Little Furry Animal Aspiration

IT'S 2:30 AM and I'm in a "mood" ...



... I just want OFF methadone...



... OFF all drugs ...



... no longer to be a pariah ...



... no longer at odds with society ...



... maybe a chance to be happy ... ? ...


?

The Tale of Hachikō... & I had an Onken

忠犬ハチ公 HERE'S THE STORY of a great Trotterdonkey Doggie named Hachi, which means he was 8th in the litter, who met a professor of agricultural engineering in Tokyo sometime before World War II who faithfully followed the professor home every night. Each evening, Hachi used to wait at the main railway station for his master to return home. When one day the professor died suddenly of a heart attack Hachi refused to accept the death and continued to show up, every single afternoon at the appointed time. Thin and bedraggled he was fed sandwiches by the Japanese commuters... All attempts at rehoming him failed. The faithful furry simply ran back to Shibuya Station and continued his vigil.

After he died, a statue was erected in Shibuya Station in Hachikō's honour. In 2008, a Hollywood film was released, starring Richard Gere. This is the story of Hachikō's life. Original Japanese version. You don't need any Japanese to follow this; it's all set to music:~~~~~~~

ハチ公物語 Hachikō Monogatari ~ The Tale of Hachikō



Top illustration: the original Hachikō...

Here's an Akita-inu tied up on the way to the dog show. Same coloration as a brushwood doggie; much bigger. Then you get to see lots of Japanese people down the precinct.



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I HAD AN ONKEN this afternoon. Vanilla yogurt with chocolate flakes.

Not much else to put. Not feeling too good.

8pm Hey I'm having "psychiatric symptoms" ~ "racing thoughts". I keep hearing the most random ideas spoken each side of my head. Down the library this afternoon I heard some woman whispering my full name, which irritated me. Then this other woman continued to have what appeared to be a pretty detailed conversation about me. The cow! I told myself I was "just being paranoid".

8:55pm the "psychiatric symptoms" have died down. I've been having them all day. I feel ill. I nearly went to bed just after 6. I don't know whether to see a dr. I don't see what a dr can do for me. I don't know what to do.

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HERE are some 柴犬 brushwood doggies, some shiba-inus in the snow...

Back to Brushwood

I'M REALLY INTO THESE BRUSHWOOD DOGGIES now. Even the sign 柴 "shiba" in 柴犬 shiba-inu has a little brushwood tree, a 木 ki, in it. Put two trees together 林 and you get a wood. Three trees make a Japanese forest 森.



Shiba-inus remind me of HM the Queen's cogis:





Originally I wanted a giant wolf-like 秋田犬 Akita-inu. They look like huge furry shiba-inus. They're used in Japan as police dogs...



Little and Large: haven't they got furry ears!



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Grrrr: I wrote this crap earlier and just wanted to save it, but blogger wasn't having that, so you get it. I'm sorry....

I found an interesting book down the library called You Don't Have To Be Famous To Have Manic Depression by Jeremy Thomas and Tony Hughes

They make some perceptive points about addiction:

Nicotine patches no more match up to the early morning hit of the first cigarette ... than swallowing a dose of methadone matches up to jacking up a decent dose of smack. Nicotine patches and methadone have a lot in common. They keep addicts off the streets, stop them injecting/inhaling, and keep them in thrall to their drug of choice.
p251

There's a good section on schizophrenia, though why on earth anyone with bipolar, which used to be called manic-depressive psychosis, needs an explanation of what it's like to be mad is beyond me. Lots of people with bipolar type 1 hear voices, though you wouldn't know that from reading this book.

With a brain prone to schizophrenia come accompanying talents and insights. For example, some people with schizophrenia have an almost uncanny way of sensing how other people are feeling. If the gift of manic depression is energy, the gift of schizophrenia is sensitivity.
p283

That's my problem. I feel too sensitive, most of the time. Heroin is a psychic blocker: it made life very much more comfortable because I no longer felt too much.

On diagnosis:

To be diagnosed a manic depressive goes to the very core of who you are as a person. It is difficult to feel good about a diagnosis that reaches into your very soul. Furthermore there are no external signs to mark the condition out as special, to get the ordinary sympathy for illness or to provide even a hint of what you experience. Suddenly, medication becomes a permanent part of daily routine. Doctors and psychiatrists become privy to every personal fact andableto judge each personal experience...

Depression is the wages of mania. Lack of energy reflects exhausted mental batteries left for dead after the multi-millennial light-shattering firework display that was the preceeding days and weeks.

It is doubtful whether the brain ever truly recovers from an episode of mania; the world never looks the same again.
p228

When I glance over recent posts and see statements like: I cannot imagine anything that would make life worth living, I wonder if people understand what I was getting at. I meant I look to the "future" and see nothing. I cannot imagine living as some supposedly functioning independent, successful individual. Because I never did. I did jobs, but the only ones I could get were very low-key compared to the ones my grandmother thought I should have been doing. Then again my grandmother had this idea that being clever somehow got you a good job. It doesn't. Employers are looking for people full of confidence and bullshit, which I wasn't. Which is how I ended up in jobs supposedly "beneath" me. I just wish I'd gone for something I truly enjoyed and done graphic design or painting and decorating. Lots of graphic designers have been put out of busiess by the ready availability of design software, meaning small businesses just do it for themselves. There's still work for painter-decorators, just not as much of it. I'm not qualified for any of this (you don't need qualifications, do you?)

Did you know the suicide rate in manic depression is around 20% compared to around 10% for normal depression.

That's because on top of the depression, manic-depressives are suffering from something akin to hangover syndrome: when you look back to things you did in the exalted state and ask yourself: what on eart was I thinking? My Mum knows someone who lost her house because she gambled everything by hiring out an enormous warehouse with nothing at all to put in it. The woman had thought she was on the way to becoming a multibillionaire business success. She knows someone else who got manic and randomly went calling on people up the street, inviting himself into their houses for Teletubby tea and trotterdonkey Sunday roast. See that's what people do. Then they come down and have to face the consequences of being high: bad debts, malaria, repatriation costs, veneareal diseases and it's all too much. No wonder they want to commit suicide. Talking of malaria, I know someone who pretended to have schizophrenia so he didn't have to work (which annoys me, because it makes me think I should be living in a cardboard box. The government keep saying they want to cut all sick scroungers off benefits. So what are they going to do? If the government get their way, there will be over a million sick and disabled people living on the streets. When that does happen, I hope they feel proud of themselves.

Anyway, this person who pretended to have schizophrenia had a brother who was indeed a manic depressive, who married a Thai bride, not by looking in a catalogue, but by actually flying to Thailand and falling in love in a remote village where he and his wife lived happily in a thatched hut. Until malaria swept through the village and nearly killed everyone.

Strange thing about Pretending to have Schizophrenia Guy was: he most definitely WAS extremely neurotic. He just wasn't psychic-psychotic the way schizophrenics are.

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Sorry about all that.

I had a tired day. Got up. Went chemist. Scored an ineffectual tiny bit of heroin.

Waste of time. I've only the last dregs of a habit remaining.

I bumped into someone this morning with a carrier bag full of chocolate. He'd shoplifted from a supermarket ~ an entire sehf-load and was about to sell it on. How dumbfoundingly naive I used to be! Not realizing that when a small shop mysteriously stocked up out of the blue on brand-name headache pills, batteries or fairly traded chocolate it often meant they'd bought it from somebody who had pillaged Sainsbury's!



If I were a doggie I'd look like this sleeping...

On Doctor-Drugs

I'M ON DRUGS AGAIN! The Doctor's Risperidone stuff. It knocked me right out. I don't like the feeling of being brought down. I was very peeved (to put it nicely) last night. I watched something to do with baying furry huskies in the arctic. They remind me of Japanese or American akitas (American ones came over after the defeat of Japan in World War II, they're generally bigger and furrier and come in patterns the Japanese wouldn't consider "right"). Akita dogs seem to have a fairly reserved temperament. They don't run up to people they don't know, though one once did to me and stared into me, very intense, not aggressive, just looking at me. She had beautiful fur. She used to go walkies in my Dealer Park.

Anyway I was TRYING to keep relevant and on topic.

I woke up after 8 hours sleep at the very shortest. It was probably closer to 9. 10-6, though the last bit was me awake going uuuuuuuuuh?!? zonked out of my head on this antipsychotic stuff.

My head was going quick. I know the sign. Waking up with loud very fast music going round my brain is NOT what used to happen. Also the strange sense that my head is echoing outside itself (that is I can hear the echoes) even when that happened before it didn't happen within 5 mins of waking up.

I learned about symptoms from a self-help guide re depression. It says the first to come on are usually the last to go, which is why I put them down, even though I'm not depressed. I hoped I wasn't going there last night I was in a pretty bad mood. Anyway before I go in a complete loop that's all there is...

... and this in italics happened when one sentence was struck down:~

Lizzy is talking to me on the other screen on Gabbly. I think she is rushing about between bits of toast, hairbrushes and coffee. Lizzy would never smoke cigarettes. She is a nurse... Now (10 mins later) she's gone to work.

oh yeah and "turning into pure energy" (yesterday) was a feeling more than an idea (not a delusion!) (methinks he doth protest too much, ha ha!)

Illustrated: American akitas (can you see why I was slightly nervous when one ran directly up to me in a park, you wouldn't want to mess with one); snake biting its tail, how I tend to go ~ in circles ~ no I don't think I'm a pair of gold earrings; "pure energy" google brought this up, not what I was looking for but it looks nice

MOZART: REQUIEM; LACRIMOSA - CLASSICAL
ok far as i know, lacrimosa is the decent part of mozart's requiem and lacrimosa means sadness or sad. crying sad not utterly pathetic. mozart is a lot of things, pathetic is not one of them!



MOZART: REQUIEM TRANCED UP
with pictures



MOZART: REQUIEM TRANCED UP
faster and bassier than the old version

Confession

I'M NOW ONLY ONE DAY CLEAN. Last night I wanted to score. I turned the idea over and over in my mind. I wiped my old text messages then a new one appeared, timed fifteen minutes earlier. This was from Dealer #1, the one who used to sell giant £20 bags. So I thought: You want it that much. You get it. So I did.

In a way there's nothing to post because the gear was so crap* that drugs-wise I might as well have chucked £15 down the drain and saved a perfectly good needle. It cooked up far too dark. It smelled of heroin being smoked, rather than cooked (a different smell). I thought that's odd. When I tasted a droplet: nothing. So I banged up the entire lot at once and felt the faintest opiate tinge for all of 45 seconds.

All I've done is ruin my number of Days Clear, not get high, throw £15 away.

On the plus side I got the craving to use out of my system. The same way I gave up crack two years ago, yet wondered back six or seven times afterwards, I never wanted it again the next day. I just remembered why I hated it that much. I no more want to use again than a person who went to Disney Land on Monday would wish they were on a rollercoaster again Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Heroin is a spectre from a past life. More a ghoul than a spectre. A monster who tries to deceive: You give me everything, then I'll give you More! Somehow, in the end, it didn't work.

So don't worry about me, I won't be hurrying back any time soon. I have Caramel Baileys, mince pies and temazepam, so I'm well sorted for Xmas.

Hope y'all have a Merry One one too. If it can't be Merry then may it be Tolerable. If you're 100% substance-free then may it be Serene (and of course Clean).


Plus I hope 2011 is better for you than this Bag-o-Shite year ever was!!

The doggie is an American Akita, the sort of dog I really want.

I'll be online on Gabbly tomorrow so if anyone wants to talk I'll be there.

*To anyone who hasn't followed, there has been a severe drought in the British heroin supply for over 2 months; that's why my formerly reliable dealer was selling crap. It's hard to find a constant, reliable source of heroin anywhere now.

Pets, past and future ~

These are some pets I'd most like to have... and actually have had.

FURRY FRIDAY ON SATURDAY


Akitas are one of the oldest pure-breeds of dog in the world. The American Akita was taken back from Japan by American troops after World War II. It is bigger and furrier than its Japanese counterpart. Whenever I see one down the local park, I want to kidnap it. One came up and stared me right in the eyes. I was down on the grass, so we were eye to eye. She just stared into me. Very intense. Akitas are loyal and dignified and very Japanese. Similar in character to Alsatians or Rottweilers. They are used in Japan as police dogs. I have never heard one bark.


An idea of their size!


The puppies are well known for being savage and wild. This is pretty obvious when you take a look at one:


My favourite little dogs are Norwich terriers. If I got a small dog I wouldn't care too much about breed. The type I'm on about tends to show up in Rescue Home catalogues named "Scruffy". If you've seen "Scruffy", you know the dog I want. Every animal shelter has a Scruffy.


Chinchillas look like rabbits from Mars. They need a big cage, a huge wheel and a "marble", that is, a stone slab you can stick in the freezer for them to lie on in summer. Chinchillas come from the high Andes and do not enjoy temperatures much above 75F, 25C.


The best pets I ever had were roborovski hamsters. These come from Mongolia. They're a totally different breed to ordinary hamsters (2in/5cm fully grown, pingpong ball-sized when curled up). They are the smallest and fastest hammies in the world.


Unlike ordinary hamsters, which fight when kept together, robos are highly social. They sleep in a heap:


They do everything together. But they're easily startled, don't tame at all easily and don't like being handled. They ping off on the floor at the first opportunity, have taken me 2-4 days to recapture. Imagine a wild house mouse on speed and you're still not close! Aren't they cute ...

WISHING Y'ALL A CHARMING WEEKEND. IF IT CAN'T BE CHARMING, THEN MAY IT BE TOLERABLE.

Porkshire Sunday

I SAW an American Akita, really cute, who looks like he's got shades on, such is his face pattern. He walks down the road two streets away. The owner caught me staring. "But his tail isn't curly!" I remarked.

"Ooh aye!" she replied. I think she comes from Yorkshire.

Talking of Porkshire terrorizers ~ there's a Japanese girl on my street who walks one that looks just like Baby Itchy Roborovski when fur-bashed, soaking wet and compulsorily groomed by Bashful and Spherical. Very sweet.

And talking of Japanese, I'm doing really well with it. Studying every day. I know 200 kanji now and have a vocabulary of about 600 words. I'm aiming at 7000-word fluency within the next two years...

I'm still in a quandry about dogs. There's no room at my place for an Akita, much as I'd love one ~ and I really love them. (Who would ever guess~~!!?!) I found a mop terrier called Scruffy at a North London animal shelter, but I he is reserved and I think I would have to get a puppy anyhow, to train it to do tricks, including smuggling itself in a bag into supermarkets etc (and when my landlord comes round and I mysteriously have to leave every time). We're not really meant to keep pets, though I didn't sign anything. The guy downstairs has a staffordshire bull terrier, but he has access to the back garden... well I'm still working on it...

... and I have to go, I'm about to be timed out as per usual. Hope y'all are having a CHEERY WEEKEND!!

Back tomorrow...

Free Puppy Offer!

I GOT OFFERED A FREE PUPPYDOG YESTERDAY!!
I'm not sure the "act" has actually taken place yet, but when it does, the father will be a pitbull-mastiff cross and the mother a perky staffordshire bull terrier~...!!
I am saying nothing!!!!
The male dog I know well. He is enormous. When they got him, his owners thought he was a rottweiler. I thought "well I got their temperament all wrong" (quiet, standoffish, dignified) ~ this one is really cheery with most people and really aggressive with other male dogs. He barks loudly when tied up, has huge zest for life and never goes unnoticed wherever he is. He looks like a rottweiler on steroids or a rottweiler-brown bear cross ~ with his gigantic head...
... which of course belongs to a mastiff.
I was very flattered at the offer, but not to be nasty: Pitbulls, Mastiffs and Staffs are probably the three breeds I would LEAST likely go for. About HALF the dogs you walk past on the streets in some areas of London seem to be of these types. Their owners usually seem to want to look "hard" ~ and yet many times the dog is walking them. Which pretty much says everything.
In the library today I found a book called Your Akita. Now Akitas ARE the sort of big doggies I like because 1. they are beautiful with bushy fur and 2. I like their nature which is quiet and reserved ~ but not at all timid. They have the most magnificent bearing. But enough about doggies for one day I have to go as I'm about to be TERMINATED yet again..!
SOBER TODAY!! HAHA!! :-)

The Tale of Hachi

Chūgen Hachikō 忠犬ハチ公 means the faithful dog Hachi. Hachi means "eight" in Japanese.

This true story is famous in Japan. In the 1930s. Hachi, who later research showed to be one of only 30 pure-bred Akita dogs in Japan, was a puppydog in transit from the Northern Japanese farm where he was born to a new owner in the city. The crate in which he was travelling fell and sprang open at Tokyo station and the dog escaped and was found trotting the streets by a kindly professor from Tokyo University.

Unable to trace the dog's new owner, Ueno Hidesaburō 上野 英三郎, professor of Agricultural Studies at Tokyo University, took Hachi home and devotedly looked after him. Each morning the Professor would walk to the local station with Hachi in tow. There they said goodbye and Hachi trotted back home to re-appear each evening at Shibuya Station in time for the Professor's train.

One day Professor Ueno was stricken with a heart attack while at work and died. Hachi was rehomed but continually escaped, trotting back to the Professor's old home. This went on for months until the dog realized that Professor Ueno didn't live there any more.

From then on Hachi showed up at Shibuya Station 渋谷駅, the third-busiest railway station in Tokyo, every evening on time for his master's train. He became a fixture at the station, ever watching and waiting in hope of his master's return.

Regular commuters grew to recognize the dog, and kept him well-fed with tasty treats as he continued his vigil.

The Faithful Furry continued to show up every evening on time and to wait patiently for the late Professor. This went on for NINE YEARS.

During his lifetime Hachi became a cause célèbre and a national symbol of faithfulness and hope. When he died his body was stuffed and put in the National Science Museum in Tokyo, where he remains on display to this day.

Hachi's story was filmed in Japanese in 1987 as Hachikō Monogatari ハチ公物語. In 2009 a Hollywood version was released starring Richard Gere as a caucasian Professor Ueno.

This screen is a montage of clips from the Japanese original, set to music and telling the complete story in three-&-a-half minutes.




You can watch the complete 1987 film Hachiko Monogatari on my Animals Crackers pets blog by clicking here.

Photos 1: the actual Hachi; 2 bronze statue outside Shibuya station; 3 Hachi's stuffed body at the National Science Museum of Japan, Tokyo.

In Memory of Hachi
Tribute montage. I think those doggieharnesses that fit on their back like a bumblebee wings holder are really cute:
BTW doesn't the cover image look just like a little shiba-inu. Shiba-inu, BTW, means "brushwood doggie"...

Dogs

WHAT was all this crap I banged in yesterday about "doggie fun"... what was I on? Nothing? What was wrong with me. Everything, probably. Well I'm not deleting it even though it was stupid.

I don't know whether I wanna get a dog or not. I do. But I don't as well.

I suppose I wanna learn how to take care of myself first (wah-waaah!!)

I am scared of getting hammies as the gap under my door is so huge they could easily just ping under it and be out in the hallway in 2 seconds flat. Then the people downstairs would jump out of their skin the minute they saw a round roborovski furball scurrying across their carpets in the dead of night.

When Itchy escaped, on the frequent occasions that she did, she usually laid low for at least 48 hours ~ in that time I did not see or hear hide nor hair of her, so as far as I knew she could be dead or out on the street or anywhere. Then, when it was really quiet I would suddenly see this tiny tubby cartoon mouse like thing that looked more like Tweety-pie scuttling across the floor. Any movement from me and she was GONE.

We had wild mice in the house at the same time in one address, and I can vouch that a domesticated escaped roborovski is considerably FASTER than a wild housemouse. The swines!

Anyway when it comes to dogs, these are the types I like.

1. Really fuzzy furry ones, like Spanish water dogs:



2. Old English sheepdogs:



3. Fuzzy terriers. But these aren't a breed, so you cannot reliably seek out and find one, not without endless poring over pictures of internet puppies, wondering what they might grow up into:



4. Wire fox terriers. It's the fluff-round-the-nose thing...



Japanese dogs. There are six original dog breeds from Japan. Their genetics have been traced back as far as 3000BC. All of these breeds have the same wolf-like appearance and distinctive curly tail. The two most popular in the West are the tiny Shiba inu 柴犬 (inu just means doggie).





And the Akita inu I keep going on about.
The appeal of these is that if I'm going to have a dog I want one that's cute and tough in equal measure. This is important today as the parks are full of yobbos with Staffordshire bull terriers (yesterday's fashion) and Rottweilers (today's fashion).
I would go for a female dog anyway. Hopefully then the snarlers in the park would treat her like a lady instead of savaging her. Also if I can find another Akita at the right time of year... free puppies, wahey!!

Note the similarity of features with the shiba, but huge disparity in size:





These are Shikoku dogs:



A Kai inu: