I HAVEN'T WRITTEN anything here because not a lot has gone on. I didn't have a good Xmas, really. Or a happy new year. I don't know, I must have been depressed, or sick, or something. I don't know. Hey I just got a comment saying I was delusional because I thought I could get in print. Well... maybe I am, maybe not. Fiction writing is not like blogging. Everything goes through at least two drafts, if not five, six or seven. Here I just tap it in and press publish; there I weigh every word. Fiction is about characterization and dialogue. Blogging is just me reporting every turd I've done. My fiction, you might argue, is just a literary turd ~ and a real steamer of a sloppy one at that! They have almost nothing in common, so you can't really assess my ability to write novels by reading my blog. Anyway I haven't written anything for about a month. I finished my first (short) novel in computer-ready form and almost instantly spiralled into depression so bad I couldn't focus enough to weigh up two versions of the same short passage, to work out which should go into book two. I don't know why I got like that. My GP wanted to up the meds by another hundred milligrams, but I don't want even more antipsycho tabs. The ones I'm on are causing enough side-effects as it is. Er, I don't know what else to say. I feel like I'm under seige. I have this feeling that I need a guard dog. I saw the most beautiful doggie on the Australian Animal Rescue programme. At first glance I thought she was a St Bernard. She was really cute, but she had been bitten by a snake and they couldn't save her. So she died. And she was one of the most beautiful dogs I have ever seen. And she wasn't a St Bernard, she was an Akita. I have always wanted an Akita puppy but have never seen them for sale. I have this daydream that one day a stray will come looking for me, and that will be my sign. An akita puppy. See how cute it is..?? Though I think this one, with the sawn-off legs look, is something of a crossbreed... I must go. Hope everyone's all right... Hachiko monogatari: the tale of Hachiko, the faithful dog who never stopped looking for his master...
I PASSED a one-eyed, fuzzy furred, porkshire-generic, three-legged mongrel on the street just now. Trotting behind its master with a smile on its furry face.
The dog looked so happy.
How come a person with one eye and a missing leg can be so cheerful whilst I, with all fingers and toes intact (+ able to speak fluent English) am so miserable on 30mg methadone?
It doesn't make sense!
MUSIC: this is what Polish techno sounds like Is it any good?
WELL, I have spent the last day or two feeling like I've been dragged through a hedge backwards. This is all my "brain's" fault for making me "elevated" all night the night before and unable to sleep. Either that, or the mystical rivers of my Energy Sphere have been overflowing. I'm not sure which. I tend towards the mystical energy explanation nowadays ~ the world is full of mystical energy that scientists aren't even able to measure. I once found a Chinese medicine leaflet on the bus that explained how every "illness" I have ever suffered resulted from a deficit, excess or misalignment of vital energy.
Apart from a few crumbs found wrapped in a cigarette paper (which I wasn't entirely sure didn't come from an old digestive biscuit) I have not touched heroin for something like four days. (I'm not sure as I don't count days "clean". I think it's unhealthy.) The "crumbs" could have been 1/100th of a gram. Not very much. The methadone is holding me again and I don't need any more than the prescribed dose. But I am taking it in two goes. Half around 6am; the second half around 4pm. It seems to work much better that way. I feel really sorry for Americans and people from other countries where methadone seems only to be available on Supervised Consumption. It's not so much the "supervised" bit I disagree with (although it is rather demeaning to have to drink it in a public pharmacy in front of althelete's foot sufferers, bachache pensioners and pregnant women) ~ it's the compulsion to drink an entire day's dose at once. It just doesn't last 24 hours. If I drank my entire dose once a day I might need 1.5 or x2 as much. And I would still probably wake every day feeling crap. My dose has gone UP to 30mg a day now. At least 30mg works. A few months ago I was down to 14mg and I didn't exactly feel brilliant on that little. You know methadone is more addictive than heroin?! (Which the clinic never warned me, by the way. I think that would make an interesting court case, don't you?) More to the point though: how on earth am I ever to get off that crap??! I asked not one but two workers at my present clinic could they exchange my dose to one of (far less addictive) morphine instead and they said no. (Without explanation.) When I pointed out that on heroin I was able to drop directly from £80 or £100 a day (this was years ago) straight down to £20 with no withdrawals they looked confused. (My point being if morphine's easier to titrate down then I want morphine.) But it's not in their interest to understand common sense when they're a methadone/suboxone clinic and hence blinkered to every more effective treatment option.
At the peak of my habit, by the way, 100mg would barely hold me. Even when I gave it four or five days in a row. So my dose went up above 130mg. I'm not very proud of that...
I really need a savage guard dog/bodyguard. I'd like one like this from the Pedigree Chum advert.
Really I'd like an Akita (of course). They look really ferocious when annoyed.
Here's the TV adaptation starring Julie Walters as mother and Beryl Reid as Grandmother. None of the male actors seems to be famous, except Chris Gascoygne (Nigel).
When I say I want a dog, I mean one like Adrian Mole's. With scruffy fur. Except mine needs to be savage and ferocious. I need a guard dog/bodyguard too.
Oh by the way, I found out why Korean boybands look like girls. It's because they dye their hair ginger...
I'VE JUST SEEN a leather 3-piece sofa I really like. Real leather. Just apply shoe polish to improve that dynamic sheen... Charity shop said they'd do it without the matching chairs for £95 ($145.93) (it's £195 ($299.54) with 2 matching leather armchairs...) I said I can't put down a deposit now. I spent my last 30p (46c) on a Spanish novel called El misterio de la cripta embrujada ("The Mystery of the Haunted Crypt") by Eduardo Mendoza. With the aid of my trusty Collins Spanish Dictionary and copious notebooks plus an entire pack of blue biros with which to copy out every single word I don't know or cannot guess ~which will be about 20,000 words!~... but when I've done this in German, my vocabulary expanded by leaps and bounds. I'm also looking out for the defunct and undeservedly out of print Penguin Book of Spanish Verse. + I also want the German and French versions. Poetry, they say, is the very best way of picking up a foreign language. Great for improving the vocabulario and nice and succinct. These Penguin books come complete with prose translations, so the need for three hulking great dictionaries is obviated.
Oh by the way did you know the Spanish word for "dark" is oscuro ~ as in obscure. Never knew that one...
Well I've just come back from visiting the nuthouse. Yet again. My mind is humming. Also the loud Scouse House I'm listening to isn't helping. I was in such a bad, paranoid, irritable mood this afternoon. Effing and blinding at every little thing. Depressed this morning. Hyper in the evening> at least Binky says I am. She says she can tell when I'm going into a "manic" one by the sudden addition of liberal sprinklings of the word Glodemer into my conversation. Glodemer being the name of our late doggie who had the sweetest nature of any doggie I have never known and looked like a seal with mottled silvery grey and black fur. I was absolutely gutted when she died of status epilepticus ~ constantly fitting out for hours and hours until her body just gave out. (This was all brought on by puppyhood distemper.) My parents kept saying they might have to have her put to sleep, but nature took its course before human intervention and she died under the cherry tree in our massive garden. A snow of white blossoms against infinite blue sky. The Japanese say cherry blossoms symbolize the all-too-terrible briefness of life. It was very sad. I felt much more upset over the death of this dog than any of my friends. Except one ("Lucky"). Can't believe Lucky went and died. She just keeled over and her organs failed one after another. Like a power blackout in a big city where you see block after block going dark. So she died. Anyway glodemer is my name for "cute". Japanese かわいい kawaii.
Binky is talking about my going into the emergency psycho clinic if I don't come down soon. I told her when I did go into ultra ultra hyperacute mania more than 2 years ago now, it took a good couple of weeks to get from where I am now (just moody) into extreme elevation with auditory and visual trippings and full-blown confusionality. I'm not anything like that now. It does sound like my carrier bags are whispering mysterious phrases at me as they rustle, but that's just me living out a children's book. Where deep in the enchanted forest trees have great gnarled faces and steam trains puff out exclamations like "Ready to go! Ready to go!" Life is a mystery. Everyone must stand alone. I hear you call my name. And it feels like home.
That's Madonna, darling.
Eddy : "Life is a mystery. Everyone must stand alone."
Saffy : "That's lovely."
Eddy : "Yeah, I hear you call my name and it feels like home."
Saffy : "Who said that ?"
Eddy : "Its Madonna, darling."
I can't remember what else I was going to put. Oh yes the bed scandal! My Dad is trying to deliver me a bed and just as he was trying to text me a junk mail text came through offering "great deals on both, 3 for £20, 4 for £25..." which I promptly ignored (it having seemingly booted my Dad's text out of my phone) and so I missed the delivery. Of the actual mattress. Because I was two annoying minutes from my house. (I think it is a mystically self-inflating mattress malarky thingie...) Bloody ridiculous. My family are fretting that it might never get delivered and go pinging off into some hyper-conscious censorious vortex of hyperspace where all the missing full-stops congregate in a great H-bomb fusion of transcendently transmogrified unaccented unaccounted accumulated power. Something like that. You know, the space in the Twilight Zone where all the Missing Socks find their long-lost loves. You know: their Sock Partners... Something like that. But It Shall Come. It Will Be Delivered. All Shall Be Fine. Glodemer said so.
Well the weather here in London Town is still lovverly... I don't know. It felt horrid and cold this morning. But this afternoon FEEEEELLLS about 85F. I don't know that it is really that hot but it's such a fantastic evening. Charming as a Chelsea Bun, sweet as a Danish pastry. Curly as an Akita's tail...秋田犬 And just as Glodemer Furry.
Well I've got to go. Knowing my luck UPS are trying to deliver my dhinghy-bed RIGHT NOW!!!
MY MOODS are in terrible confusion... I really do not know what to say... when, about who?.. about me...?...//... why?...//how. I'm a manic-depressive. My moods are prone to be mixed up and extreme... and TO the extreme. I'm sitting here having just given long, long answers to Beverly under my last post. I'm attempting to conduct some formal research into people's experience of mood disorders and how badly these people were impacted, what symptoms they dealt with and to what severity for what length of time, and how they coped. In depression, some people oversleep; some undersleep. Some experience a cycling sleep disturbance in which insomnia and hypersomnia hit at varying, different times.
This past weekend I've been feeling truly terrible. There's been a death in the family ~~ my step-Granny died last week; the funeral's in London; everyone is coming and I said I'd go. Truly: when I think about what's going on, and how many people I'm going to have to deal with... I just cannot handle it.
I asked Binky whether she'd be willing to go with me and she said yes. I also have a friend called Mitt who offered, for the cost of the petrol, to drive me across town and back.
I spoke to a person in my family whose viewpoint I respect earlier today, who asked basically how emotionally I was going to cope. What with my mood having peaked and troughed and cycled up and down in days gone by. And nobody knowing what it's going to be on the Day that is Not About Me at all (and I don't want people thinking about me then either). In truth, the mood swings I get nowadays are nowhere Near as extreme as bipolar moods can go. But, in truth also, I still feel like a basket case.
We had The Conversation earlier on and it was agreed that my meeting my Dad and my Step Mum and Brothers (I have 2) for the first time in eight, ten and twelve years respectively ~~ would be far better done under less stress-laden circumstances.
But Binky, never one to miss the opportunity for an emotional meltdown in her own life, wants to disagree. She says it's really disrespectful not to go when this funeral of a lady who spent her latter years in West Wales but always wanted to be Laid To Rest with her Late Husband in an Outer Suburb of West London is taking place in a location reachable by me. When I could attend if I Really Wanted To. If I could Only Tough It Out... Timewise, whether we went by car or tube, the cemetary would probably be equidistant.
Binky was really peeved and pissed off with me for having switched off my phone on her and anyone else who might have wanted to ring me back. And for having agreed to come across town with me for this funeral. And now I'm chickening out. But I'm terrified, basically, of meeting all my long-lost family-members all at once and them staring into my eyes... mirrors of my soul... I don't know what they're going to see. I'm terrified of what my soul might tell ... maybe, after all, I ought to wear dark glasses... I don't know. Binky is really pissed off with me for nearly adopting a furry great doggie, offered by Mitt offering free of charge. If I took on a crossbred dog she is EXACTLY the cross I would request ~~ a German Shepherd/Akita. And a SHE! A SHE! I ALWAYS wanted a great furry Akita, didn't I always say that? Well Mitt, who's HIV+ among so many other of his problems says I can have this doggie absolutely free ... who was going to go to Battersea (famous London dogs' home).
The way I see it, regarding the doggie is, the best I can do is take her on. And if we don't get on, or if she's too badly behaved, I myself can dump her in doggie prison. Being bushy-furred and Akita and female I know for a fact that her time in Doggie Prison won't last long. It's Staffordshire bull terriers who end up doing Life because they're what I call Badly Behaved (going nuts whenever a person comes to the door, jumping up at people, pulling on the lead... etc)... plus Staffies are so popular these days I expect it's no Understatement to declare that about one dog in three in Britain these days is a Staffordshire Bull Terrier...(!)
Well I don't know what to say. Although Binky disapproves, and although my feelings are severely mixed... it probably Is the Right Thing that I Don't Come to this funeral on Thursday... and it might Also Be The Wrong Thing to take on this doggie that I've always wanted, but hell, if Mitt brings her round on Weds as promised ~~ providing he furnishes me with lead and bowl and a good week's supply of food, I think I WILL take her on. The poor swine needs somebody to love her and I have so much love to give to somebody who is bushy-furred who will not hate me back...
Sorry: I really need to go now. It's dark and I need a cigarette. The DSS have messed up my money so I'm reduced to penury. The electricity on Emergency. My mood hit a pretty extreme low this past weekend. On Saturday I tried taking my medication in the afternoon (as prescribed) in order to, as my near-neonatal GP recently declared, "regulate" my mood. But all it did was to smack me out from about five PM until I awoke at midnight, just in time for MORE meds... straight back to sleep till about 8:30 and less than an hour later drowsing till after two in the afternoon. This means I slept nearly TWENTY HOURS out of TWENTY-FOUR. Ridiculous, I know. But, the mood I was in, it was SURELY BETTER THAN HAVING to ENDURE all THAT TIME AWAKE..!!
I don't know what else to say, except that my moods this past week have been bad. Most of the time I endure rather than enjoy. I wasted ridiculous money in Iceland yesterday, wishing I had not blown the sliver-slim remnant of my cash on Mr Kipling's Rum n Raisin Slices and a box of Thornton's Milk Chocolates (when really I'd far have preferred plain but hey you gotta go for what's there...)... I used drugs today and hyper-reacted. I have to stop the drugs. Without them I feel too terrible for words. Or too manic-depressive. I never know what is going to happen. Binky is annoyed with me because I told her this morning that I ought to take up the habit of regularly overdosing on my medication like she does. I think she finds the notion of my copying her behaviour unconscionable. Oh I don't know about any of this. My head is in a whirl and a swirl and I don't know what else.
Please take care of yourselves and each other. I wonder WHY it is so incredibly DAMP and CLAMMY and FREEZING COLD and INCREDIBLY CLOSE weather. HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE DAYS.
TAKE CARE, EVERYONE. i HATE winters. HATE having to SURVIVE. HATE EVERYTHING about these days.
I really hope my Family is OK, those who are grieving the most... but I don't know what else to do apart from follow the advice I have been given and if Binky wants to guilt trip me over situations she does not understand... well she can waste her breath as much as she pleases but I've never been one to dance to anybody else's tune and I'm not gonna start doing so now!
i haven't read this back... i hope i haven't said anything TOO Terrible... {o bloody hell: please no!}
Peace, love and respect to you all XxxXxxX
Hey I've just clocked WHY Binky went so nuts at me earlier for switching off my phone: DSM Diagnostic Criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder:~~~ "frantic attempts to avoid Abandonment, real or imagined"...
♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫
HAVE A LOVELY MUSICAL EVENING MADONNA: BLOND AMBITION TOUR ~ LIVE IN JAPAN
I WAS GOING to name this post The Bipolar Porkshire as there was this furry blonde doggie (a porkshire cross) at the supermarket howling and baying and groaning and moaning and hollering out as loud as possible in doggie language and I kept saying "are you a furry maniac?!" and the doggie bayed back.
I only feel human today because I went and took heroin this morning. Before then I was frozen... as Madonna would say, my heart was not open. Or as I would say, I was drifting downwards towards worthlessness. I've had enough moods of such extremity to be able to say that mood and value (plus personal self-esteem) are inextricably linked. And I've been falling from over-valued to valueless. Sorry to put it that way but it's true. I hope y'all are feeling better than I do. And I hope you don't need to take an illegal class A drug in order to just feel "normal". Methadone doesn't make me feel "normal". If flat, depressed, hollow, empty, meaningless and worthless count as normal then yes I've been feeling very normal indeed.
I'm going to attack my druggieworker next week and demand to know if he really feels as terrible as he likes to say, why doesn't he just top himself? I would, if I felt that way. The one single reason why I hang on is my elevated opiate tolerance. If I could only get off the methadone, and hence reset my tolerance to that of an ordinary "opiate-naïve" person I could deliberately overdose and have a good chance of success. I'm not saying I want to kill myself now. But I do wake up in the morning wondering why on earth I should go on. Questioning why I should get out of bed. If it wasn't for next door's workmen drilling right into my wall and a phone call that woke me at 10am I might still be in bed now. There was nothing at all worth getting up for. Even visiting the heroin dealer was more stress than joy. If only I could go to a tree in my garden that grew heroin, ready purified and wrapped up, that would be so much easier. Or get it from Boots the chemist's at 30p a gram, china white. If only the world were more accommodating to the hopeless drug addict.
I think that's the first thing you learn at NA: that the world is not out to help you in your quest to perpetuate your drug addiction, and that as a recovering addict the biggest key to success is to negotiate life on life's terms... ha! If only I could put my money where my mouth is, instead of pumping it straight into my veins... things might be so different... See, I say this, but I don't really mean it. Life without heroin has only ever been worthless ~ or if not, blank, or psychotic, or hypomanic, or hyper-manic. All of the above.
Right I have to go; I'm running out of time. Have a tolerable weekend and Take care, all of you...
Yes Anna Grace has broken her Youtube virginity (as she puts it) and posted up a couple of really entertaining videos of her being hyper. She's especially hyped in the second one. She says it's because she was on her ADHD medication, Aderall (which contains neat AMPHETAMINE!!) And she is bipolar. That is: full-on bipolar 1 with psychotic features in mania and depression. I said I'd ask my psychiatrist for her what he thought of her amphetamine+bipolar combination. And whether prescribing amphetamine to a bipolar sufferer was a very "doctorly" thing to do. He did not approve at all, saying it would make her "really, really manic". When I said well she gets really really depressed, he didn't sound surprised about that either. Anna has a borderline personality disorder, just like my friend Pinky. During my Heroin Years I met loads of people with personality disorders and many more who were undiagnosed yet personality disorder seemed the only way to make sense of their odd behaviour.
Anna once pretended to be dead. A blog post appeared by a "friend" saying she had finally done it: put a gun to her head and squeezed that trigger... I believed her. I didn't feel upset; I felt completely numb. Then I realized other people had looked up her mother's Myspace or Facebook which contained new postings with no mention of a dead daughter and then I realized what was up with Anna was more than bipolar disorder complicating an opiate addiction. It was then that I began to suspect personality disorder. The psyche nurse at the druggieclinic began to suspect I had a personality disorder too, so I was given the mission of looking them all up and deciding which could be me. I picked Borderline Personality Disorder. The nurse thought Avoidant Personality Disorder. Neither is true in my case.
Anyway back to Anna Grace and doncha think her voice is drop-dead cute? She sounds like a real-life cartoon character. BeverlyBabe says she's like Betty Boop. I'm hoping she's going to put her cutesy-pie Porkshire Eleanor Rigsby in her next one. Especially when she's just had a puppy cut. (That's the fur-cut that makes Porkies look really cute. I used to think there were nice porkshires and horrible ones. The horrible ones having ridiculously long hair. But no. Basically all owners of Porkshire Terrorizers have to give the swines regular fur-cuts, otherwise they just look ridiculous. Like a bush with wild eyes and trotting legletts. I think Anna Grace should get a job as an actress, or at least as a voice-over artist. She'd love that. Anna can also sing coloratura soprano with ease as her voice is so stratospherically high.
She says she's having a squeakesome moment because she was nervous. I hope she mentions me in her next video as I'm amazing. Also she is my cyber-wife. Even though I'm having a torrid affair with bleached blonde beach babe Bev ha ha!
Here's a mental health joke:
What do you call it when you talk to God? Prayer.
What do you call it when God talks to you? Schizophrenia.
What do you call a person who thinks they ARE God? A psychiatrist...
... wah wah waaaaaahh!!!
So come on Anna Grace Old and post up some more Youtubes. Next time crooning with your Porkshire! AND TALKING ABOUT ME!!
I HAVE JUST COME BACK from the breast clinic. I walked all the way so I am exhausted. I had two x-rays taken of each side. They squeezed my nipples quite violently into a class contraption and then the woman ran away to hide behind a screen. I wasn't allowed in the women's waiting room, where I hoped I would pass as a lesbian. It didn't work. So I waited in a room with a couch and a screen until a nurse turned up informing me that a doctor had looked over my results and no ultrasound was necessary. Does this mean they know I'm so riddled with cancer I'll drop dead before another appointment is possible??~! I'm just kidding. Surely, surely this is a good sign..? But what on earth does it mean? And why wouldn't they tell me? I didn't even think of asking till I was halfway down the corridor and the nurse was gone. I doubted she knew much about my case anyway. I'm going to have to wait till my consultant appointment in June ...
I was really upset yesterday because I went to the laundrette and that stressed me out and tired me out. I felt so decrepit I nearly cried.
I could have slept at 6pm, but stayed up late. Next thing I knew it was past 1:30. I got into bed exhausted and didn't sleep for at least an hour. Then I woke up, freezing cold and dying for a cigarette at 6. Eventually I went back to sleep and got up at 10 . I was getting confusing racing thoughts all day and I think it was them that kept me awake.
Oh what a mundane day! I wrote out a really long post yesterday about how upset I was to be schizo. But that's going to take days to type in.
The Calorie-controlled diet is going well. I'm still at approximately 1500 Cals per day. Ironically I don't need to eat very much less than usual to achieve this, so I don't think this alone is going to make me thin. Exercise comes next. Now that might make a difference...? Problem is, I've never done any type of formal exercise programme in my life. The only sport I like is swimming. So I was thinking of forcing myself into three sessions of that per week. I was going to take it up last year, but laziness, shyness and body issues got in the way. I felt far too fat to wobble my near-naked portly frame in front of hoardes of strangers!
As far as I know, I've never gone over 220 lbs, 15 stone, 100kg. Currently I am around 14 stone, 200 lbs, 90kg. I haven't weighed myself since the diet began. That's partly because I judge myself not on what the scales say, but on how lithe I feel. My target weight is 11 stone, 154lbs, 70kg. I don't want to go below 10 stone, 140 lbs, 63kg.
I really wanted to see the chirpies in the birdery, but the old man seemed to have shut up shop and gone home. Wikipedia describes lovebirds as miniature parrots and that's why I want them . What better bargain can you get than mini parrots at less than £30 ($50) each?!??
Soon as I get a council flat (that means permanent public housing) I'm getting roborovskis, a massive furry American akita or lovebirds or all three!!
And last but not least: best pop performances of all time:
MICHAEL JACKSON: BILLIE JEAN, MOTOWN 25, 1983
MADONNA: "DANGEROUS LIAISONS" VOGUE, 1990 MTV AWARDS
