No Sleep ~~ then Lots of Sleep

I BARELY seemed to sleep at all last week. In fact I calculated I'd gone about five days on just eleven hours ~ with most of that sleep at the beginning of the five days. Then I just couldn't sleep. I wanted to give Dr Disbelieving an eyeful of me in an "elevated mood" but as it turned out I needn't have worried. I actually thought at the time that my mood was fairly "normal" but in actual fact it wasn't. I was certainly high. I remember at one point the dr saying he'd like to test my blood pressure and that I should stop talking for a while "if that was possible". Anyway I spent days feeling what I thought at the time was "normal" but was probably "elevated". At one point Binky said "you don't seem that mad today" and I said "why, do I normally seem mad?" Ukh. In the end I was scared of sleeping, because I thought it would bring me down. It DID bring me down, but not in a bad way. At the beginning of this no-sleep episode thing, every time I did sleep "properly" (ie actually went to bed), I woke feeling really tired, sluggish and horrible. Then over the course of the day I'd pick up and by the time I reckoned it was "time to go to bed" (which was actually the time I'd previously woken up, not gone to sleep ~ an easy manic mistake to make!) I felt far too excited to bother with anything as timewasting as that. So the only sleeping I did for several days on end involved conking out in front of the television after midday, having spent all the previous night awake. Now I thought that you could get a healthy few hours' sleep purely by conking out eg a hundred times a day for half a minute at a time ~~ I thought that would add up to fifty minutes' sleep. But aparently to my frazzled brain it didn't. I had no difficulty conking out. It was the staying asleep that eluded me. Probably each day I fell asleep a hundred or more times... the problem was these mini-sleeps only totalled a few seconds each. (I know this, as I could still follow what was happening on TV).

Oh well that's about it. I don't WANT to come down anyway. I don't know where I'm going now... I'm thinking of learning fluent Portuguese so I can live in Brazil and be a translator. I'd also like to learn Japanese, German and Chinese. I've found a double-honours Portuguese-Japanese course at Birkbeck ~ University of London. If I didn't want to do Japanese, I could do Portuguese-German. If I didn't want Portuguese I could do Japanese-German. The only offputting thing about Japanese BA degrees is that they expect to take you from very little to no knowledge to only "one year post A level"... apart from my shocking grammar that's where my German is now! I want a far better language competence than that... which is why Portuguese appeals so much to me. Brazil is the ONLY country in South America I've had a real fascination for (which kept annoying me during my "I'm learning Spanish" days ~~ I kept realizing the one country I really wanted to visit didn't speak Spanish at all! Also Brazil's economy is in the ascendent ~ which is always good for getting jobs. Germany and Japan are said to have peaked. I don't know WHEN I'm going to fit this Portuguese study in, being as I'm currently on ITALIAN and thoroughly enjoying it. The Italian language, so a great many people would say, is thee most beautiful langauge in the world. It really is so gorgeous that when in the right mood I can just read it aloud because it is so sublimely beautiful and wonderful to pronounce.

I don't know HOW I would fund any degree course... and you NEED a degree in order to be a professional translator... I think I will get round it by obtaining the money myself. Where there's a will there's a way. I will contact rich mentally ill former drug addicts and try and get the funds out of them. I don't see why they shouldn't cough up. When I'm super-wealthy I've always planned to set up a special foundation for persons in challenging circumstances wishing to study langauges. So I don't see why someone else shouldn't first do for me what I've long planned to do for others... Oh I don't know. I was really hoping to win the £141,000,000 ($217,376,880) Euromillions prize but it's rolled over to £157,000,000 ($242,043,760) which is paid out tax-free in one lump and providing the banks don't crash and tuition fees don't inflate too madly it SHOULD fund me through university... (let's hope so).

PS I'm reading Jay Mackinery's Bright Lights Big City... makes me really glad I'm not addicted to cocaine...

Illustrated: top and middle ~ 秋田犬小狗 akita puppies; bottom ~ 柴犬小狗 shiba puppy (miniature akita-type breed)...

Elevated, Irritable, Expansive Moods...

YEAH, BINKY says I'm "high" today because I won't stop singing at the top of my voice and talking about Hammy (my 1990s late hamster) and Glodemer.(our late 1980s silver-&-grey coated family New Zealand Barking Dog who "looked like a seal"). Our family GP, Dr Grendle, said that Glodemer, who was only medium sized and had the sweetest nature of any doggie I have ever known yet had the deepest, roughest bark was a "New Zealand Barking Dog" ~ a kind of unofficial breed out there. But I just googled New Zealand Barkers and got nothing back so who knows... My sleep pattern has been horrendous. My last-but-one period of wakefulness began when I rose at 10:30pm at some time over the weekend. Then I stayed awake for a good day-and-a-half, if not longer. I was going to trot off to a Narcotics Anon meeting at 7pm on Monday night but drowsiness and exhaustion overcame me before I could leave the house (to my then sleep-pattern the meeting was at 5am anyhow...) so I went to bed at about five pm, slept for what felt like ages but I subsequently found out was only three hours. But even that tiny amount of sleep had totally burst the bubble of my lovely "elevated mood". I was very irritable, tired, acheing all over and starting to feel horribly depressed. I was also craving heroin strongly. So in the end I bought said heroin and did at least get a bit of kind of half-sleep. 

But I didn't sleep that well at all. I was up all night copying Italian Linguaphone dialogues into my mega notebook. Then I had to get to Binky's for 7:30 or 8:00am to lend her £50  ($78.25) I "need" to lend her that money as having blown so much on furniture I know I'll be Stoney Broke by next Monday, which is precisely when said debt is due to be repaid. I think my Druggieworker is in a bad mood with me for having thoroughly avoided her clinic for two weeks solid. Naomi, the Dual Diagnosis Nutter Club lady, who specializes in Nutter Junkie work, invited me to a Drama Therapy Group. Much as I love Naomi (because she calls me "amazing") and do enjoy acting from time to time, I cannot think of anything I'd less rather do when Seriously Not In The Mood than strutting across a public stage in the midst of angry public paranoid depression!

Yeah anyway I'm in Druggieclinic Bad Books for not having attended "MBT group" (which is a treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder anyhow and I don't have that). I don't want to go to these groups because I suspect their agenda is to deconstruct my coping mechanisms thereby eroding my mental health and sending me permanently and intractably mad! I'm not entirely sure how MBT is meant to work but if it IS going to undo my coping mechanisms ~ thereby leaving me unable to cope, then I'm seriously NOT INTERESTED!...

Oh, I forgot to say about my {inadvertant} "cruelty to pigeons" scandal! Yes I finally managed to keep my errant electricity cabinet shut only to discover, two days later, that a poor desperate pigeon had been locked in there all that time! It's true I DID hear intermittent desperate flappings at the door and yet every time I peered inside, said cupboard appeared to be bare. Until a good two (if not THREE) days into this saga when I finally opened the door only for a surprisingly healthy and rainbow-plumèd pigeon to make an instant flap for freedom the minute the door was ajar. Anyway, I opened my back balcony door the other day, it being a sultry summer's day and all. The door blew my door wide open and when I reached over to shut it, I noticed a brand new nest of long grass and a poor desperate-looking pigeon sitting on this nest. Yes! I have a pregnant pigeon living on my balcony! I know she is "pregnant" because yesterday morning, when she went for a flap across our estate, I could plainly see the gorgeous pair of pigeon's eggs left behind in her wondrously made nest... 

I wonder when they're due to hatch? And will I be able to tame one or both of the babies? Will they end up living in my house? And if so, will the sound of top-volume early-morning cooing finally drive me over the edge...? (Of the balcony...) Anyway I must flap off myself. I've a "dis-appointment" with my horrible new GP in a couple of hours' time which I need to psych myself up for... Last time we met he had the gall to declare that the mousy, depressed and very upset version of myself that he saw was somehow the "real" me (ie that despite claiming depression I was actually "OK" ~ I wasn't OK at all... So now I'm elevated I'm going to give that bastard one in the eye and let him know what I REALLY THINK ..

.

Another New Sofa + 2 Armchairs + matching blind...

I'VE JUST PLUNKED £105 ($163.83) down on another (used) sofa + pair of matching armchairs. They are beautiful. The minute I saw them, nearly a month ago, I thought "I want!"... And OF COURSE a bloody great RESERVED sign lay right across my seating. It's an unusual metalic green-and-beige kind of colour. Not at all the type of furnishing you'd expect in a batchelor pad. On the phone to my folks I called it an "old lady's couch" ~ it's very padded and sumptuous and you can imagine a 67 year old putting her feet up on one of those armchairs whilst popping dihydrocodeine, in recovery from a quadruple heart bypass op. If you're wondering why the image is so specific, it's because it reminds me of my friend Tommy Tired's former landlady Marge whose gay son lives a half-hour wander from my old house. He's been off work for years, faking schizophrenia. He's one of the people who make me flip out internally when I think of what they've done. There was me, desperately needing some kind of help for years, and never getting it (I kind of knew I had some problem underlying this drug addiction and, in my heart, knew it wasn't just ordinary "depression"), whilst people like him play the system and get away with it. I couldn't grass him up even if I wanted to. It would just be my word against his and his longstanding doctors. (There is something "wrong" with this guy though, I mean, he's totally neurotic for starters... But he does not hear voices, see visions in the dark or get so paranoid he doesn't know who to turn to...) Anyway!:~

I came back to the shop today for a three-seater mud brown sofa with matching endpiece (making four seats) but Binky said it looked horrible and it was like sitting on soggy old cardboard boxes. Not good. The lady who runs the charity shop said she'd do it all in (inc. delivery) for £50 ($78) but even then, it was obviously only a temporary solution. Like the kind of furniture you found in early 90s style of student accommodation I used to reside in ~ no double glazing,1950s gas fires and mismatched 60s and 70s wallpaper.

So far I've spent £165 ($257.41) on a two-seater red sofa, film director's chair, large bookcase, small outdoors occasional table, plus three-seater viridescent beige sofa and the pair of matching chairs. O yeah and I got a blind matching the new furniture ~ that's another fiver ($7.81) making £170 ($265.54)

I went to see a rather militant locum dentist this morning who insisted I invest in an Oral B electric toothbrush. So I'm really glad I didn't waste £19.99 on a Vitality toothbrush because that would have left me too broke for the sofa. I told the dentist that back in the 80s, when I was at school and the adverts used to say "ask your dentist", my dentist used to say all toothpastes were the same and that I should use a soft ordinary toothbrush. Back in those days electric toothbrushes were considered a real extravagance, suitable only for persons too decrepit or disabled to brush manually. They were the sort of things we knew Americans probably used, alongside their garage door openers and electric can-openers.

Hmmm... anyway I've got to go. Must rush home to move my red 2-seater couch out of the way to make room for all this viridescent furniturial entertainment. Wish me luck with the delivery. The shop kept saying if their henchment couldn't weild it up my public stairway and/or into my flat then my money was down the drain. It was this type of talk that had put the fear of the devil into me regarding delivery of the last sofa: will it fit in my hallway...? will it get stuck in the public stairs...? Then my Mum talking about bulky items having to go in through the back door on the balcony via cherry-picker..! More than likely the entire lot will fit in the lift anyhow so I don't know what I was fretting about...

The illustration doesn't really do my new couch justice. I think it's the nicest second-hand sofa I've ever seen... Anyway have a wonderful day everyone ~~ I'm outta here!!

New Furniture New Home!

 FINALLY MY FLAT IS FURNISHED!

I got a brick red 2½ seat sofa, a large bookcase, a film director's chair, an occasional table and a TV and DVD stand. All for just £60. ($93.34). The furniture was free. £60 was the cost of hiring a van + 2 people. On reflection the two people weren't probably necessary but I was freaking out so badly about this furniture getting stuck on the public stairwell then a huge fire breaking out and 200 people burning to death because their one escape route was blocked by my flambeéd couch. And I was thinking "but I don't even own an axe to break it up!" Not that I'm totally neurotic or anything...

Last night, around the time I was delivering household rubbish and recycling to their respective bins, my mobile phone somehow went walkies. I felt totally lost without it. The bastard who found it switched it off. Eventually. Giving false hope for several hours that it might merely have fallen into some long-forgotten enclave of my home, only to rouse me with its cheery chirping next time someone chose to call...

What with severe furniture stress, the missing phone was the last straw and I went into a miniature psychotic episode with mental confusion, voices laughing and echoing twisted speech through the sinuous rills of my head and everything. Ultra-luminous bizarre thoughts pinging through my mind, echoing back and forth in an auditory reverberational kaleidoscope. So I took a stonking great dose of quetiapine, the antipsychotic, but still woke up at 5am. (By which time the voices had vanished.)

Binky has been such a good friend to me. Amid much exclamation at the depth to which I'd allowed my living conditions to sink (I had spent weeks camping on a stained concrete floor on uncovered duvets with no furniture to my name except a pine dining chair covered in rubbish). She cleared ALL the junk within the space of ONE single hour. That's absolutely amazing. Do you know it could easily have taken me TWO DAYS, pottering constantly all day, to achieve not even that much of a feat. In the Rubic's Cube of the human genome, the "cleaning gene" somehow passed me by.

All I need now is a fridge-freezer, a cooker and a washing machine. As much as anyone "needs" a nonessential like a washing machine I do need one. Handwashing clothes isn't really ideal and our local launderette charges £4 ($6.10) for 1½ domestic washloads and their dryers are CRAP. 50p (76c) a pop and they barely dry at all!

I'm not bothering with fitted carpets. Never thought particularly much of 'em anyhow. What I'm going to do is collect rugs about the size of a single bed. And just put ten or more of those down. Rugs look très bohème. I used to share a house with a girl who decked out her room au style bédouin what with Indian wallhangings threaded in gold, wooden chests and incense-burners galore... I'm not sure I'd go that far. After all I am a 41-year old man not a 25 year old girl. But it's a good sauce of inspiration...

I'VE FOUND THE BREED I WANT for my ferocious guard-puppy. Like I said, it has to be threatening and agressive (in a totally non-legally-challenging way) to would-be muggers. As for any burglars fool enough to break into my pad, it can feel free to savage them to death, as long as it doesn't ruin by Bedouin rugs with bloodstains. I think housebreakers are scum of the earth. Apart from fierceness, the main characteristic on my bodyguard-puppy wishlist is cuteness. It must have pointy-up ears and bushy fur... In other words what I need is an akita-tosa cross.

Usually when I talk about akitas, people assume I mean the tosa 土佐犬 fighting dog (something like a Japanese pitbull). The akita 秋田犬 is actually a Japanese police dog ~ much more similar, in character and looks, to a German shepherd.

Mix the two together, however, and you get a massive dog who is very cute + very fierce-looking indeed!

Being regulated under the UK 1991 Dangerous Dogs act, I think it slightly unlikely that I'm likely to come across a tosa able to breed with an akita. Which is such a shame. Binky has been driven to the edge of distraction by my ceaseless "attack puppy name brainstorming". Top of the list so far are Qleddebber and Boddlemmer. Neither really "means" anything. I just like the sounds.

If I got a terrifyingly scary, ginormous female akita-tosa I might call her Bloodwin (after the Welsh name Blodwen, which means "white flower"...)

Oh and by the way, if you're wondering what type of inadequate person I must be to want such a horrendous dog, YES I AM. I also want a friend. Dogs are far more trustworthy than any people I've ever met. Also I'm dead set on having absolute control over this baying wild beast. When I click my fingers she rolls over, sits and gives me a paw. She will never pull on the leash. She won't go wild jumping up at strangers (which really annoys me in other people's pets and would embarrass the hell out of me if my attack puppy did the same). She will be intensely stand-offish, just like every akita I've ever met. And she will have a gorgeous bushy coat.

Because the regulations say I'm only allowed ONE dog or ONE cat (not even one of each) ie if she did have puppies I couldn't keep them, I'm not quite so bothered about getting a female now.

Binky says I wouldn't want to be bothered feeding or walking this gigantic beast. But I live minutes away from one of the biggest open spaces in London, where doggies are allowed to ramble freely (no leash laws here).

Hey wouldn't it be fun to rehome a retired police sniffer dog? Then every time I relapsed back on to heroin we could play "hunt the baggie"... Of course I'm not relapsing on to heroin... it's just an entertaining image...

AS FOR MY SOBRIETY I'm not posting anything about being "clean" (ie on methadone but not heroin) until I've managed two weeks flat. I've been told you don't even out until you've done that time... (Which I have, on many occasions ~ only I never counted days and so I never really thought about how long I'd gone "clean" (never really thought about heroin use either. 

Because I've only ever gone clean because I didn't want to use. If I did, I'd use. Simple as!

ANYWAY, it's a cheery, bright weekend here in London. I hope y'all have a great weekend too!

Illustrated: red sofa a bit like mine, tosa-inu, akita-inu, akira-tosa cross, sinuous rills, dirty drug "works"...

video

funky houses
love this



frantic/hardhouse academy 2004
don't know the name of this tune, but I like it...



tony de vit djing at trade club

The Happy One-Eyed Three-Legged Doggie

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?

The "Cookie Crumbs" Scandal...

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.

I HAVE BEEN reading The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Age 13¾

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...