posh lime cordial.

The weather has been beautiful. And at 5:30am the little birdies are already tweetling their feathery heads off. They sound like some pet shop owner dished out all their bird stock into the trees to chirp their heads off when it was still dark. They're not nightingales so what are those birds that sing for joy in the last dark of the morning? Night jars? Larks? (I'm thinking Romeo and Juliet here).

Now I have to go.

PS I had Chinese last night; it was the one I was craving after with a certain flavour of mix vegetable fry rice. Beef black bean sauce {"most traditional") mix vegetable fried rice very nice.







ROMEO
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

ROMEO
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

ROMEO
Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.

JULIET
Then have my lips the sin that they have took.

ROMEO
Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
Give me my sin again.

JULIET
You kiss by the book.

Romeo & Juliet Act 1 Scene 5

Not as Down

I'M NOT AS DOWN as I was yesterday. I was in a horrible mood last night. The only good thing about those horrible moods is that nearly always I sleep for hours on end, which I love. And I did sleep twelve hours flat-out. I can go past twelve into the teens but I don't like to. When I wake up then I feel vile. Especially if I sleep twice in one day, when I wake up the second time I feel horrendous. Something I've noticed time and time again.

It was this type of mood, a kind of depression, that I was taking gear to self-medicate all those years. I tended to feel down whenever I had no gear and the days without it were just unbearable. For this reason I preferred using a small amount of heroin on top of methadone every day than larger amounts spaced throughout the week.

I usually felt OK-ish in myself (I thought I was all right) and I could raise my mood (slightly) by doing things like walking down the street. But I'd walk nowhere and feel like I didn't want to go home and the small amount of OK-ness that I got tended to be deluged in depression eventually, so it just drowned.

I lived that way for years, never entirely feeling better. Never getting any treatment (and the last time I was on antidepressants was, as I have written, unmitigated disaster).

I don't want mood stabilizer. It will prevent me going manic-swimming for one thing. Risperidone can be an alternative to lithium. (Thanks Lizzy for the link.) Carbamazepine can be used for rapid cycling but I'm allergic (was prescribed it over fifteen years ago) so I'd have to try oxcarbazepine.

I still don't have too much to say. It's a dark day! Nah I'm joking. I'm OK I'm flat as a pancake. Uninspired. I hope everybody likes the baby wallabies below.

I'm off to the Chinese in a minute for beef black been sauce mix vegetable fry rice.

PS i found something funny; it comes from the Royal College of Psychiatrists' website:~

■ Mania
At the start of a manic mood swing, the person will appear to be happy, energetic and outward-going - the ‘life and soul’ of any party or heated discussion. However, the excitement of such situations will tend to push their mood even higher. So try to steer them away from such situations. You can try to persuade them to get help, or get them information about the illness and self-help.

Practical help is very important – and much appreciated. Make sure that your relative or friend is able to look after themselves properly.

But whoever wrote their website needs to add a schizoaffective page. I can't believe they left that out when they had SAD (which my Mum says she has). SAD is equally uncommon and is a recognized subtype of a fairly common illness (many people with SAD are actually type 2 bipolar; they go up in spring as well as down in winter. I asked my Mum whether she ever did this; she said no.)


ps should I not eat the Chinese? It is full of calories after all? And I'm supposed to be starting a strict exercise regimen VERY SOON INDEED!