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HELLO I'M BACK. Trying to piece my life together. I've got a new key worker at the clinic. I'm going to get a support worker back.
Ukh, I didn't sleep last night. Hope you're all OK. Take care XXXXXXX

A Friend in the (Mental) Hospital is a Friend Indeed...

BINKY IS IN the psychiatric unit. Yet again. So is her friend Janet. Janet is almost unrecognizable. Really down and withdrawn and not even the "mentally ill" self she was last time I met her in the hospital. Binky however is her normal self. Talking at the top of her voice and screeching demands and remarks at all and sundry when she's in a bad mood. Then being in a good mood and being quite reasonable. You know all this is doing my head in. The LAST place I wanted to go this afternoon was a nuthouse. The staff, well one member of staff, was being really off with me. People are being off with me all around. 

Eg yesterday I was trying to buy ice lollies from Morrisons. I needed lollies because I was so roasting HOT inside it was unreal ~ like heat inside my body. Then I HAVE to go in the shops; the shops have their heating on full. So I feel absolutely horrible, with a river of sweat pouring down my back. So I try and buy these lollies, but just when it's time for 76p change to come cascading through the selfservice machine it decides to break down. The guy on patrol of these ridiculous "unexpected item in bagging area" devices tells me to go to customer services to get my refund but it was nearly 6pm and I had to get my methadone out of the chemists + I desperately NEEDED to eat an ice lolly just to cool down, so I stormed out. On the way out the security guard started being all solicitous. I have to admit that, despite my bad mood, I thought he was trying to be helpful and help me get my 76p refund. But no. He kept banging on asking for my receipt. I yelled at him that I did not need a receipt and pointed out 76p man. Who said yeah yeah so they let me out. Far unhappier than before. So I get my methadone then come back, having eaten 2 of this lolly 4-pack, a bit calmer. But the woman at customer services treated me like some sort of nutter. Maybe it's because I was eating an ice lolly in front of her in January, who knows but I was boiling hot and sweating STILL. Anyway 76p guy had vanished. Eventually I found him at the other end of the store but he studiedly ignored me. Ie saw me and pretended not to so I gave up there and then thinking it was well worth 76p just to get the hell out of their furnace of a shop. Then I went home. 

But I'm not very happy with anything or any one. Eg the council putting letters through my door about window maintenance. I DON'T WANT MY WINDOWS CHECKED. But they insist so I'm making an appointment for February. I might tell them I'm in the Scottish Highlands and cannot come down before then. You know. And Binky. Everybody = driving me crazy. This is what no drugs does to you. People always think I'm together when I'm on heroin. When I'm off it, they think I'm a drug addict (which is of course true, because I'm a methadone addict when I'm off heroin). And yes the strapline at the top of my blog IS accurate because this blog IS about my life after heroin. What kind of a life it will be, I cannot imagine. Even my own family seemed to assume (over the phone) that I was out of it on drugs during the period I used no gear whatsoever for weeks/months (no idea how long: not into day-counting). (They never actually said they thought I was using, I just got the impression that was their suspicion.) When I went mad about 3 years ago, I wasn't on any drugs, except, eventually antipsychotics. And a tiny bit of methadone. You know I'm pretty sure I know what caused all that madness in me: it's because heroin is a psychic insulator. It closes you down and wraps you up. It always made me feel centred and much more stable than off heroin. Just as a fur coat makes you feel warm in the arctic. Take off the coat and it's no surprise you've suddenly got frostbite. Doesn't mean fur coats "cause" frostbite though.... Do you follow? The drugs that actually make you go whacky all of a sudden are all ones I hate. (Ie everything except heroin and benzos.) Benzos are stuff like diazepam and I get that prescribed in tiny amounts for emergency use. It's diazepam withdrawal that makes people lose the plot, but I've never been addicted, so I can't ever have been in benzo withdrawal... What am I banging on about...?

Ukh it's Binky she makes me feel all UNcentred and agitated. Despite being my dearest of dear friends. I find going into nuthouses rather disturbing. Especially when the staff seem to be treating ME like a nutter. Which she encourages by speaking to them about me in psychiatric terms. Yes it's Binky that I caught labelitis from, at one point. She knows all the labels and very often speaks in labels. Most mental patients these days do. Ie it's not at all unusual to hear a person on her ward tell a nurse "I've got suicidal ideation again"... It's spread into our culture... Psychiatry is the Great Religion of our Age.  It validates and makes sense of the central unhappiness most of us feel living in such a surface shallow hypocritical unstable economy...

If ONLY she could never go in hospital again and never have another meltdown then I might... just might... be able to forget all this nightmare of psychiatricality. I'm so sick of the whole subject. + the groups they pushed me into going to via the methadone clinic, which encourage excessive self-absorbtion (I think). I'd rather think of things outside... Which by the way I have been doing a LOT, by means of my art and literature, but I can't post art up because I don't know how to. And I can't post up my literature, because it's copyright and I intend to sell it as a proper publication. Once it's all finished and ready &c &c &c...

Anyway my biggest problem at the moment is Binky I don't know what we're going to do with her. She's so unstable it's unreal and I can't handle the stress.

Anyway I've got to go.

Sorry for all this burbling. I have really mixed feelings about all the subjects discussed above. Especially "mentality" I just want to FORGET all about that madness stuff, but am never allowed to. Because of Binky going crazy and ending up in the madhouse over and over again...

PS: Hey did you know Michael Jackson's brother Jermaine has a son called Jermajesty Jackson. What a name!!

Illustrated: madness animated; perspiration; window cleaner; Jermajesty Jackson (poor kid; +, like all the rest of the Jacksons, excepting Katherine, Prince, Paris and Blanket, he got nothing at all in Michael's will)...

A Friend in Need (of more booze) is a friend indeed...

BINKY CAME ROUND first thing in the morning hollering and screaming, her voice echoing and clashing all around our housing estate, neighbours coming out asking "what's wrong?" and "WHO did you want?" I was hoping she'd just go away because my house was in a mess and I didn't want her to see it but eventually I let her in just to shut her up (I was going to get drest, wait till she was walking off muttering at the top of her voice and swearing because what kind of a friend was I pretending not to be in ~ and then catch her up saying "O, were you really knocking and making a scene in front of my scandalized neighbours for a full half an hour? I  didn't notice. Anyway I'm going to the shops why don't you come with me?" (to keep her out of my house)). But none of that worked. I asked whether she'd slipped and fallen in a vat of vodka because that's what she reeked of, but she insisted upon having drunken nothing at all (as if). She had just got back from being in casualty (which is what we call the ER over here because ER means Elizabeth Regina (the Queen)). She was in casualty because she took a deliberate pills overdose yesterday but said the drs said the symptoms didn't concur with the amount of tablets she said she'd taken (which were all the "Pams" (stuff ending in -azepam; temazepam, clonazepam, etc). 

But anyway I ended up getting drunken with her and asked whether she thought her way of dealing with her emotions is different to mine. She seems to feel hers so very strongly she doesn't know what to do except follow them right through by acting them out. I pretend mine don't exist so I don't have to feel them. And she said yes, my explication of her feelings was bang-on (but not mine; she's never been me for the day, so how can she possibly know). Then I said I felt dreadful and ashamed of my cruel words on xmas day when we ended up having a multi-phonecall and vicious text message shouting match in the mid-afternoon. To my eternal shame, during this episode I actually ended up saying things I didn't even mean, and KNEW I didn't mean at the time. I know probably a lot of people do that. The type of people who end up on the Jeremy Kyle show. But I superciliously look down on such types and would sneeringly label them as rough and immature (well, if unsympathetically critiquing my own behaviour, I might phrase it this way).

I thoroughly enjoy feeling separated from myself, whereas Binky seems far far far too in touch with herself most of the time, hence the constant trips into psyche wings to be punished for her schizophrenic borderline personality disorder. Oh and then she did start saying what she thought my problem was and I said "well what then?" and she said "schizophrenia!" She said "when you're manic you're not just manic you're more schizophrenic." I don't know where she got any of this from, so I asked, "is there any similarity between me and Penny?" (the girl I met in the nut unit who I asked out but she said no) and Binky said YES! So I said well what then? And gave my impression of Penny, when Penny has been really ill. That is, that she's a bit elevated and excited but much more scattered, scatty and off the wall, kind of like a completely non-joined-up person, as if all in separate bits that might function independently but don't seem to cohere. (Hard to explain Penny any better than that.) And Binky said yes like that. (Penny did seem to be in a very familiar state when I met her, but I couldn't pin down precisely why ~ THEN Penny told the label they'd given her, which just so happens to be exactly the same one as mine. So maybe there IS something behind all this psychiatric bollox after all. I don't know.

So anyway, because we got roaring drunk together today, Binky and I seem to be getting on far better than last year. I took her home and Genoustable the Mauritian support worker (who speaks French as well as a mysterious French creole as well as at least three Indian prakrits. + I think she also speaks fluent Tamil, which is a highly mystical Dravidian langauge from the Indian South with an alphabet that looks like a load of stylized ampersands ("&&&&&&&&") (it actually looks like this: திராவிட மொழிக் குடும்பம் do you see what I mean about the ampersands? I once went to Madras, better known now as Chennai, just to meet the Tamils and found them a peculiar lot (I fell out with the lackey in our guesthouse about a broken teapot lid and am convinced to this day that he poisoned my food). 

So anyway I said "oh Binky's not drunk!" and Genoustable kept saying "how much has Binky drunk?" and "has she eaten anything?" So I microwaved her a frozen pannini. Then Binky kept saying "don't you want any more cans [of cyder]?" and I kept saying "no". (When I drink, I never get into that thing of wanting more and more and don't really understand people who do. Once I've had so much I start feeling nauseated and only want to drink water and that's what I was doing this afternoon, after only a couple of cans. Even Binky started drinking my water.) So I told Binky I didn't want any more and that I was afraid that if she did keep indulging she'd end up puking everywhere. (What I was more afraid of was her going into emotional meltdown.) But neither thing happened because I distracted her with cups of tea and she put on a show on Pick TV about British police arresting people; then Binky fell asleep so I left.

So that was my exciting day. And how was yours??!


ABBA VIDEOS!
When I'm trying to name this song I usually call it "no more ace to play" but it's really called
WINNER TAKES IT ALL
~about Anyetta and Bjorn's 1980 marriage breakdown


THE DAY BEFORE YOU CAME
little known final song
about the "disappearance" of a Russian dissident 
sorry about the (brief) bit of German voiceover: it says that when they split up there was no final tour, just a slow dissolution and fading out... and then Bucks Fizz came along...

♪♫♪♫♪♫♫♪♪♪♪♪♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♪♫♫♪♫♪♫♫♫♫♫♫♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♪♫♪♫♪♪♪♪♪♪♫♪♫♪♪♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♫♪