The Fix

I HAVE TRIED TO FIX MYSELF IN COUNTLESS WAYS; and I'm not just making tawdry puns about drug-injections. Recently I took to viewing videos keyworded "heroin" on youtube. Some of the best embeddable ones you'll see scattered about here. I think it's in the Khun Sa link I gave a couple of days ago, there's footage of Thai and European/Western ("farang") addicts at the famous Tham Krabok monastery near Chiang Mai where patients are given vomiting drinks and told how to restructure their lives. One among them told how he'd injected his savings then his car then a house. (I know someone who smoked nearly an entire house (as crack) and injected the rest (as heroin) in little more than a year...) This particular man said he spent every day using telling himself it was going to be the last.

Contrary to what you might assume (as a nonuser), once heroin's got you, when you're clean and basically tilting downwards towards withdrawal your only fixation's going to be getting getting getting your heroin. Once you've the luxurious swirl of opiates in veins and brains THEN thoughts turn to the terrible habit that's gripped you and how you really must do something (this or that, whatever the newest thing to do happens to be). But that's the luxury of being high and a vast step removed from truly feeling the realities of any situation.

A good illustration can be found in the Carlos and Dadinha vid. You needn't watch far. Just a couple of minutes into it you'll see her swaying on a mattress declaring "we've lost everything". Look at it and see how little she appears to care. That's heroin in a nutshell. A drug for those who wish not to care...

This is why heroin addicts find it so difficult to stop and stay stopped. Other drugs might be far more exciting and intense in their effects. There is nothing very exciting about heroin, even at the start. What it does best is kill pain, give confidence and knock off life's harsher edges. Heroin becomes a very mundane part of life ~ almost like having a cup of tea. The hits mark punctuation points in the day. The eventual effects are subtle, so subtle you might easily say living with them is a bore. The problem is, living without them is agony.

I don't know whether I really am ready to stop, even now. Still not sure.

Burma's Heroin Trade video

Here's the Wat Tham Krabok official site...

... here's the Wikipedia article that (strangely) suggests the Thai Govt suspect the place of being a centre of international narcotics distribution... well clickit and see...

I wrote out an explanation

I WROTE OUT AN EXPLANATION for what I was doing, why last night... I am not in the mood to post it. It needs tidying up and I'm not in the mood for flicking back and forth between notebook pages jiggling words, honestly. I've been miserable all day and all I want to do is sleep. Nothing's connected with nothing. Nothing leads to nothing. Nothing's ever enough...

Drugs Telesales

THE DEALERS HAVE BEEN HAMMERING at my phone this morning all declaring "mine's pukka ~ proper sizes ~ I've got both ~ etc etc". I get barely half an hour's break before someone else takes up the cause. Already I'm a fifth of a gram heavier and £7.50 lighter. Someone else wanted me to test his batch and give marks out of ten ~ for free, whoopee!! ~ and sounded really put out when I gave it a six. I was being diplomatic: actually it was closer to a four-and-a-half...

I promised myself I would not waste any more time and energy negotiating a drugs drought, which is what appeared to be happening. Though 150kgs, if I got my sums right, would last the UK's estimated 300,000 heroin addicts a mere one or two days. Even if that seizure was bound for London alone (it was discovered in East London: Forest Gate) then London would surely have got through it within a week...

I've a new drug worker whose foreign name I still cannot recall ~ sounds like Maple Syrup or something. Throughout our inaugural chat she kept huffing "you must address this" and "I am not at all happy about that" and "why are you drinking so much again?" (ten cans a week even though they're high alcohol 7.5% cyder hardly makes me alcoholic of the year. I'm not that much outside the recommended units guidelines and at least I was honest enough to fess up. If she's going to jump on everything I say and criticize I'm just going to feed her porkie-pies... which isn't really going to help either of us.

I walked away feeling she was determined to break me. Mild mannered I may be, but anyone who knows me well will agree that I can be extraordinarily stubborn and will not be pushed around by someone who's working for the satisfaction of their own ego (as I began to suspect she might possibly be...) I will not be "broken" by anyone...

Then again, on waking at the lovely sociable hour of 4:30 I got to musing, "maybe I want to be broken just this once..." broken and fixed up again nice and clean and normal and recovered... Perhaps, just perhaps this drugs worker might be able to help me in that. But "at the end of the day" (as the massively over-used saying goes) any change I achieve is going to be all down to me. To sort out. To stick with. And to force through... As an old university friend of mine used to say, who sadly had an eye condition which was going to result in almost certain complete blindness within a matter of years: We're all alone in the dark...

Do you like my new antidrugs videos, kids?

Here's one I got labelled CNN from America...

THIS IS NOT what heroin does to brain and body. How can I say that? Because millions of people have been given heroin ("diamorphine") in British hospitals~ and survived without their shells broken. It's the most effective painkiller there is.

But the rest of this commercial, in my opinion, is pretty much bang-on.



Have a look at my Price of Heroin clip (top of sidebar, can't miss it). Why on earth that girl weighs just over 4 stone I've no idea. Heroin doesn't do that... maybe she's heavily into crack, which really does wipe out the appetite... maybe she's anorexic... maybe she's HIV... maybe all three, who knows. I just know documentary-makers love showing an oversimplified gloss on the subject. But, as the saying goes, if that film keeps just one child away from drugs then it's surely worthwhile...

I found a fascinating documentary about the famous or infamous Golden Triangle opium Lord Khun Sa ~ which means Prince Prosperous. The journalists went right up over the border into the Shan Province where he's de-facto monarch, looking after his people, as he'd put it, with his own 20,000 strong army. I love the sinster Buddhist-chants motif they bring up whenever they want to evoke "scary"! Sorry the twonk who loaded this up specifically had "embedding disabled by request" (why do people do that?) but click here and you can see the half hour Burma-thon in its entirety...

PS I'VE still not given in on my "no more crack" resolution... wahey!!!!

PPS Amazing garden pictures alert. In my bloghop today I encountered this blog with flowery-leafy-traily snaps of the grounds at Whitworth Hall Co Durham...

Sunday Inconvenient Sunday

I HATE SUNDAYS. Hate them so much I thankfully managed to sleep through most of this one. What is wrong with me when sleep comes only in patches at night, yet I can doze successfully through the entire daylit part of the day?

There isn't very much to say about anything. I have been living on pasta and black coffee with the odd lot of Turkish biscuits (chocolate "creme" in the middle)...

It's not as Siberian-cold as it was last week, but my brain feels frozen as an ice-block. Maybe I am depressed, who knows? Bored/drug-ravaged by years of poppy-"power"...? Who knows?

Roll on Monday, that's what I say! Roll on Monday...

Have a Furry Weekend Y'all!

YES... A FURRY WEEKEND. My hammies have been lying in bed, like little birdies in a nest together (three little gremlin faces peer up at me whenever I speak to them). Itchy has kept her pouches continuously packed with the new hamster food I put out on Thursday, so she wanders around looking like a furry cobra head, which is faintly ridiculous. Specially for Lime, the illustration is a pair of European harvest mice (apparently American ones are bigger and different), these being called micromys minutus (doncha just luurve that Latin~?!?) They live up corn stalks where they make weaver-bird-style nests for their chirrupping furry babbies (which are born blind and naked, like mini baked beans with paws...).

Now on to drugs, but in a more "clean" way... as I mentioned (and I'm sure this is the cause, though I'd imagine the addicts in London would get through that much in not much more than a week...) I believe the current glitch in the heroin market, which seems to be threatening to become a drought, is down to a 150kg seizure made in Forest Gate early last December... Low quality gear is reportedly everywhere (when I have used I've managed to avoid it, mainly by going to one person who's still got a nice lot)... a vast number of the dealers are switched off because, unable to pick up anything worthwhile they'd rather simply stop trading. As I told myself if or rather when this happened again I would give up rather than stress about what I buy/when/how much/from who/what/why/whatever. Life has better things to offer than worrying about heroin, which I'm so fed up of anyhow... so I'm seizing my chance...

PS I can smell the gear off that photo... but why on earth someone's seemingly tried to smoke it off the spoon I've no idea...

PPS I WAS JUST considering this: how can it be a "success" when drugs are taken off the streets only for their price to rise ~ resulting in more crime ~ and drug-dealing criminals to add dangerous adulterants that could kill the drug-using criminals... what a crazy world...

PPS Read how mad these droughts get from this from earlier this year when we did have a drought...

PPPS FROM THE SIDEBAR: HERE's Pablo the "drugs dog"... made for "Talk To Frank" ~ the UK National Drugs Helpline, this is the tv commercial "There's a Darker Side to Coke"...



DRUGS IN THE NEWS: NORTH KOREAN STATE-SPONSORED HEROIN PRODUCTION CLAIM

Exhausion (pt 327)

YESTERDAY ~ ON NO DRUGS AT ALL ~ except my prescribed methadone, I managed to sleep sporadically most of the night, then deeply most of the day till past 3pm. Last night I could not sleep. Yet I was absolutely exhausted and feeling deprived by 9am. So as soon as my head did hit the pillow around midday I slept till past 7pm! What is wrong with me? I don't have sporadic opiate consumption to blame this time...

Do you like my picture? No that's not a Chinese cowboy but Chinese-Burmese Heroin Lord Khun Sa, who russeled an army of over 20,000 men in the Shan-state frontier regions of the famous "golden triangle". Because opium requires an otherwise obscure chemical, acetic anhydride, ordinarily used in production of cellophanes, tapes and filmsto process to heroin and to cover himself with a cloak of respectability, he opened a huge carrier bag factory in his Warlord State. He took full advantage of his cellophane supplies, by famously branding his heroin, which appeared in the West in coloured cellophaned bricks decorated with elephants, Chinese characters and other logos "worthy of Madison Avenue"... He actually sold heroin under brand names: "Double UO Globe" being the most famous in the 70s/80s...

And that's about all for today. Last night I was asked, if actions speak so much louder than words yet yous can only go on what I tell you, how will any of you know if/when I really am clean..? I'll tell you how: because my entire demeanour will change. Even on the printed page I expect you'll notice that...

Serenity

THIS IS MY NEW GOAL: far from being just blank and "clean" (never was sure of the "clean/dirty" terminology) but to strive for the true peace and Serenity (as NA call it) of Recovery.

Recovery is not a mere state of being but a process. As far as I understand it is the process of reconciling oneself with the reasons and forces that led us down Smack Alley to the morass of Addiction and moving on from there to learn how to live without drugs of any kind.

NA put great store on this "avoid all drugs" motto (and I think this is the most dangerous aspect of their thinking). They say that even having a drink is using, even if drinking never formed part of your using. Swapping focus from one drug to another is "like switching seats on the Titanic: you're still going down"...

Yes I can see they have a point. And their point makes doing the NA programme actually harder than living "drug-addiction free" than many normal people do, who might pour out the red wine before dinner, continue quaffing while cooking and finish a bottle a person over food after a hard day's work, then feel entitled to get slaughteringly drunk at the weekend (well: if you're British, Irish or Australian especially) and then in this drunken state perhaps turn to 4am spliffs and perhaps cocaine. Millions of "normal" people with respectable jobs engage in such behaviour on a weekly basis. In my day popping ecstasy pills was the thing. You'd go to the club or rave and take the magic tablet (or one and a half or two)... an hour later you're in a wonderland that, most amazingly you share with everybody there. It felt like the most amazing thing. None of the people engaging in this activity would have called themselves "addicts".

Once you have become a full-blown addict, I suppose you have to recognize that you've messed up brain and body to such a degree that for a very long while drugs of any kind ~ including drink ~ are going to be a no-no, unless you want to risk slipping back into deep waters ...

Having said that, I feel some people at NA take the "all using is relapsing" theme too far. I've heard a few stories about people who "lapse" maybe by popping a sleeping pill or knocking back a Scotch. Next thing anybody knows they're back at the heroin and crack. And in this country the vast majority of NA-members are there for one (or more usually both) of those two drugs.

I don't know why I'm saying all this: to convince myself...? To tell you all I'm convincing myself..? I don't know.

PS IF you want something entertaining, click here for a quick snapshot of my "personality"...

PPS ANSWERS to my Coca Cola quiz are: cans (in reading order zigzagging down) Arabic, Russian, Hebrew; the bottle was ARMENIAN!!!

PPPS I SAID I was going to put up stuff for worried parents. Of course I have not done. But there is one organization called Adfam for the families of addicts and users. Clickonthem for more info. The link I got was British but there are similar organizations internationally.

Hamster Television

WARNING A STUPID HAMSTER POST...

WHEN I'M A WHIZZY SUCCESSFUL TV EXEC I'm going to sell my "pet" idea to Mongolian state television ~ "Roborovski Watch" show... they can put out cameras in the back gardens of their yurts to capture midnight films of Itchy, Bashful and Spherical's distant ancestors scurrying across the dunes...

Then I shall go into book publishing and get millions of copies of my whizzy new tome slapped out: The Hamster Songbook. All the little robos can sit round a campfire (a robo-sized campfire would be the flame from a single teelight!!) and sing songs like "Mongolia"

"And did those paws in ancient time..."

or "Silent Wheel" (a chrismassy one this)

"Silent wheel, tiny wheel,
Spin so fast, do not squeal
All the Trotters will run very fast
But the butter on you will not last
And you'll soon get jammed up!
And you shall soon be jammed up..."

And that's all folks ~ before we really do get Loony Tunes...

PS: See how enormous normal (Syrian) hamsters are compared to the tiny trotting robos...

Dazzlingly Clean and yet... Dirty

MY HOUSE HAD TURNED INTO A PIGSTY... bits and pieces, trish and trash everywhere, tomato-spattered floors, fag-ash by the bed and the hugest mound of washing up I've seen outside the catering trade. It took nearly half an hour just to do the washing-up (properly). Then I sprayed Cillit Bang on the floors and mopped them so clean they've been dazzling me. That's the great thing about teak-effect plastic laminate. I know interior designers like Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen would probably puke over it, but it is practical. The tiled area round the cooker is also nice and easy to keep clean ~ though scraping off dried-on Ragu-splatterings took some doing. (I eat about a bucketful of Ragu a week now.) What's inconvenient about tiles are: they make a plate-smasher's paradise. And for the not-so-nimble-fingered like me that means what looks like the smithereen remains of a Greek wedding end up scattered there. And I don't keep shrubs in pots (no green fingers, no garden) hence no need for this "crocks" collection... Yes so the place is spotless once again. Blank surfaces glare back at me...

... and so of course I am dirty, and though I was craving after crack all day (it was Monday) I resisted. But got stoked up on the "brown" nonetheless.

There was a 150-kilo seizure in London around a month ago, and I wondered whether that would cause any dip in the supply. Seemingly it has, because I've been hearing stories all around of garbage-gear in circulation. I managed to avoid it, though apparently my old "best" dealer's had something that resolidified like jam in the works so you just can't take it. No way am I negotiating my way through another heroin drought. Basically what happens is the price effectively doubles and you never know who to go to, who to trust. Extraordinarily strong gear of any colour suddenly hits town, suddenly China white is around, which is normally rare here. But most of the gear's heavily adulterated (sometimes to the point of being unusable like the jam gear I just mentioned).

You'd think people dealing in drugs (and successful ones almost never "get high on their own supply") would trouble to learn the basic properties of their merchandise. But no, some people are thick. There was once, up and down the country, which means multiple kilos must've been thus adulterated, a phenomenon called the "oil slick gear". I heard tales about this from as afar afield as Birmingham and Norwich. I scored a bag once. Cooking it up, the powerful and distinct aroma of myrrh accosted me. I looked down at the spoon and thought "I don't remember leaving the filter in". Something brown and soppy was floating in the middle. I fished this out: it was the proverbial "oil slick" (and it didn't half smell nice). Probably one thicko dealer had said to another "so what me cut dis gear wid?" and the other would have said "resin" (meaning the stuff you rub on violin bows: powdered down this probably would look like "brown"). So the idiot goes to a Neals Yard-type herbalists, asks for a resin and gets all this myrrh, mixing it into kilos and kilos without even checking what it does... O boy. THIS is what makes me wanna steer clear of heroin and the "drugs scene" and all they stand for. I don't want to be worrying about injecting my legs with violin resin or myrrh. And I'm fed up of losing touch with friends for a few weeks then automatically wondering whether they're dead.

This is not a war zone. This is not a life. They say heroin is for those too frightened to live. And yes, ever since I found it I clove to it like mother's milk. Yet I was not born a junkie. I should not need opiates to survive. I've had enough, had enough of this. The time is coming to leave this mess behind...

PS: Notice how the illustrations for heroin seizure and powdered myrrh appear almost identical...

MUSIC:
EIGHTH WONDER (PATSY KENSIT) ~ I'M NOT SCARED
Written by the Pet Shop boys, I think this version's better...


Patsy Kensit wanted to be "the most famous person alive" and, watching the vid you see she did have the star quality to be a British Kylie or Madonna... she was so trendy in her day, dropping "E" at Shoom club (British birthplace of Acid House ~ actually a south London gym), marrying one musician after another, culminating in Liam Gallagher where she lost it so much she turned down a part in Friends... now look at her. She landed in a helicopter in Emmerdale, now she's a nurse in Holby. Hey: it's a job!

Here's allegedly original footage from the legenday SCHOOM CLUB, 1987

Me: Online: Tonight: Talkin' 2U...

I DID NOT STEAL chocolate. I yammed it down this morning... Ritter milk and biscuit which was a compromise for 2 cravings (thick, thick chocolate and biccies)... though I wished I'd gone for neat dark choc as afterwards I felt vaguely sick, yet craving more... Something dark chocolate never does. Ho-hummm.

The picture is supposed to be Whoopi Goldberg from the 80s film Jumpin' Jack Flash, which as you probably know, features lots of onscreen dialogue of the style now possible on my blog via my personal Gabbly Gledwood chatroom!

It's not just for yarning to me you know, you can speak to each others...

You know whether you've got company, and how much, by how many "gabbers" are listed online at any given time... The doorbell sound announces a new arrival at my page; the schmonng sound means someone's just said something.

To reply:

Just tap something out in the dialogue window, press return, and you'll see it join the rolling script.

The screen will tell you you're "gabber 609", say. Change this number into your name by clicking on that and replacing it with your internet "handle".

I shall be online tonight answering notes, queries and making general conversation with anybody around from 8pm local time which would be around 6am Australian and for you Americans is around 3pm Eastern, or midday to y'all on the West Coast...

Please give me a minute or so to reply if you initiate the conversation: I might be on another window, waiting to hear that schmonng that says someone's talking to me. (How do you bring up another window? I scroll down my own sidebar to that Google searchbox and take it from there. It means I can be in my blog twice without losing my place on Gabbly if I happen to skip off-page for a sec...

OK so looking forward to speaking to anyone who can be there 8pm "Universal" Standard Time!!

Here's a tune I hear time and time again:
Guru Josh: Infinity 2008

Candy Craving

I HAVE THE MOST MASSIVE CRAVING FOR SWEETS AND CHOCOLATE TODAY... more to the point chocolate... dark chocolate. Ritter dark chocolate which is German and used to be called Halbbitter because it was 50% cocoa solids. Now it's 71% and even funkier. Nothing around (apart from the very posh stuff) gives a lovely bitter chocolate kick like this. So bad did this fixation become this afternoon I very nearly found myself shoplifting a block, which is so much not me. My own shoplifting career was short with a bitter ending (not nice-bitter like high-cocoa chocolate)... Even though most of my friends think I'm stupid not to lift easy basic things like pens, envelopes, etc, it's my particular scruple not to. Hard to explain why, but I'd rather pay my way. Anyway back to chocolate: first thing tomorrow morning and Ritter and I shall be as one (how sad). But hey at least I'm not writing about heroin! Probably this is what psychologists call a displacement activity. But hey ~ surely it's better to be "displaced", get chocolate-dirty and tubby yet remain heroin-clean (if that is possible...)

Baby Itchy's Human Mountaineering

I TOOK OUT "BABY" ITCHY ROBOROVSKI, the smallest and tamest Tiny Trotter for a ramble today and she spent half an hour mountaineering along my arms, up my knees, then disappearing down an inch-wide long plastic tube I rescued from a skip and shoving around my sleeves. I say shoving because she does this nudge nudge digging thing with her nose which is really ticklish what with her 2ft long whiskers (in robo-feet). She can also climb it when it's literally vertical, then appears at the top, all furry and surprised, as if saying to me "where do I go NOW?"

I got one drugs telesales call when I was fast asleep at 10 o'clock this morning. The screen said TWONK (ie it's someone I wanted nothing to do with anyhow...) he quickly gave up within around 6 rings...

I've had such an obsession with gnocchi I used the entire 500g packet, together with half a jar of Ragu Oregano and Basil ~ half price (66p). You have to be careful which of those pasta sauces you buy as Ragu is proper ie 150g tomatoes go into every 100g (they are boiled down during production). Supermarket's own brand (£1.15 for about a litre) was only 40% tomatoes, I noticed, and contained added water, as such sauces should never do. If you want added water, add it yourself during cooking (it makes 'em go twice as far). Another top tip is to add Ragu to chopped tomatoes. The Ragu taste you simply cannot get, even from concentrated tomato puree. Your tomatoes must have gone through the specialized 3-hr lidless oven-baking sessions to get the mega-mellow taste right. Adding just a bit of Ragu to chopped tomatoes and puree makes it just right. But without that little bit of Ragu... you're nowhere near there! I've also used half a tub of grated Parmesan in about 2 days: yummm!

La Toya Jackson (yes! Michael's sister: looks how he probably wished he looked) is on Celebrity Big Brother, together with a tiny Hollywood actor guy called Verne Troyer (played Mini-Me in all them Austen Powers films), together with "Gangsta's Paradise" rapper Coolio. (Do click those links ~ they're hilarious!) For those of you without access to Limey TV, here's a clip of the first two discussing the third:



PS MY "WHERE IN THE COCA-COLONIZED WORLD" COMPETITION from yesterday's still open. Will somebody please gimme an answer on the mysteriously-lettered bottle. I know you don't know so just GUESS!

No Heroin But Italian Food

TWO NIGHTS AGO I WROTE out a lovely little post, all tiny and succinct about how I was quitting gear "just for today" ~ and the £20 in my pocket's going to my bank account not the dealer...

Only for all this to be scuppered by my waking up feeling slightly chilly which caused me to run screaming (metaphorically!!) up the road to "the flats" where £20 was exchanged for a lump of what looked like mud but was powerful enough to knock me out. Then, not having slept properly for days I slept on and on and on and woke up feeling so mightily depressed I decided to post more about my rising Italian food obsession than on how bad I felt. I am fed up of my own voice, whining...

Last night I wrote out no posts, but have reminded myself WHY I want NOT to use the heroin. And so, despite having £35 left ~ £30 still in the bank, the change from £5 on me. I only withdrew the minimum over the counter today. I am NOT spending on drugs. But there's a supermarket trolley round the corner with my name on it and I need a list of cheap things: thin bleach, sugar, Dolmio, gnocchi. I hope I can get all those for £4.40...? Well let's see. Anyway I must go: those gnocchi are calling my name!

PS: Wherever I go, I always crave Coca-Cola!

PPS: Can anyone guess where they all originate from? Especially the really mysterious writing on the bottle? Clickonit to make the image larger...

Black Pepper & Tomato Pasta Sauce

I'M SO TIRED I SPENT most of the day sleeping... It took some something-or-other to get out of bed and come here; today I am too blackpeppery and I didn't feel like it. Not into gurging out selfpitying whingeings yet... I wanted not to use anything and did. The lump of powdery dried mud knocked me out... "helped me catch up on lost sleep"... I have not slept properly for days. Sleeping somehow sometimes feels too much like giving up...

The BBC have put on a new version of the Diary of Anne Frank. Never having read the original I can't say how much it compares. What they have done is remake it in the image of the present time focusing on arguments and her burgeoning romance with the Jewish neighbours' son. They're all in hiding together. Perched in rooms off a back staircase, which is hidden behind a bookcase, upstairs from a shop. Final episode is tomorrow and I don't know how much I can handle watching The End, when all these characters in such sharp focus... well: knowing what happens to them.

When EastEnders came on afterwards it seemed so trivial I went out of the room and did cooking. I'm trying to learn to make Italian bolognaise sauce, y'know the type manufactured industrially by Dolmio-Buitoni-Ragu, from scratch. I heard you're supposed to take tinned tomatoes, chop them if they're not already chopped, and boil them over a low heat frequently stirring for a couple of hours or so... Am I right? You just cannot replicate the taste of these industrial sauces with tomatoes or puree just as they come. I believe they're massively boiled down and thus concentrated up. I only had one tin and the patience of half an hour, but I have to say in that time I did appear to be getting somewhere... IF ANYONE KNOWS THE RECIPE PLEASE HELP ME OUT!

PS DELIA SMITH says oven-cook for 3 hours in an open casserole dish... Bacon-schmacon: I'm not adding swineflesh to mine though!

PPS DELIA'S first "media" gig (though she was already food writer at the Daily Mail) was creating that fabulously fancy chinzy iced cake for the Rolling Stones' 1969Let It Bleed LP...

More Robo-Food & A Crackheads' Conference

THREE GEAR-&-CRACKHEADS were chatting in the street as I ambled along. One was a former dealer of mine, who is now clean and has a goofy smile all over his face. You should do it too!" he enthuses. But enthusiasm alone just won't cut it... as I've discovered. One of the three I didn't know. The other is notorious. He calls himself Mellow and I have little respect for him. He once pulled a knife on an Irish guy who was a friend of mine... next thing anyone knew Mellow was pelting up the road, knife in hand with Irish Guy raging up behind him. And that tells you all you ever wanted to know about Mellow. Except that I first properly met him in what the press call a shooting gallery and we called "the Burnt-Out House". I was sat round a table with two lesbians. We had all just had a pipe and were now onto the gear. Mellow, was at this time still smoking all his drugs, started pulling a pathetic rant about "don't go squirting that crap in my direction". It was me who pointed out that at £10 a pop we were hardly likely to be playing waterpistols with it, were we? Then again some people are stupid and he doesn't look like he's added any IQ points as he's gone... Anyway they didn't spot me today as I quickly pinged by...

OK that's druggie story of the day done with. Now onto "cleaner" issues. No of course I have NOT touched any crack. At ALL. It really was as I said a once a week £10 thing in the end... and the end went on for months. Now the end is over. And done with. I'm fantasizing about breaking all my bottles. But I still haven't done it. (Not having a bottle has never stopped me piping in the past, so maybe that's it. Throwing needles away I found even more dodgy as when I was minded to "use" I would "use" no matter WHERE the needle came from. I'm just glad I tested HIV-Hep B-Hep C negative because I honestly didn't think I would. (Especially the last one...)

And now to hamsters. OK now mine have to be the best-fed in Christendom as I've gone out and got them a kilo of Wagg hamster Gerbil Mouse Munch. The packaging makes it sound so vitamin-packed they'll go supersonic... so let's see...

For anyone new to these pages who might be bemused by my constant references to "robos", I mean roborovski hamsters and here's the writeup at roborovskihamsters.webs.com

Roborovski Hamsters (Phodopus roborovskii) are the smallest and fastest of all the hamster family and are kept as domestic pets. Of the hamster species, they live the longest (2 to 3 and a half years).

They are very curious, easily startled, and generally timid little hamsters. Their suitability as pets to be handled is further diminished by their size and speed. Roborovski's are, however, extremely social and affectionate with each other, and when housed together from an early age, sleep in one place and indeed eat, play, etc. together. They have a very good temperament and rarely bite either each other or people, which makes them ideal for family pets.

They grow to about 4 - 5cm long [2"](not 7cm like you sometimes hear) and have bullet shaped bodies and have very long back legs for running extremely quickly.

See why I find them so entertaining?

Kicking Coke in Public

ALL OF A SUDDEN I FEEL STRANGELY EXPOSED, making progress in my drugs-fight and reporting online.

Cocaine, or more to the point, crack, has long been a feature of my life, holding hands with heroin and tangoing together as daily speedballs in certain years gone by. More recently I was reduced to Snowball Mondays. I'd buy just enough crack for one nice little pipe, then crush the rest into heroin, to make into snowballs.

Cocaine intensifies the effect of heroin and just like butter on bread or sugar in coffee, the combinations's hard to give up once you've picked up a taste.

An old drugs worker put it best: "Crack just separates you from your money as quickly as possible. And it makes you use even more gear."

Although I've usually had the control to keep my spend at £10 or £20 and then leave the crack alone (people who insist on buying the smallest amount then saying "let's get some more!" and "let's get some more!" really annoyed me. I always saw the high of crack as temporary and false and thus far easier to see "through" than my beloved heroin, who's done everything to make my life the garden of delights it is today. Ooo! Is Gledwood being sarky here?!

Now back to crack. I managed to beat it back to a single day a week and when it wasn't that day even if I had the dollars I didn't feel tempted. Compartmentalizing life is one thing I'm good at, so I found myself sticking to this rule without much trouble.

Also I was so unused to exercising any moral gumption it made a spiriting change actually to make a decision and prove I could stick by it.

But of course my Crack Mondays have been sabotaging all attempts to steer heroin clean. Because come the weekend's end ~ and Sundays have always been miserable for me ~ and I'm always broke ~ I'm suddenly chucked into the glory of a monday morning with money and a double temptation and so I always gave in, and so the only pattern I made in life was circular: a vicious circle too!

So you see that little bit of coke was far more of an issue than it might seem at a casual glance. I didn't dare post this much yesterday because my inner demons love so much making me a hypocrite. I can just imagine posting "I did it!" then running straight to the dealer. As soon as addiction flourished in me so too did an inner gremlin who seemed to spiritedly enjoy chucking my resolutions to the wall. After all I'd lost so very many dignities there was no way now I could do without the consolation of drugs cushioning my fall. And so I didn't. And so I lost the power to resist.

Please don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying "I've done it. I've kicked the crack"; I never can. (You can only ever do it day by day...) But I managed it yesterday and that felt like some achievement...

hey! Now I can throw out my crack bottle collection (they were brandy miniature like the three to the top left pictured). I need the drawer space and I don't need the reminder.

I STILL FEEL SHAKY WHEN I SAY ALL THIS. Something in me just wants to sabotage and cheat. I'm a drug addict! How can I ever trust myself again?

OK: before this post turns viciously circular as well I'm going to ping off like a roborovski.

Excitement at the Trottery!

EYES ARE GLEAMING, ears pricking up (why do hamsters poke up their ears when a good dinner's to hand ~ what's to listen to? ~??!?) Yes Bill Oddie's own brand, the poshest birdseed £££ can buy with about 10 different mixed grains in it... the Rolls Royce of all robo-banquets is proceeding as we speak.



That's why I didn't want Trill, which is just millet for budgies, or cheapest, sour-looking grade C rubbish from the petshop up the road. The "I'm so busy and I don't suffer fools (I also never listen to people)" Countess Arrogant who works there insists on selling a minimum 1-kilo bag, which would last my hamsters months.

Weight for tubby weight Bashful, Itchy and Spherical are by far the most voracious nibblers of all the furry animals I've ever had. They weight not much more than an ounce apiece and yet they devour their own weight in cereals in less than a fortnight... if not a week. So-called "experts" say you should not overfeed seeds as the high fat content will make the hammies too tubby! I think hamsters are smart enough to pick out whatever they need from a balanced diet of birdseeds, hammy mix, biscuits, breakfast cereals, bread crusts, chocolate drops and pumblechooks...

... besides I've noticed a high-birdseed diet gives 'em gorgeously glossy fur. OK I know this is totally irrelevant to anything but I found this whilst searching out a clip of an escaped horse trotting through a picture-house ... supposedly while a film was running. The entire lot was captured on CCTV... according to the Sun newspaper. Instead I found this: not that I can preach about high speed rail being far better than cars coming as I do from Britain which is low-speed central. Our ONLY fasttrack being the one directly OUT of the country to Belgium and France; how embarrassing is THAT..???!?

No drugs today. I've been meaning for quite some time to post an "I think my child's using heroin! What do I do?!" parental guide. My blog was originally intended to be an information crossroads for drugs issues of all kinds but addiction and recovery in particular. Well I'm still working on that one and this afternoon I scrawled out a Facts and Stats about Heroin post that just shouts drugs Drugs DRUGS! Too much for me today. Specially as I'm quitting crack today (remember I said I'd taken to using just once a week? That once a week would have been today and it's not happening any more. Just writing it makes me want to cheat and use again... But I really don't want to use. I gave up crack for over a month last time, my willpower only sabotaged when a dealer gave me a free bit... I can live perfectly well without crack... it's just thinking about it winds me up and makes me want it. I knew that dealer was playing games who held out his hand saying "pay me for it later"... and then having a dealer so near I could score within 1 minute flat really did my head in, not to mention reducing resolutions to ashes. Now I want control back. Kicking in crack is a major way of achieving this even if I DO leave myself a raving heroin junkie who's fighting THAT addiction a little less satisfactorily. One thing at a time, as they say.

And with that thought I'll love yaz and leave yaz. L8RS!
Gleds ;->...

PS See how quick the robos run around in the top one? THAT is why Itchy was so impossible when she turned escapee....

PPS And last but not least: LOOK AT THIS! I've always wanted a basket full of furries ~ just imagine keeping this pinging pile of pets..!!

Tuppence a Bag!

FOR DAYS AND DAYS since Xmas that dreadful Mary Poppins song has been going round my head. It's about birdseed: "Tuppence! Tuppence! Tuppence a bag!" (I bet you could have fed a human being for 2d in those days ~ forget the birds). I desperately need birdseed for my hammies yet nowhere seems to sell it. I think my rodents are fed up of living off the food I live on (pasta smothered in tomato sauce). Also they have become Tutku addicts. Tutku are Turkish biscuits I dunk in my tea. Brown and white in what I'd call a "harlequin" pattern, these are full of chocolate fondant. Not sandwiched like ordinary creme biscuits but totally closed in. My pets have gone longer than a month on this kind of diet ~ replete with breakfast cereals and pumblechooks and bread. I think it's about time they went back to "proper" rodent food of the type wild mice eat in your house ~ e.g. candlewax and soap (joke!)

Does anyone remember the time Itchy escaped ~ this was 2 houses ago ~ no sign of her for days. I was tearing my hair out. Also the place was scuttling alive ~ especially at night ~ with wild housemice and I was terrified they'd mug her and beat her up. Robos are not very violent animals, far more likely to take flight (or, unlike other hamsters, freeze and play dead) than to actually fight.

Anyway I was just giving up hope of ever seeing poor Itchy alive again ~ this must've been at least 48 hours after 1st disappearance ~ when a suspiciously persistent scrabbling set off in the corner, where I'd lined up my books, 3 deep on the floor. Imagine my surprise when I came face to furry face with a shocked-looking housemouse, which rapidly pinged out of the way. I couldn't believe my eyes when the scrabbling continued and there appeared a cleaner, fatter and smaller rodent (yes ~ Itchy really is tiny. Fully grown yet smaller than a mouse. Plus she can run faster.)

I could not believe this ~ the little swine had been out under my wardrobe with a frenzy of wild mice, partying away (no wonder all that squealing ~ and it wasn't from her ~ robo-voices are more like the honks you get from kiddy-toys) ~ they'd obviously shared their dinner. Or she had stolen it off them (cheek-pouches being such an advantage). They'd taken her on a jaunt across the adventure playground of my books. Unable to ping back under the wardrobe because I blocked off the way, and never having learned to spring the way rodents have to in the wild, she was effectively marooned within a Berlin Wall of paperbacks. I took advantage of her instinct to seek cover by dropping a toilet tube down there. She scuttled straight inside and appeared most astonished suddenly to get snatched up and plonked back down with Bashful and Spherical. Roborovskis are the most social of all hamsters. "Regular (Syrian) hammies will fight to the death anything that dares invade their burrow. My robbies on the other hand sleep 3 to a massive bed, which is always under their wheel. They don't seem to mind getting repeatedly kicked in the head as they carry on dozing when one of their number decides to get up for a midday spin...

... And back to drugs. I am depressed because my addiction is more powerful than me. (Is this the meaning of that 12-step phrase "we admitted that we were powerless over our addiction"?)...

... Every now and then I have a reality check. Similar to the time when, in the bourgeois house I used to live in (many years ago) my one ally said of the other housemates "they all think you're a heroin addict" ~ and I suddenly saw "heroin addict" ~ the drug-ravaged spectre one steers clear of on the street ~ converge with me. My innocent self. It felt most disconcerting actually to be this labelled character. I feel the same jolt here sometimes. Especially when I vision my blog popping up in suburban kitchens, casserole in the oven, dogs running around, grandchildren yelling in the garden. And I think What am I doing here? My blog was never meant to be a cry for help. It wasn't meant to be a game, either. "Confessional" rides a rocky road once outside the confines of Secret Diary covers.

"Never apologize; never explain" goes the Immanuel Kant quote on one blog I only recently took up perusing. The first bit I go with ~ but the second? ~ Each to his own. My style of soul-searching would sit about as well with Melody Lee as black pepper on strawberry icecream. My drug addiction needs explaining.

Even if you don't need explanations, I do. Maybe, if I dig around the dustbin of my life, I might find a diamond. My mind was once furnished with marvellous things and I must have chucked them out somewhere... maybe they're still around...

And here endeth today's babble.

PS just a thought: I bet yous lot all thought "tuppence a bag" meant bags of "gear"... but hey ~ if only heroin was tuppence a bag.

(I'd probably be using 2000 bags a day...)

PPS LA TOYA JACKSON is on Celebrity Big Brother... hahahaaahaaah!!

AND FINALLY: I don't usually deliberately post up crap (I just have execrable taste) but here for y'all is Julie Andrews chiming away our titular melody...

Thrown

REGULAR READERS may have noticed a sudden change of tone in this blog.

This is down partially to my having discovered ~ through my blog's followers who somehow found me ~ a new set of bloggers either using or going clean, writing about their experience the way I used to ~ when I wasn't drowning in trivia! You can access this new world (new to me) via my "users' blogs" link up top. In a way you could say I'm replying to what many of these people have said. I also feel I need to leave a witness statement of how life is ~ scungy as it may be ~ while I am still using. Or swaying between temporarily on-methadone-clean and back-on-heroin dirty.

I must leave details of where I am, especially as I intend to move away from this place.

I hate being like this. The pain of living stuck between two intentions, totally at the mercy of the whims of my illness hurts too much.

What also depresses me is the realization I've come to ~ via some of your comments @ that Clean is something I might want. And sincerely desire it. But I just don't want it enough. And that hurts me.

When people really turn the corner, they say they would go to any lengths to get where they have to be. I've shown myself unwilling to do this.

Yet I want it. I do want it.

I'm also depressed that methadone doesn't hold me enough. The dosage I'm on should replace all the feelings I can get from heroin enough that some people say that, at this level, they can barely feel heroin at all. Yet this is not the case with me. Some years ago I used to be able to take 70mg a day and feel a bulletproof hold around me. Now the hold feels all too frail and ragged... Perhaps addiction has marched on with sister time...

Nowadays on the methadone I wake feeling like an ice block every single morning. I'm not withdrawing, I'm not "sick"... but I do feel blank and empty and under the weather. Heroin of course takes all this away...

... So I don't know what to do.

I'll leave you with a hamsters song I sing to "Baby" Itchy ~ my One Tame Robbie ~ when I'm feeling dur:

Itchy's covered in fur
Itchy's covered in fur
Eee-aye-a-dairy-mouse
Itchy's covered in fur

Hmmm: hardly liable to win me poet-laureate-hood, is it?

Here's a classic from Youtube... from a Japanese TV show (hence "hamu-STAAA!" CAT AND HAMSTER... this lil' kitty seems to think the winter-white Russian hammy is her OFFSPRING..(!)
And I take it the cat IS a "she"... (somehow looks that way...)



And last but not least, here's something more inspirational I'm sending to my Gran, who's slowly dying of cancer in a nursing home. She's so morphinated she's barely conscious these days. I know William Wordsworth is her favourite poet, so maybe it'll bring back some sparkle from days of yore...

The following lines from Wordsworth

Ode
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

PS WHEN I WAS LOOKING for pictures of a "secret diary" I stumbled across this reference to the Secret Diary of William Byrd... has anyone out there heard of this guy?

Oh and BTW here's the Mamas and Papas: I got Creeque Alley back again (as some of y'all may have noticed, the one on my sidebar hasn't run for about 35,000 years...) so THAT has been replaced by THIS herebelow... which DOES indeed run very well indeed. The clip is from the Ed Sullivan show, which I know OF well but have never seen in my life...

Grotesque

THE DEALER TOOK SO LONG this morning and I was resentfully waiting wound up into ever such a state that, despite over 80mg methadone (which I've been on every day so it's well entrenched in my system) that I found myself vomiting yellow bile. Yet telling myself that I wasn't really "sick", just winding myself up. Bile-retching is a big part of the withdrawal syndrome. But I'm telling myself it also had a lot to do with barely having eaten yesterday, partially because I was sulking due to "no gear".

My head has been shillyshallying both ways between dead-set on not using and "if it was here I'd be doing it right NOW". On the one hand I can put a sustainedly "clean head" on for several days at a time ~ which used to be near-impossible for me. But on the other I'm recognizing more and more the chinks in my armour and the feebleness of my desires to stop. I don't know how I'm ever going to make it happen now; it feels forlorn.

My new year's resolution was one I thought worth working on and that's to say bye-bye to crack. I say little about it here because there's little to say. You go up like a skyrocket. You come down. Most people want more and more and more. I've succeeded in reducing consumption to one £10 rock, once a week. And even if I DO find I have money "spare" that could go on it days later, it does not. Most of this coke gets mixed into heroin, which candifies it up massively. But that means that when I DO have crack I can easily get through a gram of the other in a day, which is way more than I want to be using. And just to explain to non-users: it might be easy to assume that "a gram" means a dosage unit but with heroin this is not the case. In fact a gram of the local street heroin is potent enough to kill a (non-tolerant) family of four. Most junkies would get between three and ten hits from a gram depending on how much they're used to using. I hate the fact I've turned into an opiate sponge. Almost anything I take seems to get soaked right up and barely touches the sides. My aim with heroin, if I can't stop completely, is to use as little as possible. All things are relative, anyhow. The more you take, the more you need. So you may as well take as little as possible ~ then you'll need less.

I got fluorescent vomit all over my notebook, which means I'll have to copy my shorthand lists of "brief forms" and other contractions into the volume I set aside as my "secret diary" (except half what's gone in there has been posted up here!) My searches online have revealed to me that after Mr Gregg's death around 1949, rights to his shorthand were bought by another company, who, through successive editions of the manual, progressively dumbed it down till it was nearly useless. My "simplified" textbook from 1950 is the least dumbed down version but I'm working on converting to the 1929 "Anniversary" version, which is the last edition Mr Gregg worked on and used himself. Writing shorthand is one thing: you've gotta be able to read it back! Hence the practice. I've wanted to learn this art since I was very little indeed and I'm not giving up now. Who knows... Someday I might even get a job out of it..?

Back to my addiction "issues"... thanks for all the comments everyone. I'm just getting tired of all my own words. Fed up of hearing them. But still, I've readlized, I don't have strength enough of desire to turn away. I just hope that meanwhile y'all don't get bored to death!!

Last but not least, purloined from my friend Welshcakes Limoncello's blog (what a funky screen-name!) is this polyglot HAPPY NEW YEAR message!!

Hello 2009!

WELL I HOPE YOU'RE HAVING A HAPPY ONE Y'ALL... did yous all go to great TV-news-captured celebrations? Or just stayed in and got staggering drunk? Or just stayed in and drank half a grape juice? Which is worse? Depends where you're coming from...

Well I "used" yesterday and some urgency told me to get all three hits done and dusted before the fateful chimes (any excuse to use quickly). Which meant I spent most of yesterday evening comatose kind of half hanging off the bed (which is how I always sleep on drugs: if not bolt upright head lolling backwards or in some other odd position...)

I had half a mind to go out and hit the local populace for spare change, the theory being that drunk + red letter day = generous (well it always used to). I've not gone begging in quite some time so that would have felt like a step backwards. Instead I stayed in bed agonizing about this and watched Elton John see in 2009 with celebrity friends blablah...

Can I just say: what on earth was that I spewed out yesterday? Not so much WHAT I wrote but the words... I just looked them over; they went duhduhduhDUDUDUHHH on me. Which is writing in serious need of hacking around. In mitigation, may I say that I DID write the entire post in shorthand. Which involves staring at a page full of what looks like barbed wire HOPING that some words might eventually emerge. It can be a forlorn hope.

Anyway that's about all. I have not used in 2009 (except methadone), and I don't feel that spectacular as a result. My willpowe is wavering and, while we're on "clean" I have realized I'm going to put a hell of a lot more welly into this process than before... and STOP MAKING EXCUSES! Which I am World Expert at...

I was reading a book by an Aussie chick who experimented with heroin after student days... wound up as a street hooker, jumped into the legalized 6-room brothel system they run in Melbourne and became one of their most prized "ladies"... anyway SHE was saying she went right through detox-'n'-rehab after 2 years of daily using and sailed through the withdrawal part. Only when she became hooker extraordinaire did her habit really amp up. My point being that by 2 years I had the most reeking habit on "gear" was so badly addicted it was unreal. Most of this was psychological and that's my point but I couldn't even watch morning television without the most overpowering association to scoring. As I'd turn up 10am at the same person's house each morning Mon-Fri and there we would await "da man" as BBC's daily tripe spewed on. Not to mention eating, sleeping everything else in life being by this time totally tied up with using. It was impossible.

Anyway today I've been drinking weak cyder (someone dropped a full bottle on my road and waste not want not) and as I say not using and where there's life there is hope! Sorry I've got to go my brains are hobbled...

I'M STILL STANDING
OK this one came on last night's Elton-a-thon. I 1st heard this at school (of all places) where this 13 yr old girl stood up and belted it out expressing all that it meant... which is kind of remarkable. But WHO chose this deadbeat-a-delic video? They should be terminated!