HAMSTERS & HEROIN: Not all junkies are purse-snatching grandmother-killing psychos. I'm keeping this blog to bear witness to that fact.

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DIARY OF A SLOWLY RECOVERING HEROIN ADDICT

I used to take heroin at every opportunity, for over 10 years, now I just take methadone which supposedly "stabilizes" me though I feel more destabilized than ever before despite having been relatively well behaved since late November/early December 2010... and VERY ANGRY about this when I let it get to me so I try not to.

I was told by a mental health nurse that my heroin addiction was "self medication" for a mood disorder that has recently become severe enough to cause psychotic episodes. As well as methadone I take antipsychotics daily. Despite my problems I consider myself a very sane person. My priority is to attain stability. I go to Narcotics Anonymous because I "want what they have" ~ Serenity.

My old blog used to say "candid confessions of a heroin and crack cocaine addict" how come that one comes up when I google "heroin blog" and not this one. THIS IS MY BLOG. I don't flatter myself that every reader knows everything about me and follows closely every single word every day which is why I repeat myself. Most of that is for your benefit not mine.

This is my own private diary, my journal. It is aimed at impressing no-one. It is kept for my own benefit to show where I have been and hopefully to put off somebody somewhere from ever getting into the awful mess I did and still cannot crawl out of. Despite no drugs. I still drink, I'm currently working on reducing my alcohol intake to zero.

If you have something to say you are welcome to comment. Frankness I can handle. Timewasters should try their own suggestions on themselves before wasting time thinking of ME.

PS After years of waxing and waning "mental" symptoms that made me think I had depression and possibly mild bipolar I now have found out I'm schizoaffective. My mood has been constantly "cycling" since December 2010. Mostly towards mania (an excited non-druggy "high"). For me, schizoaffective means bipolar with (sometimes severe)
mania and flashes of depression (occasionally severe) with bits of schizophrenia chucked on top. You could see it as bipolar manic-depression with sparkly knobs on ... I'm on antipsychotic pills but currently no mood stabilizer. I quite enjoy being a bit manic it gives the feelings of confidence and excitement people say they use cocaine for. But this is natural and it's free, so I don't see my "illness" as a downer. It does, however, make life exceedingly hard to engage with...

PPS The "elevated mood" is long gone. Now I'm depressed. Forget any ideas of "happiness" I have given up heroin and want OFF methadone as quick as humanly possible. I'm fed up of being a drug addict. Sick to death of it. I wanna be CLEAN!!!

Attack of the Furry Entertainers!

Attack of the Furry Entertainers!

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

A Very Pleasant "Repast"... And More Cockroaches

I HAVE JUST SPENT £4.50 on the strongest cockroach spray I could find. Yes I am (of necessity) an expert on the various domestic insecticides and their relative dosages and potencies. Yes: the plague has come back. In fact I have a horrible suspicion I have now encountered a third species of roach (under my fridge) ~ the beetle-sized oriental cockroach! Horrible things. The last lot of ant powder just lays around looking grey and ashy, but does not seem to exterminate, even when they're covered in it. My two cans of tropical-strength Raid have run out so I had to buy Rentokill Insectrol which at 0.46% permethrin is more than double the strength of ordinary (UK-strength) Raid. And I should think so too at £4.50 a not-very-big can!

The "repast" was really nice. I've conjured up a new dish called Yorkshire trotettes. I'ts basically industrial style yorkshire puddings stuffed with roast lamb or beef and seasonable vegetables and it's very nice especially when you made six of them that you only remember at 4:30am. They make a brilliant midnight feast.

Maple Syrup my druggieworker, who says I should go on a proper language course (for Spanish) was even suggesting I do a DEGREE. I'm not so sure of that. But I did start looking into studying German IN Germany (why on earth do a course in German in LONDON? Makes no sense to me, not if you are free to travel... I spent a lot of the afternoon pouring over the Freie Universität Berlin's online "startseite". See my German ain't that good: for I thought Deutsche Philologie meant German linguistics. Apparently Philologie doesn't just mean "philology" it means "the study of language and literature" ... They even do Japanese there ... hmmm.

And just to lower the tone I had a poke through a selection of hens' teeth ~ sorry foreign language periodicals ~ you can't get them round here. And walked off with Bild ~ Europe's biggest-selling newspaper (apparently). With a 5,000,000-a-day circulation in the 1980s and 4,000,000 a day until 2002, it now sells a shamefull 3.8 million examplares pro jour... Have a click here and see why.

Sorry for such a boring post... even I'm bored today ...

Illustrated: Rentokil Insectrol; Freie Universität Berlin's 1960s-style main entrance ...

12 comments:

Akelamalu said...

Eeeew cockroaches! I hope your new spray works.

Reeny's Ramblin' said...

Nice seguay from roaches to dinner ;) I had an infestation once and we used industrial strength cockroach gel, it's basically the stuff that an exterminator would come to yer place with. In Canada it's about $40 a pop but works a charm.

Lucinda said...

Roaches scare the shit out of me. I had a terrible nightmare once after seeing one in my friend's room, it stuck with me like a drug dream, really real and haunting, haha.
Just wanted to say hey again... I don't know...
Sorry about leaving you hanging all summer, shit went by too fast, and now it's fall... shit.
Well, I'll keep reading, as always.
- Lucy
= )

Baino said...

Well this was a mash up! Cockroaches are as dirty as the environment they inhabit. If your place is clean, you'll have clean roaches. Get baits not spray they exterminate the eggs, the larvae everything. Trust me I live in a land where everything wants to kill you. As for your druggieworker she's trying to give you a drug free distraction and it aint a bad strategy. . but if that's what you don't want to hear . selective deafness will kick in. I'm constantly surprised and dismayed that someone of your talent and intellect is a junkie. You broaden my horizons in many, many ways.

Jeannie said...

hmmm - that much bug spray - you didn't use it around your robos did you?

I've never had to deal with cockroaches thank heavens. I guess they're pretty much standard in apartments everywhere now though.

Laura said...

Cockroaches ...dear God, and I thought I'd never get over the spiders post.

Sarcastic Bastard said...

I'm bored, too, Gledds. It must be going around.

Love,

SB

Z said...

Oh god, when I was a child we had a delivery of coal to the cellar that was infested with cockroach eggs and we had them in the kitchen for ages. Horrible things. Really difficult to kill, hope modern stuff is better - I'm talking 40+ years ago. We used to switch on the light and rush around stamping on them before they could hide, stuff of nightmares.

Elaine Denning said...

I have mosquitoes in my bathroom. They fly so slowly that I can sqaut most of them with toilet paper...I can even catch some of them mid flight. I'm getting quite good at it now.

Gledwood said...

AKELAMALU: IT'S exceedingly effective. Thank God. Though I've never been convinced by the residual action claims. It's a fantastic knockdown spray, though it does take up to an hour for one roach to die from a split-second paff. And I ain't wasting spray on no roach ...

REENY: that's what I was looking for! Whatever the experts use. Domestic strength stuff is crap. Viz: that ridiculous ant powder that is little better than throwing ashes all over your kitchen ...

BAINO: I heard about that stuff. Isn't it like green pellets, they eat it and the babies eat their shit and that kills them too? I once used roach glue. That caught loads of them. But it gets everywhere, like honey. Can only be removed with neat petrol (apparently) or a wad of wire crack pipe gauze (how did I find THAT out? haha!)

LUCINDA: Thanks for dropping by:... you are OK ~~???

JEANNIE: they are everywhere in London's bedsitland. Hence THREE species (well at least two) in my bloody kitchen. Some probably were residual from 3 houses ago. I kept down numbers by very diligent spraying/hygeine measures. But I'm convinced most of the new lot crawled under my door ...

Gledwood said...

AD: I woke up with a giant spider in my bed this morning. I think it liked the heat...

SB: not borING though. Unlike moi

Z: o that sounds fucking vile. What the hell did they live on down there? Coal dust ..??

ELAINE: biting bugs love me. I hate them!!

Z said...

Fucking vile sums it up. I don't know what they lived on, my mother was meticulous about leaving nothing out. I had a phobia for years and I think I'd still freak out - though in India I had little cockroaches in the bathroom and I didn't bother about them.

I WANT OFF METHADONE AS QUICK AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE!

METHADONE ~ A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH







Heroin Shortage: News

If you are looking for the British Heroin Drought post, click here; the latest word is in the comments.







Christiane F

"Wir, Kinder vom Bahnhoff Zoo" by "Christiane F", memoir of a teenage heroin addict and prostitute, was a massive bestseller in Europe and is now a set text in German schools. Bahnhoff Zoo was, until recently, Berlin's central railway station. A kind of equivalent (in more ways than one) to London's King's Cross... Of course my local library doesn't have it. So I'm going to have to order it through a bookshop and plough through the text in German. I asked my druggieworker Maple Syrup, who is Italiana how she learned English and she said reading books is the best way. CHRISTIANE F: TRAILER You can watch the entire 120-min movie in 12 parts at my Random blog. Every section EXCEPT part one is subtitled in English (sorry: but if you skip past you still get the gist) ~ to watch it all click HERE.

To See Gledwood's Entire Blog...

DID you find my blog via a Google or other search? Are you stuck on a post dated some time ago? Do you want to read Gledwood Volume 2 right from "the top" ~ ie from today?
If so click here and you'll get to the most recent post immediately!

Drugs Videos

Most of these come from my Random blog, which is an electronic scrapbook of stuff I thought I might like to view at some time or other. For those who want to view stuff on drugs I've collected the very best links here. Unless otherwise stated these are full-length features, usually an hour or more.

If you have a slow connexion and are unused to viewing multiscreen films on Youtube here's what to do: click the first one and play on mute, stopping and starting as it does. Then, when it's done, click on Repeat Play and you get the full entertainment without interruption. While you watch screen one, do the same to screens 2, 3 and so on. So as each bit finishes, the next part's ready and waiting.

Mexican Black Tar Heroin: "Dark End"

Khun Sa, whose name meant Prince Prosperous, had been, before his death in the mid 2000s, the world's biggest dealer in China White Heroin: "Lord of the Golden Triangle"

In-depth portrait of the Afghan heroin trade at its very height. Includes heroin-lab bust. "Afghanistan's Fateful Harvest"

Classic miniseries whose title became a catchphrase for the misery of life in East Asian prison. Nicole Kidman plays a privileged middle-class girl set up to mule heroin through Thai customs with the inevitable consequences. This is so long it had to be posted in two parts. "Bangkok Hilton 1" (first 2 hours or so); "Bangkok Hilton 2" (last couple of hours).

Short film: from tapwater-clear H4 in the USA to murky black Afghan brown in Norway: "Heroin Addicts Speak"

Before his untimely death this guy kept a video diary. Here's the hour-long highlights as broadcast on BBC TV: "Ben: Diary of a Heroin Addict". Thanks to Noah for the original link.

Some of the most entertaining scenes from Britain's top soap (as much for the poor research as anything else). Not even Phil Mitchell would go from nought to multi-hundred pound binges this fast: "Phil Mitchell on Crack" (just over 5 minutes).

Scientist lady shows us how to cook up gear: "How Much Citric?" Lucky cow: her brown is 70% purity! Oddly we never see her actually do her hit... maybe she got camera shy...

And lastly:

German documentary following a life from teenage addiction to untimely death before the age of 30. The decline in this girl's appearance is truly shocking. "Süchtig: Protokoll einer Hilflosigkeit". Sorry no subtitles; this is here for anyone learning German who's after practice material a little more gripping than Lindenstraße!































Nosey Quiz! Have you ever heard voices when you weren't high on drugs?

Manic Magic

Manic Magic

Gledwood Volume 2: A Heroin Addict's Blog

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