Terrible Sleep

MY SLEEP HAS GONE SO BAD I didn't bother sleeping at all last night. We have a new girl in the next room with rough friends who are too stupid to ring the correct bell so I found myself yelling at some faceless person over the intercom at 2am. I did get a little bit of sleep around six but then Everybody Loves Raymond and Frasier came on. I feel a bit hypomanic but it probably won't last. I'll crash and sleep for hours and hours and wake up feeling run down and sad. That's scenario one. Or scenario 2 is my sleep still won't come back and I'll possibly go into proper mania. I've been having symptoms like people seeming to talk to me on the street (from the other side of the road) and my head racing fast fast fast. But not too fast. And then when I close my eyes to sleep sometimes my head is lit up with the most amazing vivid dream-imagery, even though I'm wide awake and when that happens I know sleep is going to be hard to come by. By the time the images (which are random, like golden ants circling round and round on a tree stump, or dogs wearing dinner jackets like in the Michael Jackson Leave Me Alone Video.... by the time these are more vivid than the reality with my eyes open I'm in full mania and sleep is just an impossibility. I don't think I'm manic by the way. I think I am going to sleep because I feel kind of speedy and tired at the same time. I just thought I would have gone back to bed by now. It's 11:09 and I had to get to the chemist at some time between 9 and 7 to drink one day's methadone under patronizing Supervised Consumption and to pick up another three days' to keep me going over the new year "break" (which has no good associations for me ~ at the millennium I was so stressed by the pressure of it all I found myself crying before I went out and of course you have to take your Es or other drugs early so you're flying by midnight when usually I only dropped my first one-and-a-half AT midnight ~ this was so I could dose again at 2am (a single pill, making my intake for the night 2.5 pills) and my E would be coasting down pleasantly by 6am when all major dance parties ended. After that if you were in Brixton you could go to the Fridge Bar which was full of nutters; if you were elsewhere in town there was often an official after party for pillheads who want to continue taking E and speed and whatever else they fancied right into the afternoon. Then you'd end up in someone's house you barely knew kind of stuck there not wanting to be there yet not wanting to go home. Whenever I was "having an affair" I'd ALWAYS go back to their place and rarely if ever invite them over to mine (something to do with other people in my room feeling like an invasion; I never was truly comfortable with anyone in my room even when they were just coming in to see Pandable the hamster who did a teapot trick where you flipped the lid up and he appeared hands together all faye looking surprised. The Australian girl I went out with briefly used to say "Pandable's just like a cartoon character". Hamsters are banned in Australia so the poor Aussies are deprived of the joys of tubby tail-less poppy-eyed rodents. Though I'm sure isolated enthusiasts keep them illicitly. My online friend Buggerlugz has TWENTY-SEVEN teenytiny pinging roborovski hamsters ~ the tiniest and quickest (and hardest to tame) of all hammies. And she has twenty-seven. I asked whether she ever puts a whole bunch of them in the bath to run around like furry Scalectrix. I used to let Bashful, Itchy and Spherical go for pings in the bath and they loved it. I had to put the plug in as Itchy was so tiny she could, if she'd really wanted, have squeezed her head and thus possibly her body, no matter how tubby it looked, down the drain!

Well I'm off to do some research about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome being the product of an over-active rather than an underactive brain. This makes perfect sense to me. When you have M.E. as it always used to be called over here, you feel like a phone with a knackered battery. You can rest and feel fully charged but that charge just drains to nothing so incredibly quickly the only thing you can do on a truly bad day is rest up for hours on end in bed. If it hadn't been for Talk Radio UK I think I would have lost my mind because I felt too ill even to watch television (the "photophobia" made my eyesight incredibly glary. I have this theory that all my problems are down to misplacement of energy. Depression where energy is very low. Anxiety where energy is misused, clenching itself round your heart. And mania where at the truly full-on stage the energy literally shines out of you like sunbeams. I used to have a manic headgame where I played tennis with my excess energy. Batting this ball back and forth as I paced frantically along the streets. I'm so glad to have experienced mania, it's one of the most amazing experiences of my life. To go so high I actually got higher than any drug had ever taken me ~ and I've tried everything. I felt like I was turning from physicality into pure energy and spiritual form. As the mania wore off I suddenly had a feeling one day of my feet literally and physically being on the ground, whereas before I had felt like I was flying. This manic episode went on for weeks and weeks. The very most intense part was the first week of it (following weeks of stormy moods). Within 5 days I was so hyped up I was screaming incoherently and roaring like a wild animal in the middle of my room. People in my house avoided me for weeks afterwards and people in shops visibly backed away. I have never been in such an intense state in my life and like I say, it took weeks for it to fully die down, with a couple of intense resurgences. I was medicated during most of those weeks and the antipsychotic meds actually made me feel better, because it seemed to do little to dampen my euphoria, but it did quell a lot of the agitation I felt and so respiradone was very helpful in that respect. I just wish I'd known the stuff could actually CAUSE anxiety as I started having panic attacks or near-panic-attacks in the weeks following.

What am I talking about? Oh yeah ME or CFS. Which I definitely used to have and still ahve traces of (it hardly ever goes away entirely)... being a displacement of energy and my life's illnesses being obvious displacements of energy. Chinese doctors believe all illness is an imbalance in "qi" or "chi" ~ the lifeforce. But I think in my case the imbalance was more plain for all to see. My university years were ruined by an attack of anxious depression that took over three years to fade. After that I got ME (CFS) after that I started getting mildly bipolar symptoms, after that I went on heavy drugs and the heroin levelled out my mood incredibly well. And after that (thanks to methadone) the bipolar came back with avengeance and now here I am on the cusp of New Year's Eve with my resolution and goal being to get my magazine off the ground. I am absolutely determined to produce this magazine. There's none quite like it. Ever since I was at school and co-edited the UN-official school magazine I've had an eye for publishing opportunities. I never got into any industry that truly suited me because I was so painfully lacking in confidence I'd never have got the job. Nothing to do with any lack of talent. Everything to do with lack of bullshitting skills. One thing I learned during my years on drugs was some self esteem. I hit lows so bad that I absolutely had to believe in myself ~ even in some tiny way ~ against everything. Because nothing meant anything, there was a highspeed railway line at the top of my road and all I really wanted to do was to stand in front of an express train, arms held out like a cross, and get blasted into infinity. Then I realized, because I believe in Jesus Christ, that I'd not get even one single moment's rest before I woke up again to have to live over again when all I wanted was to die die die, to never think, feel, be thought or felt about, never to remember and never to be remembered. That's what I wanted. And if it would have hurt my family that bad to see me go I'd happily have killed them too. What business anybody had actually wanting to live, I simply could not comprehend. I thought all belief in life was a delusion and I only regretted having been born to see the sheer evil in the world. A world that criticized me and called me wrong for taking a drug that took the evils of the world away, if only for a few hours. Heroin fed my nihilism in a big way for a long time. But nothing in my drug addiction was ever sraightforward or easy to explain.

I'll leave it there. I didn't mean to launch into a rant about my miseries but my point, I suppose, is that I DO WANT TO LIVE NOW, that I HAVE A REASON FOR LIVING. AND I WANT TO TURN MY MAGAZINE INTO A REALITY. I'M UTTERLY DETERMINED TO DO THIS.

Now I'll take this opportunity to WISH YOU ALL A VERY NICE NEW YEAR'S EVE AND AN EFFORTLESSLY SUPERIOR 2012 ~ MAY IT BE WAY BETTER THAN THAT MIXED BAG THEY LABELLED 2011!

HAPPY NEW YEAR FOLKS: 12 HOURS 10 MINUTES TO GO!


Illustrated: I'm a Little Pandable Short and Stout Here's my PANDABLE! HERE'S MY SPOUT!




HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 1 (TIËSTO)




HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 2

A Late Wakening

I LAID IN BED ALL DAY TILL 5PM then defrosted for an hour (ie smoked cigarettes in front of the television) then HAD to go out to the bloody methadone chemist. Strangely the methadone made me feel much better. Yesterday I was manic in the morning, depressed in the afternoon. So depressed I had to go to bed I felt lousy. Couldn't even eat, so I had to buy a shish kebab. I get the couscous version in the box with salad. A full meal of smoky lamb chunks for £6. The shop that does the less salty salad is shut over Xmas. Lazy bastards!

I nearly had a big row in the library just now for phoning a friend. Some Asian guy kept coming up to me asking me to keep it down. Then he told me to stop talking when I was trying to LISTEN to a very involved story so I yelled I'M NOT TALKING then the rude woman who tells the homeless man not to sleep in the library said "well I can hear you" so I deliberately spoke as loud as possible as I gathered my things and left. Amazingly I didn't feel the biting cold that had me in sweats of misery walking down. That's because my methadone is finally working.

The poor girl in the room next to me has bought an LCD TV and expected to get Freeview channels out here in the twee suburbs where we get the worst TV reception I've ever experienced. I said you'll be lucky. Then she asked me how to tune it in I said highlight analogue tuning and she got 4 channels of snow, just like I get. The other night Gladiator came on ITV. I slammed in the DVD and compared scenes. The DVD was normality. On ITV it was snowing in Rome!

I'm feeling ill. I don't know why. Is it just manic depression again? I don't know. I feel like I want to puke. I have an abscess on my right foot. The abscesses on my legs have gone down after I stuck surgical blue needles in each one and drained them but this one on my foot is too painful to mess around like that so I might have to go to casualty (that's the ER to you Americans) to get flucloxacillin, which is the normal antibiotic for drug abscesses. Yes I'm afraid I was using every day over the Xmas break (and what sane person wouldn't?) but now I'm back in the routine of knocking back methadone like a 40 year old baby in under the chemist's "supervision" I somehow find it easier to keep the old nose clean.

I'm fretting about what I'm going to eat tonight or should I just get drugs instead? I don't really want to do anything. I wish I could have general anaesthesia. I wish I could have £10,000 to put my magazine together. I worked out start up costs would be a mere £1000 for computers and phones but several grand to pay the printers to knock out the things. In this country WH Smith are the main distributors of periodicals but I need more information about how you persuade shops to order more copies. Can you do offers like buy 20 get 20 free? Please if anyone knows anything about the magazine industry please help me. I really need a detailed book on the subject that goes into the mathematics of print run costs and advertising revenue. Websites and links please. BTW I have looked into the idea of publishing online and for various reasons it's a non-starter. The entire point of this magazine is that you take it home and read real words on a real page. Even Dickens published a magazine "Household Words". Not a website. Did you know when American newspapers went online they garnered a mere TENTH of the advertising income from the internet as from paper. Please someone who has edited or better still been advertising or circulation manager on a magazine get in touch and tell me how it's done.

Well I've got to go else I'll get terminated. Happy New Year to one and all. (Just in case I'm not in the mood to post between now and then....)


Illustrated: the standard of technology in my house (except you can't even have a set-top box in my house) ~ the landlord who takes in over £200 PER ROOM per week ie SIXTY THOUSAND POUNDS A YEAR income from this house cannot even be bothered to fit an operational high gain television aerial to our chimney!



HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 4



HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 3

A Morning of Domesticity

(THAT MEANS SCURRYING ROUND THE KITCHEN like a blue-arsed fly, cleaning up to you!) yes I turned up the radio to top volume (I don't know why but I nearly always listen to talk stations) so Radio 4 Extra was blaring out The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe with Lucy meeting Mr Tumnuss under the snowy lamppost... then a boring phone-in without Vanessa Feltz on BBC London and then stuff to do with people being at risk of 20 years in a labour camp for not crying hard enough over the death of the aptly named "Kim Jong ILL" in North Korea. Over this time I filled an entire black sack with rubbish including at least five nearly-full cartons of milk and cleared a table top of paperclips, women's eye makeup, Vaseline lip gel and glass ashtrays. I was about to wipe it down with newspapers to clean it when I found a picture of Sunshine or Sweetie, one of the pair of Chinese pandas that have been lent to a Scottish zoo for 17 years, the tubby furry had a stick of bamboo in its mouth and just made you want to poke it in the tummy and twist those black ears round and round!

I'm so glad the "festive tide" is past us. Now it's New Year's Eve, which I haven't done for 9 or 10 years and only ever enjoyed when I was high on Ecstasy which says a lot about New Years if you require mindbending drugs to enjoy it. Then again I was at a psychedelic trance party and you require mindbending drugs to get into the groove there too so... ho-humm. All this was so very many years ago. I just wish I could kick the drugs I still occasionally take now. Even Valium is bad. I know it's nowhere near as bad as taking heroin, but I'd rather take neither. Do you know the one decent Valium dealer I know of via a friend (I also happen to know his mother) sells a minimum £20 bag. Just like a lot of heroin dealers! 20 blue (10mg) Valium for £20. The only drugs I have clinical need of are the occasional sleeping pill ~ as longterm readers will know I go through periods where I simply do not sleep. Usually I am manic and high or manic and exhausted at these times. I also get occasional panic so I started taking Valium for that over the summer. I had a near panic-attack at the Nutter Club (dual diagnosis drugs and mental illness meeting) I used to go to (where nearly everyone was bipolar, I might add and 50% of bipolars admit to their doctors to indulging in illegal drugs which means the number actually having used them must be far higher. Interestingly nearly all the street drugs tweak the same three chemicals ~ serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline aka norepinephrine ~ that are activated in manic episodes, are known to go haywire in psychosis and are probably at low levels in depresssion which is why antidepressants are occasionally categorized according to which of these three chemicals they tweak. Antidepressants can actually precipitate mania in susceptible individuals, which is why when I took Prozac I was constantly being told to calm down. One girl, who had a manic-depressive mother and sister said I was acting "manic". I did calm down... about four weeks later. And took Prozac very irregularly after that as it just made me so agitated sometimes I literally could not even sit in a chair I had to pace pace pace. This is the start of my bipolar symptoms, back in my mid 20s when my diagnosis was actually chronic fatigue syndrome. I heard a fascinating description of that condition on television last week when a former sufferer said it's due to the brain being over-activated, hence the extreme tiredness yet inability to sleep at night. I definitely had CFS and wouldn't wish it on anyone. In a way it's worse than severe depression because severe depression is taken seriously by psychiatrists whereas a person cabbaged by "M.E." (as CFS used to be known) would probably still to this day be treated as a neurotic by certain members of the medical profession. One characteristic CFS sufferers are said to have in common is a tendency to push themselves past the point of exhaustion even BEFORE they become ill. They work hard and play hard. They are not the type of people who lie down to take rests before an afternoon of activity. Yet when you have this horrible condition you absolutely have to spend your energy like a person spends money on a tight budget and you have to lie down and close your eyes and it actually gets so bad you can't even watch television because it's all there in your face. This terrible world. Glaring at you. That's what they call photophobia. Oh those were the days. My early twenties. Totally messed up by an illness many people don't even believe exists. Not even I believed it existed because it was me and I had no rights to be ill. I still had to push push push even though I'd already pushed so hard I'd broken. Not one of my friends ever truly gave any support. Except perhaps one, who did it in a subtle way. Then one day someone I'd only just met, who'd asked me about myself ~ and we were on Ecstasy after a huge party and so talking intently ~ said to me Your life has been ruined by this thing. And I cried because that was the one person. The one single person who ever listened to me, understood me and belived me.

Now I have a new idea for the future. Something I'm going to do that I could make good money out of. But it's a business requiring start up investment. I would need £5-10,000 so how I'm going to make that I've no idea. Maybe I should get writing the children's books. I know it's not the gateway to a fortune but I heard you get about £3000 in advance per book. So if I wrote 4, I'd have my money. Oh yeah but there's tax, agent's fees and VAT. OK maybe if I wrote ten books I'd have my money. But I'm determined to do this business idea. It's a magazine I want to publish and I'm sure people would buy it. So that's my wish that can and will come true. My family will remember that as I grew up I'd run to my parents with "business ideas". I was full of them. I even daydreamed of becoming a property developer. Aged 10. People don't understand me. Just because in the illegal world of drugs I'm unwilling to get deeply involved, they think I'm either soft or stupid. I'm just the type of person who likes to do things above board and to know that what's mine is mine and that the Proceeds of Crime Act ain't gonna take my plasma TV away. Know what I'm saying?

Well I'll leave y'all on that note. Have a very Happy New Year everyone. Here's to a fantabulous 2012!!




Illustrated: I love pandas and Freesat is coming! (Without the Plasma TV (for now)).


HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 5

Christmas Report

IT WAS A VERY QUIET DAY I had hot chicken Madras (supermarket stylee) and a bottle of fake Baileys and watched the Queen's Speech at 3pm (British tradition). That was about it. Then I took some Valium and fell into merciful sleep. Anything that helps one escape Xmas is an excellent thing in my book...!

But having said that:

I hope y'all had a good one.



HARD MELODIC TRANCE




HARDCORE TECHNO TRANCE RANDOMNESS




SCOOTER ONE (ALWAYS HARDCORE)

Xmas!

GREY, COLD, RAINY WEATHER. Waking up in the afternoon wondering just how life can go on.... Morrisons packed out with customers manically buying whiskey smoked salmon (as I did)... tinsel everywhere... yes IT'S CHRISTMAS AGAIN! I HOPE YOU ALL ARE ENJOYING IT!



AND IN CASE I DON'T POST BETWEEN NOW AND THEN: DO HAVE A MERRY ONE



(IF NOT, A TOLERABLE ONE...)



AND A FANTASTIC 2012!




MERRY TRANCEMAS!

Sorted

I'VE SORTED out THREE pressing things today that were doing my head in.

1: the council wanted to perform a Residence Check ~ to make sure that the person living at the address really was me

2: my Service Charge payments have been messed up since I signed a form authorizing their direct withdrawal from my account. Nothing has been withdrawn, making me look like a freeloading fraudster

3: and worst of all my only bank account has been hit by FRAUDSTERS trying to take a direct debit off my account and putting it £200 in the red (that's over $300) ~ give or take a few pennies. I rang up their helpline ENRAGED and got told to enter my nearest branch where I was considerably less enraged thanks to chainsmoking and alcohol (which calms me down). Turns out nobody had tried to fraud me. A direct debit from another customer had been typed incorrectly hitting MY account not theirs. Now all £197 has been refunded and I am a fully fledged human being with a bank account once more!

Illustrated: a map of London highlighting Islington, where I don't live... or DO I??!?




HARD TRANCE



ARCHANGEL GABRIEL: TRANCE TEKNO



"AWESOME SEGMENT"

I won the lottery!

I TOOK IN 5 OLD EUROMILLIONS tickets to my local shop to be barcode-checked and guess what? On Friday 21 October I won £3.20!!!


That's all of FIVE US dollars.


I didn't know it was possible to win so little but I still walked off in a daze, daydreaming about living up a yuppie tower block with Sky TV and a new computer.


I spent about half the money on a half litre of Fizz cherry flavour cyder, which is made in Lithuania.


Hey I found a great new blog at Lilly's place http://mymethdiaries.blogspot.com. Drop by!



*******

Not as cheesy as it could be
BEETHOVEN'S FÜR ELISE
chill out dance version
actually i really like this it's the sort of music the Queen would listen to if she and Prince Philip dropped Es together after a long day's ribbon-cutting...





This is more Prince Edward's style, methinks...
PACHEBEL'S CANON ~ CLUB MIX





... and Princess Ann mellowing out with a spliff....

E-cigarette update

I'VE JUST HEARD OF A new smoking cessation pill that is to nicotine what methadone is to heroin: Champix (varenicline) ~ thanks Lilly.(Ie a weak and feeble substitute ideal for those with enough will to power themselves through...) (methadone is actually stronger than heroin and more dangerous; it just feels weaker).

My e-cigarette which is called "Impulse" tastes like rhubarb crumble. I've thoroughly enjoyed puffing away in shops. When one store detective gave me a funny look I stubbed it out on my eye. The end looks like a diamond and is cold by the way; it lights up red whenever you toke on it.

I think I'm getting the puffing technique right, though I have to say I felt the need to buy a pack of ten Sterling Superkings "just to compare". And I'd say the nicotine blast is about the same. Obviously with Jasper and Jasper Impulses you don't get that lovely attractive smoke curling out of your nostrils.

Do you know I once got reprimanded for walking into a clothes shop while (heavily) exhaling cigarette smoke? How pissy can you get?

I'll let you know how my e-smoking goes: I think I'll be needing a newly refilled e-fag in a day or two. The ones I'm smoking are nonrechargable and disposable. Supposedly you're getting 25 cigarettes for £6.99 (which is about what 25 fags cost anyhow...) I still think it's better than nicotine gum, and way better than patches. I'm a nervous smoker. When I need a smoke, I need a smoke!

I bought a Thai film on DVD yesterday called Sick Nurses but it's pretty boring...

PS has anyone notice Blogger's "highlight a word and add a link to it" facility is GONE today... why?


VIVALDI TECHNO TRANCE



ENYA: WATERMARK
a wonderful tune



UDO LINDENBERG: MÄDCHEN AUS OST BERLIN
sad cold war era song about a West German boy who falls in love with an East German girl



ENYA: MAY IT BE
music from the Lord of the Rings

Electric Cigarettes

TOMORROW I'M GETTING AN E-CIGARETTE (as illustrated ~ don't they look real?!) I'm DETERMINED TO GIVE UP SMOKING!!

I'M FEELING WAY BETTER than yesterday and the previous few days. I think finally I have caught up on my lost sleep.

I have been eating microwave cheeseburgers that are so addictive. Seriously you want to try one. Use all the relish and extra relish (and extra cheese) if so desired. And mound it up with salad and I promise you that just like with mama heroin you'll be crawling back for more.

I did have a tiny bit of gear last night but I couldn't even feel it. It just made me sleep through till morning without waking every hour (like I normally do). I also realized my methadone isn't actually holding me properly as I'm getting bad sweats from my heater. Then I get bad sweats again by venturing outside into the freezing cold! I won't promise never to touch the "B" again as y'all know I will. But I'm determined to get my methadone dose cut down to nothing as quick as poss. I can't wait till I get to the magic 20mg. That means, to my mind, that I'm not a raving addict any more.

I saw a funky SQUARE satellite dish this morning. Just like one of those BSB Squariels (remember them) ~ but massive. BSB who went against Sky's (then) 30+ channels with SIX of their own and expected to win the war! In the end the 2 companies merged into "BSkyB". Freesat is operated by the BBC and ITV (the main terrestrial TV companies) but they use the same satellites as Sky. Anyone who stops subscribing to Sky automatically gets Freesat but lots of people don't seem to realize that. 100+ channels FREE. And supposedly 200 more if you tune them in manually.

What was I talking about? O, the weather. Yes it's FREEEZING COLD and yet I've had terrible sweats when walking to the chemist. O yeah and HERE'S THE NEWS.

TOMORROW I'M BUYING AN ELECTRONIC CIGARETTE. They cost £8 for a nonrechargable disposable one that contains as many blasts on the nicotine as 30 real fags. I'm determined to get my absolute money's worth by holding in the nicotine as if it's crack smoke. £8 is $12 and almost as much as real fags cost anyhow but I'm determined to give these electronic ones a whirl. I've seen people use them and they look so funky. The rechargable ones used to cost £40 ~ then you have to hunt down a supplier of refill cartridges and of course I'd only want maximum strength ones. I'll let you know how it goes...

Freezing

IT IS RIDICULOUSLY FREEZING COLD these days and I trudged up the road wearing 2 jackets, sweating heavily under these and a scarf. Then I drank the evil methadone, went round Morrisons in the worst mood ever and retired to the library for over an hour to let that gloopy green crap take effect. Methadone is the slowest acting drug I have ever tried. It takes a good 90 minutes for any real effect and "peak serum levels" are reached after four very long hours. I wake up each morning sweaty yet cold and it takes a good 2-3 hours to steel myself for that nasty same old same old walk to the chemist for a sip of barely effectual linctus. As you all know I can't stand methadone. I have an appointment in the new year to see the doctor who should hopefully reduce the dose still further from 60mg to 40mg over the course of a month. After that I want to get down to 20mg and from then on if the clinic won't give me take-homes, I'm just buying methadone on the street and weaning myself off it at my own pace.

I got woken up by the crackheads or whoever they are making the biggest rumpus at 5am, then this idiot went and rang every single doorbell in the building at about 11. As if that's going to endear her to the residents of Halfwit House where I live.

I got a call at around 10 saying finally I have a date for satellite TV installation but it's in 7 weeks' time and there are no earlier appointments. How pathetic is that? I'm beginning to wish I'd just shelled out extra and got the installation done privately.

I'm munching "American salad" like it's going out of fashion. The British government recommend its citizens eat at least 5x80g portions of fruit or vegetables per day. Well 2x200g salad bags works out the same and finely chopped mixed salad is just about the only veg I can bear to eat (apart from broccoli and peas). I loathe cabbage (except raw) and hate brussels sprouts. They smell like farts. I eat my salad totally undressed (70s lower middle class style) so I'm keeping my calories to a minimum. I could do with losing a bit of weight. Last time I weighed myself I was 220lbs! ~ that's gotta be close on 15 stone! I've also been eating those industrial microwavable cheeseburgers you get from the chilled meats isle. They come with a relish sachet and aren't bad doused in American salad.

I was reading Jason Donovan's autobiography in the library ~ only the bits where he details his coke habit, of course. I love reading about and watching films of other people doing coke as the drug is so "glamorous" ~ to them, but not to me. Powder coke only ever made me feel jagged and exceptionally moody and there's no fantastic rush like with crack. I always thought crack was rubbish, too. As for heroin, Keith Richards got it right when he says it's all in the name ~ the arch seductress. And just like any dirty tart you can live without her without too much hassle. Methadone is like a stern overweight babushka reprimanding you for past misdeeds but I take methadone as a means to an end. And that end is a life on no drugs at all...

I wasn't back on heroin...

I WASN'T BACK ON HEROIN when I made my last post I was off it. I was enthusiastic about everything because I wasn't sleeping and was a bit hyper. Nowhere near hyper enough in my opinion, but there you go. I haven't taken heroin in more than a week and I don't miss it. The relapse started off when an ancient dealer of mine ran up to me on the street and led me to his car where he gave me a sample of B that he guaranteed would be better than anyone else's. It was. So I scored it every day for about a week. Then one day he couldn't get it together to come to my house so I thought **** it and just left it there. I was scared of getting withdrawals so I scored off someone else whose gear was reliably crap. And the day after that, and the next day, and so on I have used no drugs at all. When I couldn't sleep I tried Valium which only took the jagged irratable edge off. I kept getting told not to talk so loud and I was losing my temper with certain people on the phone who owe me money and the Valium probably did calm all that down. One night I took a zopiclone but not even that made me sleep and zopiclone is the best sleeper I've ever tried by a mile. Even in a severe manic episode if I dropped it at 10pm I'd be asleep by midnight (and then get up, raring to go at 2:30am!!) So it looks like I had a miniature half-arsed manic episode as I was only sleeping about 2 hours a day for days on end. Then one day I slept all afternoon. Then returned to not sleeping. Yesterday and last night I slept for hours and hours and hours and surprise surprise I feel sluggish with flashes of depression. I really hope I'm not going down.

Yesterday I had to go down my ****hole of a drugs clinic. They really are the most inept bunch of people. Couldn't even book me an appointment for the new year when I NEED A DOCTOR'S REVIEW to take my methadone down even further otherwise I will be stuck at 60mg and that's beyond the pale. I want to be on 40mg now. Then from 40 to 20. Once I get down to 10 I'm either telling the clinic I want a level dose (so I get take-home doses) or scoring methadone on the street. I'm not going through the horror of reducing methadone from 10mg to nothing under their patronizing and condescending system of "supervised consumption".

I bought a fan heater (£15) so that I can urge myself into the shower with the luxury of hot winds instead of freezing damp and cold (my other heater was completely blown, even when I changed the fuse). Plus various items from Asda including a bag of finely chopped salad. So I've been reading the Andy Warhol Diaries while munching like a rabbit.

It took me quite a while to get a hang of Andy Warhol's personality. There's more humour and warmth there than you'd credit at first glance. He did his last christmas day giving handouts in a soup kitchen, which was sad. No Halston. No Bianca Jagger. None of the glamorous friends. Just him and a member of Interview staff handing out free food to the homeless. In fact at the very end it seemed a lot of his old social set had dumped him ~ and then he died, after an operation as minor as a gallbladder-ectomy.

I'd love to be an artist with millionaire collectors but I can only paint cartoons. I'd also like to be a TV magnate ~ I have ideas for channels that haven't been done. And of course I want to be a bestselling novelist. Only problem with that last one is nobody buys novels any more and my inspiration has deserted me.

Well I've got to go and eat more chicken legs and salad. I'M OFF HEROIN. And down to 65mg methadone as of tomorrow. Have a nice day y'all...

Insomnia

I HAVEN'T BEEN SLEEPING at all well since the end of last week.

I had met one of my old drug dealers who gave me a sample of the most shyte hot heroin I had tasted in a long time. I could actually FEEL it. And so I was scoring off him every single day for over a week. Blew loads of money I'd saved up. I felt like I did in the early days of my addiction: too scared to stop. Scared in an indistinct, distant type of way and not knowing what I was going to do with myself without this wonderful heroin. My veins even started to behave, meaning I got 90% of my hits straight in. The warm buzz of yesteryear was back.

Then the dealer started taking the piss with timing. Leaving me waiting 4.5 hours one particular day. All he said was that for another £5 I could have another bag so of course I got one more. The next day he answered and promised to come right round but it transpired he had no driver and to add insult to injury he'd picked up a new batch of "B" ~ call me cynnical but it was probably nowhere near as good as the old stuff. Which is just about the only B of normal quality I've had this year. All else has been cowshit and how junkies can queue up on street corners for the crap most people sell is beyond me. They must have seriously low tolerance. I'm only on 70mg of methadone and I literally cannot feel most people's heroin AT ALL... just the vaguest opiate tinge, which could be imagination. Then nothing. Even this good stuff made me feel good for all of a minute or so then I was just tired. But not in the cross-eyed nodding out semi-conscious state heroin is supposed to put you in.

I was terrified of stopping because I was terrified of withdrawals from the extra tolerance I thought I had built up over my week and a half of using. On the last day I scored some B that was so weak I couldn't feel it (ie it was the rubbish most people buy and convince themselves they're getting some sort of buzz out of). I got my weekend methadone so I could at least take my doses when I felt I really needed them. This helped a lot.

Another issue was that I was fighting off a particularly nasty bout of depression that just made me feel my life was over. On heroin life felt OK. Without it, life was intolerable. Please please let my mood switch. When I'm manic I go vehemently anti-drugs (why waste money on illegal chemicals when you're high already?) ... It's not mania as such, but my mood did switch from exceptionally sour, down and ill to normal, up and interested. Suddenly life seems full of possibilities. Life has meaning and the meanings are beautiful. The downside to this has been pretty bad insomnia. For a couple of days I can't have slept much more than 2-3 hours. I remember one day I huddled under a duvet on my chair and just slept a while as BBC News blared away. I was taking Valium which took the edge off my ragged mood but did very little to help me sleep. Eventually on Sunday daytime I slept and slept all day. I did sleep about 4 hours on Sunday night but something's going on. I know it's not depression. When I'm down I nearly always sleep hours longer than usual. In my brief periods of "euthymia" (that is "normal mood" to me and you) I sleep almost exactly 8 hours. I am not sleeping eight hours. I feel like I've been out clubbing all night on illegal stimulants that will not wear off. Not drugged out of my head, but buzzing enough not to want to BOTHER wasting the time and effort involved in putting my head down. I dropped a sleeping pill last night and still spent longer reading The Andy Warhol Diaries than I ever did sleeping.

Good news: I've thrown out on SCART-less television, one microwave, one foodmixer. The charity shop won't accept electricals. I've given them maybe as many as 40 classical music albums on vinyl. People who should know better, people like Deshane, my Jamaican support worker, say to me "vinyl's worth money man! Don't give it away! You should sell that." The last thing a compulsive harder like me needs to hear. The ONLY records I have kept are Mike Oldfield's Tubular bells on vinyl and UB40's Signing Off. Which I very nearly gave away, thinking all the writing on the cover meant it was a Brahms concerto!

I've got to go and take my computer to the shop it came from but I'm not relishing the experience. This store is well known for having the worst customer service in the business. On the two occasions that I ventured in the staff were uninterested and dismissive and one didn't even appear to know what "dual core" meant. There's a problem on my hard drive. Not with the drive itself (so it seems) but with the cable. Unfortunately the cable is integral to the drive. I know this as I've removed and reinserted it on several occasions in my attempts at getting better connections. So they're almost certainly going to insist that I pay for a new drive thus leaving me with a totally empty computer. No Norton. No Microsoft Word. Both of which I paid extra for. What am I going to do? Does anyone know if/how the shop can reinstall these products for me. I only use my computer for blogging and wordprocessing. Oh and it MUST wordprocess in Chinese and Japanese, like the old one did. Yeah man I'm a true citizen of the 21st century. I can input in Mandarin Chinese!

Which reminds me, I really must get back to my Spanish course. Unfortunately I rapidly realized that Spanish is inferior to French. Not linguistically, but culturally. French literature, for instance, is the only modern literature that can seriously vye with English as the most superior body of writing of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. French is spoken in some amazing places. Example: I made Friends I never would have been able to talk to without the French language when I spent a couple of weeks in Morocco over Xmas/New Year 1991/1992. It was hardly a glamorous vacation. We spent new year's eve sleeping with the homeless at Fez station in bitter bitter cold mountain weather. I woke up in the very early hours seriously worried that the local man next to me, shrouded as he was in a peaked ethnic hoodie really was dead. Then the railway station master came out at 6am to loudly shoo us all away. He piped down when he saw me and my Japanese friend. Gave us a funny look. And we got on the next train to wherever. I still think back to Morocco, the most evocative place I've ever been. Even more so than India. Berber coffee, North African cigarettes and tangerines on the trees in December. I wandered the perimiter of the royal palace at dawn watching the king's trees bathed in golden light thinking: WOW, I'M IN AFRICA. Africa! How cool is that. I'd so love to go back. And I got there from West Wales taking trains and boats the entire way. It took three days but it's only a three hour flight. I can't think of anywhere else in the world, apart from the crossing from Spain to Morrocco, where two entirely different universes come so close. The one European and "Christian"; the other Berber-speaking and Muslim (Moroccans aren't really Arabs, they're Berbers. The Arabic language is mostly used in government and by the media. We got to stay in this doctor's house we met on the train and he had satellite television. Now I always think you haven't truly seen a country unless you've watched their television and I spent a couple of days glued to Egyptian soap operas and the Moroccan version of "songs of praise". The doctor could not understand my fascination. I really wish I'd known Arabic, but as I say, French is just as useful as Arabic out there and English (at least in 1991-2) was almost exclusively used for tourism (and probably international trade).

The weirdest thing that happened to me in Morocco came when the official guide joined heads with the manager of a carpet shop then came up to me and offered me a kilo of hashish on credit card!

Ho-hummm... such is life. I'd really like to go back to Morocco if and when I ever get myself 100% opiate clean. I'd rather do my healing in a faraway place... and Morocco does feel a LONG way from home ~ except it's only a 3 hour flight back to London! I could reinvigorate my French. Hashish is no temptation to me; I absolutely despise the stuff. And I doubt there's much heroin in Morocco. Morocco was the only place I could think of that I'd really like to go to that ISN'T a notorious production or transit country for opiate narcotics. So maybe I will go. One day... one day... one day.

And how are YOU today?

PS Reading Andy Warhol has inspired me to become a great pop artist in my own right. My Mum sent me an art easel for my birthday which I'd really like to get some 2x2ft canvases for, so I can paint cartoons in acrylics. Cartoons are probably just about all I'm capable of producing art-wise... I'm going to save up and blow £100 in an art shop. I'll try and slap up the results online... (dont' hold your breath until this gets done...!)


Andy Warhol ~ diarist extraordinaire; the mysteries of the "east" (actually the West (Morocco is just as westerly as the UK)); hashish ~ it is exactly what it looks like

No Free Cable But Freesat Is A-Coming

I TOOK MY CABLE BOX to my friend Valium Marilyn's, unplugged hers, plugged mine in and hacked and hacked away trying to get a free signal. She even produced two free viewing cards that had been lying amongst a pile of junk mail but the cable somehow knew the serial numbers of the cards were mis-synchronized with my digibox. "Aren't they crafty bastards," said Valium Marilyn. It took over ten minutes to get her TV working again, then we watched Australian customs undercover on channel 100-and-something. Both of us were glued to the screen as some Vietnamese lollypops were slit open to reveal high grade white powder. We were slavering at the screen thinking "China white heroin!" But it was boring old coke. Cocaine from Vietnam. Whatever next. Even the customs inspector looked secretly disappointed.

I'm supposedly getting Freesat TV within the next month and a half at the longest. I'm hoping to get someone else's cancellation. I can no longer bear living with four channels of snow and endless trails for things on BBC3 and E4 and other channels everyone else seems to get in Britain apart from me.

Of course I am also supposedly moving house imminently. Which is what got me so het up about signing up for satellite television. If I get that installed surely sod's law shall come into play making me have to move out before I get my hands on at least 83 channels of free entertainment plus supposedly another 200 that I can tune in manually. You even get a horror film channel. So I'm doing what's known as Tempting Fate. Plunking down £67 on something that will really brighten my life, when my life is due to be brightened immeasurably more by this forthcoming move. True, everyone at the new house will be recovering from severe nervous breakdowns but so am I. Only a few months ago I was hearing voices every day and getting funny looks in shops. I still have to take medication and when I don't my mood plummets and sometimes I get quite paranoid. People on the street seem to be talking about me. So I take my medication albeit grudgingly. And look forward to moving house. Or satellite TV.

The pest controller came round today as we still have roaches marching around our kitchens. I showed him the Mount Everest of unsorted belongings on my double bed. We pretty much agreed it's Priority Number One that as much of these unwanted books, records, DVDs, classical albums on vinyl etc which includes at least one carrier bag full of WOMEN's clothes must go down the charity shop forthwith so that's what I'm doing. Also I HAVE to get my house tidy for the Freesat man. Otherwise I will die of shame.

My methadone is down to 70mg as of tomorrow, which I'm really pleased about. 70 mils! Wow. Never thought I'd see that day. I might actually be on less methadone now than Anna Grace out in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Now that would be one up the spout for her!

My newest to-do thing, apart from not use heroin on top of my increasingly lowly methadose, and to clear clear clear the rubble off my bed, is to GET MY COMPUTER REPAIRED. I found out if I move house I can get 30 (gigabyte(?)) broadband plus a landline phone plus 75 TV channels all for about £30 a month so I might go for that one. IF and when I move.

Well Xmas is a-coming, the geese are getting fat. Please put £20 in the drug addict's hat!

That's a traditional rhyme here in Britain. I'm not into begging up change any more. I even found a dropped purse, with money inside, on Morrison's floor. And instantly returned it. See, a change in lifestyle is possible... I just wish I could change quicker. And cut out all illicit druggie-use ALTOGETHER...

Well there we are then, as they say in Wales. I'll have to ping or else I'll get terminated!

Cable

I WAS READING THROUGH the tat I have written and what a boring life! Oh yeah FINALLY I have paid the princely sum of £67 to get this free satellite dish. You only get the crap channels but hey it's better than 4 channels of snow that are about to be switched off anyway. I went outside and had a good scout round for satellite, cable and other TV inputs going into our house. The aerial on our roof doesn't work but there IS an old satellite dish up there, right on top of my bedroom and I looked and looked for a line coming in. I found the cable line which the installers helpfully split so I can route that in through my upstairs window. Does anybody know how to get free cable TV? I have the right box and everything but no viewing card. I plugged it in yesterday and it said "digital TV initializing" which was the biggest wind up as I knew it wasn't even lined into the cable. But please anybody how do I get free cable? As you can see I have become obsessed with television. This is because my life is otherwise empty and I was getting so depressed that as recently as yesterday I found myself lost and staring into space in Morrisons. Not just once but three times. I even did it at the till. Just nothing nothing nothing there. No inspiration no joy no hope and barely any life. I feel much better now because I've started taking my medication again and it works QUICK. I had genuinely forgotten to take it for about two weeks hence the lull. Remember those happy days when not taking medication made me totally off my head manic? I wish I could be on that side of the equation. Not raving mad. But a little bit high. That would be good. There is a drug dealer with heroin I can actually feel so guess who I've been phoning. The bags are tiny which just shows how rubbishy most heroin must be nowadays to even be able to get high on such a tiny dose. I don't know what I'm going to do. My only hope in practical terms is a bit of mania. When I am manic I feel high anyway and go vehemently against drugs. If I could be manic I could be clean. I want away from all these drugs but look in despair at my own life and my own behaviour and think what for what for what for?

TV Aerials

I'm very depressed. I've been taking drugs. I'm trying to get my TV sorted out. I either need to pay for an aerial to be fitted (wouldn't count on my landlord bothering with that in a million years) or more likely a dish. If I get it pointed at 19.2E I get loads of channels in German. So I can educate myself as I stare gormlessly into space for hours on end. I'm supposedly moving house almost immediately but frankly it's worth paying £150 just to hurry the move up and I get to keep the digibox. I'll just have to convince the community nuthouse I'm moving to that Euro TV will be to my benefit. I can also get Freesat installed for £67 but that's too complicated (they only take payment by debit or credit card) whereas if I arrange it myself and pay extra I can pay in cash and should get a cash discount. So that's all that's happening at the moment. Me trying not to take drugs and getting increasingly irritated by the rubbishy picture on my telly. 4 channels and you have to move the aerial to view each individual one. On a lucky day you can even get channel 5. I do possess a freeview box and bought a £70 high gain rooftop aerial on Wednesday. Unfortunately I hadn't a clue how to assemble it. So took it back to Argos under their 14 day money back guarantee in favour of a simpler aerial which supposedly came fully assembled but I couldn't work out how to fit the coaxial cable to the gizmo that plugs in the back (even though I have done this before albeit over 5 years ago). So I brought that one back and changed it for a £59.99 really posh indoor aerial that eventually scanned in some freeview channels (minus BBC, ITV and Channel 4 ie the main channels everyone buys it for) only for it to claim "no signal" on every single one. At one point I thought Al Jezeera was going to come through but no such luck. I only like Al Jezeera because I know George Bush wanted to bomb it. And no I am not an Islamic fundamentalist. Well that's that. I woke up feeling really sick today and I think it might have been withdrawal. A drug dealer on the street gave me a free sample of strong heroin which sorted me right out. Now I've had my methadone and intend to stick forever after to that even though the clinic have a ridiculous policy of insisting that anyone on a declining dose MUST drink it in the chemists under supervision, while a person on a level dose is allowed to take theirs home! This is all "to make sure you drink all your medication". Yeah, as if you're going to drink less than all when you're on a detox. Really logical. Of course I could have opted for take homes and just cut myself down but then I'm going to get moved back to the old catchment area of the old clinic and would have to either go back up to the dose prescribed or confess to the dose I was actually on because all new "clients" at methadone clinics are automatically put on supervised consumption for a few weeks. So that's that. I took eight pairs of jeans and two pairs of pensioner style trousers plus a vase full of the most horrible artificial flowers I've ever seen (all magnolia and brown, like artistically arranged dead moths). Got rid of that tat. Still have an everest sized amount of rubbish to go. Now I must leave you as this computer is about to terminate me. Please someone send me some happy vibes I'm so miserable.