Beauty and Bipolar Moods in London Lovely London

IT'S A CHARMING SPRING AFTERNOON IN LONDON... 

I went into Town on Sunday. The place was fresh and twinkling all over in the golden morning sun...  it was as if someone had waved a magic wand over the city and teleported me to New York or Paris ... except this was LONDON, my own gorgeous lovely and adorable town. I'm always pleased to see tourists in great numbers coming to see my own private and personal territory. It's really flattering. And London is such a wondrous place. I walked from Holborn station all the way along Oxford Street past Bond Street and Selfridges.

I had a poke down New Bond Street, which is where all the designer stores and diamonds and ultra-high end stuff is to be found: Tiffany, Cartier, Harry Winston, Boucheron, Boodles, Bulgari etc etc. There's nothing like a nice 17 ct blue diamond on a Sunday morning twinkling it's head off in the London sunshine as far as I'm concerned. I wish I had someone to buy all these blue diamonds for. Come to think of it, I wish I had a couple of hundred million or so — y'know, to purchase all these blue diamonds to begin with.

I WASN'T on psychedelic drugs last time I posted; just very very tired and my brain feeling very UGHKHkkkhhhhy indeed.

Did you know Binky thought I was a crackstable still? "Crackstable" is my nice word for a crack smoker. Of course I'm not on crack. She did admit I was probably hypomanic  on these supposed "cracked out" occasions. LOADS of people have accused me of being on coke when in fact I was on nothing at all, except a naturally Elevated Mood. It IS possible to BUZZ on nothing except one's own private neurotransmitter collection y'know!

Talking of ELEVATED isn't this an effing fantastic track....




Hey I have great news I shall be BACK ONLINE before very long at all as I'm hopefully getting my OWN COMPUTER BACK. Not the same one as b4 but a wizzy new and improved version...

Did anybody see the bipolar documentary on Channel 4 last week? They showcased 3 sufferers. Paul, who was in the luscious grip of psychotic mania, a Welsh lady called Siân who had "bipolar 2" the supposedly "mild" type (it just means you don't hear things or see things or get delusional on the manic phases, which are labelled "hypomania" meaning "below mania". Lastly we saw Ashley, who was pingponging rapidly between "hypomanic" and "depressive" symptoms.

Philippa Perry, the psychotherapist who presented the show, said she believed the term "bipolar" to be a little too wide to encompass all that's crammed under its gargantuan roof these days and I agree. Ashley to me seemed more like a borderline personality disorder case than truly bipolar. True bipolar swings aren't usually triggered by comments a person might make. In fact when you're being really bipolar you can often feel totally insulated from other people's shit all together.

I've seen borderline personality disorder up close. It shares with bipolar an extreme instability of the emotions but that IS the difference. Borderline is an emotional condition; bipolar is a mood condition. Moods underlie emotions. In depression, emotions can become paralysed; in mania a person is extremely reactive and yet, paradoxically, there's a huge "don't care" component when it comes to the feelings of others.

I do reckon that there's more going on than the mere throwing of a genetic switch. And I think a bipolar state is more than just a drought or surplus of dopamine or serotonin. They sometimes theorize about a "manic defence" (and she alluded to this in a rather oblique way). The Manic Defence hypothesis theorizes that in order to avoid being slayed by negative feelings, a person instead becomes manic, grandiose and euphoric. I believe this may very well be true. But what the theory doesn't explain is why only one person in a hundred will ever experience full-blown mania during the entire course of their life. Why is it that some of us become manic, yet the overwhelmingly vast majority of us never do?

In the 1980s, when I was a teenager, I remember the term "manic depressive" being used amongst ordinary non-medical folks to denote a person who was (or had been) extremely depressed. The concept of pathologically elevated moods was quite alien to the public consciousness back then. Perhaps the younger and more chemically "enhanced" or "altered" generations have more experience of their own mood elevations to be able more easily to sympathize with maniacs and hypomaniacs... I don't know. But going back to "manic depressives"... the big irony is that all the worst cases of depression I've known or known of were without exception people with ordinary "unipolar" depression (ie these people had never in their lives been hypo/manic). Bipolar CAN involve episodes of extremely intense depression. The difference between "unipolar" and "bipolar" depression is said to be that bipolar depression tends to be shorter-lasting and when it does go away the person isn't necessarily "well"... they could well be on the way up to mania.

Anyway I'm more interested in computers of the silicon-&-plastic type than the vagaries of the human biocomputer at this point in time... I have some tech-related questions to anyone with an answer...
1. what package do you usually use for wordprocessing? Is Windows Wordpad any good?
2. what software do I need for audio/video editing? I'm talking about simple stuff, eg if I record myself giving a speech and want to chop out the boring bits, or use parts of a take-2 interspersed with take-1, that sort of thing... what package would I use for that?
3. if I want to make "photoshopped"-looking video (ie to put in surreal special effects) what package would I need then?
4. can anybody recommend a good printer for printing out text in black and white? Are lasers still better than ink jets? Because they always used to be. Laser printing always used to be waterfast, which is an advantage when you're an inveterate cocoa drinker like me and get runny ringmarks on everything...
5. what advantages, if any, do MacBooks have over PCs?
6. if I think up a 6th question I'll let you know
12 MAR 2015:
YES QUESTION 6 I'M LOOKING AT THE LENOVO M30, has anybody got any comments on this laptop?
THANX FOR YOUR HELP!

A Very Merry Time of Year!

HELLO EVERYBODY I've been having a moody time of late but I'm feeling absolutely fine now. Well almost. 

I saw Binky today and she thinks I'm still mental from the other day. I kind of had a lost weekend when the "Full Moon Feeling" (hypomania: which is when I'm high without any drink or drugs) hit me pretty full-on on Friday/Saturday night and I barely slept at all all weekend then did conk out and came back to life at 7 o'clock with absolutely no idea whether it was the AM or PM (it was 7AM).

Ukh I hate this time of year, don't you?? But I hope you like my dancing elf figure. Seriously this was the best thing I got when keying in "elf animated cartoon gif" ~ ha ha!

I was going to do Xmas with Binky but she "has to" do it with her Supported Care Home, so I'm pretty glad I got out of that one. It just would have been roast lamb + massive cab fares all for a day I don't give a French toss about anyhow... know what I mean?

But having said that I DO with you all the MERRIEST OF SEASON'S GREETINGS + AN AMAZING NEW YEAR IN 2015 XxXxXxX 

!!!!!!!

84 Hours Awake ~ and Scarcely Fatigued!

LAST WEEK I got "insomnia" so bad that I stayed awake constantly between Monday evening and Friday morning ~ that's about 84 consecutive hours! And I was barely even tired! And noI had not been taking speed (I wouldn't even know where to get speed.) Binky said that I was "manic" during this time, but I felt normal. A bit elevated, maybe. But I thought I felt pretty normal. I spent most of the time pottering about and scribbling shorthand into a notebook. 

Everybody wonders why on earth I would want to master the dying or almost dead art of shorthand and the answers are these: 1. because it's very handy to be able to write quickly and 2. I love the idea of nobody except retired American secretary types being able to read my scribblings. 

Apart from the fascination I've always had with writing, secret codes etc, I gravitated to shorthand back in my late teens because I was interested in a career in journalism and back then all journalists were expected to know shorthand. Then, in the late 1990s I saw a job offered in one of the music magazines for a "techno correspondent" and I thought "there's no way I'm going to be able to use a dictaphone at a rave, so I'd better perfect that half-arsed shorthand I picked up a few years ago". And that's why I learned shorthand. 

I never perfected the method, however and that's why, the other day when I was poking through boxes of stuff still unpacked from when I moved in, I found a sheaf of print outs of a 1929 shorthand manual I found myself filling notebooks with pages of scibbles all over again.

The style I write in is the American Gregg's shorthand. I happened to chance upon that method because my Gran was a school secretary and that's the system they taught her back in the day. It's far faster than the British Teeline method which is still taught to trainee journalists over here; and much easier to grasp than Pitman's. Pitman's is the traditional British shorthand and it's extremely fast but requires a pencil and lined paper. When I've had cause to write shorthand I have never ever had a pencil to hand and quite often had to resort to scrap paper pillaged from a bin, so I think I was right in choosing Gregg's shorthand over Pitman's.

Anyway I think I'm sleeping normally now. 

But my shorthand is really good!

"Donk Mix 2014" (Otherwise as Bounce or Scouse House.)
I love this type of music...


Illustrated: samples of German (Stolze-Schrey), Dutch (Groote)  and American (Gregg) stenography 

I want a dog/I want to die (I don't want to die really)

I WANT A DOGgie. Where I live you're only allowed one dog or one cat (not one of each). Really I wanted two dogs. One little and cute, the other large, scary and vicious-acting (ie a bodyguard-cum-guard-dog). The only type of dog that combines both characteristics is the Japanese akita breed. Fair enough, they're not little, (they're the size of a German shepherd) but they are thee cutest type of dog I have ever seen.

About nine months ago, late at night, somebody knocked on my front door and a rough-sounding street-gang-type character said to me, through the reinforced glass (I now know it is reinforced, because of what happened next) they said is somebody called J there because they're looking for a bag of weed.

The drug-reference from a person I had never met before at my own front door really put my back up so I said no there is no J here and went away.

Next thing I hear a loud banging and I can clearly see through the security glass that a whole mob of scum are trying to break into my flat. I was completely terrified and was in no doubt that if they had got in they would have smashed my head in. They would also have quickly discovered no such "J" lived in my flat, but would have tried to rob me nonetheless.

This is what happens, you see, at crackhouses. And I'm pretty sure that before I took it my flat was a drug-house of some type. I know this by the string of dodgy and rough people and bailiffs who turned up in succession in the first few weeks I was living there.

So anyway now, late in the night, I can't sleep because I'm terrified that somebody will try and axe their way in again. So I think I've got posttraumatic stress disorder (I'm joking, I don't really think that). But I am traumatized and I need a very cute and savage guard dog so only an akita will do

Apart from that I am OK. I'm not horribly depressed any more. (Famous last words, coming from me.)

Last summer two people started beating me up here saying I was a grandiose drug addict (for saying that I wanted to speak 20 langauges fluently), that drug addicts are grandiose. Oh and that I felt I was "terminally unique" and that my depression was somehow different from everybody else's.

First thing: drug addicts are NOT grandiose. At least I've never met a grandiose one. They usually have very poor self-esteem and are the very opposite of grandiose. I have only ever felt gradiose during periods of "elevated mood~" (as the drs called them). I have had dealings with many a professional during these periods and nobody has ever thought I was on drugs, not even when I was in psychotic mania and dragged into the mental hospital, clear drug-screen card in hand.

The reason drs can distinguish drug highs from manic ones is that basically, when addicts are so out of it on drugs that they lose the plot they do NOT behave the way I do when I've been "elevated" in mood. Ie they're not outgoing, not chatty, don't laugh a lot. They tend to be paranoid, irritable etc. I know it because I've seen it enough times. (I used to live in a crackhouse.) It came back to me the other day though, after some of the remarks posted here over the years ~ I was completely out of it in a psychotic state and yet the hospital staff seemed to know at a glance that I was not on any drugs at all. (And methadone doesn't really "count" in their eyes; all it does to heroin addicts is stop them launching into withdrawal. Methadone isn't a "high" of any kind ~ which is why the addicts hate it so much!) The only drugs they asked about me being on in hospital were lithium and antipsychotics. That's because I had very florid symptoms of the psychotic condition known as mania,  (the manic phase of bipolar illness).

I had suspected I'd been having bipolar symptoms for years, but discounted them on account of my simultaneous drug-taking. But the weird psychological symptoms that later got diagnosed as "schizoaffective disorder" do predate my heroin period by quite a few years. In fact I went about four years in my early 20s not taking any drugs at all. When I moved to London I didn't know any drug dealers here and wasn't interested in drugs. So how I became a heroin addict is... ukh. A ridiculous story that I don't want to go into now. Suffice it to say that in certain ways I am the very antithesis of the gutter junkie I subsequently became!

I don't know why I'm talking about this issue again... Oh yes I do. Because my friend Binky keeps laughing and telling me I'm mad. She says she thinks I've got schizophrenia. I say why do you say that? And she says because I say and do weird things. She has spent many years in mental asylums, so she knows the signs. Sometimes I think she's only saying these things to weird me out... Does she really think I'm schizo? But she says she does. She says I know I am... blah blah. But I don't know. Do I know that I know? I wish I could say I don't care either but I obviously do care, otherwise I wouldn't be posting on the issue yet again!

I get weird symptoms, they wax and wane, but they always come back again and I'm claiming benefits on the back of being "mentally ill" (you can't claim for being a drug addict!) My family don't want to think it's real, but everyone who knows me and sees me day-to-day does seem to think it's real (I don't know why though). When I really went mad a few years ago it was immediately apparent that people thought I was completely crazy. It was written all over their faces and I don't even know what I was doing. Far as I knew, I was acting completely normally! And yet they all thought I was raving mad! I only thought I was "mentally ill" because I found it so difficult doing practical things: eg getting self, money, keys, phone, etc all assembled together in order to go out. One day I had to wash my clothes in the laundrette on the corner and it took literally five hours to get myself ready to go out. Literally all day. That is why I thought I was "ill". Plus I knew that drs seemed to believe hearing voices was a sign of madness. I didn't think I was mad because I hear voices. But I certainly knew drs saw it that way! The only reason I admitted what was going on was that I was tired of seeing different professionals and different people, all of whom seemed to have entirely different viewpoints on what was going on with me, because they all saw me in different contexts. And the problems I was having with day-to-day life, dealing with practical things like paying bills, organizing paperwork etc, were getting ever-worse. Then I found out, after being given a horrible label I didn't want, that such difficulties are actually hallmark signs of that type of illness.

Ukh, it's so miserable thinking about this, but I have nobody to talk about it with ~ hence this post here. Binky knows all about mental illness, but her viewpoint is "you know you are mentally ill why don't you just accept it". But I don't walk around thinking "oh I feel really schizo-affective today". I only ever "feel" schizo-affective in the context of form-filling, when they ask about my difficulties and I know that, in doctorly eyes at least, schizoaffective disorder does explain them. (Drug addicion doesn't.) Bear in mind, I know loads of drug addicts. At some point a few years ago I looked around myself and thought "how come my life is in such a mess and nobody else's is?" The drug addicts I've known have always functioned pretty well. I mean, a lot of them functioned well enough to fund £80 a day ($133.60) heroin and crack habits. I gave up begging on the streets years ago, so my habit was much smaller than theirs.

The methadone clinic used to imply that if I would only stop using heroin and stick to the methadone my problems would magically disappear. Now they take an exact opposite tack, saying methadone isn't meant to cure mental problems, it's just a small step etc etc etc. In other words they lied through their teeth for years on end and now they wriggle out of it on the back of a psychiatric diagnosis If they'd ever listened to me ( or even asked me) they'd have known the reason I gravitated to heroin in the first place was that I wasn't feeling OK, wasn't doing OK was NOT OK. It never has just been a question of me just dropping the drug and things would magically be all right. They never were all right. I never had anything to go back to. Because I wasn't OK and wasn't well. I don't think I'll ever be truly well or OK, not in this lifetime. My resolution is that however messed up my life is going to be in the future, it can bloody well be like that without my being addicted to drugs into the bargain!

I was reading my Michael Jackson book, about him and Elizabeth Taylor being on drugs off drugs on again off again. Opiate painkillers we're talking here. Exactly the same drug-family of choice as my own. I thought ukh is that really what it's like? Will I never be free? I'd rather be dead than on drugs for ever. I'm the only person I know who really seems to want to come off heroin and methadone and be dependent on nothing for the rest of my life. I'm determined to do it. I just want to get OFF this methadone. Then if I do go back on heroin at least I can deliberately overdose and die. The way my tolerance lies at the moment I've not a snowball's chance in hell of accidentally overdosing and dying. I really wish I would die in my sleep because at least that means I wouldn't have to put the work in of learning to live life on life's terms, as they like to say at AA and NA).

My ambition always used to be to detox off the methadone and then kill myself so that I could be drug-free into eternity. The best means of suicide would be a deliberate heroin overdose, because a Muslim outside the library told me that if you commit suicide you will spend eternity in hell committing the same act over and over for ever and ever...  (Meaning I could then spend eternity shooting up heroin.) I really really do want to be drug-free, but I don't know how I can live like that. I have never lived like that before. What I had before wasn't a life, it was just an existence. I never was OK until heroin. The only thing that has ever made me feel OK, apart from heroin, was madness! Doesn't say much about life, does it.

Ukh how did I get on this self-indulgent negative current again. Well that's what I was thinking so that's what I'm posting. Sorry.

JOAN COLLINS IN BENIDORM
Benidorm is a vulgar area of Spain where only Northerners go



PET SHOP BOYS "I WANT A DOG"


OLD TRANCE ANTHEMS

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...

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

A Clean New Year For Me

I CAN'T STAY ON FOR A LONG TIME; it's the end of a long day, I didn't go to bed last night I feel maxxed out and overloaded and stressed and I've just gone shopping with Binky pre-new-year rush and all. I'm getting on with Binky far far better. My fellow blogger-friend Beverly asked (in recent comments (and I didn't reply Bev because I only just got them, they automatically go through moderation once the post is a certain number of days old...) am I loving? Well I think, no. (In a way, at least). What I mean by this is that one thing I picked up from the failed (cancelled) MBT group I was going to was how divorced from my feelings I actually am. In many ways Binky and I are emotional opposites. She inhabits her emotions, I can, at times, tend to want to sit opposite mine feeling ironic and slightly superior. I mean, for years one of my most favourite words has been "entertaining" which one ex-friend once admitted to me, during a blazing argument, that she really found irritating because it seemed to epitomize me as a sneery supercilious person. I'm not sure that I was, but she thought I was. I'm more an emotionally deadened person who plays it tonge-in-cheek a lot of the time for want of any other way to play it. It may sound weird to talk of emotional detatchment when I've been so prone to mood problems over the years, but moods and emotions are very different things. Binky'snot to feel emotional. A lot of depressed people tend to claim they don't actually feel... that they can't feel; that their feelings are more frozen than painful as such... Do you see what I mean?
mental problems seem to focus around emotional dysregulation; whereas mine have often seemed to involve some dysregulation of mood. Mood is to do with your predominate feelings, so it's possible to use mood as a way

Why am I banging on about distancing self from feelings? Because I feel that, in a sense, I have treated Binky too callously in the past, shutting myself off from her. I can't put my finger on what it is I did wrong, but I know I do really find it difficult to engage with people in any kind of really "emotional" way... I don't know why, it's just something I've noticed over the years...

... And of course heroin, my addict drug of choice is inherently about not feeling things. (People don't really take heroin to get "high" as such, more not to feel low, not to feel real, not to feel the immediacy of life... or perhaps more literalistically you could say it seems to blunt off life's sharp edges and that's what I relied on it for far far FAR TOO MUCH.

Both Binky and I are making new year's resolutions NOT TO USE AGAIN. And it's 3:42pm ~ about eight hours till the new year and I think this year I actually am going to watch those review of the year shows and counting in hogmanay on BBC. In previous eras I haven't had the slightest interest in a change of date from one number to another, but I DID make and very largely keep a new year's res to give up crack cocaine some years ago (you know it could well be five years ago now) and was so impressed by my success there that I'm into making another resolution this year to knock heroin-taking on the head for once and for all. For so many reasons it is not a good thing. Why would I even state such an obviousness? Because there's a part in me who asserts that heroin has made me feel good, helped me cope (emotionally), killed my pain, that I have every right to the pursuit of my own happiness and if that has to involve a reliance on heroin then so be it... yes I have indulged in that line of thought in the past. I've been feeling really really horrible at some points over recent weeks (probably with depression though I'm so wearied of all that I've now largely dropped labels, except where absolutely necessary)... I'vat all...) More recently life has become confused and I so want to move on and be CLEAN in so many ways. Physically clean, drugsually clean, emotionally clean, psychically clean, spiritually clean... know what I mean?
e felt shit and taken heroin I've felt shit and not taken it. I was doing REALLY REALLY WELL late 2010, early 2011 (even though mentally deranged I was not touching heroin or any illicit drugs

So that's my resolution for 2014 TO BE CLEAN IN EVERY SENSE...

Am I blithering on in my usual self-centred way yet again? Well this IS a blog. By a drug addict desperate to stop... so what else do I write about?

I just think the heroin I've still been using has confounded an already confused and confusing situation, that it has to be taken out of the mix, that I would do better to focus on cutting down and giving up methadone ... etc etc. I have a LOT of ambitions for a new life and yes I HAVE put in the legwork to change my life, it's not just talk. I predict my life will alter in the next couple of years beyond all recognition....

And I sit here and hear myself "the heroin I've been using"... like I'm talking about drinking cups of tea. Yes I know we live in a drug-addled society but still HEROIN ~ the dirtiest and hardest and most disreputable of drugs. I'm so ashamed to say it has still been playing a part in my life and that part has been far too big. (If you don't need heroin, my advice to self and to others is DON'T TAKE IT. So that's where I'm going. Back to not taking it at all.

And like I say, I've started to feel genuinely and deeply ashamed about my drug use. I'm unhappy enough about being on methadone, but heroin is beyond the pale.

By the way I think I should add that here in London there is no scene around synthetic prescription opiates like OxyContin or Dilaudid as in America. In London, opiate abuse means heroin abuse. (Of course prescription drugs must go around, but in my approaching 15 years of addiction I've never seen pills or vials of illicitly obtained opiates. Ever. They're that rare here and that's a side-effect, I'm sure of having an NHS. Where patients are not paying customers, doctors feel far less pressured to cough out spurious pain medication prescriptions ~ that's the fact of the matter, I'm afraid.

Well I've gabbled on enough and I have to go. I just want to wish you all a very happy and successful new year 2014 and to pass on my love and best wishes to you all XxXxXxX

Oh PS I wish I knew how to post up drawings. Would you believe it my art is coming on in leaps and bounds. I actually managed to copy a picture of a puppy this afternoon at Binky's that encapsulated all the cuteness and furriness of the doggie, who was jumping for joy...

Herebelow is another person's brushpen art, just to show how the instrument can handle, though I paint in a far heavier black-&-white style...

GREAT SONG for the new year: MADONNA'S HUNG UP
You know this went to number one in some incredible number of countries... just about everywhere EXCEPT the United States, (how weird is that?)...

O and another song for the new year. I love this one: Abba Take a Chance on Me

O and this one Abba Chiquita

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Better Friends (than ever before)...

BINKY AND I are getting on far far better than I would have imagined after our friendship-fracturing-to-the-point-of-near-termination blazing xmas day row. Which was kind of all my fault, as it was I who verbally stuck the boot in (I see in retrospect). Though at the time I believed I was merely making highly valid points that needed to be made if our dysfunctional relationship was to continue to function at all... I upset her so very much I'm deeply surprised that she wants to talk to me at all. (+ deeply touched.) 

Tomorrow we're going to the art shop for my intellectual Japanese brushpen ink and her sketching equipment. For some reason, we're both into learning to draw black-n-white illustrations. Me to illustrate my children's book. Her purely for self-improvement, I think. She knows I've completed this story that I'm calling my "intellectual book" (there's nothing intellectual about it and it's barely long enough to be considered a book by anybody's standards, but I'm kind of proud of myself over my achievement at actually finishing something, even just this one tiny thing, that I started... know what I mean? So I'm learning illustration, to be able to put this story out on my own, without reliance on an outside illustrator. I'm learning Japanese brush pen because it'll give my work a distinctive aura all of its own that will be more difficult for outsiders to copy. Did you know the cartridges for this Pentel refillable brush cost literally £4 each??!? That's $6.59!!! So I took a syringe and pumped in 6 parts Windsor and Newton's India black and another 7 parts Lamy black bottled fountain pen ink and got a product almost as good. It's just not quite as sensitive to the very finest details, where the old product sank more into the paper this floats atop it, causing different effects. Also I find it quite different attemptedly painting in shadow, whereas naturally we see by light. So in effect I'm painting a photographic negative... know what I mean?

I'm also TRYING to write another story but am nowhere near as inspired as I'd like to be. + another, far better plot has come along, for another book, but I'm trying to finish the first book first... which is wearying and very trying for me, as I know I need to be most professional about all this. Even though I'm not a professional but merely a down-&-out schizo on benefits who is lucky to be able to write at all. And when I feel really ill I can't even do that. Can't get my head around the details of even the simplest passage of children's prose, in order to compare and improve short less than 1-page passages of parallel drafts. How truly pathetic is that? 

Anyway, back to Binky's and my friendship. I think it's better than ever before, for this spring cleaning of truth-telling agony... how really weird is THAT??!?

My family say give her more benefit of the doubt, she is mentally ill and all that. Weirdly, Binky says I am mentally ill. It's true, at one point I did learn all the labels but labels are all they are ~ in the modern-day prevailing religion known as Psychiatry where the priests are the doctors and the Blessed Ones are diagnosed with Schizophrenia... Know what I mean? (Ie, I mean it's all bullshit.)

I do think I give Binky a lot of Benefit of the Doubt but was angry on xmas day because I thought she was insulting my intelligence and taking me for a ride. Now I think I was unnecessarily cruel to a person who is immensely brave and strong to have survived the cartload of shit that she has been through in life and the last thing she needs is a person like me, who should be supportive, undermining her in any way. So I've decided that I need to be much more of a friend and I'm doing the things I think friends do. So I hope I'm doing the right things...

Righty-ho I've got to go. Have a great New Years Eve everybody and NO TWERKING!!

WHERE IS IT WRITTEN?

BARBRA STREISAND singing in the film YENTL

I LOVE THIS SONG

You could say the words are totemic to my life...

I want this played at my funeral

o and here's a new year's song especially for you Akelamalu, because I know you like it

MADONNA: HANKY PANKY (BLOND AMBITION: LIVE IN YOKOHAMA)

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Illustrated: top ~ this is what I think I have done in principle to Binky ~ beat up somebody who didn't deserve it though very kindly she forgave me; my Pentel Japanese cartridge brushpen; Japanese liquid "sumi" ink; "The Nightmare Before Xmas" (though ours was AT xmas...); "Where is it Written?" I love this tune...

Massive Christmas Day Argument

XMAS DAY WAS TERRIBLE for me and Binky. We had a vicious argument on the phone about me never making it round to her house. I never made it because I felt terrible and we had an argument which started with that but then went on to other things (on my part) kept pent up for too Long. So xmas day was a horrible day and Binky got reallly upset, sobbing pitifully down the phone and I felt dead guilty for having set her off so bad. So I sent her a big message saying sorry and we only exchanged pressies today.

I took my meds early and slept the entire xmas day through, missing everything on TV, proof that I really wasn't well (you know, because I secong-guess myself all the time, telling myself I ought to be fine, in fact I go through life telling everybody I'm fine even when I feel anything but...) (I cannot just sleep like that all day on demand). (What had happened was, I slept about an hour and a half over the night then it was time to go, walking six miles there and back and I just wasn't up to it. My foot was still hurting after my treading broken glass into it.... all this ridiculousness.)

She bought me a really cool watch a SKELETON WATCH which is what I've always wanted. I don't know how she knew that. And I got her gold dangly earrings and giant silver diamond hoops. Stuff that would have cost in the £100,000s were it real. I was really glad she liked hers as I semi thought she might consider it worthless tacky tat. But it's not tat at all, it's beautiful.

I have to go I'm thinking about my future life and am really stressed about the legalistics of the amusement of my "intellectual books"...

So that was my xmas. OK in the end, and we forgave and forgot. LITERALLY forgot. Neither of us WANTS and we certainly don't need to recall the ins and outs of a crazy episode... so it's fading from both our minds, exactly as we require it to. 

I hope your day was more joyous...

Pictures: not the exact stuff, but the jewellery is from the same lines... isn't it wonderful?

I'm doing xmas at Binky's. We're having frozen something, that's if the takeaways are shut. She said she's getting takeaway in, Chinese or something, I said good luck with that. I seriously doubt they'll be open xmas day but she believes otherwise.

What are you up to?

And where is everybody (of the moody variety)? Anna Grace, Beverly, Bugerlugs...

ANYWAY, HERE'S WISHING Y'ALL A MERRY ONE, if you're into xmas. Ho ho ho!

A Frantic Post

HELLO EVERYBODY! I'M just stopping by to say hi to all my Lovely Listeners... Things are going swimmingly this end. I'm working on this book idea of mine. Still. Haven't written that much, but have been up all hours of the night "plotting" (evil laugh...!)... I really feel something's going to come of this. My life is about to change. For the better. And for good. I can feel it in my methadone-laced urine. Really I can...

I've just got out of an MBT group where the Leader said that last week, when I was most miserable, and freaked out one of my fellow-group-members by gabbing on and on about self-harm and suicide attempts (from the distant past) and she just couldn't handle it. And didn't turn up this week... (big surprise). But Caroline, the leader said last week I was at my MOST LUCID EVER. Because usually I flit from topic to topic, all over the place. I said, "Do I really?" I wouldn't know, because that "flight of ideas" is so intrinsic to my cognitive style I don't even notice it.

Everybody DID notice that I was really really hyped up and flighty today. I told the group I felt an invisible presence behind me, whispering crap into my right ear and then I couldn't stop laughing, because I felt like a shoebox full of mixed vegetables. (I do love mix vegetable fried rice from the Chinese, so maybe this is deeply symbolic...?) Well it's not full moon, so why am I so manic?

I'M SO EXCITED!

On a more prosaic note:~~~~~~~

Binky is in the nuthouse. (Again.) Luckily, even though the hospital is miles away, right on the border of London surrounded by fields (in the London borough of Nowheresville, where I used to live) she's only 18 minutes away by train.

There was an amazing pet shop round the corner from the psychiatric unit, specializing in hamsters, axotlotls, frogs, newts and lizards. They had a tub full of tubby white Siberian hammies going ~ £36 for all four ~ unsexed ~(which rather put me off ~ the thought of having a mountain of Campbells Condensed Russian Hammy Babies)... anyway I'm looking for a male Dark Golden. Easier to handle (because they're bigger). And because they're solitary critters you don't have to guilt-trip yourself about not buying a companion. Aparently Syrian hammies will fight to the death over Burrow Rights...

... Anyway m'dears I must go and collect my methadone.

Here's a yummy Madonna tune LA ISLA BONITA... D this is for you!

FRANTIC... I used to go to this club every month ~~ and it lived up to its name...

HARDHOUSE ACADEMY 7TH BIRTHDAY, BRIXTON ACADEMY...

Terminally Unique or Terminally Ill?

I HAVEN'T written for ages because I was too depressed to bother to get up and make it this far from my house to the internet cafe. What happened is, I spent a week or so barely sleeping at all. I felt a bit "high" because I was obsessed with Brazil and going to Brazil and living in Brazil and speaking Portuguese. Which I am not normally.

People seem bemused by my last post, but you have to bear in mind I was very miserable when I wrote it, and could not imagine ever feeling any better. So I write about "wanting to get clean" and then say but I will never be happy when I am clean! what this means is I want to get clean and then I want to die! I spent most of the past month angrily plotting suicide and musing on what a deception it is to feel "normal" and how anybody who wants to live is delusional and has been absolutely conned.

Do I really think I'm terminally unique? I mean, yes I am as a person. We all are. But as a manic-depressive junkie, am I unique?

Well most junkies are NOT clinically manic-depressive and I AM. So that does cause a complete comprehension-block in certain circumstances. For one thing, I have learned from the current popular culture to view unhappiness as a kind of illness. And manic depression always has been regarded as an illness. And so when I am feeling REALLY unhappy a kind of schism becomes apparent in me, where I feel ill and will sometimes think "I'm ill" but at the same time I'm locked up in my own head with somebody who I really hate and I will beat this person up severely for claiming to be ill and tell him EXCUSES EXCUSES. ALL YOU EVER MAKE IS EXCUSES. GET A LIFE. BETTER STILL GET A DEATH.

I think all addicts know misery and that many know clinical depression. But my problem, medically, as far as I know is NOT just clinical depression, it's manic depression and that causes a constant shift in self-esteem that is very disconcerting and difficult to live with. In fact the last time I went to see my doctor I was determined to demand one of those agreements that states that should I ever become seriously ill, through any cause I want to be allowed to die. "Unfortunately" my mood brightened considerably a couple of days before the appointment and so my dearly-held desire slipped away from me...

Brooding brooding. I keep brooding brooding. Or planning. Planning planning.  I have so many bright ideas in my head. I call them ambitions. Probably if I told you them you'd consider them ideas above my station.

The "brooding" comes in because I want to know HOW to make these dreams come true. Even in the most elementary sense.

I'm no longer obsessed with getting "clean" because the obsession with drugs has receded, just as high tide beomes low. So I no longer care the way I once did...

I was seized by this feeling the other night, like I'd downed far too much black coffee. And wondered why this strange internal reslessness. Then I happened to glance out of the window (which was wide open as I've installed a satellite indoors that the pigeons flap in and perch on) and the moon was FULL. In fact it was just waning, but I'm convinced the moon's effect on the brain is strongest when first waning. Just as highest summer and bitterest midwinter come AFTER the solstice so the bipolar part of the brain begins to itch the most AFTER full moon.

Mmmm. Binky says I'm starting to act manic. It's true my sleep cycle is all over the place but a skewed sleep-cycle is not mania (though it may be a sign of impending mania). I don't think I'm manic. Just because I turn impressionist a lot these days and talk in loud Scottish accents  doesn't mean I'm "high". I'm normal. I'm just a person stuck in the bogs of Heroin Addiction looking for a rung up. Rungs rungs! Somebody help me please! Where are rungs for sale?!

PS I'm thinking of starting my own internet and satellite station RADIO GLEDWOOD. Eventually to launch on FM across every major city worldwide... Anybody interested in doing their own show please get in touch.

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 ..

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