A Scattering of Thoughts after 8 Hours' Sleep ~~WOW!!!

I SLEPT EIGHT HOURS (at last (wow!)) and awoke at the distinctly inconvenient time of 2am. My appetite has disappeared almost completely, which is why I had such problems with a bowl of multigrain tagliatelle with mushroom sauce at binky's yesterday. Half of which I had to take home in a bizarre tupperware contraption after I couldn't manage it.

Also, I don't know whether I'm being paranoid but I can't trust, interpret, analyse, quantify or comprehend to any meaningful extent Binky's mystic smoking cauldron of emotions. (And Binky has Borderline Personality Disorder so she's nothing if not capricious.) ~That's why I'm bemused.

And that fake, bubbly mental health assistant who was on duty there yesterday. I didn't like her attitude at all. Yes she was "friendly" but I sensed something judgemental or condescending behind those watching eyes. I telephoned Binky on this point but she says I'm wrong. But the other worker, who's more Central European (Hungarian), intelligent and reserved who I do like B doesn't seem to care for at all.

BLOODY HELL if I'm meant to be a bit elevated what on earth does this say about our God-forsaken world because, in actuality, I FEEL absolutely and undilutedly affectively NORMAL so if my "normal" is the world's "hypomanic" what does that say abuot the unremittingly drab, grey, crushingly colourless existences of the overwhelming vast majority of the population who never experience persistently elevated, expansive clinically hypomanic moods at all? How can anyone possibly cope with an existence so joyless and meaningless, so spiritually down-at-heel? Yet when you finally feel OK, you're "bipolar"!

OH BUGERLUGS, Beverly's computer's on the blink and wouldn't it be wonderful if you could drop everything and fly your brood plus a few spare roborovskis and a new and improved computer to California? (We can set up a collection for the money. Or just resort to shoplifting: after all we ARE junkies!)

OH GO ON!

OK I've got to go. Anyone with a spare chirpy baby parrot out there PLEASE GET IN TOUCH I want a cute and glebbelly conure to sit on my shoulder. Beverlybabe knows someone with a sun conure and it's extraordinarily cute. Like an un-loving lovebird (but he adores his owner).

 Here's a picture.

OK OK I'm off .

PS Righty-ho I can't remember quite why I felt any need to do this but I checked the DSMIV criteria for a (hypo-)manic episode. To be "hypomanic" I need an elevated/etc mood plus three out of seven symptoms from a list and I score four or five if I'm distractable. I suppose I do kind of keep getting distractable. Why do I need to put this? O yeah it's something to do with justifying my point BLOODY HELL IF THIS IS MENTALLY ILL am I just a complete miseryguts or is there something wrong with the world. Because I feel pretty normal, despite fulfilling these lovely criteria. THE WORLD'S GONE MAD. There, I said it. What am I saying? THE WORLD WENT MAD GENERATIONS AGO..!

Blah blah blah that paragraph is terribly written.

BUGERLUGS ~~ PPS: THE ANIMATED ROBOROVSKI UP TOP IS FOR YOU!!

MUSIC: HARD TRANCE

Doesn't get any good till 1 min 30 in...

PPPS 2:55pm oh bloody hell I really DO feel "normal" ... what is happening to me?????????????

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Bugerlugs' Secret: How To Make Clothes Smell Ultra-Fresh...

BUGERLUGS, my fellow heroin-addicted blog-friend gave me a tip on how to make my laundry reek overpoweringly of Fabric Softener. Add an overdose of this to the powder-drawer during the last rinse; then it will reek overpoweringly of "blue". True to her word, the only brand that really works is Blue Lenor. My local Sainsbury's sells "x4 freshness" and x"7 freshness". Only the first of these was on 2x750ml for £3 special offer but I invested in the allegedly stronger one anyhow. I had to sit through the entire rinse-cycle with pen, paper and wristwatch, timing and numbering each spin so next time I can know exactly where I am in the cycle.

Because I was so paranoid, I ended up adding two capfuls each to the second and final rinses. The recommended dose is only a half or one cap. But I want everyone in the vicinity of my specially-treated garments to go into near-anaphalaxis, so I didn't mind wasting a bit on a second-last phase that was only going to rinse it out. You have to be absolutely sure you're tipping it into the very end of the wash, otherwise it'll only get drenched out leaving barely the faintest aroma behind.

True to Bugerlugs' word, only Lenor is potent enough ~~ and it absolutely must be blue Lenor. She has experimented with every other colour and nothing else works. By the time the final mind-blowingly extended nuclear-strength spin was done, it was too dark to creep into the yard to peg them out, and I was terrified that fresh air might blow all the artificial "blueness" away.

So they've been on my Ikea indoor hanger. They smell OK, but next time I'm adding ten capfuls, just to make sure. I want people's eyes to water when they go near me and I want my entire flat to smell like Valium Marilyn's place. She spends the twilight of her days in a beautiful top-floor apartment reclining chaise-longue-style in front of panoramic HD cable television. I keep warning her not to fall out with her son, who pays the cable bill, because without National Geographic, Discovery and Animal Planet, life as she knew it would be over...  And her flat reeks of fabric softener too...

By the way, Bugerlugs: there is a most unpleasant warning on the bottle saying never to use Lenor on bedlinen or children's clothes and never ever to add it direct to fabric, as anything treated with their product becomes highly flammable. Offputting or what? ??~!?

I'm still sleeping marathon hours. I was in bed by two last night and woke up midday-thirty (I spend no time lying in bed awake ~ that is just too depressing ...) So I got straight up, put something on German television that I couldn't understand. Felt pissed off. And was back in bed within twenty minutes. This time I dreamed a lot. I don't like dreaming. I went back to Park Meadow in Hatfield, where I grew up. Then I was up again by three, not at all happy to be awake. I always think: if you have nothing to write then write nothing ~~ and yet this is a daily journal. So that is my non-diary for today...

Next time, maybe I'll have laundered more clothes. So wow. Maybe there will be something exciting to add to the record...

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MUSIC
JEANETTE DIMECH: SPAIN'S BEST-KEPT SECRET
When I was ten and my Dad got remarried, he and my new step-Mum brought two of her tapes back from their honeymoon...

SOY REBELDE
"I'm a rebel"... this time with English subtitles...




EL MUCHACHO DE LOS OCHOS TRISTES
"The sad boy of eight"...




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Anxiety and "Issues"

I HAVE banged up one bag of Lovely Heroin today and feel no better for it; I have one bag left. And don't even know if I want to take it.

Yesterday I felt horrible in the morning. Depressed and anxious. Then I took heroin and felt fine. All afternoon. Pinky asked if I was hypomanic. Come nighttime I felt OK and phoned my family.

All night long I slept deeply, only awakening once to pee out some of the three litres of lemonade I guzzle each day. I no longer drink alcohol at all.

So I got up at twenty to one feeling sour and blank and confused. Sometimes it pains me just to think.

Pinky has been transferred from mental hospital to burns unit where's she's awaiting surgery. When she set fire to her pyjamas last week, she burnt her leg so badly she needs SKIN GRAFTS. She's right across town so I don't get to see her for a couple of days.

People keep confusing me. The things they say; the things they feel. I don't want to take any of it on board. Eg Pinks talks about me as if I'm seriously ill. I don't like that, and I do not believe it.  If I mentioned it at all in real life, I would say I'm "a bit bipolar" but she says I'm "really bipolar" which is no longer true. There is nothing wrong with me any more. Apart from that I'm my old miserable self.

Dr Lovelace, the GP, says I should not take on the identity of "schizophrenic". I would not want to associate with a condition I do not have anyway. I said my moods are who I am. But mental illnesses are not and never will be "me". Yes in the past I have parrotted ideas that I've read. But psychiatry to me is like a religion: an object of fascination, not belief.

I'm totally off tea. I started feeling panicky earlier today and that makes me feel I should be shot dead. Anxious people are useless people ~ incapacitated by misplaced energy that crushes the heart. I loathe anxiety above every other mental state. If I get anxiety back, I will kill myself. Caffeine makes all this worse. It's just like the after-effects of crack cocaine ~ another drug I loathe.

There is nothing much more to say. If I analysed it, I'd ask myself why I should blog about feeling crap. The only reason is that I would keep a journal anyway. Saying these things in public is confusing enough. I know some people think I should just kill myself.

My blogfriend Bugerlugs, who has a cyclothymic nature anyhow, went on a beautiful two-week break to North Wales but came back not just depressed but panicky on top. I held back my opinion that anxiety is the absolute pits of psychiatry, sheer living hell.

And when her GP prescribed Prozac, I kept quiet on what fluoxetine would do to me: make me agitated, angry and dysphoric and a whole lot worse. My last experience with an antidepressant (mirtazapine/Remeron) was catastrophic. I never want to go near anything like that again. The stuff I'm now on (quetiapine/Seroquel) is for bipolar depression. But it's also antimanic and antipsychotic. So it shouldn't set me off on a psycho episode.

I hope Bugerlugs is OK. She sounds better. Her biggest problem now is a furry pingpongball-with-eyes robo-hamster who's been on the lose for nearly a week. They're tiny, flighty and much faster than normal hamsters. So it's like trying to catch a wild house-mouse. Except roborovskis are even smaller and pingier. And when on the lose, they switch to wild mode and don't want to be picked up.

Ukh. See that theory that distractions improve the mood doesn't work.

I keep thinking about Bugerlugs and what I said about anxiety. When I make these sweeping statements I'm talking about me. If Bugerlugs put a gun to her head I would be gutted. I don't want Bugerlugs to die.

As for this heroin (the other thing Bugerlugs and I have in common, apart from uneven moods) ~ I don't know what to do.

Earlier today, I ended up turning the issue over in my head. Telling myself it is destroying me: I have to make a break from it sometime.

Then I tell myself I will stop tomorrow. But I'm not naïve. When I think I've spent too much money, I'm able to put my fixation on ice for some days. So I've done a few days heroin-clean. But that day, the day that I still have a yen for gear and the money to get it ~ that "tomorrow" never comes.

Last year there were many days when I had the money but not the desire to use. My worker was asking me last week what has changed between now and then but I don't want to talk to some drug-obsessed drug-clinic worker about my mental equilibrium. Last year I had an "elevated" mood for weeks on end. This year I haven't been so high. I tested myself, by using again, and the habit came back. It's nowhere near as intense as it once was, years ago. I can do a day or several days on just methadone without climbing the walls.

And I want, I really do want to be drug-free and that means methadone-free as well.

I'm also aware that heroin is doing my mental wellbeing no good at all. For years it salved my misery. But now, it either switches my mood so I feel higher hours later than when I first took it. Or it does nothing much at all. Whatever it's doing to my brain cannot be good.

For a long time I was averse to methadone because I thought it would damage my brain.

I know what I have to do. That is: to give up all drugs, prescribed and otherwise. Then maybe my brain could be OK.

My family have said that if I leave the drugs ~ all drugs behind, I should be OK. I never used to believe that. Mainly because I wasn't OK before I went on heroin, so I didn't assume I'd be OK afterwards. But I never even had the chance to try Sobriety out ~ never gave myself the chance.

This is my single goal. To live drug-free.

Maybe next year I'll have some news to tell you...

Until then I can't promise not to put up a whole load more miserable posts. Sorry.



Illustrated: I couldn't think up an illustration, so I went abstract; I found this graph by accident but it shows something I've long suspected ~ that heroin is far more popular here in Europe than across the Pond...

MUSIC
I wanted to put up SOMETHING... but what?
This is an old trance classic,
AGE OF LOVE: AGE OF LOVE (JAM & SPOON MIX)
It has a PROPER VIDEO...



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The Sparkling Shower, Burton-Taylor and Sweeping Statement Bipolar Reprimand

I AM VERY GRADUALLY cleaning my house to professional standard. I bleach the toilet bowl every day so it smells like a swimming pool down there. My sinks sparkle with a surreal gleam. I cleaned the shower cubicle inside and out and it's ~ mmmm! ~ so zesty lemon-fresh.

I have a new neighbour down the hall. I've yet to set eyes on him but already I have him pegged as a dodgy bastard as there are constant comings and goings till past 6am. Intuition tells me "crackhead" ~ just like the last inhabitant of that room, who had BO so bad the left-behind clothes thta filled the dustbins weren't just hummin' they were honkin' with human odour...

I just met a half-Chinese crackhead by the payphones, who hit me for money (as per always). If I'd have said, "isn't Chinese a poetic language as 天氣 (simplified: 天气; Japanese 天気) ("the weather") literally means "the mood of heaven" ~ he'd have gone: "DUHHH?!"

Well I've just come back from a meeting with my Support Worker Donny, who is way more professional than Deshane, the old one (who diagnosed me with OCD and had the cheek to tell my psychiatrist he thought I had "COD" ~ not realizing, presumably that those initials stand for "Cash On Delivery" ~~ ukk, ridiculous.

Donny photocopied some exceedingly verbiose sheets I had to fill in about my medical conditions. I was hypomanic when I wrote my descriptions, so they got it with both barrels, straight between the eyes.

Like just about every mental health/drug/support worker before him, he asked whether I was hypomanic when I am plainly NORMAL. What I said was "last time I took antidepressants they made me really hyper and high" and he tried to sneak the question past me by enquiring "are you on antidepressants now?"

If I ever did take antidepressants again without a bulletproof mood stabilizer I reckon I'd be on a one-way trip to the psyche unit in Cloud Cuckoo land.

I'm glad some people liked my last post on Bipolar Misconceptions because to me, writing about Bugerlugs and Anna Grace felt creepy and weird. But only, of course, after I'd invested two hours in penning the piece and hitting publish and walking away after the internet café had closed... Anyway, I have a "no embarrassment" policy with my blog, which is why nothing ever gets taken down, no matter how lurid or sad.

By the Way: CLICK HERE for Bugerlugs' Camping In Wales photographs... aren't they amazing..!

I never detailed most of the misconceptions re Bipolar in my swiftly-written thesis. They range from brain-dead sweeping statements like "if you don't have problems with sex and shopping you're not bipolar" ~ which doesn't take into account the 43% of patients who do NOT experience "signature hypersexuality" and that in extreme mania a person might just be too ill to go out, remember they're bound for the shops and generally get it together to go on a massive spending spree. The statement also takes for granted that all patients have access to credit cards, which might be true for the New York urban élite the "mild bipolar" article was written about (and to have enhanced powers of concentration during hypomania your condition must be very mild).

The most ridiculous statement I have ever read is that Bipolar 2 and Generalized Anxiety Disorder are indistinguishable. Considering that I had what was then known as "free-floating anxiety" with depression years before I ever showed definite signs of bipolarity, I have to disagree. Anxiety usually paralyses you with fear; mania animates you. Anxiety makes it hard to sleep but mania can make sleep impossible for days on end. Also most manic people feel "high" even if irritable or dysphoric at the same time. Depression with anxiety is probably the commonest condition in all psychiatry; bipolar disorder, despite its current trendiness, is relatively rare (affecting about one person in a hundred).

Well it's such a sweaty day, the mood of heaven is switching from sultry heat to random rain. The kind of rain you get when humidity is so high the saturated air just lets go... The world is buzzing loudly around me as we speak; I cannot believe it's Tuesday already. I picked up Pinky a pair of UK size  eight trainers (that means sneakers in size 10.5 to you Americans) or deck shoes size 42 in continental Europe). They were discarded by a bin ~ presumably by the sort of chav who think's it's classy to wear everything boxfresh new and unblemished.

I'm about to go home and watch the Burton-Taylor epic Cleopatra on "Director's Commentary" (didn't even know there was a director's commentary until I chanced upon the fact on the side of the casing).

By the way, I'd often wondered how Richard Burton, on a "mere" half million dollars a movie ever managed to buy Elizabeth Taylor a 69.42 carat diamond costing over $1 million, plus the most spectacular Bulgari necklace - bracelet - earrings - ring emerald-and-diamond suite, which begged the question: ~ Unless he had no living expenses, never paid taxes and saved up for years, how on earth could he afford it all?

That's because the multimillionairess divorcée widow Elizabeth Taylor picked out and paid for the poshest pieces herself!

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Illustrated: my shower looks just like this, except there's payphone inside it; Elizabeth Taylor sporting a decent set of emeralds...


THE DAY AFTER: NUCLEAR ATTACK
Don't know why I chose this but...
This ABC made-for-TV movie was one of the highest-rated broadcasts of all time, attaracting 38.55 million viewers...
I like the bit with the skeletons... there is just something about nuclear explosions... exhilarating and horrifying at the same time...



ELTON JOHN: SORRY SEEMS TO BE THE HARDEST WORD
Official video
The tune came on Pick TV (the only channel Pinky seems ever to watch)... reminding me how much I love this tune...



MADONNA: NEW YORK FRAGRANCE LAUNCH
Don't know why I'm posting this, except Youtube offered it, so here it is...



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(Bipolar) Mood Swings and Misinformation

TO SKIP to the main part, ignore the first three paragraphs...

I KEEP having recurring dreams about me on the first day of university and instead of signing up for lectures, checking out the library, shopping for books, I am down town, armed with the name of a contact I don't really know, and I'm on a quest to score gear. The entire dream consists of the never-ending rigmarole you go through in a strange town to get drugs off someone you don't know. Sometimes, when the dream gets completely ridiculous, I end up in a succession of increasingly lilliputian shops until I'm eventually curling into a ball to fit into a wendy-house-sized haberdashers. The dream ends and I've wasted day one of a supposed new life without ever getting my hands on any gear.

I woke up feeling panicky with thoughts of death. I'm not clinically "depressed" (well I don't think so). I've just been in a strange mood for days.

After a week with exceedingly poor sleep and barely any appetite at all ~ when it took all afternoon to polish off a plate of pasta ~ and me getting repeated bursts of manic or hypomanic excitement, my sleep and appetite have come back with avengeance.

Bugerlugs has come back from a mystical break in North Wales to constant depression. Like me she gets a lot of mood "issues". She sounds like she's bipolar, or at least cyclothymic. (Cyclothymia entails constant shifts between hypomania (that is: mild mania ~ no psychosis) and depression that doesn't meet the full criteria for a "depressive episode". I'm not a doctor, but if a person feels truly dreadful for days on end, especially if their sleep and/or appetite is affected, it probably is clinical depression, in which case she might be bipolar, type 2.

The difference between bipolar depression and the "normal" type is that a bipolar person cannot just pop antidepressants, which can cause the mood to switch poles or to cycle rapidly. Antidepressants are only ever used for bipolar disorder in conjunction with a mood stabilizer.

The self-help books and sites dedicated to bipolar problems will often mention that the condition typically goes undiagnosed for an average decade or more ~ and then proceed to spout the very generalizations and misleading statements that have long helped such a situation thrive!

For example, many sufferers dislike the term "bipolar" ~ encouraging, as it does, the idea that the illness is somehow a fluctuation between extreme happiness and sadness.

Mania actually means "excitement". Although they do typically feel "high", manic people are usually agitated and irritable as well, especially as the mania gets more severe. Euphoria and depression often intermingle or alternate speedily so that a severely manic person might laugh, cry and rage within the space of a few minutes ~ like a bad drunk.

There is such a huge range of feelings and behaviours associated with (hypo)mania ~ from increased energy, enthusiasm and creativity at the mild end of the spectrum to frenzied overactivity with incoherent thought and speech and delusions and hallucinations at the other that it is hard to generalize at all.

In the textbook form of the illness, mania and depression may follow one another, lasting months each, but there are usually years of normal (or nearly normal) moods between episodes. An average sufferer has "only" eight episodes in a lifetime.

But bipolar conditions can take rapid cycling forms with periods of high, low or mixed moods lasting only days or hours or minutes. Rapid cycling is more common in women, and more common still in people with substance abuse issues. Many if not most of the bipolar bloggers out there are rapid cyclers. Presumably the more of the time you experience manic-depressive symptoms, the more intertwined the illness will be with your own identity. Hence the preponderance of rapid-cycling bipolar bloggers.

It's fashionable to label the condition a "brain disorder", as if as separate from one's Self as diabetes or heart disease. But in many respects a disorder of moods must be a disorder of Self. We are our moods, after all. Descartes could more accurately have phrased his dictum: "I feel therefore I am..."

Not everyone with manic-depressive illness seems to want to present themselves this way. Anna Grace, for instance, prefers to portray herself as an Addict ~ even at the cost of attracting Haters ~ and even though she sticks loyally to her methadone, not touching street drugs for months at a time. Her bipolar problems are compounded by ADHD and a Borderline Personality Disorder, which make her mood symptoms even more unstable.

Originally I had wanted to post something to dispel the misleading generalizations about mood disorder that seem to congregate online. I'm not sure I have managed this.

Really, I wanted to write about moodswings as they affected other people; I'm bored of talking about myself.

What more is there to say about the type of "mental illness" where just about everything you think, feel, say or do can be construed as a "symptom"?

(Probably so much more, if the truth be told, that if I continued writing without stopping, I could die of old age in forty years' time with half the subject still not covered!)

So I will close the Subject here...

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It has been boiling hot here in London. The weather Picture-Perfect. I hope you're all having a GREAT WEEKEND...



Illustrated: Bugerlugs is a breeer of Roborovski Hamsters; Anna Grace in the Rubik's Cube of time...



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GIVE ME ALL YOUR LUVIN' ~ MADONNA FT. NICKI MINAJ & M.I.A




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