OptiConfusion and Great Literature

I GOT SOMETHING IN MY EYE today. Literally there was a black dot on my iris and my eye felt weird and dry (not hurting or streaming with tears) but there was definitely this black speck literally stuck on my eyeball and no amount of finger-on-eyelid manoevring would persuade it  to go. So I spent £4.26 ($6.60) on a bottle of Optrex (I only needed the plastic eyebath as I've got two bottles of Optrex at home from when I last had to go to Moorfields eye hospital in central London for another "mote" that was stuck (inside the lid) for about 18 hours and I couldn't stop crying. That time, the lady turned my eyelid inside-out, poked it with something like a posh cotton bud  and said "this is the offending object" and it was TINY. This one was even smaller ~ but how weird that it should be stuck ON the eyeball. And literally refused to move. I kept thinking I had been speared by some non-painful miniature thorn. I don't know. It was really doing my head in. Of course the Optrex made me cry like a baby and everyone was staring at me when I came out of the public bathroom at the doctors' surgery where Binky had to get her dicky legs looked at. She needs TWO knee replacements and they say she's now old enough to go through with the operation. Because fake kneecaps only last twenty years they'll make sure you're nice and old before they put them in. Then when you reach the stage where those fail too and you completely lose the use of your legs you're hopefully decrepit in so many other ways it hopefully doesn't matter as much.

Anyway I decided to follow Handy Cotton Bud Lady (to those of you on American shores, a that's a "cotton swab") ; went into the toilet cubicle, rolled toilet paper into a twist and stuck this on my eye and hey presto the unmovable "nonexistent" black dot came straight out.

Well I've been in a VERY FUNNY MOOD  recently.  I wake up mulling thoughts of suicide in a fairly distant type of way .... then  I'm hyperactive and can't stop talking IN A VERY LOUD VOICE~!!!

O and by the way, Doctor Lovelace, my GP who I kind of fell in love with ... well she kind of looks like a more beautiful version of Myleene Klass. Just thought you should know that.

Errrr, I don't know WHAT I came here to say but that's about it. Don't worry  or get too excited; I'm not about to commit suicide . I just meant I have been feeling pretty crappy. Some of the time.

And I'm still in a piss about this Turkish television connexion. I'm thinking of turning up the heating to maximum, buying a load of kebabs in and inviting everyone I know round for a Turkish Evening ~ complete with bloody TURKSAT TELEVISION that I get but don't want .The council man wrote back pretty much telling me that if I wanted TV in German and French (for educational purposes) I should just stick a dish up. Oooo that's very naughty . The council won't like that. But I AM thinking up ways of fixing illicit television reception equipment to the back of garden chairs or on poles fixed into giant plant pots ~ then the dish hasn't been "installed" . It just happens to be sitting there. As for the bloody great hole I have to get drilled in the wall to line in four "LNBs"  ukh I don't know. But in readiness for this Bullensheiße I've taken to learning how to line up a satellite dish all on my very own . Which is extremely complicated seeing as said apparatus must be pointing at precisely 19.2 degrees east of south (which somehow works out as an "azimuth" of 155.8 and precisely 28 degrees off the horizon. Well I don't bloody know and what the MotherF is "azimuth" when it's at home..??? Well I'm determined to learn this shyte. Hey did you know you can hide a satellite dish in a binbag and it will still work ? Wow the possibilities are endless. This is for "Astra 1". Hotbird is a totally different satellite (at 13 degrees east) and Hotbird is what we're supposed to get but no it's bloody Turksat. I can't believe I am ranting on this subject yet again. It just winds the living crap out of me whenever I turn my television on. What am I saying? I barely ever "turn the TV on" . I'm one of those people who has it blaring out 24-7 (yes even while I sleep)  .Hence my severe irritation at the Turksat Scandal. Yes I do do other things apart from listen to television (  I don't actually deign to watch it THAT  much...)... in combustation of this I bought a whole load of books this afternoon. Classic texts . They are:

 Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway ~ no idea what this one's about but it's supposed to be good. Virginia Woolf, by the way, is the ONE SINGLE FAMOUS PERSON I can think of  who had full-blown psychotic bipolar 1 disorder with florid auditory and visual hallucinations, like me (rather than the Trendy Celebrity Version  of Bipolar , which is type 2 ~ that means a person might become very severely depressed, but their manic episodes are never severe enough to make them totally lose the plot. Anyway...

DH Lawrence: Sons and Lovers  ~ we did this at school. His best prose is lusciously poetic  but his worst is absolutely terrible...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment ~ this seems to be the only really good novel Dostoyevsky wrote. O and by the way he was heavily in debt throughout most of his life ~ and got paid by the page . Which should be ravingly bloody obvious to anyone who 's had the unpleasant experience of reading this guy 's worst crap .

Ivan Turgenev: Fathers and Sons  ~ absolutely no idea what this one's about , but it's meant to be an alltime classic of Russian literature. (I love Russian books.)

Tilly Bagshawe: Friends and Rivals ~ can I say in mitigation that this was only 50p. I hate chick lit but for some reason the cover grabbed me.  I'm going to give it to Binky. Also her novelist sister Louise WAS probably the best-looking Tory MP in history. Before she went and retired prematurely... akh. The Dr Lovelace of politicians and she too had to go!

John Keats: Complete Poems ~  it's such a shame this guy died young. He could have been one of the greatest poets of all time. Ode on a Grecian Urn is one of the greatest lyrics in English. And yes, Ode to a Nightingale was supposed to have been composed in an opiated daze....

Yeah that's my books. The whole lot cost about £14.50 ($22.46) . Brand new.

Well that's about it. Gotta go and FIND SOME CARPETS for my echoing concrete shell of a home....

Ukh and can I also say YES I DO SEEM TO HAVE MOVED INTO AN EX-CRACKHOUSE.  Everestine piles of red bills ... Bailiffs' cards pushed through the door. Two drunken junkies turned up at 7am yelling for the previous occupant  and when I said he no longer lived here she just yelled "LIAR!"  and a loud crashing noise echoed up the stairway...                                    

By the way if there are unwanted spaces here  , it's just the computer throwing a fit  . I don't know why......

ACEN OPTIKONFUSION: CLOSE YOUR EYES

I used to love this "song" ....

 Close your eyes... forget your name... forget the world ... forget the people... close your eyes and go insane...

Illustrated: Kurdish national costume; Myleene Klass ; Turkish national dress (Turks and Kurds are DIFFERENT don't ever mix them up!! ~ Kurds come from KURDISTAN, part of which lies within current Turkish frontiers...!), Louise Bagshawe aka Louise Mensch...

Binky Telling Me I'm a Cuckoo Clock ~ Plus: "A Bitch Called Sandy"...

BINKY keeps telling me I'm "really mad" and I keep telling her I'm not. I mean, I'm not paranoid, not depressed, not anxious even and so what if I feel high nearly all the time? I'd taken heroin in the night and hadn't slept so when I went round Binky's at 7:45 this morning, I was a bit hyper. I was trying to think up names for my fabulous clubnight and she kept getting offended by my wonderful ideas like "Slut Vagina". [I would never give my club such a vulgar name; it just seemed like a good idea at the time...] And when I took to recording random snatches of conversation. So for a while I was thinking of naming my star-spangled party "Are you on that toilet for long? Because I really need to go." ~~ I think that would be a brilliant name! The other top two favourites were "Gnome Brigade", "Dillory Pillory" and "Itchy Swines".

So what does Binky mean when she says I'm mad? She seems to think I ought to know, but I don't. Everyone in her house is insane anyhow, because it's a psychiatric half-way house. And yet when I loudly said I'd been hearing voices in the night again ~~ and I mean all of two voices saying no more than two words each ~ nobody was willing to take on board the fact that yes, I might hear the odd voice now and then ~ but no, I most certainly am not clinically crazy. Especially compared to the rest of the nutters I know.

Grizzeller, the one guy in Binky's house full of nutty girls is in such consistently slow motion that if, for example, you wanted to visit the house at 9am and knew he'd be the only one in, you'd have to phone in advance at eight to give him enough time to shamble along the hallway and get the front door open. Now that is bonkers. I am not!

When I was talking to my very young and beautiful GP, Dr Lovelace about the inconveniences of psychotic breaks and happened to opine that "hearing voices is supposed to be a sign of madness," she quite inaccurately corrected me saying, "well, hearing voices is a sign of schizophrenia". Well yes, of course it can be that, but it can also be a sign of bipolarity, a sign of psychism (clairaudience) and a sign of nothing at all! I'm really surprised Dr Lovelace doesn't realize that 15% of bipolar 1 patients hallucinate. Hallucinations are not, per se, signs of schizophrenia. In this country we have a national Hearing Voices Network brimful with people experiencing daily extra-sensory perceptions and the majority of them claim not to be mad, and do not experience the symptoms of psychosis (paranoia, incoherent thought, great difficulty engaging with life).

The British Mental Health Foundation obviously know their stuff. Binky insists all her voices are absolutely accoustically real. Well many of mine aren't. When I really was mad they did sound exactly like invisible people speaking next to me, but nowadays they're more like random words precipitating from an idea-saturated atmosphere into my consciousness:

It is also common for people to hear voices as if they are thoughts entering their mind from somewhere outside themselves. This is not the same as a suddenly inspired idea, which people usually recognise as coming from themselves. These thoughts are not their own and would seem to come from outside their own consciousness, like telepathy.

This isn't precisely my experience, but it's similar.

When I tell Binky I may be "just a bit hypomanic" she says, "you've been hypomanic for two weeks now". And when I point out that hypomania is just very mild mania, she says, "then hypomania is mild madness". You see?! Every move I make I'm already snookered. That girl has been in the mental health system for far too long and she knows too much.

Then she takes issue with me for wondering aloud what is wrong with other nutters and why they act the way they do. Well that's just me being me, I'm afraid ~ always fascinated by what makes others tick...

Hey! I'm not doing Christmas alone with an Iceland sweet chili chicken pizza this year because I've been invited to Binky's for Xmas Lunch with all her cuckoo-clock friends. How brilliant is that?! We're even allowed vodka, which has been banned for the rest of the year after Binky got me to buy two half bottles, drank the lot and then ended up lying in bed throwing a near-delirious pity-party of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. It was really not pretty.

Speaking of alcohol, I idiotically went and wasted 95p on a can last night which I mixed with my Polish fruits of the forest drink. I had one single sip and now it's sitting in a giant mug untouched and untouchable and I don't know what to do with it now. I'm very much into the waste not, want not philosophy and cannot in all good conscience pour it down the drain. Like I've said many times ~ although yes, I did used to drink enough alcohol not to be consuming any nonalcoholic drink at all and to be getting daily blackouts. But on the other hand I never had that "once I start drinking I won't stop until I'm passed out cold" thang going on, like most alkies seemingly do. I was your archetypal "top-up drinker" ~ drinking to keep a moderate level of intoxication going through every waking hour. Not to plunge myself into oblivion. Even with the drugs, most of the time, I wasn't using gear in pursuit of unconsciousness, but as an escape from pain. Now that I'm no longer in constant psychological pain I feel far less need of the gear. See it's all deep, psychological and mysterious.

At yesterday's anti-drugs group we had a cheeky chappie with what are nowadays termed "mental health" troubles but what always used to be called "emotional problems" ~ from what he said, his primary problems appeared to be anxiety and depression. This might very well be the "vanilla" version of mental illness, but let me tell you, anxiety/depression is just about the most unpleasant psychiatric affliction going. It's much more unpleasant than manic-depressive psychosis and of course the doctors take anxiety far less seriously than psychotic illness, which makes no sense, as severe anxiety is far and away more intolerable than any psychosis I've ever experienced. The doctors never, ever take it seriously, and they will not prescribe anything for it, except drugs along the lines of Prozac ~ which always made me many times more agitated than I'd been before. Anxiety doesn't generally agitate me. When it was severe, I was frozen in terror. As the psychologists say, it's "fight, flight or play dead" ~ which is very true as I always played dead. Though I've never seen a person with an anxiety disorder fighting. If anxiety really did make you fight, the mental hospitals would be full of people with panic disorders under Section for fighting instead of "flighting", or playing dead like me!

Anyway this guy with the terrible affliction happened to mention to me something about confronting the issues that have caused or fuelled my past depressions. What issues is he talking about? Do I even have any? Binky says yes I do; I said, "do you mean my massively unstable self-esteem?" and she said yes. But post-psychotic trauma aside, I'm not sure I have the type of issues that a skilfull counsellor could tease out of me so that in the future I'm going to magically not be depressed. I'm not sure my depression is like that. If it were mostly issue-based then how come the first sign, and usually the most prominent symptom is massively increased time spent asleep? Can a thorny tangle of emotional hang-ups really make you sleep more? And how come half the time I actually feel better than usual? So my mood is now elevated ~ and what has become of my issues now? Are they actually making me feel happy? Or is another set of personal hang-ups doing that? Or is it just that when I'm on the hypomanic side simply more in touch with my own fabulosity and that's what makes me feel fabulous all the time? Because that's what I think is going on...

Righty-ho it's ten past six and I have to go to Iceland to get a sweet chili chicken pizza. Writing about it has made me wanna munch it! With cheese-flavour coleslaw as a side-order. I luuuurve cheese coleslaw! I barely slept last night and must catch up before I fall asleep at the screen...

What's happening with Sandy, this humungous great tropical storm they said might flood or flatten New York? Is it really that bad? And why, if it only made landfall around midnight London time. With the time difference currently a mere four hours, that means New York was OK until eight at night their time, so why close down the subway and the stock exchange all day yesterday? Also, with New York being so low-lying, I don't understand why they hadn't long ago built seal-up-able subway and road tunnels to prevent any storm-surge getting into them... I woke up yesterday morning feeling so incredibly repentant for having been too excited about the idea of a giant hurricane hitting a major metropolis and not having my thoughts with the householders and the businesses who will suffer because of it. I can sometimes be incredibly shallow and I really felt guilty for having not taken Hurricane Sandy seriously. Also I wrote a comment to my fellow-blogger, Syd saying "so you live in South Carolina? Isn't that the land of hurricanes?" ~ no sooner had I said that than that Sandy appeared and I was terrified that Syd would get blown away because of what I'd said.

So all isn't right in the world. I keep thinking of all those people in New York, New Jersey and so on who will be dealing with massive flooding and power cuts. I mean, it's disconcerting enough when the power goes down for just a couple of hours and it's candles time and no television but what happens when a whole metropolis goes down for days at a time?

I used to be in touch with a recovering addict named B Melons Lemonade, who was right in New Orleans and actively addicted to heroin when Hurricane Katrina hit, destroying not just the infrastructure of the city we all think about, but its drug supply network. B Melons was so traumatized by events that she went down with a pretty nasty case of PTSD which is by all accounts one of the nastiest mental illnesses going...

I pray that New York and everywhere else in the path of this so-called "Frankenstorm" will be OK... 

Night-night everyone, wherever you are ~ and BE SAFE!...

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Rip Van Gledwood Manic-Depressive

I AM TURNING into Rip Van Winkle for sure. Between Friday and Saturday I slept about 27 hours in the space of 33 hours (ie a lot of sleep). I woke up 2 or 3 times, for 3 hours at a time. Then thought "what's the point of being awake anyhow?" and went back to bed. I have no idea how I can possibly sleep so long. The only drugs I was on were the miniscule 19 or 20mg of methadone I'm on (which does nothing except stop me being "sick") and 300mg quetiapine (Seroquel) taken all in one go around 10-11pm every night. I don't take quetiapine in the day precisely because I usually do NOT want to sleep then.

Anyway after this 27 hour sleep marathon I promptly went to bed AGAIN and spent about three quarters of the remaining weekend fast asleep yet again!! Usually excessive sleep is tied to depression. But I started feeling manic when I was awake. Not really manic. Just a little bit hypomanic. My mind lit up like a Christmas tree, my body still knackered.

I decided to get up at nine o'clock on Monday in case I spend the rest of my LIFE in a coma. WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN? I'm not complaining, by the way, just BEMUSED by it all.

Oh and by the way, hypomania is usually associated with markedly diminished "need for sleep" (not insomnia). I would beg to differ. I have spent days on end as a manic insomniac. Needing to sleep, yet by no means able to.

Emil Kraepelin explained it all in his worthy tome Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia, when he said ALL the symptoms of the "disorder" cycle separately. Which means one's sleep might be drastically affected, while the mood stays relatively normal. Manic and depressive features are wont to intermingle (which throws the label "bipolar" on its head, implying as it does that the disorder is always marked by phases of absolute opposites). In actuality, the old term "manic-depressive psychosis" describes it far better.

And to the people who say "bipolar disorder is not crazy" ~ what kind of bipolar do you actually have? Severe mood swings are inherently crazy. It's true only 15% of type 1 manic-depressives are said to hallucinate, but about 65% of bipolar 1 sufferers become paranoid or delusional (typically with delusions of grandeur about having stacks of money, ruling the world, or having some special relationship with God). Being as God is the source of all energy and manic people tend to have excess energy by the cart-load, there is a grain of truth in this. Also mania has long been linked with creativity or even genuis.

During the hours that I was awake, I mused on the miserable fact that nearly everything I think or feel or do, in other words nearly everything in my life can be construed as a symptom. I no longer spend the day in a good mood; I'm "hypomanic" (and do have the symptoms of hypomania; I wouldn't just use the word irresponsibly). When I'm down it's called a "depressive episode". When my mind feels more awake I have "racing thoughts and/or "thought-insertion" (that is, the sensation that alien thoughts fly into the mind from outside ~ you can point to the direction they come from). There is no absolute frontier between "inserted thoughts" and "hearing voices" which counts as an auditory hallucination. When I was severely manic I also had visual hallucinations of great beauty and splendour. Incidentally, although the doctors seem fixated on whether I "hear voices" when I'm really mad what I've heard far more is really really weird noises and distorted sound-effects. Eg the cars passing down the street whoosh several times over through some psychotic echo-chamber. When I run down the stairs I see huge words coming out of the walls in capital letters, and the stairs exclaim "oink oink oink doink doink". I'm not mad now, by the way, just reminiscing.

And that's another thing. I get frequent flashbacks to manic psychosis. And yet I have never been friends with anyone who was actively bipolar. (Everyone I've known who was mad was schizophrenic, usually paranoid schizophrenic.) So I have nobody at all to talk to. Other people with other diagnoses envy the elated mood, but don't understand how horrendously intense a manic epside can get. When I was most out of it, I had daily out-of-body type experiences. My body felt like it was turning from matter into spirit, or at least pure energy. When the mania started to wear off, I had a distinct and weird feeling that my feet were back on the ground. I had been so out of it I became impervious to cold. I had the windows wide open in late January and only noticed the chill when my hands seized up at the computer. All these weird things. I feel a great need to make sense of them.

Maybe you can never make sense of nonsense. But what sounds nonsensical to you seemed extremely meaningful to me as it happened.

And that's just about all there is to say on the subject...


PS: if you're wondering why all the Madonna videos, it's because I post stuff up to listen to. If you happen to like it, that's just an added bonus.

Here's a good one. Sorry about the weird aspect-ratio:~~~~~

THE MAMAS AND THE PAPAS (ED SULIVAN SHOW): CREEQUE ALLEY


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