Valley of the Shadow

I HAVE GONE BACK to a place I was stuck in for years. That is: my underlying mood is low. I feel bleak and empty and so cold that I sleep in coat, hat and scarf. I only feel like I'm surviving because I rely on heroin to keep me this side of sanity. I've tried and tried to go "clean" (sticking to methadone alone) but within a couple of days without heroin I'm starting to feel lousy. By the third day I feel absolutely terrible. I've never gone beyond three days without because I can't handle feeling that bad. I found somebody at the methadone clinic who actually listened to me. She said that unless the depression can be medicated away, there's little help of methadone doing any good.

I've been trying and trying to kick the gear but it isn't happening. I was stuck in this situation for years ~ unable to go without gear, because when I did I felt too bad for words. No doctor was ever able to diagnose the situation because a doctor would only see me with heroin in my system. Without heroin, I'd never have made it out the door.

Well I'm going to try surviving on methadone alone and just push through it, no matter how bad I feel.  It's from the extremes of mood that much truth is seen. I just hope I can make it through. I hope I can survive.

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  When I'm feeling really OK, music really can make me feel GOOD... but judging by the recent past, if I do keep to my plan ~ I'll be gear-free by Friday, and feeling terrible... wonder what it'll be able to do for me then...?...


      *****************************************************************************************************

I Love Harvest Mice

FURRY FRIDAY ON SATURDAY

Wishing Y'all A Tiny, Furry Weekend...

"You're Frozen When Your Heart's Not Open"

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...


MADONNA: FROZEN



♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫

The Help That I Need... And Do I Really Need It ... (And What Is It Anyhow?)...?

AT THE WEEKEND, after I'd got a bit over-exuberant and what she likes to call "really manic" but I would categorize as "a bit hypomanic" (no way was I "really manic" in doctorly terms; I was just a bit elevated in mood; a little hyper) my friend Binky told me I really need more help from the mental health services than I'm currently getting. It's true the first thing she did on my arrival was to insist on laundering my clothes, which I thought were clean but she definitely didn't. Then I had a shower in her heated bathroom, which meant that I spent longer than a couple of seconds in there. And on coming out and changing into grey jogging bottoms and a fuschia pink teeshirt that she insisted was red but it wasn't ~ it was most definitely pink ~ I have to admit, I felt a whole lot cleaner. That is, cleaner as in less dirty. Not altogether clean. I never am and never feel "clean". But maybe that's my inner drug-addict being honest, hey.

One of the Support Workers who works at the Supported Housing where Binks lives listened as I told the story of how I ever came to the attention of the mental health system at all. That was to do with a drought in the UK's heroin supply and a sudden attack of mixed mania and psychosis coinciding with the "first day of the rest of my life"... that is, my first day clean of the terrible weak and adulterated heroin that was going around in those days. And how I never really recovered over the following weeks. Because I was keeping a diary with a four-point mood-scale going upwards and down and was scoring +1.5 and -1.5 on the same day. +1.5 means a very noticably elevated mood and hyperkinesis similar to the effects of speed. -1.5 is a very sour, depressive mood. +2 on this scale means full-blown mania, +3 is psychotic mania, +4 is a quasi-delirious state with disorientation and confusion ~ as bad as mania gets. The very maximum on each end would be a plus or minus five.

In the first flush of psychotic mood disorder I went up to about +3.5 and down below -4. I remember the aerial falling off the top of my TV and it staying that way, with barely any picture, for two days because the television was merely an object upon which to fix as I stared into space. After about six weeks of rolling moods I suddenly went sky high and this is where I hit a +4.99, about as high as you can go.

But these days I'm still scoring plus and minus 1.5s. I was +1.5 on Saturday afternoon. My self and my house are getting ever further into disarray. [I never stay high; it's the change of direction that throws me every time. I never know where I am, where I'm going.] Binky somehow knows that my living space is in dire need of clearing and cleaning, even though she's never set eye on it. She needs a knee replacement and so rarely walks further than the nearest busstop, and when we meet at home it's always her place.

In a moment of empassioned despair I went and telephoned Naomi, the lady who used to run the Dual Diagnosis "Nutter Club" (as I called it). I'm not her patient and she knows I'm only phoning for advice. I would never expect practical help from her: she's far too snowed under by all her other cases... She returned my call this morning saying the best thing I can do, to get more help, is say to my GP that I need a psychiatric referral ~ or more to the point, to enquire as to where the current one has got to. When I turned up feeling depressed about two months ago, she said she was referring me to a psychiatrist. The other option is to ask for help via the methadone clinic; but Naomi underlined for me how prejudiced psychiatrists can be against drug users (that must mean they're prejudiced against most of their patients as most people with ongoing mental health issues these days are drug-takers, if not full-blown drug-addicts like me...)

She reminded me of stuff I suppose I already knew in my heart: that if you want help for depression, for example, you shouldn't downplay the "suicidal ideation" nearly all depressives get. I just don't like talking about stuff like that; unless I really feel bad in the moment I mention it, I nearly always feel separated from my own feelings and myself when I do so, so there's a good chance I'd have to hold myself back from laughing. I can't take myself seriously the way I'm "supposed to". I just can't. Well I'll try... but I wonder what I think this doctor can do..? I don't want any more meds or drugs. The one thing I think might help is counselling... I mean, I hate to admit this, as counselling has always been the knee-jerk response of health professionals of all persuasions... but who knows; maybe it would help...? It's true I still feel traumatized by the mere fact that I went totally fruitloops barking bonkers in early 2011. I certainly do not feel I've had any closure on this issue.

Binky says that what I need is the same manner of Supported Housing she lives in. And that I need a social worker and a thing called a CPA which means a Care Plan Approach ~ a written contract-type billing of what treatment I can expect and call upon when and from whom, especially in emergency. Because as far as I'm aware I have nothing like this. No community nurse I can get in touch with. All I know about handling emergency situations is that I'm meant to present myself to the nearest mental hospital's emergency department. Where they seem deliberately to keep everyone waiting for hours, as if the long waiting time is going to put anybody off when actually all it does is severely annoy some already annoyed people and help further to unravel others who have already passed their wits' ends.

So really, No. No true help is available anywhere. Maybe I would do better in a Dual Diagnosis Service (geared towards mentally deranged drug addicts) rather than the one I go to, which seems to be geared to the needs of people whose main issue is the drugs. Giving up the drugs never seemed to help my mental states in the past, which is why I'm somewhat doubtful that just giving up heroin is really going to do much good to my mind. It'll probably do my body far more favours. The two street drugs most associated with mental ill health and addiction are cocaine and speed in all their forms, neither of which I've touched in I don't remember how long. In many cases, cannabis is probably worse for a person's mental health than anything else, including crack. Which is a big reason why I loathe the stuff with such passion.

All that spliff-toking has ever done to me over the past few times, scattered as they were over many years, was to bring on paranoid psychotic symptoms without any redeeming features (such as elevated mood). The last time I smoked cannabis was a complete accident that happened because I'd been collecting cigarette butts from a nearby bus-stop and found what I'd taken for a nice fat rollie and not really noticed the herbal flavour until my mind was already enrobed by amnesiac paranoia. Then there's alcohol and "alcohol is a depressant so that's what's probably making you depressed" as many people told me... So how come I've felt equally bad, and sometimes more so without the drink..?  I don't think heroin helps me... Naomi did say this morning that she thought I'd probably been self-medicating bipolar disorder for years with heroin; and yes it did used to seem to stabilize my moods. Which it doesn't do any more. So apart from its inefficacy, I want rid of that stuff because as a member of my family once pointed out, it has killed my creativity. And it certainly has. In the early days of addiction, heroin might make a person feel more creative. But I don't think they usually are any more creative, in terms of the number of things created and their quality...

Naomi asked what my exact label was and when I told her "schizoaffective" she said she feels I'm far more towards the bipolar side of that diagnosis than the schizo one. Which puts her in accord with everyone else I know. Neither I nor any of my friends think of me as "schizophrenic". In fact the only person ever to use that expression has been my GP, who doesn't seem to perceive any meaningful difference between schizophrenic and schizoaffective. Well from what I've seen in others there's a wide gulf separating the two. Schizophrenia is an ongoing psychosis characterized by disorders of thought. Schizoaffective bipolar disorder, which I'm supposed to have, is an extreme disorder of moods with some schizophrenic features. There's a second type of schizoaffective disorder, which Binky's supposed to suffer from, which involves severe depression on top of schizophrenia. The doctors seem to have successfully medicated most of her depression away but schizophrenic features persist. If you get her talking on the right subjects, she can sound completely delusional...

Binky also says some weird things that are basically her shit. Eg that if I read too much about my own alleged condition the doctors will alledge that what I'm telling them is the result of my researches, not my experience. Well this cannot be true as I wasn't well enough to pick up any knowledge about what schizoaffective disorder actually was until I'd recovered enough from last year's episode to be clear-headed enough to actually take any information in. And between that time and this I haven't seen any psychiatrists at all. Also some of my most extreme experiences are barely touched upon by any modern texts ~ I only saw them described in Victorian textbooks I was able to access online. Plus the way I'd describe my experience and the way it tends to be expressed by others are very different. Example: I have experienced my thoughts exploding into starbursts. I've never heard anyone describe it that way. Other people talk of "racing thoughts", but that symptom never happens to me until the mania is so severe I'd be having difficulty communicating. Binky talks of racing thoughts she says she experiences in the night but I cannot relate to whatever it is she means. A person who comes home in the early hours of the morning only to find they've lost their keys might characterize their thoughts as "racing" ~ but that's nothing at all like the racing thoughts of mania, which are literally in such extreme fast-forward you can barely catch hold of a single one without it exploding into scores of others skedaddling in all directions with the utmost rapidity. So it's almost impossible to say what you're thinking about at all ~ the subject has changed so many times, the original point totally lost. You can't even remember where you've been, let alone how you got there...

Ho-hummm you see I have got on this subject YET AGAIN. And WHY? Because there is no closure. All I want is some validation and maybe some explanation... of what on earth it is that has been happening to me.

As for this "help" that I supposedly need... what help? When? How? And WHY??    


Illustrated: (1) digging one's own grave (which is what you do when you tell anything to a psychiatrist...) (2) fuschia pink (3) hyperactivity (4) Vanilla Ice with Madonna

HERE'S SOME MADONNA
Watch the very beginning... why do you think she wants to start her concerts with readings from Revelation..?



 ♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫

French and Saunders on Andy Warhol

I WAS GONNA put this up at the time, when I went through a "poring over Andy Warhol's Diaries" phase. But here ya go now:

FRENCH AND SAUNDERS: ANDY WARHOL SPOOF

Spiny Mice

FURRY FRIDAY ON SATURDAY

Real Mice... With Spines!

Wishing y'all a Spiny Weekend... But not too spiny...

Grey Hurray For Another Dull Day

I DARE NOT read back whatever whining, self-pitying crap I wrote yesterday. Back then I was depressed. Today I'm not as badly depressed ~ so my mind has more valuable. I'm swinging from utterly worthless back to "of some inherent value" again. Maybe I'll even go up to superstar blinging Emperor of the Day, shining like a padparadascha, in a brief instant, only to be swallowed once more by the howling night.

London is incredibly depressing today. Grey streets under grey skies and grey people huddling home in the cold. I even dared turn on the central heating for half an hour. Running back and forth to the gas meter to calculate how much this cost. The house barely got any warmer ~ and yet 20p went down the drain in not much more than 20 minutes! So I'm not doing that again. Normally I either go to bed, or wander around in coat, scarf and wooly hat. (Indoors.) It's been far too cold to watch television...

... But eventually I took more methadone (more than prescribed) and started feeling relatively "fine". So I searched for a DVD to put on and found something called Million Dollar Hotel. (I don't even recall where it came from, I just found the DVD in my house a couple of days ago...) Well if you're thinking of watching it, I can tell you that Million Dollar Hotel is weird bordering on plain odd. Even though it does star Mel Gibson. It's a terrible movie. So I shoved A Star Is Born into the player. This was disc 2, the Pantages Theater TV Premier, as shown to millions of gawking Americans back in 1954. It's weird how so very few of the actors are still recognizable today. Even Elizabeth Taylor, supposedly the last great movie star showed up failing to gain a personal mention; she was merely "Mrs Michael Wilding".

If you're wondering why the gemstone illustrations and what they are, the top 2 feature fancy coloured diamonds in varying saturations; the orange heart is a rare padparadascha sapphire. And finally an Ethiopian black opal... And they're just there for the sake of it. To brighten an incredibly grey day.

I would have spent all day in bed, but I slept so long last night there was no hope of sleeping any more. This is the type of day that is only worth sleeping through. (I sometimes wonder why I bother living at all. If life was down to "bothering" I can assure you I'd have died of indifference long ago...)

So there's not so much to say. Have a look at this old premier footage (same stuff I was watching) if you want a real blast from Hollywood's past...


A STAR IS BORN PREMIER, PANTAGES THEATER, HOLLYWOOD, 1954
I like the bit where the guy who says he named Frances Gumm "Judy Garland" says that even if she was called Tel Aviv Windowsill she would still be a rare and fragile talent... (interesting that he chooses fragile... which she certainly was)




◘ ♫☺♥ ♢  ♧ ◘ ♫☺♥ ♢  ♧ ◘ ♫☺♥ ♢  ♧ ◘ ♫☺♥ ♢  ♧ ◘ ♫☺♥ ♢  ♧ ◘ ♫☺♥ ♢  ♧ ◘ ♫☺♥ ♢  ♧ 

The Issue of "Issues"... Plus the Issue of Heroin...

SO I took the pharmacological de-icer and felt instantly better for it, but the depression crept back and now I feel almost as bad as yesterday ~ and yet I'm on the gear as well! So now two negatives. Although just about everything looks "negative" when scrutinized closely.

My drugs worker is really pissing me off. Every time I come in there saying I feel down he says everybody gets down. And that he feels crap every single day. Patronizing piece of shit. So I said, Well I don't feel down all the time; sometimes I feel just perfect. A-OK. A1. And he had no answer for that one.

The other thing that annoys me is when drug worker type people try and get all psychological about it, as if I'm going to tell them what "issues" lie behind my negative mood. Whatever "issues" they may be, they must surely be ones that make me feel absolutely fantastic the rest of the time, when I'm not depressed. Or else, they are at least only part-time issues.

When I'm feeling bad, I'm not depressed "about" any one thing; I'm depressed about everything.

I'm using the word "depression" but really that isn't how it feels. If I didn't know what "depression" was, I'm not sure I'd even think of myself as "depressed". I would say that I felt sick and miserable, worn out. Overcome by some mysterious and indistinct illness, an affliction of the soul... That my heart feels packed in ice. Perhaps I would say I feel this way because my chickens have come home to roost. All I am is a miserable junkie. But I do not believe that if and when I ever do get off the heroin and off the methadone completely I will ever feel OK. I strongly suspect that I'll feel exactly the same way I do now but I just won't be an active drug-addict any more. I'll be a miserable ex-junkie instead.

Remember that in late 2010 through the spring of 2011, when the heroin supply in Britain had dried up anyhow (there literally was nothing out there to score, apart from dodgy white and brown powders containing very little to no gear at all)... That was when I really lost it ~ with mania, depression and psychosis. All of which had been building up in me for years. I was never altogether surprised to have a sudden and intense manic episode, because I'd been experiencing flashes of it for years. And for even longer than that I'd had intermittent and transient symptoms of what I now know to be psychosis. But I'd just feel strange and disembodied and sometimes hear voices. But it was nothing strong enough to require treatment ~ or so I thought. The first "voices" I ever heard were so indistinct, I couldn't even tell what they were saying: if I'd told a psychiatrist about this, I thought I'd have been laughed out of his office. It was only upon googling the subject that I discovered it starts for lots of people that way.

In my heart I feel lied to. By every well-meaning and probably genuine person who has ever tried to tell me that if I'd only kick the drugs everything would somehow be OK. It just never spun out that way. Example: I gave up crack ages ago. Crack used to sometimes make me feel intensely paranoid. But I've been far, far more paranoid months after ever touching the stuff than I ever was "on" it. The same can be said about depression and drink. I haven't touched drink in weeks. And yet this week I felt more depressed than in a very long time.

Interestingly, when I told the psychiatrist that drink actually made me feel better in depression and yet did next to nothing at all when my mood was already "elevated" he accepted this and didn't try to contradict me. You have to bear in mind that by this point I'd already reduced from the equivalent of more than a bottle of spirits a day, down to three to four double vodkas, spaced over twenty-four hours. So he said I was just "psychologically addicted to alchol". 

The effects of drink and drugs have become so unreliable ~ I never know how body and brain are going to react that I'm starting to feel there's just no point in taking any of them. Not just because they're "bad" but because they just don't work. Drink did used to make me feel better. But more recently it's only made me feel more run down and equally depressed. Heroin does something weird to my mood and I'm not even sure quite what. But common sense tells me that with my moods as unstable as they are, it's probably best to take nothing at all that's going to interfere with them.

Heroin, lovely heroin all-healing, all-destroying heroin; it's the last thing left and I just cannot drop it. I wish to God that I could, but I can't.

So I do not know what to do...


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Not an original choice but what the hell

THE VERVE: THE DRUGS DON'T WORK...
This "anthem of a generation" wasn't originally about addiction, but about a person who is terminally ill... "hanging on for dear life," literally...



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Nothing to Say (so I don't know why I'm bothering saying it...)

WHAT a load of crap I wrote in my last post.

I feel dreadful today. I woke up at 10 or 11 and it took till 4:30 to actually bother to get up and get down the methadone chemist's.

I am supposed to be going up the road to borrow a £10er to get GUESS WHAT. But that will probably never happen. I haven't got the energy to get up the road to start with... And my house is FREEZING but I WILL NOT PUT THE CENTRAL HEATING ON. It's a such a waste. So is the "H" but at least that warms my heart... nothing else can...


Illustrated: bullshit

There's So Much More to Life than ... "Blurk!"...

I HAVE SO MANY ideas, but not the resources to put them into operation. I'm overflowing with inspiration for my fantabulous glossy mag. The one I'm not telling anyone anything about, because it hasn't been done before...

Do you know, I worked out ~ if we got a worldwide circulation of 2.4 million across the three regions of North America, Europe and Asia and charged the same rates per reader per page as Vanity Fair and Vogue, and we achieved an average 100 pages of advertising per issue, we could pull in $500 million a year ~ about £320,624,899.20. How incredible is that~??!?

Have I got my sums wrong? Surely I must have...? I heard US Vanity Fair charges about $212,000 per page for a circulation of just over 1.2 million. And that British Vogue charges just over £20,000 a page for 210,766. These figures sound just too luscious to be true... Are they true..?? Can anybody tell me..? Maybe the costs of running a glossy monthly are sky-high also? Who knows. All I do know is that in the beginning I'm going to have a really hard time getting anything into the magazine. And then with the passing of time and an increase in readership and the achievement of iconic status, I know that people and products will be lining up to get in. And then I'll remember everyone who did me some favours back in the beginning...

Wow: I'm in a better mood today. I can see the light once more. Last week I was drowning in depression. My friend Binky said to me "if you need to talk about it, I'm right here at the other end of the phone" ~ but it wasn't like that. Me talking over my depression, or wondering what "issues" are involved ... is a bit like a person with influenza wanting to "talk over" their sore throat and fever and putting their acheing muscles and nausea down to "issues". The depression is just something that comes and goes irrespective of any issues or non-issues (or magazine issues).

My druggieworker was a bit annoying today saying "we all get down now and then and I never feel perfect" so I countered with the declaration that I do feel perfect sometimes. I don't feel down all the time. I get low moods and they come and go. I do not have any kind of depressive personality. I never told him about the psychic voices accosting me in the night, because that would be "mental health" ~ and methadone clinics seem to know next to nothing on that issue ~ and I'm not up for educating them.

I think I made a good point when I mentioned that most junkies are miserable anyway and he said yes, their lifestyle fuels the misery. And I said that I suspect that although heroin is relatively benign as drugs go ~ yes it is deadly in overdose, and of course it is highly addictive ~ but heroin is not associated with paranoid psychosis the way coke and speed are; it doesn't mess up a person's head the way too many Es or trips might. But I'm certain it does something to a person's psychology that is not good.

All clichés contain ingots of truth: so the "miserable junkie" stereotype doesn't exist for nothing. I'm sure heroin itself assists most ably in making unhappy people more miserable still, and I think part of this is pharmacological and not just the consequences of dependency upon a drug that is expensive and of uneven quality and illicit and soul-destroyingly addictive. I think something else is going on, something nobody can quite put their finger on. And I think it has something to do with what Narcotics Anonymous like to call "spiritual bankruptcy". I believe most who have been there know the place only too well, and even if they were articulate enough to give a description of living in hell day after day for years and decades, they wouldn't want to retread those paths of memory or to relive or re-experience or even think ever again about the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

I know the reason I want to stop this drugtaking is that a life of chemical slavery is mind-cripplingly dull, drab and boring. That my life has fallen into a pit that I not only want to crawl out of ~ I want to move on in every possible way. I was not born to waste away in a junkified morass of squandered potential and life unlived. I want so much more...

Orange-Yellow Monkeys

          FURRY FRIDAY ON SATURDAY!   ORDINARILY I'm not a huge fan of monkeys; they're too humanoid to be cute... but aren't these yellow ones the furriest entertainers you've ever seen? Does anybody know what types they are? Because despite my best efforts at googling, I still haven't a clue what they're called...
 
  "Take a leaf outta my book..."  

  Real Monkeys of Orange County  
  "I want my Mummy!"  
  Monkey Correctional Centre: ~ "Lemme out!"  
  Designer primate:~ monkey feet in pollen orange by Manolo Blahnik; furry head by Philip Treacy; fur coat: Fendi     *******   FURRY ADOPTION: MOUSEY MONKEY; ORANGE BABY KITTY-CAT!  


WISHING Y'ALL A VERY FURRY WEEKEND INDEED!     *******

Dodgy Callers

WE GOT REPRIMANDED by the police yesterday for having our front door swinging open. It was only wide open because somebody had forced the lock. The lock had been forced (I believed) because the landlord had changed it the day before and not everybody appeared to have got the new key. So she took my details as I stood there all bleary in my pyjamas (horrible red tracksuit bottoms full of cigarette holes). Though I did have yellow Marks & Spencer cotton rich socks on, so that completed the designer look. I heard a sharp tapping, right on my door, and police-type radio sounds and talk. You can always tell the police, even before you set eyes on them.

Then TODAY when I was just leaving yet another policeman accosts me saying did I know next doors got done yesterday and did I know anything ...? Well yes I DID because this evening some timewaster turned up banging on the windows and moving the wheely bins around. I know me moved the bins because I heard them. This one was doing the "I used to live here and I'm expecting a letter" number and I was too dozy to say "what's your name and I'll check for you". Because the kind of house I live in nobody usually WANTS to break into. They want to break out!

So he seemingly checked through his post and took a letter and pissed off. Why do I have to deal with these people? Someone else can answer the door next time.

Which reminds me, just in case somebody does break in, I need to invest in superglue, padlocks and chains. So after I've knocked him unconscious he wakes up chained to the radiator and stuck to the floor!

Attacked by a Psychic Circular Saw in the Night

I HAD another otherworldly experience in the night. This time a circular saw of syllables came and sliced right through my mind; it was saying "numnumnumnumnummm". You see this is what happens when I stop my medication. I took an entire pill last night. But I'd taken it before the num-nums came on and it didn't stop them. I just wanted to sleep... and I got my wish. I slept twelve hours last night, then managed another four this afternoon. It's so cold there's little point getting out of bed anyhow. And I've been feeling so depressed. Every time my phone rings the nasty noise "goes right through me" and I hide it under the bedclothes. I tried Glossy Magazine Therapy, when you leaf through fashmags like i-D, but with every flick of the page, the glossy paper whispered words to me. It was kind of poetic. Ukh: am I going mental yet again? I thought I was mental last week. Well I did afterwards. Now I just think I'm depressed. Just because i-D magazine is talking to you doesn't make you barmy, surely..? I mean, maybe i-D is just a bit talkative as magazines go..?

I note by scrolling down my blog that I left my body and went spiralling into hyperspace exactly a week before the "Circular Saw of the Num-Nums Episode". So maybe there's something going on here: a weekly celebration of surrealist psychiography perhaps..? I know a doctor would call these "dissociative" or "psychotic" experiences. But to me they are real experiences. They feel more dissociative than psychotic.

I hope Anna's porkshire is OK. There's been NO NEWS of her doggie Elle since the cancer op last week... They say No News Is Good News... but why does this feel SO BAD~~?

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DO YOU THINK there is any connexion between Num-Nums and Mu-Mus?
IF SO ~ perhaps Tammy Wynette would have known...?



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Feelin' ukkh

I WENT to bed early last night and woke up far earlier than desired. I must have got about ten hours' sleep but had barely slept at all the night before. So I woke up feeling crap. Then had to go to my friend Binky's, where I didn't really want to be. So I got out of there and went home and to bed, but I could not sleep. So now I'm here and I'm feeling ukkk...

I read a thing about moods and emotions, but I'm still not sure which is entirely which while it's being experienced. It's certainly possible to have an "elevated mood" but negative emotions... strangely the reverse does not tend to be true ~ ever heard of a person with clinical depression yet bright, positive thoughts? Doesn't happen: see how crap life is? Even when you feel good you can feel bad, but when you feel bad you cannot feel good. So all I have to say about that is: ukkkk, ukkk, ukkk...

On a more positive note, I looked up how much my magazine could charge in ad rates. If I got a circulation of 100,000 I think the average would be about £10,000 ($15,983) per page. So if we sold a hundred pages we'd take in a million pounds. Not bad, huh? Now all I have to do is set the thing up and persuade the world's top photographers and writers to contribute. See? Easy peasy!


Illustrated: I wanna publish Madonna's diaries too...

Beady-Eyed, Bushy-Furred Akitas and other Doggies Including Anna Grace's, who is Recovering from a Doggie Breast Cancer Op... Plus My FabMag

ANNA GRACE, my online cyberspouse, has been worrying herself ragged because her tiny pet porkshire terrier, Elle (short for Eleanor Rigby), has been diagnosed with doggie breast cancer and went under the knife at the weekend.

I just left a comment telling Anna the worst thing her doggie will now have to endure will be wandering about Green Bay, Wisconsin for the next week or so dressed as a furry light fitting. Doggies get just as embarrassed as we do when they think they look silly. Our late dog Glodemmer, who looked like a silvery furry seal, once had such bad "diredalls" as we called it (diarrhoea) that she had to have a fur-cut around her backside to get rid of all the "cagal" ~ as it's called in Welsh. (As far as I know there is no English word meaning "dried dung on animals' backs".)  

Poor Elle has had to have the surgery all down her chest ~ with dogs having up to ten teats it all has to go. I told Anna I don't think Eleanor will be in that much pain, especially by now, as the surgical invasion is superficial as operations go. (Less than a centimetre deep ~ surely?) My friend's landlady once had a quadruple heart bypass and that was agony, but only because they'd gone so far in, and to get in had to saw her ribcage open. So every time she breathed post-surgery she was in agony... Eleanor Griggsby's surgery is superficial in comparison and I reckon that by now she'll be fine.

When I went to buy my lemonade from Sainsbury's this morning I saw a cute scruffy terrier with beady chocolate drop eyes tied up by the automatic doors. This doggy's eyes were so beady you couldn't see any whites to them. I so much wanted to kidnap the shaggy swine and take it home. But alas an old lady who looked like her name was Marge appeared with pats and kisses and yummy tripe dinner ~ and that was just for me! When she saw Chocolate Drop's lead in my hand (because that's what I'd renamed him) she started screaming like a wicked witch passing a kidney stone and security chased me right down the high road. No I'm just kidding. I always fantasize about taking the little doggies outside supermarkets for a walkies all the way home. And sometimes the great big ones. One time I came across this giant akita with the bushiest white fur,

but there was no chance of making off with it. The dog was so enormous I'd have had to drag it away. And being an akita, the most faithful of all dog breeds, her eyes were fixated ceaselessly where her very bourgeois owner was gliding up and down the smoked salmon and bagle isles. And I do think she was a "she". That's what I've always wanted. A gigantic female akita with really bushy white fur. Or toitoiseshell brindled fur. Or brown fur. Or grey fur. Or black for that matter. Or any kind of fur, really ~ just as long as it's ultra bushy and she has slanty kindly caring faithful Japanese eyes. My business model in owning an akita was to make sure she did NOT get spayed. And I was going to make sure I got to know the whereabouts and walkies habits of every male akita in the area. So when she did come on heat ~ hey presto! A basketful of snaggling, wailing, baying bushy-furred akita puppies! Which cost anything up to £1000 ($1597.50 each these days (which is why I can't afford one). I have looked in the local animal shelters' sites but they NEVER have akitas. Basically these shelters are running (and barking and baying and whistling and groaning) over with STAFFORDSHIRE BULL TERRIERS and I really don't want one of those. They've always been "a bit common"... and now just about everyone seems to have one. And more to the point they DON'T HAVE BUSHY FUR. I want a doggie with really thick shagpile-style fur. And it must be enormous with Japanese eyes and a tail that piggles up on its back. In other words it must be an Akita!

I went and bought some glossy magazines for inspiration. I have always wanted to own and edit a magazine since my teens. Yesterday I got Vanity Fair. Today I got GQ and i-D (which used to be a lifestyle magazine, but has transmogrified into a fash mag. But it's cutting-edge fashion. Not the kind of dull fashion-victim crap British Vogue seem to specialize in).
I also got a title called Hero which seems to be men's fashion. But this is ultra-cutting-edge, with arty paper and ideosyncratic text layout. Whoever is head of ad sales for that title should get shot between the eyes with their head on a plate for apart from the back cover, there was not a single ad to be seen throughout the entire publication. For my magazine I want cutting edge photography, artwork and overall layout. It needs to have a real "picture book" style to it, so you can just flick through and be transported into a different world. But then you flick back and the text is in-depth and full of the intriguing details we all wanna hear. I will specialize in really really long features about fascinating things and people. I can't be more specific than this as I don't want Condé Nast nicking my ideas! Some of my concepts are fabulous. Eg I thought of doing a society magazine for the rougher elements of the lower classes. I was going to call it Second Class Socialite. And I'll cover the social scene in places such Essex, Coventry and Manchester's Moss Side ~ don't you think that would be a massive seller?! We'd be over-run by ads for Ratners Jewellers, herpes creams, pound shops etc. Our restaurant reviews would focus on KFC, McDonalds, Burger King and the like ... hey what am I saying ~ KFC's far too "posh n pricey" for my readers! And we could do "Crack House Couture" "The World of Council Flat Interiors" and fashion spreads of stuff stolen from the charity bins. O, I can really see this taking off...

Now I MUST GO I never slept last night and my mind is bleary. Any submissions ~ text or artwork for Second Class Socialite are gratefully accepted. You can save money on wages by just taking on loads of interns, all desperate to work in "the media" who'll slog their guts out for free! Each month we'll put all contributors' names in a bucket and the winner will get a £5 ($7.99) Argos voucher! How does that sound...?

Talking of fashmags here's Linda Evangelista ~ the most Superbly Superlative of all Supermodels in her time...

  Illustrated: Anna's Porkshire Pooch ~ the original Eleanor Rigby; beautiful white akita pup; Hero magazine...

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Back Home at Last!

YESTERDAY evening I had the bizarre feeling that I was "normal" again. My head was full of rational thoughts and I looked back to my ridiculousness of the past week or so and thought "I'm glad to be myself again". I felt like when you come back from holiday and your house is cold and stale (and in my case, foetid) but hey, it's home! So I'm back at last. [From alleged "hypomania".]

Binky lent me the film A Beautiful Mind starring Russel Crowe as the schizophrenic Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Nash. O boy was he crazy! His entire life seemed to be a fable and then when the doctors come to arrest him I actually thought they were the KGB! Just like the director probably intended. I've never gone mad like that ~ that's paranoid schizophrenia, where a person has an entire delusional structure they live by. My worst madness was far more Confusional than Delusional.

At one a.m. I finally went to bed. And slept. And slept. And woke up at nine feeling "ukh why so early". Except that 1-9 made a perfect eight hours' sleep... But then I drank my methadone and went into the kitchen and spotted something that looked like a Rice Krispie on the microwave but ~ wahey! ~ it was a lump of "B". So I banged that up in my leg and promptly fell asleep. And slept, and slept. And slept and slept and slept. And slept some more. Finally getting up after four. And no, I wasn't gauwching, It was true sleep. A Rice Krispie sized bit of 'eroin would never get me that high. Actually, that stuff doesn't even make me sleep any more. Nowadays if it makes me "high" it's a hyper high, like heroin isn't "supposed" to be. But I've got to the stage now where my mind is so fried I never know what to expect of anything.

Excessive sleep is a warning sign of depression. How can I be depressed when my mind is still full of such marvellous ideas ~ all thought up last week. And apart from some of the names for my clubnight they are marvellous. I mean, I haven't even told you about my fabulous magazine yet. Condé Nast will piss their pants when they see it. The key to success in magazine publishing is obviously ad revenues. I think that's where Andy Warhol went wrong: he never seemed to have a top flight ads team for Interview magazine ~ and I bet he was too stingy to pay them a cut of revenue. Well my mag will be nothing like Interview. Imagine the fabulousness of Vogue but without the boring clothes and you've got it. [You really think I'm going to give out my concept on my blog?] Bulgari, Van Cleef & Arples, Cartier, Tiffany all the big names will be queueing to get in ... It will be for everyone male or female, young or old who is Fresh, Fabulous, Funky and Friendly... the Big Wow of tomorrow...

Anyway... It's late; I've got to go. It's getting dark around 4:30 now the clocks have gone back. But hey, my golden fleece still gleams wondrously in the night...

The Great Heroin Rip-Off Scandal!

I VERY NEARLY got ripped off for four bags of vulgar brown heroin this morning. The normal guy, who is just running for somebody else, said his man had "no B" but not to worry, he'd get it off somebody else and could be use my phone. So he rings up saying "can I see you and are you still doing the usual for £40?" And then I asked what are you making out of this? And why would you want to help me out anyway? I mean, he usually acts all friendly and promises that if I come to him with nothing he'd be only too happy to "bail" me a couple. He also pulls this "I'm only on cannabis" act ~ then asks couldn't I sort him out with 100mg of methadone. So he's one of those closet smackheads. Dealing in the stuff and using it daily and yet unwilling to admit, even to someone like me, that he has a raving problem.

So I queried: Why are you doing this for me? Surely it's four for £35 and you're keeping the fiver? And he said oh no, it's four tens for forty up here and the dealers never give discount (well mine do! Except the man who's supplying this one and I only pay £40 for four bags because they always used to be nice fat ones ~ and they're not even that any more so I don't know why I bother...) So he's claiming to be making nothing on the deal, except when he introduces five new customers to this new guy, he gets a £10 bag free.

And then I realize, not only is this guy running up the road with my money, but he also has my phone! I can be so dizzy in the morning. And then what appeared to be a crackhead and a dealer showed up, which really put my back up because I know this crackhead of old and when he started waving a handful of gear and crack at me I wasn't impressed. "If it's so amazing, you go and smoke it yourself!" I said. I grabbed the runner who still had my money and had to wrench my £40 out of his hand. Then the "dealer" started yelling at me by name, telling me to come back because he was serving up. No dealer is ever that desperate to sell. The paranoia always outdoes the money-grabbing, and it's just not cool to look that desperate for a sale. This guy did have the dealerly look about him. Tall and dressed in new-looking sportswear and the right colour skin (mixed race colour ~ I've never in my life met a heroin dealer with blue eyes and blond hair). But his eyes were so obviously drug-frazzled that I just kept on walking.

Then the runner comes back ~ junkies are nothing if not persistent ~ and keeps saying Just wait with me and my guy will sort us out. But my nerves were far too jangled by this point to waste any energy pondering who was in league with who~ and I hadn't liked the way he was so friendly to the crackhead. And how come the crackhead just happened to appear with four bags in hand right at the wrong moment? Which he was way too over-eager to flog to me. Crackheads smoke crack. They don't want to sell it unless there's something wrong with it! And that was another problem: the "drugs" he had: two heroin, two crack weren't what I'd ordered anyhow ~ I won't touch crack cocaine at all these days. It's far too vulgar. So I kept on walking and the £40-and-my-phone guy was running after me saying What are you doing? And I said Tomorrow. Tomorrow. I'll come back tomorrow. So then he swore at me because he is foreign and I vanished into the main shops...

Eventually I did score, off the guy I always used to go to. Once my dizziness had cleared, I worked out that of course Mr Runner guy was intending to pick up five tiddles for forty, keep one and pass on the four to me. So why couldn't he just tell me that? It would have made far more sense. So I scored off another guy I'd never seen in my life (old number, new man ~ the usual guy was in prison) I gave £30 for 4x10ses ~ the bog-standard price these days ~ and then I disappeared back home. It was such a chill morning, yet because I'm a junkie, my back was pouring with sweat, which is so gross...

Ukh: my elevated mood has fallen down. How terrible is that? I spent all last week insisting I wasn't hypomanic, I was Just Fabulous ~ so I MUST have been hypomanic. My mood was most certainly Up, but the Symptoms: the hyperkinesis, racing cognition, "decreased need for sleep" etc were all very minor and that's partly why I didn't believe I was mentally ill. It's true I did start Hearing Voices in the night ~ but Hearing Voices is NOT a symptom of hypomania ~ so how about that! I only think of it as a sign of madness because everybody else thinks so.

I could say here "and what's so wrong with going mad anyhow?" but I don't want to go up that path. When other people go mad there's normally a LOT wrong with it. A lot of ridiculous and bad behaviour and ranting and raving and all that but when I was mad [last year] I just thought I was fantastic. And yet did feel this inner desperation that something was badly wrong and yet I didn't know what... I mean, I was fully aware of meeting the diagnostic criteria for mania because only an idiot wouldn't, but I felt deep need of a label I could throw in people's faces: "IT'S THIS!" Talking of madness, I only KNOW that terrible crackhead with the four bags in hand because I met him in the nuthouse years ago! He gets incredibly "prang" ~ that means paranoid ~ so why on earth he insists on continuing to pipe the crack, I'll never know. He only seems to have Drug Psychosis, but his mum, so I hear, is the full cuckoo-clock schizo ~ you see it's all in the genes. I get my bad genes from my mother's side. She gets recurrent depression. Which gives me an equally elevated chance of unipolar depression and bipolar i disorder. See? No wonder I went crackers! My uncle, her brother, was an inverterate drunken gambler. One of my cousins was chucked out of school for toking Mary Juana, another called herself "the Coke Queen of South Kensington" and had a boyfriend who wanted to lug over a kilo from South America until she reprimanded him and told him not to... My other cousin is two nuts short of a fruitcake... Oh man they're all crazy. You see, it's all bad genes. But I'm the only manic-depressive junkie in the family. I wouldn't call myself a black sheep. I like to think of myself as a golden sheep with wool that twinkles in the night because when I'm Elevated that is just how I feel...

Well now I'd better go. My electricity needs topping up. My house has gone beyond chilly and into that Damp n Dank phase where it feels like a dripping wet mine-shaft ~ most unpleasant.



Right, here's some charming psycho-active trance for y'all... The music's very run-of-the-mill ~ not a single good tune until 12 mins 22 in ~ and again at 14 mins 55 and 31 mins 09 ~ but hey you can watch the kiddiewinks dancing... (And what terrible, half-hearted dancing it is! Surely this can't have been filmed in the UK~?, because the Brits are far more up-for-it than this!)



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New Eye Test Identifies Schizophrenia with 98% Accuracy

THE JOURNAL of Biological Psychiatry have just published results of research that claims to be able to detect schizophrenia with 98% accuracy by means of a simple eye test.

Schizophrenics apparently have difficulty following slow-moving objects smoothly.

Now every time I see something slow like a ladybird crawling along, I'm going to be terrified of looking at it wrong!

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Talking of visuals, I love this trancey light-show:




Illustrated: slow moving ladybirds ~ a possible cause of insanity~??!?



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