... SO YESTERDAY I SPENT MY DRUG MONEY ON BOOKS (and food). £10 got me a 972-page German tome called Der Turm (The Tower") by Uwe Tellkamp. £3.50, beautiful hardback with acid-free cream paper. Set in the former DDR... well I can't tell much about it as I'm only on page 7. But it's set behind the Iron Curtain and I have a thing about life in former communist states. The other books were give up smoking for 50p, Byron Childe Harold/etc 30p special offer (minuscule hardback) and Peyton Place (80p) by Grace Metalious, who died of alcoholic cirrhosis at 39 and sold well over 20,000,000 copies of this book about moral degeneracy in a drab New England Town. This reprint comes with intellectual introduction by some academic and I have to say Metalious's literary style isn't bad (nowhere near as bad as Jacqueline Susann's, if you're into trash fiction of the 1950s and 60s).The rest of my tenner went on food.
I was actually hoping for Teach Yourself Mandarin Chinese book and CD set for £5 (well I can hope, can't I?) but Mandarin will have to wait till next week.
The urge to educate myself is eating me up inside. An all-consuming craving, far worse than any drug-craving I've experienced for a very long time.
Today will be a test day. I KNOW a friend who will come to me in need (he always does) and how on earth I will get out of that situation without scoring heroin I have no idea.
By the way there is a terrible drought on at the moment. The drug purity has fallen ~ even in the best stuff I've found ~ to less than a third of what it normally was. I can tell this by the way methadone holds me so much better than any street heroin I've bought in weeks.
My favourite hobby is complaining about the lousy gear. So people assume I'm being ripped off, introduce me to their dealer and I'm even MORE BITTERLY DISAPPOINTED with minuscule bags of even poxier gear!
In my opinion anything that's not China white is rubbish anyhow. Heroin is properly white, not brown.
The worst stuff that was around can't have been more than 1% pure ~ if that. And it was full of some sort of resin that re-congealed on cooling, making the stuff uninjectable unless you filtered it three times.
The root of the shortage is blight on Afghanistan's poppy crop, reducing this year's opium yield from around 8000 tonnes (enough to make 800 tonnes of heroin) to something like 2500 tonnes opium (250 tonnes heroin). The UK alone uses an estimated 35 tonnes annually (at import strength), so if there's blight next year it's curtains for heroin (hurrah!)
Hurrah, because I can be free. I feel like a pan of boiling water, seething with pent-up energy and furious steam. One day I will go out and smack the world right between the eyes, because the world deserves it.
Meanwhile I have to 1. give up heroin 2. learn fluent German 3. write several bestselling books 4. learn fluent Chinese 5. learn fluent Russian 6. get on course I've been wittering on about 7. graduate with summa cum laude or whatever the phrase is.
Then at long last I will be qualified to do something.
When I was little and heard foreigners going blubble-blubble-blubble, I thought they all spoke one language called Foreign. I was determined to learn this mystery tongue, so nobody could prattle over my head again.
Also I was affronted by the way almost all foreigners appeared to be fluent in English, giving my family, friends and I no linguistic privacy whatsoever almost anywhere in the world.
My goal is to speak at least 10 languages fluently, including Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Thai ... blah blah. If I'd only not been so incredibly lazy all my life I could be a long way to achieving this goal. As it is, I barely speak fluent English!
My goblin-bitten computer cable replacement is here! Whoopeee! Now I must run in the shower. I'm so minging I'm infectious...
I'm so glad to hear giving up heroin is your No1 priority! I'm praying for a blight to help you in your quest Gleds. Your listed ambitions are achievable - I wish you success with them. Buying books and food instead of heroin is a really good first step. x
ReplyDeleteI wish I had put some more welly into achieving these ambitions when I was a bit younger... then again to learn languages or write novels an extraordinarily high degree of motivation is required; and motivation and depression, which has dogged me for years, don't naturally walk hand in hand. Thanks for the wishes :-)
ReplyDeleteYou've set yourself a lot of targets there and good luck to you, especially with learning "foreign"!
ReplyDeleteI won't need good luck. Just persistance!
ReplyDeleteAt the v least I wanna know the 6 Working Languages of the United Nations: (English), French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic ...
... then I can call myself a true Citizen of the World...!
Hiya Gledwood,
ReplyDeleteIt's my turn to pay you a visit this time.
I've always seen your battle with heroin here, it's something I don't have, don't want, but am never bitter to see in others. I have problems with smack, it's not a smooth ride, but I kinda think fuck, I've come this far now I mifght as well run the tank dry on it. But as you know I've other passions also and I do limit my use to concentrate on them. It's an uneasy balance but I maintain it.
But I really hope you can kick for good, if that's what you want. If you rwant it, you'll do it. I've seen that. It's not hopeless, just tough.
Droughts in the UK. Since the afghan war heroin supply has never recovered properly. Before that, there were no droughts, and now, every other week there's probs. I have stuff sent over in the post, and two weeks ago I actually received stuff that was weaker than the stuff here. And of course, the stuff is really lame here, but for your money you get ten times as much. So with huge fixes you make it work. But having stuff that weak at 0.3g, fuck, we may as well inject water.
I really understand what you say about having a thirst for doing things, an impulse, an addiction. I'm exactly the same, though I think it has a lot to do with the methadone. It's a very subtle drug but does kinda make you hyperactive and the days fly by as if there's not enough hours. At one stage I cut down to 5ml every two days (ridiculou, I know) and I really lost that drive and done nothing but lay around watching films.Then I learnt "excusez moi, je cherche l'hero."
The writings going really well. Hopefully Memoires will be published next year, and I'v e just finished a work of fiction also which I'll be sending around to publishers. But it looks good. Maybe for your writing yopu should set up a blog dedicated purely to that? Rather than daily details and wot not, something that is purely literary and is at least out there to catch anyone's eye who may be passing, or have read you here and want to see what else you can do.
Anyway, this comment makes up for my lack in the past. I really hope you're well Gled, and I hope you achieve all those things you want and desire and if you don't achieve them, to at least have tried is the next best reward. It ensures against regrets, and regrets are the worst things in the world.
Take care, and I should post over at mine tomorrow or so... All My Thoughts, Shane.
It's good to have dreams and goals Gleds mate :-) I didn't know there's a heroin shortage. The papers won't write about that I guess...
ReplyDeleteLook after your self dude,
V.
wow you're on a roll! Making up for lost time with the new cable I see. Nothing wrong with these aspirations Gleds but baby steps, one step at a time.
ReplyDeleteI hope that you kick the heroin habit too. It would be good if you could learn those languages and really put your mind to its potential rather than what you are doing by numbing it.
ReplyDeleteShane: thanks for that answer. It's weird you talk about things never having recovered since the Afghan war, I've heard that said elsewhere. Before the 2000s I only dabbled in heroin, so I cannot vouch personally.
ReplyDeleteIt's weird that a country as big as France should have such lame gear. I just looked up the Euro-purities here
http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/stats10/ppptab6a
and got 42% for the UK and just 11% for France!
I'm writing as well but v slowly. I gave up on the idea of memoirs and gravitated to fiction. Best of luck with the publishing; do you know any good literary agents?
I think I will achieve the goal of speaking Chinese. The characters are such a source of fascination I can spend literally hours poring over reference books and doodling them out. I want to learn Japanese too and started with that. Then I realized I was learning the wrong way round + the Chinese economy is way stronger. I'm looking into studying Chinese in Germany, if I can't get on a course in China (which all have age limits, nearly all of which I'm beyond).
Zut alors, il me faut "faire une ping", comme je dis. Bon chance avec les memoires. Bon chance avec l'héroïne, si tu en cherches. Bon chance avec la vie!
Vincent: the papers will write about it if it goes on long enough. British journalists in particular like to feel down not just with the kids but the distressed and disenfranchised and needy... I SHALL achieve my goals ~ I shall, I shall, I shall!
Baino: I'm taking those baby steps :-)
Syd: languages are mind-numbing, too ~ hahaha!