Thought for the day: 7am

IT'S just before 7am. I've been up since 10 to 5. Terrible trouble sleeping. I keep waking up again and again in the night. Even when I try and get my head down my brainbox is chattering shite at me. Random words and phrases pinging about. It's like listening to a deranged band of nutters chatting down the mental hospital bar. Radio GaGa.

When I woke up the second timme I watched an episode of the Royle Family and had a fag. Then I pondered on why I had been so depressed. A lot of it had to do with me having a breakdown that turned everything upside down, then finding out I was labelled a schizo. My parents think I have taken it to heart too much. But what would you do if you found out you were a schizophrenic. Hearing voices and all. I haven't heard any lately, apart from the odd murmur. The walls don't talk these days. Point being: all my hopes for a future had instantly vanished. All I could see was myself half mad and overweight, off drugs but terminally lazy. Watching television for the rest of my life. Basically the life I've got now going on for ever. When I was young I had dreams and ambitions. I wanted to get in the Guinness Book of Records. I never thought I was a schizo. Even being bipolar was bad enough. I kept those mood swings hidden from doctors for years. Until they got so extreme I was just annoyed at having to accouht for why my life was a mess (on forms etc), writing "depression and drug addiction" in the medical box and knowing that was far from the entire truth.

I'd just about got my head round the fact that I appeared to be a type 1 bipolar (that's the nutty sort who hear voices); Katherine Zeta Jones is bipolar II which means horrible depression and hypomania which is an exaggerated good mood. Anyway I'd just got my head around the idea that I might actually be a manic depressive, when the doctor tells me I'm schizaffective! Manic depression and schizophrenia at once! I was totally stumped. Despite my persistent elevated mood that one really shut me up. I'd been jabbering away in that office not caring that I was mad. I was really careful not to give an overblown impression of the hallucinations. Left all the best ones out (parking meter turning into a really fit police woman; spectacular full-colour Northern Lights type display in my own house; Barrack Obama talking to me; fantastical psychedelic movies popping out of the walls etc) I never told him any of that. In fact I was quite careful to underline that nothing nutty happened all the time blah blah blah. I couldn't lie. I wasn't in a state to discern what was relevant from what wasn't so I just told all...

Loads of successful people have been bipolar. Ted Turner, founder of CNN; Beethoven; Lord Byron; Vincent Van Gogh; Virginia Woolf to name just four. Bipolar disorder is really trendy. Nobody's scared of it any more. I could still be a successful writer and be invited to lots of bourgeois dinner parties with bipolar. Schizophrenia is a totally different kettle of fish. How many famous schizos can you name? Apart from that bloke from the film A Beautiful Mind?? Yeah don't tell me: I'm going to have to be the first.

Well this is what was on my mind. And all I could think was how schizos are fat and slobby and lazy (basically what I am now). And how, even when I kicked heroin, I was never going to be OK. And how I would live the rest of my life on corned beef, methadone and daytime television. And how I might as well end it all now on the railway line. And how even if I didn't do it now (British trains don't run in the early hours) my lifetime odds of death by suicide were running at around 80%. I wasn't depressed when all this came to me. Just thinking clearly.

So I don't know how to fix my problems. But I'm still not taking heroin and I am cleaning my house.

Anna Grace is clucking off heroin. She actually wants to detox, and the detoxing has given her a manic episode.

I'm neither manic nor depressed. Just undulating. I get really excited over nothing. Then really depressed and want to cry. Then really tired. Then I can't sleep. You know: an in-between stage.

I hope Anna Grace is going to be OK. I thought she was going back down the methadone clinic. She said the local one wouldn't take her on because of her bipolar issues. They insisted on a 90-day rehabilitation sesh before they'd consider her. Anna was all set for a stint in a dual diagnosis place when she bottled out. I'm no-one to talk about bottling out of rehab. I was in twice in one year and ran out the door within days of entry, both times. I wouldn't mind a rehab full of nutters as much as one full of criminals. The criminal type all look down at me these days for having mental problems. Having been in both rehab and the nuthouse, I can vouch that nutters are far easier to get on with than crackhead junkies. At least nutters go mad in different ways. Addicts are so same-same-same they're frankly boring. I couldn't handle going nuts again in front of a bunch of junkies. That's what happens to me in rehab. So I'd have to go to a dual diangosis place, wouldn't I?

I hope Anna does manage to sort her problems. She never seems happy without drugs. Never was happy on them either. She's done far better than me as regards sticking to programmes. I never gave in a clean urine test until literally this year. Anna actually reduced her methadone, switched to Suboxone, which is an excellent treatment for anyone genuinely ready to be clean. She actually followed through on Suboxone until she was 100% clean and serene and sober. Still was miserable afterwards though. I don't know what Anna wants in life. She's been writing memoirs.

I wanted to be a writer too, but I much prefer fiction to fact. That's why Valerie flows from my pen so much more easily than my boring old self. As well as Valerie there's Boomer and Bruce and a new character I've invented but I'll let this person speak for themself when the time is right.

I know this post says nothing knew. But it's what was on my mind tonight. It's half past seven now. I don't know whether or not to go back to bed. I can get to the methadone chemist in the hour. Then that's today over and done with.

WISHING Y'ALL A FANTASTIC WEEKEND!!

While Blogger Was Down....

THIS is what I tapped out sometime yesterday....

BLOGGER’S DOWN so I’m tapping this into Word.

I spent the £20 that could have gone on gear on a Royle Family DVD box set. “Princess Anne: the Divorce Years” is particularly good. Nah, I’m just kidding. The Royle Family, as all Brits will know, is a sitcom about four people who sit around watching telly, smoking cigarettes and eating chocolate biscuits. You get series 1, 2 and 3, three Xmas specials and a documentary all about the making of. That’s every second of the Royle Family ever broadcast. Now there’s a complete 30-film Carry On box set. The Carry On films, for those of you on foreign shores, are ancient British comedies full of very repetitive innuendo. Carry on Doctor, Carry on Nurse and Carry on Camping are the three all-time classics. Last night Carry On At Your Convenience, set in a lavatory factory, was on BBC2.

Well my mood was on an even keel pretty much all day. I had terrible trouble sleeping on Wednesday night. Suddenly, as I was pinging around Morrisons I started feeling hyper. Stayed hyped up all day. Like an idiot I went and bought gear, as I posted. But that’s the last gear I bought. It was really weak and did nothing to chillax me. Not that I really wanted calming down. By two In the morning I was in a really psychedelic mood. Loud psychedelic trance was banging out. I even did a spot of cleaning.

Suddenly I realized it was light outside and I hadn’t been to bed. I got to bed by sometime after six, but the glaring light kept me awake. So I hid under the covers and still got no sleep. It took me something like five hours to actually start sleeping properly. Then I got up after three.

Nearly all my depression has evaporated though I can never be sure how long it’s gone for. Today I felt totally normal until this evening when I suddenly got dog tired. I was watching the Royle family and chain smoking and didn’t want to go to bed too early (I want a sleep cycle back). I’ve had trouble sleeping for some days. I wake up again and again and again in the night.

It’s currently 3:10am. I did go to bed over an hour ago but my head was too full of random thoughts pipping and popping in all directions. Sometimes it can be really entertaining listening to them all, but I’ve been feeling a bit ill. Full of fluctuating energy. Sudden whooshes of energy. Sudden exhaustion. It just means I’m having mood swings, but sometimes I really don’t feel well.

I’m feeling a lot calmer than last night so maybe I’ll be able to get some shut-eye if I have a lie-down around four.

I hope this stuff isn’t too boring. If I actually had a private diary I’d write all this here. I know my sleep-cycles probably aren’t a source of fascination to the world, but I’m supposed to be keeping a mood diary, so I keep it in my blog for ease of access. Least I know where my bloody blog is. A journal in book-form I’d mislay all over the place. I hope the mood stays up and doesn’t fall down yet again. I was starting to feel desperate enough to submit to the dreaded Mood Stabilizers. I’m going to have to tell this doctor of mine about all this depression I’ve just gone through. I’ve had depression for most of my adult life. Not always full-blown extreme depression; maybe unhappiness is a better term for it. But whatever it is, it’s become a way of being and I’m fed up of it.

I decided a few days ago to focus myself on more positive things. Which was well nigh impossible when I was back on heroin and just wanted to curl up and die. Now I’m in my right mind it’s up to me to seek out some new interests. Can’t think up much apart from my Valerie book. Valerie has lifted me from the depths of despair on several occasions. She’s the only person who can make me laugh when I’m in depression. Apart from Anna Grace in Wisconsin.

Anna had an appointment at the methadone clinic on Thursday and I don’t know whether she went, thanks to Blogger being down. Anna got herself totally clean. Came off Suboxone. Then relapsed back on heroin and some of those strong pain pills American junkies jack up: oxycodone and Dilaudid (hydromorphone). Anna has a real thing about Dilaudid, it seems to be her favourite drug. I’ve never tried pain pills. Over here the only opiate commonly available to addicts is heroin. And if you’re in treatment, methadone and Suboxone.

I hope Anna manages to get herself on an even keel soon. She purloined an entire month’s supply of her Dad’s oxys and replaced them with aspirin. Apparently he hasn’t noticed. And she blew all her money on gear. She’s been depressed for as long as I remember, with the odd hyper phase chucked in. She doesn’t ever seem to be truly happy. Who does that remind you of?

Well I’m ploughing on with Project Life. Don’t know how the hell I’m going to do it. Has something to do with repeatedly putting one foot in front of the other, from what I know. My house is still a tip. My housing manager person (at least I think that’s who she is: the Stern Council Lady) tells me just to chuck out a couple of black bags full a week. I’m aiming at one bag a day, if not two.

As for other plans, there’s nowt but a gaping hole. I got so badly disoriented by all the crap that’s gone on since the end of last year, what with psychiatrists and methadone and all, I don’t even know what I want any more. I wasn’t living in the same world everybody else seems to live in. I went into a parallel universe. Now I’m relatively OK it’s time to decide what I am doing.

I was going to write a little book called Little Trotter Donkey Goes Away With The Fairies. About a little horse who accidentally grazes on some magic mushrooms, swirls into a psychedelic vortex and meets some gnomes, trolls, imps, sprites and fawns. I’m not sure WH Smiths will want to put that in their children’s section but hey…

A Mixed Up Day

I WENT INTO ONE in the supermarket this afternoon. My nasty low mood mixed itself into something far funkier. Among the luxury bakery products, I was chuckling away to myself; then by the time I'd reached the fresh veg isle, I had to restrain myself from weeping all over the chilled raddishes. Gradually the depression faded out, and I'm still OK now. Gattina said I should relabel my blog "diary of a rollercoaster". That's how I feel. Alive again. With depression out the window. I just hope I can sustain this into tomorrow.

I bumped into a drunken Irishman I used to know. Last time I met him it was first thing Monday morning. He was vomiting into the gutter. My skin was crawling and I was trying to keep it together to just get home and prong the **** into me to feel OK again. A case of desperation shared being a desperation doubled. Today, he made me laugh and laugh. We debated the trials and traumas of crack-ho girlfriends. I described the grossness of "stirring the porridge". We high-fived over that one.

He was bemoaning the loss of his ex-girlfriend of fifteen years, who'd suddenly run off without warning with a random black man. I told him how surprised I was, as they'd made such a good couple. I didn't tell him that, stoned off her head on gear, his ex girlfriend looked like one of Jim Henson's Muppets. He told me I was looking really well because I'm rosy cheeked and have put weight on. I couldn't actually return the compliment because he was all over the place on drink and Valium and his teeth were in a dreadful state. He said he'd been off drugs for six months. "'Cept when someone like you brings round an Arfur..." (that's a half a sixteenth; about 0.875g) of crack. Except he couldn't consider crack without drink and Valium and a good dose of brown, "coz it puts your head all over the place".

Well I let myself down yet again. Yes, heroin. Yes again. Yes I'm bored. Bored and disappointed and wondering why why why why why? Again. Dealer gave me two £15 bags for £20. He'd kept me waiting for quite some time. I'd been so entertained I'd barely noticed.

I feel like such an idiot for using gear. Half of me wanted to lie here, evade the matter or post up something irrelevant and distracting. I feel like a weakling and a hypocrite for having given in to a momentary craving when I was feeling fine anyway. The gear has barely altered my mood. It didn't need altering. I was fine already. I won't ever accept excuses from myself for using heroin: but today I'm absolutely stumped as to why I did it. This is yet another day longer in active addiction. Active addiction is misery to look back on. It's ruined my life. I want out. Despite what I've done, I still want out.

The stark reality of Rehab is staring me in the face ~ yet again. Unless I can kick in this habit, the habit of injecting street heroin when I have ample methadone to cover myself. I can't see any other choice. Unless I can pull myself together there's no choice I can conceive of.

I just hope I can say this is the last of this depression. It's been dogging me now for weeks. Using heroin on top of it only made me more miserable. Chemistry aside: being a drug addict is a miseralbe life. All I want now is to leave it behind. It's gonna take all my strength to do it.

2 TOP TUNES:

let's goa way
laughing Buddha: tapu



exalted!
hardtechno anthem

Highway to Methadone

I TOOK A LITTLE BIT OF HEROIN IN THE MORNING, so I failed there. Just as I was about to meet the man another dealer phoned me. He would have bigger, stronger stuff. But I was still intending to give up so I bought the weak stuff anyway. I don't care for gear any more. I wish I had the strength to stop it. Yet my head is telling me tomorrow tomorrow. Tomorrow will be OK because I can go see this other guy, wait in a carpark for an hour. Get a little bag of magic. Not be able to find a vein when I get back. Waste £15. Keep myself mired in active intravenous drug addiction for one day more... See it doesn't seem worth it. But if I don't do that, tomorrow I will have nothing to live for at all.

When I wake up in the morning I lie in bed for over an hour, not wanting to move. Nagging myself that I have to get to the post office to get money to score. Or to the chemist. To get methadone over and done with. When all the time I stink, I'm filthy. My clothes are horrible. I do actually use the shower, but I still feel dirty.

My head is all over the place. I get random thoughts and phrases filtering in, or echoing in the background. This doesn't bother me, but I know it's probably not meant to be good. The pills would stop it happening. The pills are a huge great issue. I don't know what to do about them (risperidone, the antipsychotic). Really I need something that's going to make me less depressed. I need to see that doctor. My worker said he would get me an appointment but I didn't really want to see any dr. But now I need to. On the one hand I don't feel well; on the other I'm not even sure what's wrong; if anything is wrong; what's happening.

I don't want to take methadone either. I looked back and realized the times when I was most paranoid, lost it, felt worst were the times it was methadone I was taking, not heroin.

This isn't my normal gripe about methadone making you feel flat and heroin being an antidepressant... blah blah blah. I'm talking about methadone poisoning my mind. Strange coincidence that it should be government sponsored and a poison. I need to get off it and quick.

For tomorrow I am trying to think out a strategy for how to face the day without scoring. It's actually the ritual of scoring and using that seems to fix me more than the actual drug. The heroin I can barely feel because a lot of it's weak. When it's strong it feels brilliant for all of about five minutes. Then I feel not much better than before. I'm not talking gear sickness wise, I'm talking about mental wellbeing wise. I absolutely have to get the gear into a vein to feel it. The other methods of taking it: subcutaneous or intramuscular injection: I barely feel anything at all. Smoking (running it along foil) has an even weaker effect and chasing brown around foil takes ages, tastes gross and stains the teeth. You can snort heroin but that is weaker still. And it really gets your nose. Ever since I first picked up a needle (which was several months into using every day) I had the so-called needle-fixation. My veins are in truly dire shape; practically all gone.

But there is one alternative. I could get a 2ml barrel with a detachable long blue needle ~ a horror film needle ~ and stick this directly into the crook of my thigh (my femoral my "groin"). The thought of doing this makes me feel sick. A lot of people who inject here get DVTs and even lose legs.

I wouldn't want to give a second wind to my injecting career now when really I want to drop the whole thing.

I remember last time I stopped it I looked at my scar-ridden ankle and my mottled foot and thought "you never have to stick a needle in there again. Ever."

If none of this self-motivation works I'm going to have to do rehab, which I'm terrified of. I'll lose the place I'm in andI will be made homeless. I've never stuck out rehab for more than three or four days. Which had nothing to do with the rehabilitation as such and everything to do with detoxing and not sleeping at all and feeling lousy. Not so much physically, but mentally. I don't want to do rehab.

Which means I have no option but methadone. I don't "think" it is poisoning me by the way, but it is pretty suspicious that whenever I've relied on it more, I've been stabilized less. Why is this? Methadone is supposed to restore sanity and give lives back. You're not supposed to suddenly get tuned into channel 999 and have brains deluged with crap. You're not supposed to feel that life is over. Life is meant to be just beginning, not ending.

So I don't understand all this. I felt before that by sticking to that vile green syrup I had at least crossed one bridge. Because methadone doesn't work well at making you feel OK, I was closer towards being heroin clean, because heroin, which makes you feel fantastic, was out of my body and here was something doing very little crutch wise. All the methadone does for me is stops me being physically sick. I don't understand why it makes me mentally ill (or am I mentally ill? Is it just normality I cannot tolerate?). Whatever's going on, something is wrong and I don't know what.

Well I don't know what I'm banging on about here. I hope this doesn't sound like a load of ranting paranoia because I'm trying to make a serious point. Something isn't right.



PS I do understand the contradiction: "heroin barely does anything"; "heroin makes you feel fantastic". It's done both at different times.

BLACK EYED PEAS: WHERE IS THE LOVE
only song I know of that pleads direct to God "father father ... send some guidance from above..."
i got into this when i was CLEAN, on subutex and super-intense about everything... love this track

Rock Bottom?

I WOKE UP AROUND 11:30 totally unable to face the day. The Deer Hunter DVD was playing that Spanish Guitar tune "Cavatina" around and around. I felt very sad and numerous miserable thoughts went through my head. About depressed mothers who kill their children. About the dead. I remembered back to yesterday and my commitment to buy more heroin. The last thing I felt was "whoopee". I couldn't face the shower, the post office, or dealing with this bastard drug dealer. Couldn't face today or any other day. I thought about NA and hitting rock bottom. They say you must first hit bottom in order to cast off your dependency on drugs and learn to live again.

(Though there's no "again" about it.)

There is no rock at the bottom. Merely shadows stretching down and down into infinity. Your personal bottom is as low as you can bear to go. Someone, somewhere will always have gone lower. Others will have given up without ever descending half as far as you. Suffering is relative. It's a purely personal thing.

I'm annoyed with Narcotics Anonymous for judging me as high on drugs when I was drug-free and mentally unwell. Even my own family seemed to think I was abusing drugs of some mysterious kind. I've got to the point of not caring what anybody thinks on this, no matter who they are.

My psychiatrist believed me. Naomi, the dual-diagnosis lady believed me. I took drugs tests that proved when I was at my most addled, that I was on METHADONE ONLY. No heroin. No speed or crack. Certainly no hashish and it really puzzled me when someone close to me brought that one up. If they knew me, they'd know me passionate aversion to the Evil Weed. (Why touch heroin if a nasty spliff will mellow you out? I gave up toking years ago because it made me anything except mellow.)

The only nonprescribed drug I took during this period was Librium. Blue and white capsules that looked indistinguishable from Prozac. I felt nothing at all off this stuff, but it's supposed to help you kick drinking. Even that had sunk almost within the British Government's recommended safe consumption limit.

It's up to me to help myself.

There are professionals who can help me, but they can't live my life for me. Narcotics Anonymous have been mooted as an option. But I don't feel understood or accepted by NA as a group. They are a group of laypeople who deal in Recovery. Recovery is when you abstain from drugs, detoxing if necessary. And far from merely not using again, you fill the void with a new passtime: learning to live life on life's terms.

My problem with NA has been their focus on addiction as the cause of all ills. My ills began before I was ever a drug addict. I got addicted to heroin aged 28. Before that I used it so infrequently ~ with weeks at a time between bouts of using. They were bouts because a £20 bag lasted me five afternoons, and I was only smoking it. I used a new introduction to a new dealer every time I scored. The old one wouldn't have remembered me.

Before I became a drug-addict, I'd done years without drugs. Miserable years. My chronic fatigue syndrome years were drug-free: what substance could I tolerate then? I felt worse than ever.

The first couple of years when I did dabble were the most miserable of all; these were my university years, and depression ruined them utterly. I dropped acid while clinically depressed and had bad trips. I tried Ecstasy and felt marvellous. Then I came down from the heavenly high, and felt worse than ever before. Speed at one time seemed an almost-answer. It raised me up to a level where I felt I saw things clearly. Only to drop me down so precipitously I could barely function at all during the aftermath. The evil cannabis was ubiquitous among students, but it brought on acid flashbacks. Yet I craved spliffs, believed I was getting a minor drug problem. Miraculously I cured myself when I took to getting my nicotine hit from ordinary cigarettes that didn't bamboozle the brains. All the joys of smoking without paranoia, fear, confusion, hallucinations.

I still had chronic fatigue syndrome when I took to regular nightclubbing. Psychedelic trance was the music of the day. I hadn't the energy to dance all night, so I spent my nights in superbly-appointed chillout rooms talking rubbish to people from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, Botswana, Italy and France. Ecstasy was the only drug that really gave me confidence. I took it in moderation. Most of us did. E doesn't mix with alcohol. Pouring two pints into a one pint pot won't get it any fuller. Once you've gone as high as Ecstasy will take you, you start going sideways, an effect that can be attained more cheaply and less dangerously on fewer pills and a sparkling of magic mushrooms. I was known as somebody who could stay out all night on nothing ~ not even drink. I always had the option of something that would set the night off with a bang, but I didn't always want it.

My mental health was still shaky. I know that Ecstasy damaged it in the late 90s, just as cannabis had in the early 90s. As my psychiatrist said "you and drugs and drink do not mix".

I know I shouldn't take any drugs at all. I don't even "want to" any more. None of the substances from my past are a temptation to me. Ecstasy would be a good case in point. It takes an hour to come on. I never enjoyed taking it anywhere except at a dance party. The peak effects from one moderate dose last about four hours but you're still buzzing slightly the next day. I haven't been out raving in over a decade and thus haven't touched E. There never was a drug I took anytime, anyplace, anywhere... until heroin got its claws into me.

Trust me, my recent use of heroin has been far more out of desperation than indulgence. It started out as what I saw as daring experimentation ~ nearly all of my friends would have disapproved, if only they'd known ~ it turned into a habit so entrenched I could not survive a day without it. They say that methadone gives stability. Some people are so stable on the stuff they can even hold down a full-time job on it. But methadone gave me no such stability. Days on the Mean Green were days spent existing, not living. At some time, at some point along the way, I realized I was merely existing on heroin too. The drug that once had turned life into Christmas every day had turned me into a wreck. Existence was drab beyond words. While heroin was depressing, methadone was suicidally miserable. I no longer have "fun" on heroin. I take it grudgingly. I deplore methadone and only take it as the greater of two evils. But a legal and at least semi-respectable evil. All I can say about methadone is that to a desperate addict, it's better than nothing. And of course, I'd rather be on nothing at all.

If only I'd embraced today's first feelings on the matter, I might have moved just one solitary step forward. Trisha Goddard, the former talkshow hostess, used to talk about embracing your depression. But I don't want to "embrace" anything. I don't just feel miserable, I feel confused. Should I embrace this confusion too? Icebergs clashing in my brains. The want of risperidone pills speaks to me aloud. It doesn't frighten me, but I know my doctor won't be very impressed when he finds out I stopped taking them. Risperidone was prescribed as an antimanic, antipsychotic. It's not an antidepressant. People with bipolar issues aren't generally prescribed antidepressants, which raise the mood. The treatment of choice is generally a mood stabilizer. I've been threatened with these, but I have issues surrounding them. So I don't know what to do.

Depression makes me realize life isn't about fun or enjoyment.

I have work to do. I hate cleaning. No sense of achievement ever came from doing it, at least not in recent times. Yet I decided to clean my house; and to do it for myself. Not for the stern lady who comes round from the council who seems to think the way I live is unacceptable. I'm doing it for me. If I had somebody else to keep my house clean and tidy for, trust me, my home would be spotless. But what's the point doing anything for myself? I've not been able to motivate myself this way in a long, long while. So I'm venturing on to fresh fields with this one.

I have to do what I realized I'd have to when I woke up this morning to a litany of ideas of doom and gloom and destruction. I shall walk away from this. There is no choice. This is what I shall do.

I never intend to embrace my depression. I intend to leave it far behind. It doesn't matter whether or not the whys and wherefores of the matter ever become clear to me. At the moment they seem utterly incomprehensible, so pondering them is an exercise in particular futility. I'm doing what I was taught to do as a very small child when my Dad took me hillwalking. You put one foot in front of the other. No matter what, you keep going. I don't know where I'm going, but I know what I'm going away from. And I'll get there in the end.


STANLEY MYERS: CAVATINA
The Deer Hunter music

Corned Beef Hash

THAT LAZY COW ANNA GRACE HASN'T POSTED ANYTHING TODAY. Probably in a heroin-induced stupor. Or sick as a parrot due to a lack of gear.

I scored a £10 bag this morning to go with my shopping (corned beef, cyder, cigarettes). I borrowed £20 off someone till Monday morning.

The £10 bag knocked me unconscious all day. Really good stuff it was. I'm buying more tomorrow. Told you I would wait till Monday to decide whether to go with antidepressants (street heroin) or death (a train).

When I looked at what I had posted I thought "why did you say all this". I know it was true and all but still. I suppose I wanted people to get used to the idea that I wasn't long for this world.

I only feel OK now because I've been drinking. The film The Deer Hunter is on. It's that scene when they're in the water and the helecopter only picks up one of them. So cold and wet and disappointed. Then the Vietnamese captors force them to play Russian roulette. Gun to the head. Piles of money (that would be the Vietnamese dong). Lots of jabbering in SE Asian dialects. Must be like Valerie's house when the hungry kids come home from school.

Not much else to put. I've done a spot of cleaning. Head cloudy. Head all over the place. Head much better now alcohol is in it. Now I feel clear.

I know the corned beef diet isn't a good one. Keeping myself alive has hardly been a recent priority which means eating fills me with conflict. I'm going to eat a bit of salad anyway. Salad's supposed to be good for you and it's really low in calories.

I wish Anna Grace Old would get in touch. Her dog has mites! She thinks the dog caught them off a mouse!

Tonkie Ears my pet wild mouse has deserted me well and truly so it's all depressing here. My back's better so cleaning will begin in ernest. My family say I should do things I enjoy but I enjoy nothing. Only thing that induced me into cleaning was that it's a torture and suffering is what life is all about. I used that reasoning and it worked. I got a binbag full of crap outside.

Now I got to go; it's 2:16am.

My Experience With Bipolar Schizoaffective Disorder: Mental Situation Explained

LOOKING BACK OVER MY LAST FEW POSTS, how miserable was I?! Misery and suicidal ideation left, right and centre. Yes I have been very unhappy of late. I basically feel ill all the time. And yet I don't feel I'm depressed. I feel like nothing is wrong with me, that I'm a time-waster, a malingerer and a fraud and I don't deserve help. Yet looking at my life I'm in desperate need of something. Most people would call it "help". But how can I accept it?

I question why on earth I ran to a doctor in my "elevated mood" of yore.

But that isn't true. I didn't run to any doctor while manic. What happened was I went manic-depressed ~ BOTH in the same week. The walls started talking to me LOUD. I had the most severely mislaid lost weekend of my life. My sense of hearing suddenly went ten times more acute than normal. It was like living in a house without walls. Everything anyone said or did in any room I heard full-on, like the bizarrest radio play. Everybody on the street. My next door neighbours even. I heard conversations, chatter, sex and a sawing noise like somebody constantly going at a piece of wood. When cars rushed down the street they whooshed echoing into a cyberdelic vortex of sound. And I was hallucinating auditorily vividly. At one point I heard voices speaking Spanish and Chinese. At another it was as if somebody had strewn fifty or so radios all on different channels spewing music, spouting speech all babbling and jangling at once. My mood zoomed and soared and I saw visual spectaculars: the northern lights in full colour in my own living room. This is the most floridly psychotic I have ever been. Although I'd woken up feeling so dire I lay on the floor for four hours before eventually mustering energy to get out of bed, have a cursory shower and heave myself up the road to collect methadone.



I couldn't sleep all weekend. Neither could I eat. I remember drinking tomato soup straight from the tin, cold. Something that looked like a cross between fur and grass was growing out of the top. I knew it wasn't actually there, but that didn't help it go away.

Up and down, twisting in and out my moods dipped and soared. I was cycling in what psychiatrists call a type of mixed bipolar state. And I wasn't on drugs. I was NOT on drugs, this is how my brain reacted to "normality". This is what kept me using for so many years. Untoward mental symptoms, only now they'd gone truly spectacular.

The next few days I felt not only down but injured. I curled up in a chair by day seeing visions of myself in prison, full of guilt, imprisoned for the rest of my life. I didn't want to die: my life was over already.

One day I was perfectly blank. Another day I was depressed. Some friends came round wanting to score. I was totally averse to drugs by this time. They used my dealer and I partook nothing. But I got into their car and experienced a rush like suddenly coming up on Ecstasy full-on. I couldn't stop babbling.The more stressed I got ~ and I got very stressed indeed ~ the higher my mood soared. Nothing this intense had ever happened to me before.

I knew that first weekend that something had gone drastically wrong. I phoned my Mum who was already shocked, having seen me bombed out of my head on dodgy benzoated heroin. She had phoned my druggieworker in horror so they had a dialogue going. I told my Mum to tell my Worker I had been hearing voices. The worker called me on Monday morning. I got a psychiatrist's appointment that Thursday. Seeing a psychiatrist is always stressful. I was particularly stressed. On the ride down a black girl was very obviously talking about me and insulting me repeatedly. I was very angry and kept my hands to myself though I felt like throwing her downstairs. I paced back and forth in the medical building, knowing it would hype me up but destroy anxiety. By the time the doctor saw me I was more hyper than I realized. If you want to see the state I was in watch the video on my sidebar "manic episode: Trisch goes nuts" ~ I was in that type of state. A markedly elevated mood, racing thoughts, rapid speech. Knowing the doctor wanted to know what happened, how much, how long, how intense, what it felt like, how I felt, I told him all this in one uninterrupted stream of consciousness. He only asked three questions in the entire session. To my ranting banging "you can't say I'm manic; I've only been like this six days and the diagnostic criteria say seven" he replied "what do you know about schizophrenia?" I answered "it's not caused by a mood and it's a psychosis"... At home his question came back to haunt me and I wondered whether I did have schizophrenia. And I cried.

I stayed off heroin, went down into a depression. Went back on heroin for a week. Wasn't impressed. Back to methadone. My mood was still cycling. One Sunday I was depressed, hearing voices and wandering aimlessly on the streets, too unhappy to enter my own front door. I went home, slept and woke up the next day in a markedly elevated mood. I remember queueing for my money in the post office. By the till they have shiny bags covered in rainbow holograms. One had acid-smiley faces. I was transfixed by the bright colours and depth of texture. I felt wonderful and sensual, the way I used to on Ecstasy. Though I would never in a million years have dropped an E in order to appreciate goods in the post office!

I'm not sure I slept that night. Next morning my hearing had gone hyper-acute again. A man turned up on our garden path jabbering into a mobile phone about having moved my bed around. I lay there thinking WHAT??! All day, I felt irritable, angry. As I was about to leave for NA I heard two voices. In one ear "nervous breakdown"; in the other "schizophrenia". Schizophrenia again. This put me on a real downer. I stomped down the road, caught the bus and endured loud conversations about my background, my reputation, my school records from other passengers. At this time I was getting well meaning but off-beam comments telling me to go to NA or AA every single day. I don't think anyone realized what I was actually going through. One person even said "I used to hear voices too on my way to meetings" this same person criticized me for sitting in a meeting for five minutes then upping and leaving. Maybe their mental condition was markedly different from mine. But hallucinating floridly and poor attentionspan tend to go hand in hand. We were cooped together in this meeting. Everyone smelled of periods and semen. I thought the man next to me was going to pick my pocket. The man giving the chair kept staring at me. And the meeting was so packed there was a chair in the way of the door. I couldn't stuck this out for nearly 20 minutes and eventually left, causing marked disturbance. But I didn't care. I just needed fresh air.

I didn't sleep at all that night. My mood soared higher and higher. My house was a mess and I was supposed to be cleaning it but I couldn't focus myself enough to clean anything. There used to be a dual-diagnosis meeting I always referred to as Nutter Club. It took place once a week. Naomi, the lady who runs it is expert at dealing with people with severe mental health issues. Most people there seemed to be bipolar. A couple of schizophrenics turned up, but they say far less. Naomi had met me and we'd spoken in depth a few times over the previous couple of years. She knew that I believed I had something bipolar going on. Not necessarily bipolar disorder. But I was definitely on the so-called "bipolar spectrum" as it's very trendily known nowadays.



I remember her saying one time between the florid stage of my condition and my actually getting a diagnosis "you know and I know that it's not drug-related but you've got to stay away from everything so the doctor knows that too". This particular comment came back to haunt me. On the one hand I didn't want to be thought of as a druggie timewaster, going nuts because I'd used too much. On the other I was terrified of the term "bipolar disorder" I didn't want the label slapped across my forehead. I didn't even consider that it could have been something else, something worse...

I was in such a state this day I went to the nutter club. I had been dancing about my kitchen in a state of disarray. My clothes were dirty, my hair unwashed; I was thoroughly unkempt. I had great difficulty getting myself and my keys and my Oyster card (for the bus) and a little bit of money and my phone all in my pockets with my brain flying all over the place at several thousand miles per hour, on no sleep (which I didn't really need, though it felt strange to someone used to sleeping sixteen hours or more a day in my depressions...) I arrived at the nutter club thinking my mood was fairly normal, that I was just a bit hyped up. In a group with three other nutters I was unable to contain myself from laughing hysterically. People tried to talk and I kept stopping them saying WHAT??! They might as well have been talking backwards: gibberish. Naomi said "look I think you need to be seen by a doctor" so the meeting closed early and she took me to the mental hospital which was just down the road. I kept asking "do I have to speak as slowly as possible and not wave my arms about?" (ie not act manic) she said "oh no they're so full you don't have to worry about being sectioned" (involuntarily committed). The only thing that could have got me sectioned, as I understand it, would be direct, focused threats of violence or active suicidal behaviour with a specific plan. I was seeing this doctor because I had known for years that something was wrong, that I'd had bipolar symptoms and nobody listened. Nobody took me seriously. i got the distinct impression they thought I was lying. Trying to make myself seem more interesting.

In the mental reception my mood soared higher than ever before. Naomi introduced me to a colleague who looked just like a woman off the television. I peed in a cup and sure enough: no speed, no crack, no cannabis. Nothing except heroin METHADONE and benzos, both of which are downers, not uppers. The benzos were from my attempt a week earlier to give up alcohol for once and for all. But I never managed it.

Naomi and TV Girl said goodbye and I was left with a depressed middle aged man and a depressed black girl who kept phoning someone and screaming her boring personal problems down the phone.

Meanwhile my head was going more manic than it had ever gone before. I went through double doors to a corridor where the walls and doors and ceiling were echoing with scores of conversations. My head went from racing into complete overdrive. The words in my head broke off. So that "I'm going too fast" might stop with "going", the "-ing" broke off: ing-ing-ing-ing-in-in-in-INININININ" whooshing round with spectacular speed.I was losing my mind and the only way I could keep a grip was by yelling these syllables as my head disintegrated into random noise.

I calmed myself down by running through the alphabet out loud ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO.... over and over again. Pacing back and forth avoiding the bad letters. A is for acid, that's bad. B is for brown ~ heroin. That's bad. C is like the sea. It's brilliant in the sun; it's calm. That's good. I flew through them quickly and the black girl was staring at me. I didn't care. And I knew the nurses wouldn't be observing me.

Eventually I saw a kindly man who introduced himself as a psychiatric social worker. He pointed out, very patiently, that we had 45 minutes to take my entire psychiatric history. This was quite some challenge. When was I first depressed? In childhood. In my teens. It first became a major problem at university. Suicide? Yes twice. This got me raging about tetracyclic antidepressants. I took 8 pills and a bottle of vodka. Then I thought "fuck it" and downed a bottle of sixty heavy strength lofepramine. I puked them up almost straight away. The coating was still on the pills in the vomit which was everywhere. All over the floor. On my clothing. Down my hair.

If only I'd gone for Prothiaden/dothiepin I might be dead now. Merely touching on this subject sent me crazy with pent up anger, self-hatred, frustration and rage. I had to enumerate every upsetting, depressing experience. Being yelled at on railway station platforms by people who thought I was going to jump. Being waved at BY THE DRIVER of a high speed train. I've mentioned this before but it gets me to this day. How did he see me? How did he know at close to one hundred miles per hour that I, acting as normally as anybody in such a situation could, wanted to kill myself under a train?

When my depression reached one of its all-time lows I had a persistent idea that the train would hit me and I wouldn't really die. I'd just lie on the trackside in the cold, in the rain, in agony forever, trains rushing past and nobody ever healing me.

Having to dredge through this psychiatric history in the highly impressionable manic state was traumatic beyond words. Now that I FINALLY have a psychiatrist and proper notes and a diagnosis etc etc etc I should never ever have to go through this again. If I ever had to do it in an emergency situation I think I would walk out rather than seek treatment. It's just not worth recalling all that. People seem to assume that I dwell on my past. But I don't. I only dwell as I write. Then I'm in another zone.

Mild thought echo: age 23. Mild antidepressant-induced hypomania: age 23. Natural hypomania: age 27. First heard voices: early 30s.

A long, slow, slide downwards.

The psychiatrist looked stunningly beautiful. Her legs were shiny. The lights outside looked amazing. She asked more questions; this time about the present: how fast was I? How high? How irritated? How many voices? What did they say? How little sleep? She prescribed zopiclone 7.5mg ~ the best sleeping pill I've ever tried.

I walked for two hours then took the bus home. This night I slept for all of five hours. I hadn't slept this long in days. Next day I was even more euphoric. I felt grandiose and grand. I was out of this world. The world was left behind. I hate this world in both phases of my "illness" I never want to be in it.

The mania intensified until I felt like a tiger roaring. I swaggered up and down the streets. When people crossed me, as they often did, it was sufficient merely to glare at them. They seemed to spring backwards. People seemed to make way, clear paths, back off. Yes they looked terrified, but that was a new thing and it felt fantastic. A confirmation of my higher power.

I was obsessed by energy and power. My willingness to drop drugs turned into an aversion for drugs of all kinds. Taking crack or E or speed was the saddest thing you could do. By this time I'd gone higher than I'd ever been on any drug. The drugs seemed a pale imitation of reality. I tried heroin towards the end of the mania and it did little except make me sleepy and racy at the same time.

Over the weeks my mood went through a roughly seven day cycle. Seven days flying high; seven days lower. Sometimes hypomanic, sometimes vaguely depressed. Then up again. I thought this would never end.

My first few days of mania were by far the most intense. My psychiatrist prescribed the antipsychotic risperidone. As I came down gradually over the weeks it began to eat away at me that I didn't even know the name of this very obvious mental condition. I thought it was bipolar. I could see that I was high sometimes; low at other times. Surely that was bipolar disorder? No. The S-word returned to haunt me. SCHIZOAFFECTIVE. That's what my doctor, a consultant psychiatrist, thinks I am. Meaning I matched the full diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia and mania simultaneously. He said my psychosis was more florid than most manic psychosis. I think he also recognized my longstanding issues of self-care. People have long been deceived because I'm articulate, that because I'm able to talk and to touch type that it somehow follows that my house will be in order, my life will be in order that all will be perfect. it's not perfect; it's a mess. During the worst of my illness I couldn't even handle money. I just lost it. Keeping track of my housekeys was a major hassle.

Most people who go manic feel sociable and sexy. I felt neither. I was just as reclusive manic as depressed. I tried to use my hyperosity and energy to clear up my scruffy house, but I couldn't stick with it. Unsociability and avolition are key characteristics of schizophrenia. If you can be manic and still have these things going on they're extremely deep seated. Realizing this has done nothing to help my recent depression. I know I can't choose my illness from a psychiatric Chinese takeaway menu. Though I cried because I had schizophrenia, there are still a thousand physical illnesses I'd less rather have. By itself schizophrenia isn't necessarily a horrible condition. It makes me feel dissociated, unreal, bizarre and poetic. Occasionally I feel paranoid, but nearly always in public places. When I'm on my own I'm OK. It's a big reason why I keep myself to myself. Other people only bring me down.

I've been feeling depressed for several weeks now; it's not the worst depression in the world but it will not shift. It won't go away. It's eroding my self-esteem, making me feel worthless and guilty. Making me want to be dead. I've spent years in this state, so it's like Welcome Home.

This is the state that kept me using heroin for so long. I used every day I could afford to last week. Which puts me into desperation. Addicted and stuck, not coping, back on heroin a drug that I gave up for weeks on end during mania... back in the morass. I can't cope. I don't want to go on. I really can't cope, I'm not coping at all. I'm thoroughly dirty, living in a mess that the council send a sterm lady once a month to complain about. I'm waiting to be housed in a mental health hostel because my coping skills are so bad. I'm 39 years old yet life is reelling backwards. I've done the exact opposite of scrounging. None of the help that was meant to be out there for me came until I had a full-blown psychotic break. I know of people who have faked schizophrenia and psychosis to get housed, to get sick benefit and DLA and they make me so angry because even getting to my appointments feels like a major stress, yet these people are acting, they're quite capable. That's why I feel like I should be dead, I'm only a drain on society. If they cut off my money I couldn't work because there's no job you can do at your own pace. No job that accommodates someone who sleeps more than sixteen hours and NEEDS that sleep, every single day when the depression intensifies. I'd have to keep myself clean and tidy and get there on time. I can't handle looking people in the eye. I deceive people on the phone because I modulate my voice, but I can't do face to face when Im sick.

The jobs I'd most like to do are writer of novels which I'd be able to do even when quite sick. Even when I can't focus to follow a book by another person, I'm able to write ~ as you see from my blog. I don't believe I'm the greatest but I do have a uniqueness and that's what I'd aim to harness.

In more down-to-earth jobs painter-decorator is one I'd like to do. Many years ago I had an intuition that whatever career I went for, it'd have to be low stress. This coincides with all the advice I've read about schizoaffective disorder. Stress makes my condition very much worse. In mania I literally feel something like an accelerator, foot to the floor and a WHOOOSH!! In a normal mood, which I'm hardly ever in, I get horrible anxiety. And I still can have psychotic experiences when I'm in a normal mood. This is how my condition differs from bipolar disorder, where the psychosis occurs only at the polar extremes of mood. In depression everything feels like too much and I can't take it on.

Anna Grace and I have a lot in common. Anna has several years' history of intravenous opiate abuse. Tar heroin, white heroin and Dilaudid (prescription hydromorphone) being her favourite drugs. Her mental diagnosis is bipolar disorder but she's like me. Nearly always noticably up or down. Hardly ever "normal".



Most people with bipolar have episodes, which last weeks. But they end and the mood between episodes is neither low nor high: it's totally normal. But Anna and I are always depressed and when we're not depressed we're manic or at least hyper. We've both had psychosis. Neither of us function very well off opiates. Only problem is, Anna lives 3851 miles away in Green Bay, Wisconsin. We would like to live together in New York City, but short of a massive lottery win, whats going to make that happen?

Anna is my cyberwife. She's cheating on me with some guy called Jess who does bootycalls, as she calls them. Of course this isn't unfaithfulness, there can be no chastity or commitment over 3851 miles' distance. Still, if I meet Jess in a manic episode I will punch his lights out.

Now you've read some of the story of my mental health. I'm not always sure I'm ill. When guilt gets me bad I can feel like I deserve unhappiness. When I really get severely depressed, which is rare for me, I believe I'm in spiritual crisis rather than depression as such. In the lowest of the lows life is over; there is no life. My highs took me higher than drugs. A feeling of connectedness, of spirituality as my thoughts exploded in starbursts. Impervious to weariness, my body seemed to be turning from physical flesh into spirit. That's what I wanted most of all: to be out of this world. As I say, I hate this world at all times. I don't want to be in it, I want to be out of it. It's the only way of coping I know of.

MANIC EPISODE: "TRISCH GOES NUTS"
Knowing she was going to spend all day cooped up in a car, she was letting off steam before a road trip... The comments at Youtube contain a lot of doubters but this is the only film I've seen captures true manic behaviour:~


FUN WITH BIRDS ON THE BEACH
... and here's the sane Trisch with some very entertaining birds



PS: I've found a new blog by Jane, the mother of a freshly detoxed addict who's troubled by anxiety, depression and insomnia. He's opiate-clean but in a very vulnerable situation. Check out her blog and give Jane some moral support: http://janeinsearchofsanity.blogspot.com.

5am SCORE!

IT'S 5:44 I SCORED ABOUT 45 MINS ago and I'm still feeling pretty good. I spent all of £1.59 on my substance of choice. It was corned beef from the local shop.

Why did I write all that crap I posted earlier. It's true it was what was circling round my brains at the time but I just read it back and it's SO depressing. I'm trying to keep my thoughts on positive things. The only positive things I have are Boomer and Valerie. Boomer from Yuma gives Anna Grace Venom heroin in exchange for sex when she goes down to Arizona. Valerie is the Housewife Superstar Heroin Queen of Australia. She has a bouffanted Margaret Thatcher hairdo, a French manicure, wears treble strings of pearls... and imports ten tonnes of China White heroin into Australia and New Zealand annually. Her beer-drinking crack-smoking husband Bruce invests the money in what Valerie terms "respectable enterprises: gambling parlours, whorehouses and strip-joints". I can't really think of anything else to write about. Valerie will be furious for me mentioning her and I'll probably get another death-threat for writing this, but hey.

Actually writing is the only thing I can still do when I'm down. Nothing much else gets done at all! I'm stewing already about having to lumber down that chemist's shop to pick up a weekend supply of methadone at nine o'clock. I hate going in there being judged as an antipsychotic-blitzed junkie. When the doc-doc does prescribe a mood stabilizer which he probably will, they'll have even more to laugh about. My drugs worker is making an appointment with the dr which I don't really want. I told him I wasn't really severely depressed or ill or anything, just lazy. Wish I'd kept my big mouth shut now. I was just stewing about being labelled schizo then having looked up the symptoms and seeing I had the "negative" ones. Negative symptoms is a medicalized term for damn laziness. So I'm afflicted with laziness but I can't break out of it. I've tried and tried but I just can't. And I never used to be a layabout, by the way. I somehow turned into one and can't stop it. That's one big reason I never truly got on with the potheads at university. They seemed to revel in lazing around doing nothing. My attitude to life was you had to set goals and achieve them. And I wanted to be extraordinary, not ordinary. An extraordinary person is one who produces extraordinary things. What have I done at all? Got myself addicted to heroin. Felt OK for the first time in my life (early childhood excepting). Now I can't get used to feeling totally un-OK. It's for THIS reason I say I don't really care about losing my mind to a manic episode. Least mania burns brightly and is creative and loud and jazzy and FUN. Heroin is frankly boring. A drug for people in pain (which is why I took it for so long). Depression is beyond the pale. The only psychological state I hate more than depression is anxiety, which thankfully I barely ever get. I want to be ALIVE again. Only time I ever felt truly alive was when I went "manic". So that, if you were wondering, is why my constant references to mania. Mania is a state where you're so full of life you literally fizz over with it. It was the severe mania I had problems with. The moderate grade was fantastic. I can't bear to listen to any of the tunes I did back then, they all sound so flat and miserable now. I want to be ALIVE AGAIN.

My back is still bad which is annoying. Well, obviously. Soon as it's better I really have to tackle the state of my house. Empty corned beef tins, cyder cans, cigarette ends strewn all over the place.

I'm annoyed that Tonkie Ears the mouse seems to have deserted me. Perhaps if I bought some Wild Bird seed he'd be tempted back.

I really wish I hadn't posted up the crap I did earlier. It makes me look like a really mixed up confused soul. Sometimes I do think what I put; other times I don't. I don't know what I think or feel any more. I mean I feel a bit depressed and yet when Anna Grace posted up a lurid sexual fantasy I laughed hysterically. She did exactly the same thing the first time Boomer got in touch. She was down in Yuma desperate for some gear and then a cab driver sorted her out with a connexion who got her a gram of tar heroin for $90, which is supposed to be good value.

You know top notch heroin used to cost only £30 a weighed gram, that's $50. I know they were full grams; I had scales. Proper great lumps of brown (not suspiciously fine powder) that reeked of Afghanistan. I used to love it. Still I binged on it whenever I had the chance. When I begged for a living my usage averaged just under a gram a day, although I could survive on 0.6g (my dealer sold 0.3g for £10). With purity fluctuating between 40-50% in this period that's quite a lot of intravenous diamorphine. No wonder I had problems with methadone. When a doctor tried to convince me 120mg methadone was a stonkingly high dose I pointed out that I'd researched equivalences online and with opinions varying between 1mg-1mg and 1mg methadone to 4mg (neat) heroin, 120mg methadone wasn't very much compared to 360mg diamorphine. In British hospitals, 5mg diamorphine is the usual dose of painkiller for a heart attack victim. In exceptional circumstances the dose might be titrated up to 10mg. So 360mg was quite a lot. Yes, pharmaceutical heroin is used in British hospitals, no need for Dilaudid unless the side-effects profile specifically calls for hydromorphone. Diamorphine is considered a better drug than morphine because it reaches peak plasma concentration far more quickly than morphine (which takes 35 minutes intramuscular!), it can be dissolved in tiny amounts of water (several hundred milligrams in 1ml) and because it DOES provoke euphoria it's considered especially useful in palliative care where the terminally ill could do with every lift available to them. The only reason medical heroin isn't used in America is to justify their "war on drugs" stance, that heroin has "no medical value". It's actually the number one painkiller for terminal care in the UK because it's better-tolerated than virtually anything else.

I took my methadone early last night. Around 2am instead of 7am. I can grudgingly accept it might have a tiny effect on mood as it did make me feel a little bit better.

I'm off the alcohol today. Blew my beer money on corned beef. The corned beef craving actually exceeded the one for alcohol, which is saying something...

Now I'd better go. I still feel crap. I'm so pissed off, it's unreal. I'm going to try watching Michael Jackson to cheer me up.


SAY SAY SAY
This features Paul and Linda McCartney and La Toya Jackson as Michael's "luuurve" interest...



Test scores:
Psymed 43Goldberg 75

A Laugh

HALF MY BRAIN TELLS ME not to post this. But what else would I say? Might as well have a good laugh about dying. I'm sure lots of people would find it funny if I died.

I'M IN A GOOD MOOD because I went out to spent my last pennies on alcohol, found a pound plus some orange mixer (for cyder) then went back, shot the entire lot down and read Valerie. Valerie [2 posts down] is the only thing that cheers me up. How I can write that way when Im depressed I do not know. I must be like those stage actors and comedians who put on a bravura performance then shoot themselves dead in the dressingroom afterwards.

If you want to see someone stick a gun in their mouth and actually do it, the link's on the post below. It fills me with heart to see somebody die so easily. I wish our bastard government would legalize handguns for the "mentally ill" or restore the death penalty. Then I'd find an old lady patently in agony and dying, kill her with her consent, make it look like I'd robbed the place and write a false diary full of yucky fantasies about old ladies: all the shit you need to get hanged.

Tonkie Ears the mouse has deserted me. I have no hamsters left and am not in a state to look after pets. I keep fantasizing about going down the nuthouse but I'd rather give up looking left and right when I cross the road. Every time a car (or better still a bus or truck) whizzes past I have this moment of despair when I realize I have lost yet another chance to get smashed to smithereens.

XXX suicide ideation shit deleted XXX

I could buy a gun. I could also pay somebody to shoot me. If you can take out a hit on someone else you could surely get one put on yourself.

I have to be careful what I say about death, because although I believe everybody would be better off dead, it's probably considered immoral (by God) to post anything up that could be seen as encouragement. When I do die I wanted my body to go to medical science (to be dissected by trainee doctors) but that rules out all the best suicide methods. Ie very quick and very violent ones involving massive injury to the head. I wouldn't jump off a bridge for this very reason: your legs get it first. I want my head smashed to such a pulp there's nothing left.

I went to bed during the day to escape the world. I'm on a 500cals food (plus 2 cans cyder so that's about 2000 more) diet. I'm hungry all the time now but I'm not giving in.

The only thing that is ever going to make me better is heroin and heroin is illegal. Which means I am illegal. Which means I should die.

It's that simple. No I'm not going to do it tonight. I won't do it until I have money to buy more heroin and make an informed choice.

Early Morning Blues

I DIDN'T POST EARLIER because I was asleep. I tried the Heroin Cure for depression and it worked well enough to get some words out of Valerie, Heroin Queen of Australia (see below) but I woke up around midnight feeling sour as an unripe lime.

Valerie still makes me laugh. In fact anything I write that I think is funny I can laugh at. But nothing else seems to touch me. So you can call Valerie my therapy.

I don't think there is any cure for depression. For laziness I can imagine the drill the psychologist would tell me: write a list, do a few things every day blah blah. I really don't see the point in doing anything.

Normal people seem to take antidepressants and complain that they make them feel "flat" and at best take the edge off depression. With me they most definitely made me euphoric and the depression evaporated entirely. Nothing flat about them! Problem was last time I went on a rollercoaster mood swing that dipped so far down I lost my ability to bullshit the world with a polite happy act, the one we all do. Soon as they set eyes on me people asked what the hell was wrong. So that's antidepressants.

Mood stabilizers do nothing until you're out of an episode. They prevent mood phases recurring. Which is double depressing. Meaning the misery stays and no mania to follow it up. The thought of going manic is my only real hope in life.

Also I can't have lithium because it needs regular blood level checks. And where would they get a vein? I know the side effects and they're ones I'd find particularly disagreeable (feeling cold, tired, visual problems and poor attention span: EXACTLY what bothered me about chronic fatigue syndome. No thanks). There are other mood stabilizers and these are all anticonvulsants: oxcarbazepine, valproate, lamotrigine et al.

I finally finished the quarter bottle of vodka (found in an alleyway on Wednesday afternoon) at around 3am Friday morning. Which just shows what a heavy drinker I am. I had to put it in black coffee to take the vomitsome taste away.

The Chinese Chicken Curry from Morrisons tasted far too strongly of Five Spice Seasoning, which should only be very vaguely in the background. So they got that one totally wrong.

Now I'm craving food yet don't feel physically hungry. The thought of eating makes my head feel mixed up.

I think my problem is what saves me: I can't focus on things. So I don't focus on negativity the way you'd think I might. Stuff about me being murdered or shot to death by firing squad is half tongue in cheek. But only half. I don't know what I actually think about anything, don't want to know.

The one thing that made me focus in life was drug addiction. It focused me on heroin heroin heroin. Heroin was real. The lack of it was a desperate emergency. Heroin heroin. Such an irony that it seemed to keep me sane. Without it I go all over the place. I noticed this years ago, and noticed that in rehab type situations I got extra meds and appeared to monopolize the attention of the counselling staff. Everybody else in there seemed pretty well balanced. And in the second place, they all slept. I was wide awake despite sleeping pills and antipsychotic (given for its sedative properties). Everybody else seemed to sleep like babies.

I never thought this meant I had some mental condition. I just thought it meant I was a big baby who couldn't cope with something everybody else seemed to glide through easily, no matter how difficult they claimed it to be.

A few years ago I would have latched on to any psychiatric diagnosis as an excuse to continue using heroin. These days excuses are not an issue.

I went beyond desperation and to a state where I realized I had two demons to fight. The psychiatric one was considerably bigger and stronger than the drugs one. When you fight with drugs you're fighting yourself. So you and your opponent are equally matched. Having a full-on breakdown is like being slammed in the face by a truck. You can't fight it as such, you can only resist it in a stubborn type of way.

The only time I've truly felt mentally injured was when my mood flew then plummeted several times in the course of a week leaving me catatonic. I actually felt mentally injured then. Usually my system adapts to anything life throws at it. But not that time.

Well I have to go, it's a quarter to six in the morning and I feel like ****. I regret being awake. I'd really like to sleep for ever. I'm scared of getting psychotic depression. I don't care about being psychotic and manic as much but psychotic depressed scares the hell out of me. That would put me straight in the nuthouse.

I'm surprised my druggieworker is taken in by the idea that someone who has insight isn't ill. There are psychiatrists and mental health professionals who have also had psychosis. Their training never stopped them going mad. I knew the basic diagnostic criteria for mania so I was well aware that I was manic when my mood went high. Mania isn't so much a good mood as an accelerated state where you feel very excited, go into overdrive, stop sleeping, get irritable on the one hand and feel poetic on the other, and the self-esteeem soars. Just knowing I was in this state did nothing to make it any less intense. At the peak of it my attention span was so impaired I was basically disabled. I could sign into the computer (it seemed to take an hour to do this; I was on fastforward). I could post. But I could not edit what I said, I could only grasp the gist of comments etc and when I was really out of it I could barely understand the written word at all. I couldn't follow the spoken word either. People seemed to be talking crap all the time. But I'd still rather be manic than depressed. I know it's not much of a choice, but it's the only choice I've got. Providing the mania does come back. Knowing my luck I'll be stuck in misery for ever. The mania is just a torment. Telling me I used to be able to get high not on drugs, that I'll never ever feel happy ever again.

Being as life is torture anyhow, I have decided to have a stab at cleaning up my house and filling out the DLA form. DLA is a benefit for people who are mentally deranged or severely disabled, who need help in their daily lives. Example: if you live in a house full of rubbish, only ever eat food direct from the tin, sleep on the floor in the clothes you wore during the day and cannot be bothered to shower and your doctor thinks you're schizo you should get DLA pretty easily. I don't get it because I was so depressed when it ran out last time I just felt like a fraud. I got no support from anyone in authority: drugs workers etc. They were taken in by my sardonic pose and heroin-saturated brains and thought I needed no help.

Everything changed when I went mad enough that the dr saw it all over me the second I walked into the consulting room. He looked really shocked at the state of me and I thought I was normal! Then the council sent somebody from another department to do a home visit and this person says I have issues of self care.

They say that depression deteriorates the attention, (which it does) but nowhere near as badly as mania. As long as I'm talking (or writing), I can follow my own outpourings. I'm no good with books at the moment but I reckon I could do that DLA form. Problem is I have to FIND it first. I have about five copies but my house is such chaos I haven't a clue where a single one is.

It's very shaming filling in that form. You have to admit what a fuck-up you are. Under diagnosis I have to write schizoaffective disorder which I'm not even sure is correct. I'm not psychotic, I'm just miserable.

On the other hand, I know if they cut me off my benefits, I wouldn't go out and get a job (what employer would possibly have me?), I'd just live on the streets begging for spare change. So I suppose if I keep this in mind I can feel entitled to money. Everyone else seems to get DLA. I don't get it because I was too much of a mess to make a claim.

Well I have to go it's past 6am now. I badly need a cigarette. I really don't know what else to say.

PS: Anna posted up a video of somebody committing suicide the way I'd so it if 10,000mg Seconal weren't available (gun in mouth). He falls down way quicker than people in the movies and blood comes spurting out of his nose. I don't advise anybody watch it who's thin-skinned or easily shocked. The link is here.

Valerie: latest report!

MY GOOD "FRIEND" VALERIE, China White Heroin Queen of southern Australia has been sending more highly confidential emails to Anna Grace, a key drugs player in the Wisconsin-Chicago region of the USA:~

Valerie said...
O Anna Anna Babe

WHY THIS OBSESSION WITH THAT FUCKWIT GLEDWOOD? You really need drastic psychotherapy on this one. I can't believe I'm saying this. Seven years chained to a bed in a Cambodian brothel and my counsellor believed I had "issues of sexual trust" well WOULDN'T YOU??!

I only did "therapy" to pass the time in prison. Whingeing bitches trying to get their hands on my drug supply 24/7, totally did my head in. (Not that I wasn't profiting heavily and QUEEN OF THAT PLACE. But still....) I ended up with post traumatic stress disorder when I ran out of crack, didn't I?

Normally I wouldn't advise anybody waste their time with a counsellor but you, Honeytits, you sound like you really need it.

As for the suicide shit. That's obviously a lack of Dilaudid and other strong opiates speaking. I felt suicidal when I was in that shithole of a women's jail on only 800mg methadone. I willingly accepted the detox in order to bring down my tolerance for a bit. Remember I poked the governor's eyes out with a nifty V sign, when she complained that my constant use of her computer between 10pm and 4am (only hours that sad bitch didn't work) was "turning her office into my personal fiefdom". She also seemed to have a problem with the constant supply of dancing boys and vodka I brought in. Didn't care so much about the drugs supply. That was safely stashed up Ho Ling and Fat Trish's private parts. But the bitch wanted to teach me a lesson and I thought "a change is as good as a rest" coupla weeks on methadone bored the living shit out of me I was so glad to get out of the punishment block and back to crack, smack and reality.

The old crack was making me see and hear an old witch cackling over her couldron. The doc said it was just to be expected after a lifetime of hard drugs abuse. But that fucking old hag kept me awake all night with her cackling laughter. Except when I was bombed outta me head on illicit Rohypnol.

I've never been chased by a giant teddybear like you have, but I do have irritable bowels syndrome as I said before. That involves a constant cycling and mood swings of the bowels: a fluctuation between football-sized lumps of constipation and the raving shits that squirt out so fast you wouldn't believe it. So I thoroughly sympathize with what you're going through with this bipolar disorder.

Now darling are you going to divorce this saddo cyber husband of yours or shall I turn up at yours with a twelve-bore and shoot you right between the eyes. Put you right out of your misery that would. I've SEEN that loser Gledwood. Not only does he look like a homeless as he himself says but he stinks, is covered in needle marks including where he's shot up in that vein on his forehead. And he hasn't washed his straggling hair in about ten years. Looks like an about-to-be-binned floor mop it does.

Now Honeybuns cheer up why doncha. I sent ya a lovely million-milligrams pot of neat Dilaudid. It was addressed to Anna Grace Old. That's your name isn't it? 2057 Cedars Drive, Green Bay, WI, USA.

If you didn't get it some unsuspecting motherfucker's gonna be extremely happy that's all I say!

Email me soon, I want to know you're OK. As for that Anonymous saying you're a big mac addict ~ so am I, darling, so am I. Only ever want one after a golfball sized shot of China White Heroin which means I'm about 200lbs overweight... but there we go!

Ta-ra sweetypies and CHINA UP.

Fuckit china white on the brain, me. I meant CHIN UP.

BYE BYE BABY AND KICK THAT FUCKING LOSER GLEDWOOD OUTTA YOUR MIND. YOU'RE WORTH SO MUCH MORE!!

Your loving friend

Valerie

xoxoxox

May 5, 2011 9:07 AM




Valerie said...
And RSVP this time you miserable sow. Do you KNOW how difficult it is to tap this shit into a blackberry with a French manicure, one whining husband asking where the last quarter key of crack has gone and two little shits blithering away in a Central Asian language? I mean my little DARLING KIDS whingeing away in Chinese that they want their dinner. Fucking Chinese nanny did a runner when she realized we were A-grade druggies didn't she. Now I'm lumbered with 2 kids fluent in Mandarin who barely know a word of English. They go to the Chinese school down the road. Thought it would be an investment in their future, didn't I. How was I to know English lessons were barely on the curriculum? Least it means Brucey and me can have a private conversation about the whos/what/wherefores of our Conspiracy to Supply All Australia With pure A-grade white smack doesn't it. But apart from that it's a real fucker not being able to communicate with your own offspring.

They stay in the house next door so's not to get under our feet what with the constant piping/hitting up/drinking/all night cards parties and swinging nights Brucey puts on. Get on real well with the neighbours now we do. Now that we have naked photos of them being snorting cocaine while being whipped on the arse by me dressed in a rubber cow costume, complete with milk-squirting udders. Complaints to the police have gone down 97% since Brucey's "bridge night" brainwave. Only trouble we have now is the binocular weilding old bitch opposite. Until I paid of a psychiatrist to diagnose her with paranoid schizophrenia and alzehimers and had her bundled off in restraints to the State Mental Institution.

Unfortunately there's a hole in the hedge where our Bull Mastiff escaped when we forgot to feed him for a week, so our little-shit kids are constantly running into the house complaining about Chairman Mao, silk worm blight in Hunan Province, or whatever the fuck they chatter on about.

Does your Mr Kim know any English at all? My colleagues up in those Burmese Hills say he's fluent in Cantonese which is a bit of an inconvenience considering the local languages are Burmese, Thai and Wa with a bit of Shan thrown in.

If he is, once he's done stirring the latest 10-tonne batch of shitty brown heroin into nectar of the Gods (China White) would you PLEASE arrange for him to come down here. I don't care how fucking doddery he is, or that he is patently half blind. Long as he can keep my unruly kids in order and interpret for me what the living shite they are saying, he's my man.

Gotta go darling, more crack to pipe.

PS that fucking witch shut up her constant mumblings soon as I was outta the can. See what prison does to ya? Sends yer nuts. I reckon that brown bear you saw on that crack binge, manic episode whatever the fuck it was... I reckon it was a symbol of the love you have for your oxycondom-filled old dad. I'm into psychotherapy meself, long as it's purely drug-related and I'm high on drugs when I do it. Otherwise it's like sobriety. Complete fucking waste of time!!!

Yours noddingly

Val

XxXxXxX

May 5, 2011 9:30 AM


Anna Grace said...
Valarie you old cow,

I love dirty men. The less he washes his hair the better. That Gledwood is so sweet. I heart him.

Thank God for the Dilauded you've sent because I'm sick as a dog, as my dog would be after eating parts of me while I lie there dead after shot gun blast to the head.

I'm gonna post a graffic suicide on blog today. Its of a American congress man who shots himself in the head on live TV.

don't get ideas of shooting old Bruce with a shotgun to the head.

Be safe china white queen.

Tell gledwood that I'm the worst thing that could happen to him. He's lucy I'm 3000 miles away.

All my love you daft cow.
Xoxoxox

May 5, 2011 9:20 AM




Valerie said...
O you beat me too it you fucking bitch. Thought you were going to ignore me, as per usual, I did.

What are you saying? You like stinking, scummy 100 year old looking homeless guys? Well you've found the mother of 'em all with that Gledwood, that's for sure.

Stank the house out he did in our last new year's eve party. Guests had to crowd round the barbecue and Bruce's burnt sausages just to escape the stench.

What do you mean "don't get ideas of shooting my Brucey through the head"..? Only comfort I have in life is that fantasy, babes. Truly, apart from the smack and crack that's my only comfort.

It's true the bastard invests our money in respectable enterprises: gambling houses, strip joints and whorehouses, but I'm sure I could do without him.

NOW PLEASE DO YOU KNOW OF ANY BILINGUAL MANDARIN-ENGLISH SPEAKING NANNIES PREFERABLY WITH AN OPEN MIND AND/OR DRUG HABIT WHO WOULD BE WILLING TO LOOK AFTER MY LITTLE SHITS 24/7.???

I'm willing to pay $100,000 a year just to have the little blighters taken off my hands.

I would get them adopted but Bruce bursts into tears then rides that lawnmower bare ass naked more than ever when I suggest that one.

Oh what a shitty life this is.

Personally I can't wait till the first 2 tonnes of that fresh batch of gear come through.

The current one we're on has been up an illegal immigrants anus. Smells that way too, specially if you cook it up too long.

Got to go honey. Bruce is trying to steal my pipe. As per normal

Take care and have a good time on the Dilaudid

Yours truly

Val

XxXxXxX

Mr Misery

I AM IN A **** MOOD. I am beating myself up about whether or not to eat Morrisons industrial Chinese chicken curry with egg fry rice or to buy a tin of corned beef from the corner shop for £1.79 (cheaper than Morrisons who charge £2.49 for a big tin). When I've already eaten two and a half chicken thighs and a Pot Noodle today and am not actually hungry. I'm on a diet, remember. And I take in excess calories through my alcohol consumption. I only want to do comfort eating. "I hate myself and I want to die" as Anna Grace says. I don't want to be a waste of oxygen. Or a waste of food. I've had no heroin today or yesterday which might be why I feel so crap. Not that it's withdrawal as I have ample methadone. But because, as the nutnut nurse phrased it, it's my "underlying mood". I was only using gear to aleviate depression. I hate relying on heroin for a barely passable sense of happiness. I hate not being on it because I'm so miserable.

And yes I do realize how funny that paragraph sounds.

I keep asking myself why I bang on so much about wanting to be manic again. Wanting to be manic is wanting to be severely mentally ill. Just shows how desperate I felt when I wrote those words. On the other hand "severely mentally ill" is merely the medical profession's view and they're probably jealous of people who have a fantastically elevated mood with thoughts exploding like starbursts, beautiful hyperacusis and poetic hallucinations and all the world shimmering like a firework display. That was the good part of being manic.

I was very offended when my dr used the term "manic depression" (not to mention schizophrenia) with regards to me. Why do manic and depressed have to go together? Why does everything in life that seems so good have to be SHIT.

I stand by what I thought and probably posted at the time. You only truly see reality when you're at the very top and bottom extremes of mood. At the top you see neverending beauty and wonder. At the bottom, all is worthlessness and pain. Doctors never give painkillers for mental pain. Which is why it's up to sufferers to score for themselves on the streets.

Anna Grace is probably pissed off with me because she wrote a post about her suicide fantasy and I laughed at the bit when she said her dog might start tucking into her rotting corpse. My sick sense of humour overcame good taste and I told her. There's no point deleting the comment as I know it will have gone direct to her Blackberry. Sorry Anna I am one sick fuck. You just have to accept me for who I am.

On the way back from Morrisons I had a persistent, vivid fantasy about finding an eighth of top-notch brown heroin wrapped up in black binliner. It played over and over in my head. In my dream I ripped open the bag to be engulfed by the overpowering aroma of Fresh Afghan Gear.

Getting off the bus I took a deliberate shortcut through a back alley. I've found gear in alleyways twice before, so this was my best bet for locating this tantaliing eighth. In the alley was a discarded firedoor. Guess what? Poking out from the door was a bit of black plastic! I grabbed it and found an unopened quarter bottle of vodka. Not exactly heroin, but I'm about to start drinking right now.

I actually hate vodka and I know it will only make me want the corned beef even more, so I'll have 2 more things to hate myself for. I know it sounds petty hating myself for eating, but I got down to one single tin of corned beef per day (plus 2 cans of cider and 2 small tropical fruit juices). So I'm hardly in anorexia mode, but it feels like a triumph to be eating so much less than before.

I know everything I've written in God knows how long probably sounds desperately fucked up. I'm not going to lie, am I? If I was going to do one of those "aren't I witty and cool" blogs, I'd have taken up that pose from day one. There's nothing cool about me. Cool people only like me because I don't pretend to be cool. And don't I sound like a 13 year old talking like this.

I could say I wish I'd never got into heroin, but heroin gave me a feeling I'd never had before. A kind of contentment and a false happiness. Before that I had nothing stronger than cups of tea, the occasional Silk Cut cigarette scabbed from the secretary downstairs and packets of Maryland hazelnut choc-chip cookies and videos to indulge in when I was down. I had a gaping hole inside me, nothing but heroin ever filled it.

So now I have to live the rest of my life either empty or stoked up to the eyes on psychiatric drugs, when my real problem is hypochondria and laziness. I don't really believe depression is an illness and when I was manic I didn't feel like I existed at all. I was out of this world. Now this world is all too real and crushing me down. I so wish someone would murder me. That would be the best of all worlds. A dangerous criminal would get taken off the streets and I would die. This is the stuff that goes through my head. I couldn't actually provoke someone into killing me: that would be moral cowardice of the most abysmal kind. I just wish I didn't have to live in this world. It's not that I want some pain to end, like people like Trisha Goddard insist is the root of suicidality. I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN THIS WORLD, I HATE IT. I hate everything about it. The longer I live, the more I will sin and the worse a person I will become. We're all in darkness. The world is dying, our societies are crumbling. I don't want to live to see it.

I need a drink.