Intellectual Librariantics

A DAY OF INTELLECTUAL DISCOVERY. I have so many ideas... I have been trawling the library to pursue them... research... (I have to research this book that I'm determined to write down. Determined.) ... Languages of the world... there are so many countries I want to visit and so many different languages I've wanted to speak... I have an abiding interest in antiquity, especially the ancient Near East... My study of the Bible piqued an interest in this, particularly Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah (the Jewish exile) which were set in Babylon and the Medo-Persian empire... fascinating. I spent ages copying out the Hebrew alphabet but there weren't many good sourcebooks for studying that language (I think I'm going to have to seek out a specialist Jewish shop...) Then I got waylaid by showbusiness. Madonna. The library has barely anything about Elizabeth I and yet they have two volumes of Jordan's autobiography. Priorities, please! Also I got tired of the security guard prowling around like we readers were trespasssers on his private domain (and perish the thought that we might want to take a dreaded mobile phone call~ oo no that is too much) but the man who spent half an hour in the upstairs toilet with a queue of African exchange students rat-a-tatt-tatting ever more desperately on the door and then fled leaving it blocked with diarrhoea and the most gruesome pong rolling in an invisible putrid cloud past the Britannicas and into the maps reference section. Only when it reached the enquiry desk did loud exclamations arise and a large sign go up saying toilet out of order. Ooer I've got thoroughly waylaid now but it was a good day. Cheerio everybody.
Till tomorrow!

VIDEO:
Bringing to life surrealist art, this supposedly cost $5 million (I don't believe that)... it is one of Madonna's best though...

School Dinners and the Schizophrenic Crackhead on the Stairs

I MADE OVEN-READY FISH AND CHIPS at 7am... but the fish was the cheapest breaded cuts of pollack (and only 47% there...) and the chips got burned... all in all it was like school dinners when you're on last sittings... very reheated and not very nice. The fresh tomato salad that went next to it went some way to redeeming the situation ...

For the past few days we've had a schizophrenic crackhead sleeping on our stairs. This is the black lady who's about 60 and has crack lung. She took me for a total innocent, so when I asked for a bit the other day (came out of my room and there she is smoking) she didn't believe I even knew what the stuff was called. Then she put on four whopping great pipes, probably hoping I'd be vomiting everywhere. But I had a lovely time ~ so har!

Last night she knocked on my door at about 3am. I was awake anyway and so not really annoyed. She was obviously off on one, rambling all over the place with paranoia and irrelevancies, asking the most intrusive questions about my life yet telling me to mind my own business if I dared ask about hers. She offered me sexual favours in return for sleeping in my room but I told her to sleep in her own. This she will not do either because (1) some paranoid idea tells her there's a ghost in there or something like that (she kind of hinted at this) or (2) she's actually got chucked out (which she also hinted at last time we spoke) and is just using our hallway as a dosshouse, which wouldn't surprise me at all. I knew someone who was sleeping for several weeks in the upstairs bathroom of a house share. Because nobody knew each other very well in the house, nobody quite twigged that this constantly occupied bathroom (with strange white smoke coming from under the door..!) was actually inhabited by a crack-addict prostitute who spent the other half her time accruing "business" up the high road...

O well enough of the sordid stuff, I'd better go. It's a lovely sunny day now but man! It was raining cats and dogs earlier. Take it easy everyone!

VIDEO:
CHRIS DE BURGH: LADY IN RED
The Lady in Red blog reminded me of this tune... and isn't it amazing..?
Even people who cannot speak English have come up to him and said (through an interpreter, I'd assume) that though they could not understand the words ever bit of emotion comes through... and of course it does...

General Anaesthesia

IT WAS A GENERAL ANAESTHETIC of a weekend. All I seemed to do was sleep wake up for more oven chips and chicken pies (upturned, cut open, piled in with buttery mixed vegetables and showered with gravy)... then sleep once more. Once all this sleeping finished I was convinced I would be left wide awake all Sunday night and unable to sleep till too late Monday morning when I was due to be up anyway... but no! General anaesthesia took me yet again and I sloomed blissful as a baby till my alarm clock (yet another function of my mobile phone) intruded ungraciously at 08:44am.

No news of any tubby critters. I was heartily depressed when conscious and too leaden to do very much of anything. I didn't want to do anything and spent some gloomy minutes wondering how on earth "normal" people manage to work, have any semblance of lives plus do all the sleeping I have to do (which I don't want to do yet have to, simply to restore sanity...)

... and so I despaired ~ and slept once more.

Pingpong the Chinese hammy plus my robos urgently need cleaning out because they smell of wee-wees (too much scent-marking on the newspapers...)

I've had a skinpop of heroin so I'm feeling far better than yesterday. Also a drink down my throat did a similar trick...

At Mother Hubbard's there's a film on UKTV History about "the Forgotten Prince"... one of the Edwardian era's royal children who was epileptic. I do not know the names of any of the sonorous Shakespearean actors cast in this costume masterpiece (each shot framed like a Victorian oil painting)... yet Miranda Richardson appears to play the role of Queen...

PS: Does anyone know of any better clips of the 2008 Opening Ceremony to the 29th Olympiad at Beijing? Serves me right for posting without viewing all the way through: I had assumed my own clip (see next below) would progress beyond two metallic gentlemen in their underpants ... sadly not so!

PPS: Have a clickonthis: Sparkle Seahorse Shining :: a fantastic arty blog!

VIDEO:
NOT FROM ANY OLYMPICS... yet surely worthy of the greatest opening ceremony of all... this the THOUSAND HAND CHINESE DANCE ~ from my Random Vid Clips Blog is AMAZING... have a look:~

Woody Woodmouse Weekend...

BABY ITCHY, かゆがってさん (Kayugatte-san) is looking particularly touselled, tawny and harvesty this afternoon. My robbies were even starring on the radio the other day (OK, slight correction ~ about two and a half months ago!) The world's tiniest dwarf hamsters: fully grown and the size of my thumb. If an ordinary solitary hammy's a Transit van; my three social hammies were Nissan Micras. The host Ray Khan was in thrall. A "regular" hamster curls into a furry tennis ball in sleep. I have three roborovski pingpong balls. Their cuteness perked up the waves just like their pink noses and perky ears. That was until a savage Peta-style environmentalist declaimed semi-sobbingly my "gerbils" and how when they did grow up and get more than thumb-sized and huge I would inevitably get bored of them and that's when animal shelters get full and the robos' home is left empty. Poor swines! As if I would ever do that to them! This morning as I stroked a furry hipopotamus lookey-likey who peered up at me moo-cow style and lowed ~ I promptly realized this was Baby Bashful and not Itchy. Just as she sunk razor-sharp dental stubs (worn-down from all that seed-nibbling) into my thumb and bit me!

I think she is angry with me for keeping her confined in a nest with an increasingly fractious Itchy. Many a honk I have heard squealing from their tubby domain as they squabble over who goes where in the hamster hierarchy. A vigorously honking hamster-chase sets off across the roborovski-garden, Itchy pursuing Bashful until she overpowers her sister, pushing backwards so the Daz-white belly's on stark display. This she grooms vigorously in a compulsory preening ritual. It's usually cut sort by shrilly honking cries on Bashful's part as the naughty Itchy takes to biting her, the swine! It's all such a shame as they used to get on so well. If they really did fight I would have to separate the offending Itchy character out, but it never gets blood-drawingly bad... and always, by evening, in the peace and dimness of the end of day I see three furry pingpong balls a-dozing all together in sleepy harmony.

I saw Woody Woodmouse yet again this evening, and so Google Images have provided lookey-likey photographic commemoration of his furriness for this weekend... Have a charming one won't you, y'all...

PS Bashful didn't really fall over on "furballs of birdseed" day. But she didn't pack her pouches. Which made her look really tiny and weird...

PPS How many of you numbered among the reported 4 billion ~ that is close-on two-thirds of the planet's population ~ who watched some or all of the opening ceremony to the 2008 Beijing Olympiad? Was it any good? I feel like the only person among those 4,000,000,000 who missed it!

For anyone like me, or anyone who wants a recap, have a look at this, some live highlights from the event "the greatest show in history" according to the (London) Independent newspaper:~



And on that note I shall have to love you and leave you...

HAVE A SUPERIOR WEEKEND, FOLKS!

Furry Balls of Birdseed

AS WELL AS GORGING MYSELF ON INDUSTRIAL BATTERED FISH, I have bought my tubbies more "wild bird" (also I might be putting up a feeder; if I can find a place outside my upstairs window that will hang one...)

The Roborovski family went mad when the seeds came out. Momma Spherical led the way and soon was looking like a furry football; Baby Itchy followed and swiftly resembled a miniature version of the same... Bashful was too busy craning her head backwards to peer a look at me (and falling slapstick right over with sawdust all over her head) to bother filling up...

My mind is all set on my latest literary "scheme"... I have embarked upon my gargantuan mountain of research... Fast-paced pop fiction of heartrending intensity is what I intend to serve up to the world on the golden platter of my glittering prose (as if!)... All I am saying here is that I want to write popular fiction, not the ponderously "literary" time-wasting type... If I ever get nominated for the Booker prize or anything similar I shall commit suicide! And that's about all I have to say about writing "write" now...

Which leads me back to Paris. The guy on late night talk radio was chundering on about the British government and local authorities' surfeit of roadway speed cameras and how dangerous these are (actually causing motorists suddenly to break, sending those behind smashing into one another)... good driving is about keeping distance far more than it's about reducing speed... (surely?)... This and stories of local councils fining innocent families for over-packing dustbins or (crime of the century) leaving them out on the wrong day... Spy (sorry "security") cameras everywhere (4,000,000 and counting)... No smoking anywhere ~ except the government won't just ban tobacco completely as they are too addicted to the multibillions it rakes in in taxes they can mis-spend... innocent people slapped with £80 spot-fines for dropping litter as inconsequential as a single match stick, or in one case the end of a sausage roll that wasn't even noticed dropping by the hapless eater (it was, however filmed by an undercover local authority "enforcement officer")... and an £80 fixed penalty that couldn't even be contested as within 30 seconds the local pigeons had eaten all the evidence... this and the poll tax (sorry "council tax" (poll tax by another name though even worse as inhabitants of a house share are "jointly and severally liable" ~ ie the authorities are fully within their rights to bulldoze an entire house's bill on to just one poor resident and to hell with the consequences... all this and parking charges, jobsworths, rude kids, knives and the ineffectual Gordon Brown (yes our prime minister though I'd forgive you for never having heard of him: we wish we never had too...)... all this and I so badly want to flee this country!

Not that I think life is all rosey-tinted abroad or that I shall somehow escape my problems. I'm just fed up of living with this set of national problems and want to be somewhere where other people are complaining about other politicians and I want to be able to give even less of a damn about them than I do nowadays...

And back to cooking: my next ambition is to make my own pizza ~ from scratch (meaning concocting bases from flour, water, sugar, yeast (at least that's what I was told was the recipe))... nearest I've come thus far is buying vulgar value margaritas and chucking veggies of my own atop...

OK gotta go the day is sultry and stormy ~ amazing horizon lightning last night that never fulminated into a full electric storm... is that what they mean by "heat-lightning"?... it was forking sideways horizontally over the rooftops... quite impressive... Have a nice day everyone and don't get too hot and sweaty!!

Fish Repast

AN UNACCOUNTABLE CRAVING for cod in batter led me into Sainsbury's where I spent £2.99 on "4-6 pieces" of Birdseye's best... Two of these with oven chips and baby tomatoes sprinkled with black pepper. I crisscrossed the batter with a knife and drizzled with lime juice (nicer than lemon and stronger, so you need less of it, which suits an old skinflint like me down to the ground...) The tomatoes were lovely too and contributed to my "five a day" portions of fruit and vegetables, as the packaging handily reminded me. I really need to learn proper cooking one day, but industrial fish and oven chips is a start (I suppose..(!))...

No other news except I think my middle roborovski hamster Baby Bashful has a genetic fault! Don't cackle at this, but when I coo her name from on high she peers up at me craning her neck back and back and back... until she literally falls over backwards! She has done this several times and it looks hilarious. I know that roborovskis are prone to a breeding fault where, due to faulty balance, they spin furiously round and round in a tight circle. I wonder whether Bashful doesn't have a shade of this... it's a shame as I won't be able to breed her now and had always thought it might be fun one day to have an entire basketful of rambling roborovski pups...

And that was MY day: how was yours?

Mon rêve parisien: la vie en rose

ZUT ALORS!!... last "night" I slept in (and in; and in...) longer and longer until it was past 3pm. I must have needed the sleep... and my dreams! I was dreaming galore! My heart tells me to up and flee to Berlin or Paris. I am in a quandry as to which, but as I know Paris a little, I dreamed about there...

Illustrations: top: metro map and RER map below that ... (click twice to see in vast detail); left: Paris nightscape; right: Galleries Lafayette, view up from the perfume hall...)

Galleries Lafayette (Parisian Harrods).. Shakespeare & Co. (English language bookstore providing free accommodation to anyone willing to muck in int shop that day...) the pursuing aroma of doggies' diarrhoea from Parisian pavements (all those pampered pooing pooches...) and the most luxurious of luxury goods I have ever seen (on the Champs Elysees)... only place in my life I've ever glimpsed a genuine crocodile-skin bag! And I'll never forget the amazing Egyptian room in the Louvre. Or the assistant who directed me there, stopping my dead half way through my "excusez-moi madame; où se trouve le département des antiquités égyptiens et orientales?" with a halting hand and a businesslike: "what language?"!

... and later following signposts to La Joconde... eventually to file amonst a transcontinental crowd into a chamber where from about 4m or 12 ft away and through the bulletproof sheen of several smoked glass coffee-table-tops I was at long last able to glimpse the tiniest and most famous painting on earth: Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa!

The best art in Paris is to be found in the Orsay museum. A bright, light and airy former railway terminus, this features a room packed with about 20 Van Goughs. All I could think as I craned to within inches of the legendary brush-strokes ~ and how they stick out! ~ and through no glass, no barriers bar an ankle-height metal string... This was the late 80s/very early 90s when Sunflowers and Irises had sold for upwards of £50m each or $100m a piece (in today's money) ~ I was in the presence of over a billion dollars' worth of modern art!

The Mona Lisa, incidentally, was vlued by would-be insurers at $100 million at the turn of the 20th Century. So costly in fact was the premium that the Louvre baulked at sending it on an American voyage and, one adventurous theft aside, it has remained at home in Paris ever since... Where its value has surely surpassed the one billion dollar mark...

My Mum, who spends some months a year in a 2nd home in the French countryside (where I've never been invited) described an hilarity moment back here in Angleterre when, caught up amongst a roomful of babbling fellow-humans, she quite unexpectedly realized: wow! I can understand every word they're saying! She's definitely a chip off the same block as me: my lifelone obsession with acquiring exotic languages stems from a sheer repulsion of not being able to understand similar crowds of foreigners from my own childhood as they blibble-blebble-blobbled in "foreign" ~ a tongue I had decided I should master so that nobody would speak over my head ever again!

Photo-blog of the Day:
Misty's Musings www.mistysmusings.com
... fantastic wildlife shots...

Accidental Post

I'M ONLY POSTING BY ACCIDENT as I was stuck on a bus so desperate for a (cyder-induced) midday pee, I ended up jumping off here by the cybercaff instead of anywhere near home...

Now I had fantasized about posting something intellectual or sociologically meaningful today (but when has THAT ever happened?)...

So I shall keep this post mighty short and wish y'all (as per usual)


An exceedingly charming weekend!!!!


PS: Why is it, looking at a little boy peeing is somehow "cute" yet ogling a little girl doing the same might be equally well construed as faintly disgusting or even pervy..??

And now on to music. This first one reminds me of those summer evenings that seem to last for ever... reminds me of feeling genuinely happy ... (not drugged-up the way most "rave" music does...)

VIDEO:
KAOMA: LAMBADA
... isn't this one classic..?!?...
... The video's dated 1989... surely it came out in most Anglo-Saxon countries a long time after that..? I seem to remember it from the mid-1990s...



Those shots of kiddies dancing reminded me of this one... it's from a Spanish film called Cria Cuervos (Cry of the Crows)... this track was a hit all over Europe.

JEANETTE: PORQUE TE VAS

African Pygmy Mouse; Mongolian Pygmy Hamsters...

JUST NOW I have cleared out my robotrotters' tiny toilet, the Italian Grated Hard Cheese (ie own brand Parmesan) tube latrine with washing-up liquid and lots and lots of water.

This I rinsed out into my own toilet's cistern until that was brimful with bubbles and yet the fresh water running out was foam-free and clear. It took a lot of rinsing...

Now the Trotters are glaring at me suspiciously and rambling 21 to the dozen on their wheel. Not even Baby Itchy will go into the latrine tonight (where she has been known to sleep on occasion ~ tawdry little swine that she is!) ~ it is too clean for them all and they do love scent-marking. My squealy observations, "you smell like a wee-wee!" are taken as compliments, pink ears and pink little noses all a-twitching...

Gazing at these ovel furries from on high, I see they are hammy equivalents of hatchback cars. A stubby of build and a little too short-looking for their own good. Makes me wonder how they ever balance, though they do. And their rotundness of body never stops them pinging about like crazy...

It is, after all, the Chinese year of the Tubby Hamster. In Vietnam they've gone so very crazy with the new trend of pet hammykeeping that the Communistic national government has actually banned these pets, saying such verminous face-pouched mini-rats do nothing for the good of society (what about shining the sunlight of joy with their nocturnal entertainment escapades~??) and harbour only diseases and fleas...

(These are the 2/3-of-a-rat-sized Syrian maxi-hamster, the traditional tubby so many of us kept in schooldays.)

I saw Woody, my personal wild Woodmouse again this evening. Pinging along the pavement and scurrying into a bush.. The European woodmouse, Apodemus sylvaticus, has bigger, poppier eyes than the common housemouse (mus musculus, the common housemouse, also the common white labmouse beloved of testers-on-animals worldwide and the same species as the "fancy mouse" of varied coats and colours so popular as a pet in times not too long past...) Woody Woodmouse has perkier ears and a droplet, rather than a bullet-shaped little body; and his natural coat is a chestnut mouse rather than the duller, more greyish mouse of the house mouse. To my eyes Woody appeared enormous ~ almost the size of a rat. But then again everything of the rodent persuasion appears enormous now I'm so fully roborovski-ized. Roborovskis are the smallest of all pet rodents, the tiniest (not to mention quickest and most highly-strung) of all hamsters. The African Pygmy Mouse is one of very few rodents who is actually smaller than the roborovski. In fact African pygmy mice are the tiniest rodents in the world... yet even these are no shorter in body length than a fullgrown robbie. They are only smaller because they're far, far slighter of build than the oval-tubby robo. You can watch one timidly testing a tidbit of cheese below...

VIDEO:
African Pygmy Mouse ~ the world's tiniest rodent ~ Nibbling Cheese. 4 or 5cm in length, these are just a little shorter than the 5cm/2in-long roborovski hamster. Being far thinner, however, they're far lighter and slighter than the tubby roborovskis.



Another mouse-like critter has hit the headlines of late thanks to a scientific study on its drinking habits. The Pen-Tailed Tree Shrew. This is a tropical tree shrew, who seeks out alcoholic beverages in the form of fermentingly ripe berries by sniffing out their yeasty aromas, scuttling up to the groaningly over-ripe bush-bar and squatting on it's branches where he laps up the goodness with his tiny tongue until he has imbibed the equivalent of nine glasses of wine in human terms... Scientists are intrigued: how on earth does such a tiny furry hold his drink so well..?!?

VIDEO 2:
Sinead O'Connor: This is a Rebel Song (live)
This is one of my favourite Sinead vids.
(Ignore the title, btw, if you don't know it: this is NOT commie protest music, it's a song about being in love yet unable to share feelings... both nationally and personally...)



Food blog of the day: Debrueil Family Cookbook debreuilcookbook.blogspot.com

Mumzy, Tutankhamun and the Jubilee Line Trauma

FINALLY MUMZY AND I got to see Tutankhamun at the O2 Centre (formerly known as the dreaded Millennium Dome) in North Greenwich. The exhibition was fantastic. It does not include the famous golden Death Mask, but does have lots of other stuff including Neffertiti, Queen Tea (Neff's mother or mother-in-law, I believe) and the white Tut bust illustrated...

... I was in a really Egyptian mood when I left.

This however got totally wiped out by the trauma of having to ride the Jubilee Extension through Canary Wharf (mini New York) and London Bridge Station in hi-tech cattle trucks full of gormless office-zombies (ie folks like me in the future, I expect!!) Dismounted at London Bridge to Change Northern Line only to find out the connexion I wanted was unavailable due to a broken escalator, so cussing, I resumed an extraordinarily crowded train, had to change in the middle of town and finally am home what feels like an hour later (but it was only half an hour tops!)... those trains are so exceedingly sweaty I felt like I was going to melt. How on earth people endure them daily in full business dress unable to change and take a shower on arrival I shall never comprehend... When I'm an international typhoon I shall have bed, kitchen and bathroom in my office (in other words so I never have to go home!!) ... but that's another story or kind of daydream of mine.

Actually the exhibition was so vast my mind started wandering... and rather than admiring the last of the 3200 year-old statues inside them I started wondering whether the plexiglass cases would make nice homes for the Roborovski family...

My Mum was fine by the way... And how was YOUR day..??

PS Next time we're doing Buckingham Palace..(!!)

What a Gorgeous Day

(I NEARLY SPELT THAT "GEORGEOUS" (what? as in Stanislopoulos-type...? //whatever..:~
Yes it is a very nice day with a cool breeze. Though not quite like the illustration. Panting dogs outside the betting shop, lots of cold beer on sale. Mars confectionary have ceased advising retailers to put their chockie bars in the fridge after figuring out that Mars Ice Creams will sell even better and for more than twice the cash!!

I am sure it is barely more than 80F/30C today. Because I've not been using buses or tubes I'm not complaining too much about the heat. Our buses (a totally new fleet as well!) have been non-designed without adequate opening windows. Their only concession to "hot" weather is a white roof, with the microscopically fractional heat-deflecting effect that might achieve... (To be honest, I thought this was just a ruse to save on red paint!)

The tube is totally non-air-conditioned and soars up to 10C HOTTER than the surface shade temperature ~ so imagine that! 45C and steaming with humidity and crowded. Not nice!

Which reminds me: I'm meant to be riding into town tomorrow to see my Mum so wish me luck (in case I don't melt before I get there...)

VIDEO

BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM HOT HOT HOT

Very Anglo-Asian hot

Smelling the Way Ahead

HAH! THAT MIGHT well have been a title for me some months back in that old house with no hot water, yes a bath (full of a gnome's beard shavings) and no way of plugging it except with flannels and old socks (so I barely ever took a bath...)

Actually I was thinking of my Tiny Trotters yesterday with that Minty Corridor plunked in their midst and how within 30 seconds Itchy and Bashful were investigating in the most highly-strung way (one behind the other), cautiously creeping up to the garage-door style cardboard flap opening at one end only to spring back in amazement as the entire structure took to feverish vibrating ~ because Big Momma Spherical had thundered in blithely at the other side and was duly stomping through it...

But really it has to do with those strange "memory" flashes I mentioned yesterday. They come in aromatic form, but are actually windows into a lost world of stately halls with long oaken libraries full of musting books ~ the world of my old imagination, before it got gutted by a life where I ceased to daydream for years at a time (except for craving more you-know-what...)

Now I even have aromatic flashes from this book I'm intending to write. The only downside is that much research needs to be done before I can even start it, as it's not set in the present day. I have given up on the idea of writing about drugs: I don't think it's a popular subject and I've always said I want to write for the entire world ~ not the tiniest section of it that doesn't even buy books anyway (it only shoplifts them!!)

That is what I meant by the scent of freedom... see I'm sniffing out the future...

(but have yet to find it...)

PS: Do you like the golden hammy picture, top left? I was thinking of using that as my new "avatar"...

Robotrotter Sunday and the Smell of Freedom...

IT IS 7:30AM SUNDAY at precise time of writing. The world is dead, thanks to having been hijacked by sunworshipping Roman-Catholicized 4th Commandment-breakers who have purloined the title "Christian" and made a travesty of the Sabbath!

How I hate Sundays!

(Sorry, slight irritation moment there. I was angry because I was WIDE AWAKE and WANTED TO DO SOMETHING... and yet the dopey, closed-down world was stopping me... not even the shops (supermarkets and all) open till 11am on Sundays, thanks to antiquated trading laws...

Well I'm sure I shall have to wait well past 10:30 for any internet caff to open to type this in.

Actually I'm in a glowing good mood this morning {well it didn't show, did it!}... full of the world-conquering thoughts that used to drive me on, before all this switched to heroin-heroin-crack-drink-heroin...

I met a vulgarian crackhead at 6am in the Ornamental Gardens. Bellowing my name 6 times before I deigned to notice and turn round with a great false smile. He looked like he wanted to murder me (so rude!)... I had the misfortune to bump into him last night, when he pulled the same expression. I know him from the mental hospital, where he was confined as punishment for crack-induced paranoid psychosis.

Claiming he was "sick for B" (heroin) and did I know anyone? (No: not at 6am)... then he wanted me to come to the wider Kings Cross area (a heartland of vulgarity) where he'd split a £10-deal with me. No thanks. He smokes his on the end of a crackpipe which is a pitifully diluted way of taking the stuff (but safe though and litle chance of overdose, which I suppose is good and is why I have never tempted to induce him into taking it a more potent way... which is an act of sheer self-restraint, as his pushiness threatens to bring out the evil side in me every time we meet)...

The guy's pupils were tiny whereas when you're "clucking" your eyes dilate widely, like a raver's... I told him if he goes on like this he really will get a habit, but no-one ever listens...

I know I've barely been in touch with anyone and it's eating at me daily...

I bought a new toothpaste yesterday and my Trotterovskies were at first sniff in sheer terrour of the new minty-smelling corridor. Next thing I see is all three furries scampering full blast on the wheel as quick as they can possibly manage! They are running away from their beautiful new Household Feature as rapidly as nature will take them..! Scuttling in such confusion that Bashful (whos' now the smallest, hence the lightest one, hence most likely to be picked up and flashed round and round and round along the wheel, and, after much Roborovski-squealing and honking to establish the fact,unfortunately for her, Bottom Peck under the Ruthless Pingy Baby Itchy. Big Momma Suherikuru-san is Top Dog as ever, though naughty old Itchy had the cheek to try even this one on. Boy! And I can tell you the robohonkings from this one in the Itchy Challenges: The Battle of the Spherical Supremacy were quite some honkings to behold.

I tell you what: Someone else in possession of the same three Furries might have kept these pets as long as I have, laughed and cried the same as I have and yet never realized quite how socialized these little trotters actually are ~ they even greet with a European-style kiss on both cheeks ("pink nose to pink nose") ... their hierarchical social structure is quite something...

DUR! Does that paragraph make any sense at all? OK I'll put it another way, if I hadn't been given a wildlife documentary lesson in animal society from Meerkat Manor I wouldn't realize how critters of the same species inevitably have a hierarchy. Now that I see it with my roborovski hamsters let me tell you it is fascinating, big time, to watch...

Anyway: back to today and Three Balls of Fur are a-rambling the wheel. Really, I ought to go purchase a second McMambler for 'em all, but our local petstore ~ believe this or not ~ sells ONLY those wheels that clip to the sides of a barred cage and no freestanding ones at all. There's a posh ballbearing ultra-smoothie £9.99 model that I really want for them...

... and all I'll say now is:

It comes to me in aromas, but visions of my future have it me Time and Time Again. I see it, I feel it.

I smell freedom!


VIDEO:

CHRISTIAN THE LION

Wow... amazing. I've never seen anything quite like this.

Keep watching, it does launch into some of the most amazing film I have ever seen...


Thanks for this to Laurie of the Los Angeles Pimps and Prostitutes Mission...

Harrassed and Happy

I'M GETTING TROUBLE AGAIN from nasty neighbours but, as the song says (see below) "I don't wanna talk about it"... all I will say is that when I threatened to call police the poison person in question quickly fled!

One of very few vaguely interesting things I've read about drugs recently came from an Ecstasy Fact Sheet I picked up in the drugs agency. It was actually a good 4 or more sides of closely typed foolscap/A4...

"Are people still taking that?" I thought, and read on. Now some of the old hippie types at ecstasy.org-type websites would say that MDMA (ecstasy) is a "heart-opening substance)... it's basically an upper that, as well as making you feel excited (like you're at the best party that ever was, hearing the greatest music, etc.. etc...) it actually does, to recoin some 1960s-speak, make you feel full of "peace and love"... quite amazingly so, in fact.

One of my more curmudgeonly friends, who preferred nasty old speed, told me "but I don't want to sit in the corner of the rave feeling like Buddha" (exactly the effect I took it for!)

Anyway this new (to me) info told me that ecstasy does not elicit any feelings that are not inside you anyway...

... which is one of the most positive things I have ever read... meaning that I am full of the most amazingly transcendental joy it breaks the limits of description.

To put it another way, I suddenly realized something I suppose I've always secretly known all along: that you don't need drugs to feel "high"!

After reading this, I decided to contact this Inner Joy: and suddenly I did. It was a couple of weeks ago and I was trotting mundanely back from the chicken shop with my £1 special deal (+ piece + fries), and I thought about what I'd read and ~ wow! Amazing! I did get right directly in touch with this amazing joy inside me!

That is the happiest thing that's happened to me for a long time..!

Videos:

Everything But The Girl: I Don't Wanna Talk About It

Everything But The Girl: Missing

This one got to number one time back in the late 80s (if I remember rightly...)

a v nice tune.

The group's name, btw, comes from their original ad in Melody Maker or the NME magazine "everything but the girl" (ie we have a group put together but we need a sweet singin' vocalist) and she does sing sweet...



This, however, is probably their greatest and most memorable hit:~

Everything But The Girl: Missing (club mix)



ps Bashful's name should really be バシフルさん Bashifuru-san (far as I know, that's the nearest Japanese equivalent...)

and here is the dictionary definition for "itchy":

かゆがってさん (that is Kayugatte-san)

Bashful would be 内気さん (Uchiki-san)

Spherical is 丸さん Maru-san

(the katakana readings given yesterday are phonetic transliterations (yes: Iichi-san, Bashifuru-san and Suherikuru-san are the nearest the Japanese can get in their own language to Itchy-Bashful-Spherical!

PS yesterday's title Frank was a pun I forgot to elucidate on the former British National Drugs Helpline "Talk to Frank" ~ clickonit to see...

Frank

No Part II
(Two spitting-image portraits there of イーチーさん (Iichii-san (see below) my tamest hamster...)
YESTERDAY'S POST was scrawled on pizza boxes before I took it in here to tap in... I'm glad now I did not type up part II and was cautioned by my own warning, as I don't see it as anything much better than a bit of "drug porn", the ramblings of a user who is just high and glorifying his cocktail of choice and achieving very little else.

Thanks for the answers yesterday! I did read them but haven't yet at time of writing responded to them.

I keep thinking of rehab. There is a kind of rehabilitation you can do where you go into a mixed house full of people with all manner of life problems. It is called a Therapeutic Community and though "therapeutic community" is so often a mere descriptive term for drug rehab (as opposed to Minnesota Method or 12-step) there are in existence mixed therapeutic communities where not everyone's main problem is drugs and some may not be in for drugs (or even drink) at all. (Anorexia, self-cutting and other life problems are the type of thing that would bring people in there.)

Not knowing really where to look I'm going to have a bit of a search around the www for it. But what tends to come to prominence here are the expensive private ones the State will not fund for the likes of me!

If you're wondering why on earth I would want to engage in "recovery" not in the uniform presence of other drug addicts it's because I've been in detox/rehab twice (for very short times until I checked myself out!) and, in the second place especially, which was a full rehab, found myself outnumbered by folks in legal trouble whose main motivation for being there was for a "jail swerve" (no wonder talk of prison crops up so very much in places like that: even though in the first such place it was expressly against the rules...)

Junkies all tend to be very much the same and I got bored of the same presentation, the same self-deception and emotional constipation. The only apparent difference between me and most other addicts is that I have picked up from years of counselling before the addiction really grasped hold of me, an unusual frankness and an almost complete lack of shame in discussing my emotions. This is so extremely rare in drug addicts, especially common street junkies like me who have taken on their mantle of self-protective manoeuvres many years ago and now find it ever so hard to drop them. It was this quality, rather than anything special about my life story that, I thought, qualified me to pen those memoirs I keep rattling on about. (I'm always going to finish them, but am more minded now to knock out a ficitonal story of drug addiction. The subject crops up so very frequently these days and yet is so seldom written about with any degree of depth or frankness I feel compelled to put the record straight...)

Having said all that, self-deception and emotional constipation are so much the hallmarks of the regular junkie that I'm sure I must have them in spades. Deception, wily as it is, is never going to wave arms yelling "This is me! Here I am! You're doing it this way..."

But I would much rather "recover" as I say among a mixed group rather than boring old addicts. They really do get boring and I get fed up of them. Mental patients, on the other hand, differ even more greatly from one another than ordinary people do; I suppose because mental illness and personality disorders illustrate the extremes of human experience...

Now I won't rattle on about boring self any more.

Though I don't really like modern chicklit, I did used to have a thing for the family saga style epics of the 1970s and 1980s. Belva Plain's Evergreen would be a good case in point. I'm not trying to fess up that I enjoy romantic novels either! The ones I really liked tended to be long and complex tales of money, hatred and revenge! Not love at all!! My present tome is one I've had for donkeys years and somehow picked up in my hurry to flee the last place (where I left more than half of my old possessions behind): Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Woman of Substance. If you like the old television series Upstairs Downstairs (about life, as the title says, amongst the servants and family in an upper-middle class family at the turn of the 20th century (how old I feel having to specify which century I mean!) I think BTB's prose, at its best, is quite luxuriant and elegant (though I have to say she uses twice or three times the space I would to tell the same tale). The only irritating thing about it is a tendency to treble-underline everything in metaphorical red pen: yes we did pick it up first time Barbara you don't have to rub it in! As I say it's not really a love story, more a tale of money, power and business success. One day I'm going to write an historical novel with these ingredients. I already have my characters and theme, I just need to do research first. (And plenty of it.)

The Roborovskis paid a visit in their diggery to Mother Hubbard's house last week. I managed to get Baby Itchy to walk about on her hands. It was funny though, Itchy was far more confident rambling about on me than anyone else (and I had to be ever so careful that she didn't hop off and ping across the floor...) Of all my Trotterovskis, Itchy is the ONLY one who will countenance rambling about my hands, and even that she will only tolerate for five minutes tops until she gets fractious (and has even tried to bite me!)

まだ日本語を勉強します
mada nihongo-o benkyo-shimasu
(I'm still learning Japanese)

I've translated my hammies' names into that mysterious Eastern tongue; they come out as

イーチーさん Iichii-san (Itchy)
バスフルさん Basufuru-san (Bashful)
and
スヘリクルさん Suherikuru-san (Spherical)

and their names come out of the translator as
かゆみを伴う (Itchy) 恥ずかしがり屋 (Bashful) 球状 (Spherical)!
I have to say those "translations" seem suspiciously long-winded to me. Most English words can be expressed in two or three kanji at most (the Chinese-Japanese characters).
I wish I'd remembered to bring my dictionaries with me. Those translators can be fatal and I hesitate to think what I've actually written in The Language of the Rising Sun...



Here's another tune that goes round and round my head. Here, in the original clip from Breakfast at Tiffany's, Audrey Hepburn sings Moon River:~



PS the title Frank was a pun I forgot to elucidate on the former British National Drugs Helpline "Talk to Frank" ~ clickonit to see...

What now?

Part I
GOOD AFTERNOON ALL. The druggie part of today's post lies herebelow in italics. {CORRECTION: IT WILL BE ADDED TOMORROW}... I would strongly advise caution ~ or simply not to read it ~ to anyone in recovery whose poisons were heroin or crack or the so-called speedballing mixture of the two...

I never know quite what to say or what not to say when it comes to my drugs but they are, for better (hey what am I saying: for WORSE!), still the central axis of my life and despite what steps I may have taken away from the most intense times now past, the obsession is very much still there (under, perhaps, an occasional virginally pure-seeming layer of thin snowfall)... very much still my addiction.

Recently I feel I've hardly discussed anything else.

I feel I've come close to, and perhaps have been circling, some kind of turning point or crux.

Remember when I described a day things got so bad I actually felt REVULSION and AVERSION in place of what ordinarily plagues me:~ a near-constant magnetic attraction (for ever there, only to be activated by a simple suggestion, or an image, or a thought. (Hence my warning hereabove to those walking the thorny path to freedom: be careful of part II!)

Looking back over my life ~ the recent years of shadow ~ a shameful near-relentless emotional carcrash of a life plays out before me. Interviews by those who have put out memoirs of their own drinking and/or drugging or the books themselves, have freaked me out. I know it's hardly a competition, but I've reached the stage now where my own experiences are so much darker and more sordid and more despairing than anything these people have seen fit to reveal. Most of them seemed to hit a supposed "rock bottom" (I use inverted commas for I never felt any solidity below my feet there, merely the unbearable crush of the mega-gravity of an emotional black hole where everything's so intense it's become unbearable. I have come time and time again to such states where I just cannot go on. Just want to die. And yet on I have dragged myself ~ on and on in the dark. On despite teh soul-destroying gravity and depravity. And I've carried on using. Barely ever have I denied myself when I really "wanted" to use. I do methadone days now because I cannot bear returning to the chaos of hitting up morning, noon and night, hitting up for breakfast, to eat and to sleep... never feeling any confidence my raging need was going to be fulfilled, never knowing for sure where my next hit was coming from and yet knowing beyond any shadow of doubt that within little more than eight hours of the last one I'd start to need it. I crossed so many barriers and bridges on the Way Down, gave up so completely the remaining semblences of dignity ~ that I just do not know how I can do whatever it takes to fight out of this, get out of this. Break free. I ahd so very many aversions, self-warnings, self-cautions to break down to get here, that once the transgression's accomplished, my only refuge from the shame of knowing how polluted I am has been drugs, more drugs and more of them. I still hate myself even when I'm high. But when I'm low I can't live at all. And I don't live. I barely survive. I need to learn so desperately how...

I need coping mechanisms so bad. One at a time, as I cast the old echoes of my former life off, as I slithered ever lower down the pit, so I lost nearly everything.

Now I just want it back.

What do I do?
I'm asking: does anyone really know?
What ~ please ~ what on earth do I do now?
Somebody help me, please!


Video:
Thorn Birds the love theme as played out on "the beach scene"...

The book was a massive international hit when it came out in the late 1970s. The only romantic novel I have ever managed to read to the end...

Then the TV adaptation starring Richard Chamberlain as the Priestley Lover, was a huge success when broadcast in the early 80s.

How many of you remember this, the Love Theme music...?

All these years later and still it has not gone out of my mind!

Taking Care

I'VE JUST HAD TO LOOK AFTER A FRIEND who nearly overdosed in front of me... had to watch on her, check on her, keep squeezing the hand (nicer than waking them up saying "are you OK? are you OK?" which is just annoying for the other person) making sure I get squeezes back... yes all due to lovely heroin.

Heroin the "love" of my life. And that's the saddest thing... it's like a bad relationship where you're consistently abused, battered, let down and cheated upon and yet still you turn back and back again and again because it's the only thing in the world that makes you feel better...

... like that Bob Dylan song:

I'm on the pavement
thinking about the government;
he's in the basement
mixing up the medicine...

heroin is like the ultimate balm...

imagine a medicine that soothes every ill within seconds of ingestion, the ultimate easing balm... that's what it does. Sad as may be, I have loved heroin like nothing and nobody else because no matter how I have otherwise felt, it always made me feel better than before.

And apart from that I don't know what else to say.

I had a long talk at the drug service. My worker, whom I've clicked with, said "you seem to be drowning in this moroseness"...

Drowning? That's exactly it.

The day before I'd spent entertaining the repetitive thought of curling up under a hot shower, digging nail scissors deep into the pulse at each wrist and lying there bleeding...

morose?

Then I told her I was learning Japanese, and she said "what do you want to do for the future?" and I said the only thing I could think of that I could easily get qualified for (something that does not require a degree or long training course) was the TEFL Teaching English as a Foreign Language certificate. It costs about £1000 to aquire and once you have it you can travel just about anywhere in the world and get a nicely paying job, as I say, teaching your own language. And because I have troubled to pick up two more languages approaching fluently and another three more basically I do feel qualified to do that job well...

... so as for the future...

... let's see ...

;->...

It was Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday last week...

VIDEO: SPECIALS AKA ~ FREE NELSON MANDELA



VIDEO II:
MOBY: Go
This tune incorporates the dreamlike theme from Twin Peaks...



VIDEO III:
NUCLEAR TESTS

I found a really poetic compilation of nuclear test fireworks, it was absolutely beautiful... Nuclear fusion is the very power of God Almighty in action and this video is the nearest thing I could find to it today...



PS:
This may be old news to some of you, but I heard it on BBC Radio 4 this morning... my blogging acquantance, Olive, from Sydney, Australia, "the world's oldest blogger" died last week aged 108... RIP Olive...

Neither Hide nor Hair

MY HOUSE HAS BEEN QUIET SINCE MONDAY when a man from the council came to "measure everybody's rooms"... he had ever such trouble getting into Immaturity's room; standing outside waggling keys in the lock etc etc...

... the house has been quiet and I am glad.

I keep finding Roman Catholic magazines on the street from some organization called The Two Patricks (or something like that)... all stuff to do with apparitions of the "Blessed Virgin" ("Mother of God")... I looked for apparitional videos on Youtube but found only disappointing shots of Virgin Mary dolls (supposedly a statue) opening its eyes... a cross-shaped light over an Armenian church... oh and a "film of a real demon"... but as soon as I saw the first shot, a guy in darkened woodland with a torch on his face I thought "no no no!" and disconnected. So I posted something far more REAL instead: a nuclear bombing. THAT is the real future!!

VIDEO: HIROSHIMA



MUSIC: Cygnus X: Orange
Here's one of my favourite tunes from olden times. Here in the original version with video



ORANGE: BEST MIX

There are gerzillions of versions of this out, but I think this is the best. You need to give it nearly a minute to get going, then it doesn't stop (made me feel like I'd been at the disco biscuits again...)

"Washing My Door For Me"

WHEN KINDERGARTEN KID returned after 11pm last night, she stomped upstairs to my door (I was in); she did not knock but I heard something clacking loudly against the woodwork, as if she'd petulantly smaked the door with a dogchain or keys or something. She hared off downstairs, I ventured outside in time to hear her entering her own room downstairs. An empty McDonald's style Coca Cola cup was lying outside my door and wetness at the bottom. She had chucked the remains at it and what I'd heard had been the ice-cubes.

So I stood the cup neatly at the top of the stairs last night. This evening, just before leaving, I brought it downstairs and put it neatly by her door. Unfortunately she was out. When I do get to speak to her next (and I'm not speaking to the boyfriend again. Do you know he was actually pressing up at me agressively in a way I've not been treated since my school days. And I left school over 18 years ago!)... If he ever does that again I shall say what I was tempted to gush before and say, "really, I do wish you'd stop rubbing up to me like that ~ people might get the wrong idea!"

And when I do get to speak to her (not that I'm going out of my way to have anything to do with a silly attitude-ridden little girl: as I say I had my fill of that ilk of behaviour at school and am not up for tolerating any more now that I'm approaching 40, living alone, keeping myself to myself and less interested in "The World" by the day...

... I'm going to tell her, "it was ever so sweet of you washing my door for me like that, but you don't need to do that on my account as we have a cleaner coming in once a week. And I thought you might like your cup back."

Thanks last night's wise remarks, people:


Baino said...
. . .shame you can't pick your neighbours . .
Too true!

Sometimes Saintly Nick said...
Well, it seems the adolescent “house mate” likes to play damsel in distress and whine to the would-be dragon slayers. And you got to be the dragon!

Am I really a "dragon"~? Ooer!!

S**t! I mean, I’m glad you didn’t accept the s**t and I believe you did the absolute best thing in confronting the would-be damsel directly rather than messing with her rescuer!

Great job! I applaud your handling of the situation.

Thank you, Nick!

Anonymous said...
Hhehee Nick has said it all! You handled it well Gledwood, best avoid the trio from now on.

BEWARE: do not bounce along gathering bluebirds. They will bite!

What is gathering bluebirds..??!?

Vincent said...
What a twat man. Someone's going to be ignored for a while I think.

Yes most definitely, Vince. I'm just flattered that I seem so important to these people!


Flipside said...
Good evening Gledwood!

Sometimes Saintly Nick makes some very valid points.

Your house-mate may just be attention-seeking!

Girls can be very sensitive :o) You were consciously avoiding your house-mate, but she left the door open for you. That was an indication that she was aware of you, and made a friendly gesture. You then "banged the door"? She may have seen this as an aggressive response, and been disappointed! Maybe she was expecting
a shout, "Thanks for leaving the door for me!"?

Does she fancy you?! (She effectively got close and spoke to you, and got you to speak to her (!) without incurring the wrath of her big fat "bodyguard"!)

The man may have been attempting to sus you out and establish "Pecking order".

You skilfully defused a potentially explosive situation by employing a biblical technique, (ie "A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.")

PS Intrigued to know who I am ? - why? I'm also intrigued to know if it would make any difference to your response if I was a rock star, a waitress, or the heir apparent? ;->
In time you will know me.::::::::::

I don't think she does fancy me, as I've been pootling about in my German exchange student fluoro orange kagool, wearing my worst glasses and doing all I can to appear (drugswise) "straight"... and it works! Junkies in the street beg spare change off me, not realizing for a second I'm one of them! Oh the joy of sheep's clothing!!


Bimbimbie said...
Hi Gleds, I'm in agreement with Nick, you did the right thing speaking directly to the girl. Hopefully she's a quick learner and won't try that one with you again.

... would you believe the great seed trail brought two King Parrots around for breakfast just one day after my telling you I hadn't seen them for weeks. They must have heard your request ;)

I'm glad the parrots came back. I love those redbreasted "giant robin" style ones especially... like that one that used to follow you round the garden...


Akelamalu said...
Some folk can cause trouble in an empty house! I hope this wasn't a taste of things to come for you Gleds.

Hopefully not! If things deteriorate any further I'm keeping a timed/dated (+witnessed, if possible) antisocial behaviour daybook... if any of these little kids DARES touch me physically I'll have police on to them quicker than they can say "but he slammed the door in my face when I wasn't there!"

K.C. said...
Good for you, honestly, writing it out and getting it out. Can't change what others do.. only how you react to what others do. How you react will determine how the situation will evolve...

I didn't know you at all until a few days ago, and now I find myself thinking of you several times during my day and wishing you all the best... you will change lives.

Kayce

I would like to think I could change lives when I'm clean... I've been thinking of that a lot. Of course I want to redeem myself and the only way of doing that is by reaching out to the "still-suffering addicts" and to the vulnerable kids. Maybe I could do something worthwhile... I certainly hope so!


Nicole said...
What stupidity. It's probably just mental illness of some sort, but still nothing you should be putting up with, you've got enough worries of your own.

Precisely! And I really do not have time for timewasters ANY MORE. As much as anything else, I'M TOO OLD for it!


Puss-in-Boots said...
Would you say that behaviour is drug related, or is she just an attention seeker? Good idea to keep clear of them, Gleds...idiots they are...what's with the black dude, is he their pimp??

Interesting you brought up the idea of "pimp", too. Someone else made that suggestion to me. If he IS, he's well at the amateur end of the spectrum.

I've met some pretty formidable people in my time: these lot are childish, amateur would-be's and all the more pettily irritating for that!!


Kahshe Cottager said...
How very annoying, but it sounds like you handled it very well. I wonder why people do things like that? It seems a waste of energy to me.

I'm not wasting my energy on THEM, that is for sure!

Welshcakes Limoncello said...
Oh, dear, Gleds .. there's just no fathoming some people! You take care.

No fathoming: yeah. I'm not going to waste my time fathoming the sewers of some 17 year old's insecurities. Far as I'm concerned she can go on being insecure, just not in MY face!



Megan said...
Wow. "Overwhelmingly ridiculous" is right.

Here, here!

Monogram Queen said...

Yes just avoid them if at all possible. I hate smart-ass whippersnappers!

That's precisely my plan!

AS for the Proverb quote above: well said, Nick! "A soft answer turns away wrath!" That's always my first line of resistance...

OK folks, slightly unusual post here, I know, but I gotta go. Time's timing me out already.

Take care everyone!

Gleds
xx

Slam Door Argument in Hallway...

WHAT IS IT WITH SOME PEOPLE..? I'm just leaving the house nary an hour ago on my way here when I'm confronted by the new people downstairs. The new resident is a white girl: very young, quite depressed looking. She doesn't look heavily into drugs and appears to have her sanity (two big pluses against most of the inhabitants of this standard of accommodation..(!!) but I get the feeling she comes from a miserable and highly disturbed background (that is, that she was probably in "care", is an "orphan" or has been otherwise abused. It's unusual for such a young person to end up in "emergency accommodation" unless they're here directly from a foster home type situation...

... Earlier on I had returned home exhausted, wet, tired, ill, hungry and all-round not feeling very good, only to glimpse her at the end of my road. "Oh no," I thought, as I was not feeling up for conversation of any kind... thankfully she promptly disappeared into her room, leaving the front door open for me. I ran inside and banged it shut behind me thinking at least she's considerate enough to leave the door open for me ~ how atypical of the younger generation.

A couple of minutes later a tapping at my door that I did not answer. I was irritatedly pinpricking something at my foot in the bathroom. Something to take the nastiness of the day away. And was seriously not up for discussions of any type. Especially "are you my new housemate" type cooings as I (rather magnanimously, as it turns out) ASSUMED this might be...

On leaving I'm confronted by her, her tiny female friend, also about 17-18-ish and short and a great fat black bloke. I said "alright?" to them, as they had been banging about as if locked out. I don't know what their problem was.

Black guy promptly squares up to me saying "we all keep ourselves to ourselves in this house, right? Well what's this slamming doors in her face?" and he indicates New Girl.

I was utterly flummoxed, I have to admit. I did not understand what on earth he was going on about.

Turns out he was accusing me of having "slammed the door in her face".

Only afterwards did the overwhelming ridiculousness of the situation really hit me: that she's a grown woman and why on earth should she need this amateur-would-be-bouncer-type "threatening" me..?

I said what? Did was someone outside? I didn't realize. I'm sorry. Nothing intended.

Then he blahblahblahed like well it's OK then let's drop it. So I spoke directly to her: "did I slam the door in your face? I'm so sorry!"

She quite aggresively countered: "just forget it, OK!"

Point being, NOBODY was outside, door slammed in NOBODY's face. That's called trying to stir up doggy-do's where there is none!

Well I have the measure of THEM. But if they think they're even edging towards the league of my old house they're sadly mistaken (very 17-year old attitudes). I had a neckful of crap at my old house and I aint' taking no more off THESE type of pretenders..!!

PS Especially for ME {thanks Bimbimbie!} Red and Rainbow Queenslander garden parrots!!

VIDEO:
THE HOOBS
"Hubba Hubba steals the show"..!

This is the former "favourite children's TV prog" I used to go on about well over a year ago...

... (little else to say about it now..!!)

The Crackhead on the Stairs

O NO! History is repeating itself... there's a crackhead sleeping (not piping as in the pic: that was the best crackhead picture I could find...) on the stairs. SHE (yes another she) hasn't washed in days and appears to have a bad case of "crack lung"... at night you hear her coughing outrageously. Nasty business...

I got totally freaked out the other night having conked out with the radio on doing phone-ins at full blast... I wake at 3:30 am in the dark and alone with a woman describing vividly the demonic voices that have plagued her head since the age of 15... she describes some weird childhood occult cult meetings she was frequently taken to... claims the voices are down to Voodoo, the implantation of a demon in the head by the adversary to gain advantage. And all throughout this shadowy conversation, which was about as heartwarming as a candle flickering inside a human skull on the Altar of Satan, some cracked-out weirdo is creaking this way and that back and forth along our hallway... UGH! A seriously unpleasant night!!

And so on to my hamsters... who are all as furry as ever and were pinging in a Roborovski Donkey Derby (TM) between gazing up at me adoringly before I left to come here...

Have a cheery day y'all..!

VIDEO: BARBRA STREISAND SINGS "EVERGREEN" in French!



VIDEO 2: DJ TIESTO ~ DJ AS GOD...



PS Next week, at long last, the tell-all expose on Madonna the world has been thus-far lacking. Written by her brother (the one who appears as Chief Consoler) in that Truth or Dare movie...

My Name is Gledwood I Am An Addict

I WENT TO NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS again... (hardly my first meeting, I knew someone there from three years ago when bingeing made me want to be clean)...

Usually at such meetings there is a "chair", that is, someone gives their account of what brought them to NA and how they have done since, then whoever wants to speaks (one at a time) either in reaction to the chair or just to say anything they want. This meeting had no chair just a five minute silence for "meditation" (no crossed legs though). Everyone their seemed normal apart from me. Then at the last minute a mad Swedish woman with a Liverpool accent turned up on a bike insisting "look after this! Don't let anyone steal my bike!" and almost wailed in utter despair about being on crack, having CCTV'd up her entire house and still a voice is screaming in her ear (ie she's paranoid) and basically she cannot go on like this any more. I know how she feels (crack made me exactly the same way except I thought other people were spying on ME and nearly electrocuted myself dismantling electrical sockets etc to remove the hidden cameras...)

Do you know I actually (how naive is this?) embarked upon my drugtaking "career" hoping to "find God"..? The ONLY spiritual "personnage" I have encountered along the whole way of chemical "enlightenment" has been the DEVIL!!

What a charming picture of drug abuse I have found. Hmmm someone is smoking hash right behind me. Anyway look at the state of this man's veins he has been digging trenches in his crooks. Mine are way too hammered to inject there (though my arms look "smooth" apart from the giant blister scar on the left one, track marks all down the back of my hands and from my thumbs to my elbows and a gigantic barbiturate burn on the back of my left leg. (The "infection" I had in February.) It WAS almost definitely caused by barbiturated heroin by the way. The fact that a urine test done three days later was barbiturate-clear means it was probably Seconal or something like that (which leaves the body in a day or so). The hospital were flummoxed as to why anyone should have such massive blisters full of brown fluid when not burnt. When I said "could it be barbiturates?" the doctor said "yes that's it!"

You should have seen the look on the nurse's face who'd come in to "aspirate" them (ie pop them and drain out the goo!) when the doctor pretty much introduced me as "the local barbiturate injector". I did protest several times that I've never "seen" a barbiturate in my life (never knowingly bought them) but no-one was listening oh blah blah OK gotta go

Here is the NA Serenity Prayer

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

The Long Weekend

... AND BACK TO N.A.!...

HELLO MY FRIENDS... back again at long LAST. I never WANTED to be away, but was separated from the e-world by a lack of internet connexion and a lack of funds so bad I couldn't EAT yesterday, let alone shell out money for fancy-shmansie international textsational bloggeries..!

So what have I been doing? Not sulking, not surlying even... just kind of "hibernating" in my room... even though it's not "hiver"/"hiber" or any hibernational time of year...

My trotters have been on good form though... Poor Baby Itchy is fed up of my cooing: "are you the Tiniest Trotter? Yes! You're the Tiniest One...!"

She just looks up at me all furry and weary and goes: "shut up, man!"

Now as for that free drugs gift from that evil dealer: I do know the man; he rang me, saying "where are you?" "Why?" I wanted to know. "Because I have something for you." Then he came round with said Free Gift ... it was NOT a "sample" as they sometimes give out, but rather a Compensation Bag as I complained so vociferously and bitterly at how microscopically TINY his previous sale to me had been. Plus, as I said on the day, it STILL blocked the blinkin' works up. I.e. it was useless and I have refused to call him since.

... So, cutting a possibly circuitously blabberous story short, I'm returning BACK TO N.A. TONIGHT! And shall tell how it goes!!

And now on to music. Please answer this query of mine as it's a point of fascination:~

MUSIC OF THE DAY 1 (play this first...):
REM ~ LOSING MY RELIGION...

Intrusive Query of the Day: Have you ever wept bitterly as this song played out around you...?



MUSIC 2:
REM ~ EVERYBODY HURTS.

No queries here, but don't you think this is the better tune? (Not to mention video..?)




Have a cheery day, everyone!

The Tiniest Trotter

WHO IS THE TINIEST OF THE TROTTERS? Answer: Baby Itchy Roborovski. She is intensely small. All my hamsters have been in hiding in a dark cupboard by day (from the sun and from the landlord) only to come out (in 2 senses, as they come out of nests and also get physically presented under a red light that makes them apparently believe they are in pitch darkness) after evening time...

They do recognize my voice as whenever I start talking to them they up sticks and perform something like a mini furry horse race darting and pinging about and gazing up at me as if in Great Expectations... only to flee or chase it the moment The Giant Hand enters their domain.

A drug dealer turned up with a Free Gift of ukky white heroin today. It is "supposed" to be better than the brown but some eejut selling it (several stages up the so-called pyramid as this stuff's everywhere) ALSO decided "this stuff's good so I'm going to jump all over it" ... I don't know what this twazzock added but it crystalizes in the "works" and took three cookings up plus four filtrations before I got anything out of it that was doable. Then I had to go pyoing in my foot, which was not very pleasant. Yes and scarlet blood all over my white socks!

I think I'm going back to NA!

PS I've always wanted pet bees (as in the furry buzzing variety, not bags of "brown" I'm afraid if you're British and into drugs that does sound a bit like a pathetic pun... but no! I mean real bees, the honeymaking insects. Do you know if you DO keep bees you actually can get PAID for placing hives along farmer's crops in spring and summertime?

12,000,000 bees recently escaped in Canada on the way home from a fruit-nectar jamboree on local raspberry/whatever fields... unfortunately the lorry carrying them overturned and gerzillions of the bees decided "right that's it! we're fed up of that boring white old hive they cramped us into ~ we're off!" and duly swarmed!

Highway chaos ensued until firemen with hoses persuaded the poor furry buzzing swines that it was raining soapy water and the insects angrily crowded back home. Apart from the million or so who DIED of detergent poisoning, littering the road with furry winged carcases...

VIDEO:

PET LION CUB

TRUE STORY of a lion cub purchased from Harrods in 1969...

This purloined from Raymi the Minx blog...

Where is the Love?

WHERE IS IT? C'MON, SOMEONE TELL ME! In illustration we have Raphael Nadal (L) currently playing tennis against Andy Murry in Wimbledon and Naomi Campbell (R) currently doing community service for going mental when a bag containing a gown she had been scheduled to wear that night on an American talkshow went missing in London Heathrow's "fantastic" new Terminal 5 (don't go there! All they ever seem to do is lose everyone's luggage and leave you hours late still sans baggages...

Plus I'm posting below (Godwilling it will actually be there on Youtube for me to plunder) the Black Eyed Peas' Where is the Love: the only pop song I can think of that makes a direct plea to Almighty God: (paraphrased)

Father help us send some guidance from above;
People got me questioning: WHERE IS THE LOVE?

Talking of Higher Powers yes I did make it to Narcotics Anonymous last week. Unfortunately I missed the best part of the meeting (something to do with "acceptance") though what people had to say about "acceptance" was interesting. One guy said he never throughout his entire career of using conceded defeat to crack cocaine. What he meant was that he never threw up inner hands and went "that's it, I'm an addict I'm going to give up on giving up and I'm just going to use" ~ which I have to say is not like me. I "accepted" that I was a deadbeat junkie long ago and I can tell you once the inner struggle and all the lost promises "I'm giving up tomorrow/next week etc" had gone I felt a lot more comfortable just wallowing in the pigs' diarrhoea of my addiction (well what else can I call it). Another guy said that the heroin-crack snowballs he used to inject put him "in another dimension"... "but I'm in this dimension. So I stopped doing it". I know exactly where he's coming from re crack and have found it quite easy to accept that you simply cannot stay that high all the time. Heroin isn't a "high" as such, it feels more like pharmacological "food". In fact the dealers often call it "food" if offering in anything like mixed company... I know the heroin-crack mixture well and though I have done it strong (ie 50:50 strength) I can think of one morning in particular when I knew I had "a bit of coke on my spoon", threw heroin on top, banged it up in the bathroom with the window open. All I can say about the coke was there was more than "a bit" of it as I broke into a profuse sweat, felt a trembling nausea rush up from my heart like an express train, followed by a literal whooshing through the ears (you can actually hear the crack rush when it's strong) and a high that was rather like being picked up by the feet and swung around somebody else's head by the ankles. Right in the middle of this the next door neighbour's kid screamed in their garden... a scream that got snagged on the crackrush and seared through the back of my brainbox and out into infinity. I do not wish to experience THAT again 1st thing in the morning and ever since have kept my crack use tinsy-winsy! (Not gonna lie and say I've given up ANYTHING entirely as I only fall flat on my face back in the pigs' diarrhoea when I do...)

Righty ho. It's still FAIRLY hot. Actually I might have got yesterday's temperature wrong. It could have been 38C not 28C which makes it 100F. Boy can you feel THAT in this town. The tube, as Eileen said is particularly stifling and an average of at LEAST 5C hotter if not 10C hotter than the overground shade-temperature. Now I have to go else I'll never get this posted. Take care people!

VIDEO:~

BLACK EYED PEAS: WHERE IS THE LOVE?

Exhausted again

WHAT'S NEW? All I did was go out visiting today. And got back at 5pm. NOT what I had been planning on doing...

O man what IS new? Well I'm not suddenly magic-wandically 100% CLEAN that has not happened.

I'm not as depressed as I was.

Er... and yeah they said it's one of the hottest days of the year today, even though it's only 28C which is only around 80F and I'm sure it went up to 37/38C which is 100F this year (if not, then last). Now THAT felt meltingly hot. Especially for anyone unlucky enough to be caught on board a London bus!

The Trottertubbies are fine. All they do is ping ping ping round and round their house like a miniature horse-race...

O yeah and I'm exhausted. Slept for a good 12 hours last night and still feel like I could do the same again...

... well I'd better go, else this will never get posted and I will never be able to reply to my comments. Take care everyone lots of love

xx

PS 私はまだ日本語学習します。
(I'm still learning Japanese) (and no I can't vouch for the veracity of that though it does say 私は (I) 日本語 (Japanese) and 学 study... I got it from Google translate. My big excuse for not writing anything myself is that ... well how on EARTH would I input in Japanese script..?!? dur!!