There!

OK: I'VE NOW OFFICIALLY MOVED HOUSE! 79 Pancake Towers, Walford, London E20 9LP. OK if I were an EastEnders character that would be my address, but they say you shouldn't give out too much personal info on your blog. Which means I'm pretty f*cked, what with my heroin confessions of yore and all... Well I'm TRYING not to use it. And not entirely succeeding. Hey and guess what? My mood, for the last several days has been almost entirely NORMAL. Not high as a kite, and not too depressed either.

I started keeping a mood diary, where I rate the highest and lowest I felt that day as well as various other factors such as manic feelings: racing thoughts, hyperkinesis, etc. It's something I'm supposed to fill in every day, though many days I don't. Takes about half a minute to scrawl out the answers, then every week or so, I plot my highs and lows on a graph. Very interesting. At the beginning of the year I was hypomanic and suicidally depressed on the same day for more than a week. A complete basket case. Then we see clear-cut euphoric hypomania with no depression. Then the hypomania declines and depression appears in a characteristic wedge shape. With me, the mania usually looks like a shark's fin (peaking very soon, then gradually declining, though you may see two or three sharks' fins in a row). The depression gets steadily worse day by day, hits an all-time low; then suddenly, the day after, I'm almost better. Interestingly the letter S for "suicidal" DISAPPEARS when the mood plummets past a certain point. Anyway the rest of these notebooks are full of the most drivellous rantings possible, usually composed while manic and to be honest I'd like to burn them. What I like the most about being hyper and high is that when I'm right up there, my old neurotic self almost entirely disappears. Also in depression beyond a certain extreme, I'm not neurotic either. But my normal boring personality is so insecure and neurotic I irritate the pants off myself, so what effect I have on other people I hesitate to guess at...

By the way, the whole point of the mood chart is to correspond one's state of mind with whatever shit life has thrown at you that week. Weirdly the news that I'd been offered permanent accommodation actually set off depression with suicidal ideation. I kept thinking of this flat and telling myself: Now I know where I'm going to die... (Which might well be true; because I ***should*** have lifetime tenure. And if I don't die in hospital, the odds are I WILL die at home. That's just statistics for ya. (But of course when I'm really desperate I fantasize about dying in other ways and places. Don't think I'd ever have the guts to put that into operation though...)

Binky is STILL CONFINED TO A MENTAL HOSPITAL for the FIFTH TIME IN LESS THAN A YEAR. I don't even know what is "wrong" with her. She seems completely "normal" to me... But! She was severely punished this morning for calling the doctor the C-word and isn't allowed outside. A 49-year old woman grounded for having borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia and being in a bad mood. Which has me running all over the place purchasing cigarettes, paying off her multiplicitous catalogue bills... etc. Being as my new place is two miles from the nuthouse I can't get there every day any more. Hey last Saturday we had an interesting ride in Manic Girl's car. Bloody hell. I had just remarked how "normal" Manic Girl appeared and why on earth were they keeping her in hospital for so long... Then we got in the car and I realized. I don't think I have ever whizzed through the sinuous streets of London at such extreme velocity. When we got to the post office, Manic Girl said "I used to work there but it was so boring I jacked it in and travelled the world for three months". I wish I could be that spontaneous, but I'm very cautious and boring at heart.

Of course I have heard back NOTHING in my great fight to get keys for all my doors and windows and non-Turkish satellite TV.

I'm living on cheese coleslaw sandwiches. It's that posh multigrain malted bread, so I feel most bourgeois nibbling on these whilst viewing Abu Dhabi TV (formerly sky 796 now you must tune to Astra 2 28.2 east 11662 or 11623MHz horizontal) or Horse and Country (Sky 280 not on Freesat) or The Peace Channel Urdu (Eurobird 1 28.5 east, transponder F1 upper, 12559.67 mHz horizontal (not on Freesat or Sky). Yeah I had a go at tuning my German TV box ~ the one that made me hit the roof when I tried to get Hotbird 13 east and was instead deluged with hundreds of irritating channels in BLOODY TURKISH ~ into the Sky/Freesat satellites at Astra 2 28.2 east. You get about 300 channels free-to-air, most of which aren't on Freesat, some of which aren't on Sky either. I do love my satellite television, hence this massive gripe with the council over negligently miswiring my Hotbird feed and giving me F*CKING TURKISH TELEVISION INSTEAD!! Don't get me wrong. I love most things Turkish: cheap under-the-counter tobacco, large lamb shish kebabs with all salad loads of garlic sauce bit of chili sauce for £5.50 and jewellery that is far nicer than anything else you'll find in the low-to-mid price range (though Indian jewellers are also good). But I DO NOT WANT TURKISH TELEVISION!!!

Ukh, all this ranting... am I going manic again? The mere fact that I think about mania, or remember what it's like at random points of the day, is often (weirdly enough) the first sign of its return. That and fantastic adrenaline rushes lasting hours on end, woven into the psychedelic fabric of life's rich tapestry...

" /> Bloody hell I'm hungry. I'm going to have to run to Iceland for something to shove in my sandwiches. Good job it's winter: because I have no fridge, I'm just stashing stuff out on the balcony. Where, by the way, a pair of pigeons keep mating. First thing in the morning and right in front of my face.

Righty-ho. Better leave it there. Hope y'all have a chirpy weekend...

(And if it can't be chirpy, then may it be chirrupy instead...)

Link: my right to satellite television under EU law http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-01-913_en.htm?locale=en

Illustrated: these apartment blocks are far too pretty to be anywhere in London ~ what you see is Neukölln in Western Berlin...

MUSIC: DOLLY PARTON ~ THERE

I used to listen to this when I was very little: it was on the album New Harvest First Gathering

What a Grey Day...

IT IS nearly 4pm. I have been up since 10 or 11am. I go to bed relatively early and get up late because I'm sleeping 12 hours solid. Between 7 and 9am I nearly always wake up. Then I drink my methadone and fall back to sleep. Drinking my dose a good 2 hours before I get up means that once I am up, the methadone is working full-on and I'm far less tempted to use the alternative.

I had a horrible dream that my Dad, who doesn't even like taking headache pills, had a couple of ounces of very low grade, dark brown heroin.

Usually when I wake up after a dream like that, I just want to use. But today it never even crossed my mind.

I got up, got tomorrow's methadone (because I pick it up a day in advance) and for some reason, youtubed up the Prisoner Cell Block H theme, which made me so sad I nearly cried.

I have felt lousy all day. I never even bothered showering until ten minutes ago. I have been stuck in a chair, staring at television, not wanting to move.

Yesterday, I suppose I managed about 900 words of this children's story, which is supposed to be ridiculous comedy. I was going to force out another 600 words (2 manuscript pages) last night, but had taken my medication too early and just wanted to sleep.

I'm only on 300mg (quetiapine). My friend is on 750 mg quetiapine (Seroquel) plus TWO antidepressants ~ mirtazapine and venlafaxine (Remeron and Effexor). What the doctors are trying to do in her case is medicate the very changeable moods of borderline personality disorder (her quetiapine is for schizophrenic psychosis) but I'm not sure this can ever work.

The BPD is sometimes considered to be on the "bipolar spectrum" but the mood swings in BPD ~ swinging from OK (not euphoric or high) to very angry, frustrated or sad ~ are totally different from bipolar moods which in my case have, at the extreme, alternated between highest exaltation and deepest despair, although I can get extremely irritable at both poles, especially mania.

Anyway I am not and have not been even hypomanic for several weeks. I am now getting more and more depressed.

Under normal cirumstances my moods aren't very much more extreme than those of Stephen Fry as filmed for the Secret Life of the Manic Depressive documentary, although when I'm hypomanic I'm probably more hyper, more cheerful and prone to laugh uproariously  over practically nothing. My attitude towards the "illness" is similar to his. He was taking no medication and I don't want any more than I'm on. The last thing I want is a mood that's pancake-flat.

I also agree with the man who says he's seen angels in psychotic mania ~ that it's worth any amount of misery to go that high. [I didn't see angels: I felt trillions of volts powering through my brain and went into outer space.]

But I agree with Carrie Fisher too ~ eventually I'm going far too fast. Thoughts are racing totally out of control. Then they all crash into each other and become completely garbled. The whole world is in ridiculous slow motion. So that when the computer asked me for a password and then spent what felt like months considering my answer before allowing me in, I very nearly sent it crashing across the room, on many occasions.

Someone once asked me how, if I was in such a mess, I managed to put up posts with pictures. The answer is, I very nearly didn't. The pictures only appeared hours later and the effort of finding them put me into near-meltdown with yelling and swearing and the computer was lucky to survive at all.

In mania the symptoms vary widely over the course of a day. So when I was in complete confusion ~ which lasted for hours ~ I never posted at all. I couldn't even speak coherently, let alone write, And there were many occasions when I literally could not read at all.

As for "liking" being bipolar, if my mood continues to fall, ask me the same question in a couple of weeks and you might get a very different answer.

(I'm not trying to say, by the way, that I enjoy losing my mind, just that I love the extremely high moods... And why does the world have to be so crap that the only "illness" that makes you feel better than anything else is the same one that shows you utter hopeless bleakness and despair?)

Over the last couple of days, I took to wondering, if I ever did achieve success, how I would possibly cope. The answer is, if I ever made any serious money (how would I do that anyway?) I would be extremely stressed by it. But would still far rather be rich than poor. The only thing it could pay for is a change of scenery and I would use it to insulate me from the world as much as possible. And I don't think I will ever find true happiness. Never, ever.

I have just been watching, with one eye, a documentary about the Baader-Meinhof gang and Stammheim prison. I love TV programmes about the Cold War era, the Iron Curtain and the Eastern Bloc. That's one reason I so like watching telly in German.

My house is getting more and more untidy. I don't mind cleaning sinks, surfaces and showers ~ what I hate is clearing, sweeping, scrubbing and mopping the floor ~ and it requires all four. So most of the rubbish is on the floor now, uncleared up.

The Great Bathroom Stench, by the way, has temporarily gone. I know if I call the landlord, the bad smell will hide, only to return with avengeance once he's left.

I should end on an inspiring note ~ weeks before that man made the 128,000 ft leap from space to earth, another guy in America, constructed a gas baloon with a camera that filmed the whole ride up right into the stratosphere. When it fell to earth with a GPS, they found it and you can watch the film here.

Fastforward 2 mins 15 in to see the launch...



And here's that Prisoner Cell Block H tune...



*

Epic Escapes from Communist East Germany

FINALLY I'm getting my money's worth from German telly. Several of the channels are doing a season on life in communist East Germany. My favourite programme was one that told in detail how the "inner German border" and Berlin wall were fortified and how people managed to escape.

Outside Berlin the border consisted of a strip of grass several hundred metres wide with watchtowers overlooking a fence no higher than many people have in their back gardens. The problem was that the "lawn" was strewn with two million Soviet mines. One day, a pair of East German border guards spotted a group of West Germans at the fence. They strolled over and shared cigarettes and beer. They were only half-way back when ~ BANG! ~ both were blown up by a mine. The border guards, who were basically teenage boys in the year between school and college, hadn't even known the mines were there. The West Germans climbed through the fence and fearlessly ran across the mine-field and carried the injured guards back through the fence, where they took them to a West German hospital. Despite having attained "freedom", both insisted they wanted to be returned to their own country...

The best story was about a group of people who made their own hot air balloon, which flew them to within 600 feet of the border only to run out of fuel and crash-land. So they make another even bigger balloon and actually do make it to West German soil. Disney made a film about it titled Night Crossing.

I'VE DECIDED to give up the heroin yet again. I know you've heard this time and again. But I'm far too psychologically dependent on it because it's the only thing that raises my mood. Alcohol doesn't. I've had three drinks in the past three weeks ~ half-litre cans of Lithuanian Fizz brand cyder. I only used to buy it because they drown out the taste of alcohol with overpowering cherry flavouring.

I'm terrified I'll plummet right down to the darkest abyss of depression, because I've been feeling bad for a month now, and it's been steadily getting worse. Dr Lovelace said I seemed broadly the same as two weeks ago and today I probably was. But I felt terrible at the weekend and have too much experience of low moods to be taken in by a two-day, probably heroin-induced, improvement.

I know I'm going to feel like crap, but I just have to grin and bear it. I have to live the rest of my life without illicit drugs and I'm going to have to start some time. So that time might as well be now...