Season's Greetings and Happy New Year 2016!

WISHING WARMEST GREETINGS OF THE SEASON AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO EVERYONE XXXOXXX

Are you like this too: every time you seem just about to have got around to mastering one thing then another (which cropped up ages ago, unnoticed) has gone so ridiculously neglected it's like the enchanted forest around Sleeping Beauty's Castle... Well my life is like that!

Anyway, have a happy new year as well XxXxXxX

J'adore cette chanson
VOYAGE VOYAGE TECHNO REMIX




AVE MARIA: this isn't the tune most people think of when you say Ave Maria but it's a beautiful tune nonetheless. (Music by Gounod Overlaid with Bach's Prelude in C Minor)




This is the "proper" Ave Maria. There are loads of versions and although this isn't the strongest version it's the best non-operatic Latin version I could find without spending all day at the computer...
I'm listening to it again. It is quite good. What an amazing tune!

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 

!!!!!!!

Moods

WELL I WAS OK YESTERDAY. I cannot sleep properly. So I was awake half Tuesday night, then in bed again on Boxing Day afternoon. Then I couldn't sleep Boxing Day night either, despite having gone to bed after 3am. At about 5:30 I decided to get up again.

Then the fire alarm went off in the hall and made me feel really excited. Not irritable. Excited and high. I never used to get randomly excited until I turned officially bipolar two years ago. You see: it's changed my reactions to everything, including smoke alarms. I think the alarm's been going off, by the way, because of the water still dripping through the ceiling and that's buggered the electrics. Anyway I'm not manic. When I eventually went to bed at 6:30 I did sleep until about 2pm so that's 7 hrs 30. No real loss of sleep. And I woke up feeling depressed, ukh, and can you believe this?~~ went and scored two tiddly bags of heroin for £15. This after that supposed had my "last hit" on Xmas Day... Well, I did promise myself to give up for New Year and it's still only December 27th. I'm terrified of getting full-blown heroin dependency back, when I really cannot live without it and the methadone will not suffice at all, no matter what the dose. (I lived that way for YEARS.) The heroin hasn't lifted my mood today. I'm still dysthymic today. This means my mood is cycling in a low-grade way, or to put it another way, I'm getting "mood-swings" every day. I came down from hypomania on Wednesday last week (19th); Tuesday was the last full day of it. Ever since then I've been feeling up and down and sometimes depressed, sometimes excited. In other words, the symptoms have never fully gone away. I had a cup of tea at 5:30am and thought the tea was making me high. Until I realized the cup was full and I hadn't touched a drop.

In fact I just checked my blog. On Tuesday, December 4th I was complaining of feeling down. By Saturday 8th I was saying: I woke up at four a.m. and tried drinking hot tea to keep warm and either the tea or the lack of sleep has made me high and I'm feeling so good I don't NEED drugs. (Disrupted sleep is often one of the first signs of mania. As, of course, is feeling high.) On Monday 10 December I said: I've managed to switch myself out of depression by cutting DOWN my medication. Now I feel stone cold normal most of the time. Except when I get this weird meaningless feeling of excitement, which is really entertaining. But the main problem is IT'S COLD... FAR TOO COLD! And I'm drinking tea to stay warm and the caffeine makes me hyper and high. So I spent half the night playing All Saints songs on top volume... I mentioned feeling "excited" on Tuesday 11th, too. On Wednesday 12th, in my post "Off My Tits On Tea", I said: My mood is intermittently "up". Two cups and I was "speeding off my tits". By Thursday 13th I was saying: I'm not in any type of elevated mood. Or other mood. But I know myself well enough to realize that the mere mention of "elevated mood" meant I probably was in one, but the mood was uneven. (Otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned it at all.) On Friday 14th I was posting "I Wanna Job" ~ and I did. I must have been feeling very well indeed to be saying that. Between Saturday 15th and Tuesday 18th I was most definitely high and Binky was telling me I was "really manic". So the up-mood lasted two weeks. A week afterwards, and the signs are still there. But I'm not hypomanic now (overtalkative, overconfident, hyperkinetic, racing thoughts, distractible). I have to keep track of this, because I want to know precisely how this happens, what the first signs are, and the precise pattern. Oh, and I had one of those otherworldly experiences early in the morning, where bizarre thoughts are pushed right into my head: Num-num-num-yes. Num-num-num-YES! Making me feel I was going crazy. I didn't start shrinking or sprialling out of my body, however (like I have before).

O there's somebody watching porn opposite me. Why do these porn stars always insist on filming in houses decorated in grey and white with magnolia walls. To me, that is the epitome of bad taste. And why must it always be shot in the full glare of daylight. Are they afraid of shadows in Porn Land? Oh, she's taking it right up the dirtbox now.

Ukh: my mood really is uneven today. Half an hour ago I said I was dysthymic. But now I feel off my tits on black coffee again. I haven't had a single cup of coffee all day. I've had only one cup of tea since getting up.

Binky has still got my Xmas Present, which she forgot to give me. After going to bed and sleeping all through Christmas Dinner, which I forgot to mention yesterday. She said she hadn't slept in days. In fact, she claims rarely to sleep properly, complaining of "racing thoughts" in the night. I've no idea what she means by that. Lots of people say their thoughts are "racing" when they experience anxiety. But I had free-floating anxiety for years, and my thoughts never raced. In fact, I never had proper Racing Thoughts until I went manic a couple of years ago, and then they raced with such velocity they became unintelligable.

Here is a good description of my mental process during hypomania. But I wouldn't describe this as my mind racing. I'd say my head was flooded with thoughts, that I was thinking a lot. Not that my thoughts were racing. They don't "race" until they're literally on fast-forward and then, as I say, I'm already too maniacally incoherent to make sense of them.

Racing thoughts may be experienced as background or take over a person's consciousness. Thoughts, music, and voices might be zooming through one's mind. There also might be a repetitive pattern of voice or of pressure without any associated "sound". It is a very overwhelming and irritating feeling, and can result in losing track of time.
Generally, racing thoughts are described by an individual who has had an episode as an event where the mind uncontrollably brings up random thoughts and memories and switches between them very quickly. Sometimes they are related, as one thought leads to another; other times they are completely random. A person suffering from an episode of racing thoughts has no control over his or her train of thought and it stops them from focusing on one topic or prevents sleeping.
Racing thoughts, also referred to as "racing mind", may prevent a person from falling asleep.
(Wikipedia.)

Well I wish for New Year that I didn't have to Think about any of this any more. Or have cause purposefully Not To Think About It, and to feel exceedingly irritated whenever the issue crossed my mind, as it has often been wont to do. Because I consider psychiatry to be a religion. Like all religion it fascinates me. And like most religion I'm sure that 99% is UTTER HOGWASH!

Oh finally I saw the Downton Abbey Christmas special at 4:30 today. I missed the Xmas Day airing thanks to my totally disjointed sleep cycles.

Sorry if this is boring. I ought to keep my mood records separately, only I don't keep a journal. And if I did, I'd only keep misplacing it. Or getting paranoid about psychotic stalkers breaking in to read it. So I'd rather keep it here, if it's all the same to you.

Well CHRISTMAS IS OVER! I hope you all survived it satisfactorially. If anyone's up for buying me a present I'd like a nice-natured and chirpy peach-faced lovebird complete with luxury cage. Oh, and a new copy in hardback of the latest edition of Goodwin and Jamison's Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, only £71.25 from Amazon. (I'm writing my own book on moods. Hence my meticulous observations on my own...)

Well I must go. Good night all!

An OK Christmas

WOW, I'm spelling Christmas with a Ch-. I must be in a good mood.

Yeah it was quite good. Of course I opened the £20 bag at midnight. Cooked up a lovely brown shot. Then cooked up the rest, which was really dark brown. So I saved the really dark one for Xmas morning and took the weak one first.

I had been feeling like I'd drunk a petrol tanker full of black coffee. (Only I hadn't touched any caffeine at all that day.) I hoped the heroin would calm me down. And it DID.

On Xmas morning I had the great big gloopy shot dripping with brown heroin at about 11am. Apart from going over the spoon later that day for the absolute dregs, that was my last ever shot. It went partially into one of my collapsed veins and I felt OK.

I didn't get to Binky's house till past 1:30, even though she is only 10 minutes away, because I was too paranoid to leave my house. I thought someone was hiding somewhere in the hallway, down the cellar or up the stairs. I kept hearing creaking noises and was convinced some psychotic housebreaker was after my stuff. I'm not worried about my person. Just my stuff. So I hid everything and took the tellybox with me. When I opened my door I saw upstairs's water was dripping into the hall and THAT had caused those sinister creakings. The mountains of unopened mail in our hallway are completely soaked through. But I was right to be para. There were people going up the road at 8pm on Xmas Eve dressed in fluorescent jackets making out they were some kind of officials, knocking on doors just to see who was and wasn't in. They were so obviously housebreakers I glared at them as I swooshed past and one, the dodgiest of the two, said "Merry Christmas!" in a criminal type voice. You know really fake.

On the way to Xmas Dinner I had a sudden urge for Advocaat, so I got a £7.99 bottle of Cooymans (Warninks is too expensive). In fact I had orders for a whole array of drinks so I turned up with half a distillery worth of hard liquor. Then when I got there nobody really wanted much. I drink snowballs so weak that even after five I was nearly sober.

Hey but I wasn't manic or depressed either. So how wonderful is that. Neither did I get sudden rushes of ridiculous enthusiasm over nothing, that take two hours to come down. And eventually all join together to form a type of "episode". Perhaps the Advocaat acted as a mood stabilizer. Maybe the eggnog was by a goose who lays golden ones..? Or else it was one of my very rare totally euthymic days.

Binky's housemate Trudy spent hours slaving over the hot stove. She kept saying she had burned the potatoes because they were crispy on one side. But I kept saying they were perfectly done. Don't most people like crispy potatoes? I know I do.

At 3pm HM the Queen came on, so I started yelling and everyone said they were coming but they didn't so I watched it alone with a catatonic person. Then everyone came in and questioned me closely on what Her Maj had actually said. But I couldn't remember any of it. [It was actually about the Olympics. And people surviving Xmas on their own. And something else I cannot recall now. Oh and it was the first Queen's Speech shot in 3D. She looked very cool wearing the special glasses on the news.]

I had tried to avoid eating too much by way of cheese crackers and Quality Street partially because I thoroughly enjoy being on a puritanical diet. But I still couldn't eat the entire turkey dinner. It was really nice though. Trudy excelled herself. She said she's never cooked a Christmas Dinner before, but you wouldn't know it.

So I ate half, then went out to the kitchen for a fag. A terrible film came on ITV called Tangled. It's about Thumbelina or Snow White. Or Sleeping Beauty. The one with the long hair. Rapunzel! And how awful. Like a cartoon that they've had half a stab at 3D-ifying. And everybody too apathetic to switch channels. Oh and then people started dropping off to sleep. So I went home with half a bottle of Advocaat still left. Yes, me, who is supposedly alcoholic of the century, according to some former substance abuse workers. I never finished it until 5am, when I was up watching the foreign shopping channels and wondering what Camilla Parker Bowles was doing for Xmas.

Like I said I went over the dregs on that spoon but there was barely anything. So technically that was my last shot. I didn't even bother trying to find a vein. My veins are now completely hammered.

I have been sleeping all at the wrong times. Drinking methadone like there's no tomorrow. Amazingly, I don't feel that bad. The first day on that stuff is always the worst, no matter how much I take. So feeling OK on day one is a good sign. Ukh: I hope I can keep it up to spend the rest of my life drug-free.

A member of my family recently said to me: yes you give up heroin but what do you replace it with? At that moment I didn't want to say this, but a nice flash of mania is nicer than any drug. It's supposed to be your brain's reward system going totally nuts, so no wonder. There's a lot to be said for pacing back and forth laughing insanely. Real paroxismal belly laughter, at my own witty ideas. (The more manic I get the less of a crap I give about anyone else's thoughts,feelings or opinions. I know that doesn't sound good but, hell, it's so much better than being depressed. Or being on drugs. Depressed people feel nothing. People on drugs would like to feel, but don't think they can afford to get hurt, hence the drugtaking. And maniacs are just cuckoo.) I kind of wish for the new year that I could be "normal". If normal means totally mentally and physically well, deliriously happy and stratopsherically rich, then I'm willing to go for it.

Anyway I hope Xmas was entertaining for you all. How was YOUR day..?





HM THE QUEEN: CHRISTMAS MESSAGE 2012




HARD TRANCE

I put this up before... but I like it...




How can I have nearly missed this?
QUEEN BEATRIX OF THE NETHERLANDS CHRISTMAS MESSAGE 2012
VINCENT, WHAT IS SHE TALKING ABOUT..?



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Random Drunk Found In Cellar/Not Looking Forward to Tomorrow

I FELT LIKE I WAS GOING MAD yesterday. 5AM and the house resonating to the rumblings of somebody's coughing, wheezing, snorting, gurgling and so on ~ which seemed to be emanating from somewhere just outside my door.

So when, at 8AM, I eventually dared to open the said door to investigate ~ the hallway was empty. So I crept down to the "wine" cellar (never seen a bottle down there, except my own methadone which once dropped out of my pocket when I was trying to top up the electricity) ~ where I was confronted by the sight of a homeless looking bearded giant in a grey anorak, sprawled unconscious across the concrete floor, snoring for England.

Then I was idiot enough to lean slightly on the door. There was an ear-splitting squeak and I ran and hid behind my own door, which slammed loudly. I stood cowering like a panic-stricken roborovski as terrifying shuffling and shambling sounds stumbled up the cellar steps, into the hallway and up the main stairs where they seemed to disappear into somebody's room. I barely dared breathe, in case we had a homeless psychotic killer on the loose. (Well he seemed to vanish into Potishell's room, so he could well have been a psychotic burglar, if not a part-time murderer too.)

I had a much better day on Sunday than Saturday, when I only got up to collect methadone, then scurried back to bed, where I remained all day and all night until the Psychotic Intruder Snoring Scandal at 5AM. I get waves of depression and waves of excitement; nothing connected with nothing. All this crap from cognitive Therapy, implying that depressive mood is caused by negative cognition. Well my first sign of depression is nearly always massively increased sleep. At first the dysphoria comes in waves, seemingly unconnected to anything going on. For example: last night I was spooning coleslaw into a hot baguette when a heavy sinking feeling came over me. It happens like that a lot. I'm not thinking depressive thoughts at the time. Usually I'm not thinking anything. The negative thought process seems to arise in reaction to an already depressed mood ~ definitely not the other way round.

My hypomania improves my self-confidence massively, which remains high afterwards until depression eventually takes it down. So I think those CBT smart arses want to drastically rethink their theory. I'm sure that negative thought process ~ habitually telling yourself you're no good and that all you do will fail will perpetuate a depressive mood; but they most certainly do not cause it.

Surely I'm not the only person to experience things in this way. Please, some depressives get in touch and describe how it is for you.

I couldn't face the idea of xmas ~ not xmas dinner at Binky's house in mixed company where everyone except me and the duty care manager will have schizophrenia ~ without heroin. So I blew £35 on two miniscule bags, one for today, one for tomorrow. After that, I've promised myself NEVER AGAIN. O promises, promises...

{The bags truly are microscopic: less than you used to get for £10 in each and about a sixth of the potency. And this is the best stuff going!}
O and by the way it's not schizophrenia, or anyone from Binky's house that I cannot face:~~ IT'S BLOODY XMAS!

I do truly resent having to give money to Disorganized Crime (if drug dealers are gangsters then most are truly amateur ones) ~ wasting all that cash just to feel NORMAL. If methadone does give "normality" then it's a very unpleasant state to be in. I've told myself no matter how bad I feel for the rest of my life on methadone, that I'm just going to have to fight through it and make the best of the state of sickness methadone seems to induce in me.

The only time methadone has ever made me feel truly wonderful was when it brought out in me symptoms of full-blown psychotic mania (well I was taking no other drugs at the time so those of you who want to believe my mental problems are entirely drug-induced, even though they began in childhoood, will have to recognize that methadoen has turned me from a depressive into a full-blown manic-depressive.)

I am truly sick to death of relying on an illegal substance just to be able to cope with my day. I have lived without heroin before. Trouble is: before and after heroin I was mentally sick. But if I'm going to have to live my life clean, yet mentally deranged, then so be it. There are worse things in life than manic-depression ~  I can't think of all that many, but being on hard drugs is probably one of them.

I do apologize for all this self-pitying whingeing. At least self-pity is a sign of self-esteem. Far healthier than self-loathing (self-pity's opposite). I just want to be off heroin. Surely "I'm worth it", as the shampoo ads say..? Fair dos: xmas is the single worst day of the year, but I shouldn't need heroin to survive even that.

My New Year's Resolution is to STOP HEROIN FOR EVER and within the next 12 months to STOP METHADONE TOO. You see why I'm so put out at "having to buy heroin" just to cope with a day I'd rather was just expunged from the calendar? There will be no blow-outs. No last hits on New Year's Eve. I've already got the gear for tomorrow, so that's a fate accompli. But after xmas day, there's no excuse left for drug-taking. Not even in my drug-skewed mind, which is supposed to invent justifications for everything. That's part of the "illness" of addiction. (I do get a bit wearied by NA members' parrotings about their "mental illness" (of addiction). They wouldn't know a mental illness if it slapped 'em round the face. And quite a lot DO deserve a slap with a wet fish: eg for constantly mistaking my manic states for crack cocaine intoxication. The drug clinic seem to be able to distinguish even mild mania from drug intoxication and yet NA can't? Maybe that's because NA have one-track minds, even more so than methadone clinics. Well whatever...

As you can probably see, the only xmas spirits I ever believed in came in bottles. Because I don't believe in drinking any more, I don't believe in xmas either. Nonetheless:

I WISH YOU ALL A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS AND IF IT CAN'T BE MERRY THEN MAY IT AT LEAST BE TOLERABLE !

See you afterwards

G XxXxXxX




Aren't xmas songs horrible? Except for this one:

BAND AID: DO THEY KNOW IT'S XMAS


 
O and this. At least this one captures the true spirit of xmas
POGUES & KIRSTY McCOLL: FAIRY TALE IN NEW YORK


BTW if anyone's wondering why I insist on spelling the holiday with an X, that's because THERE IS NO CHRIST IN CHRISTMAS  ... But there IS a DOWNTON ABBEY SPECIAL on ITV at 20:45 so DON'T MSIS IT!

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