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

First Light of Dawn

MY LANDLORD came and tamed our Rampant Bush, then his handyman came in and polished all my cookertops and kitchen surfaces. With an explosion of magazines, papers and carrier bags on every available surface, the hanchman asked how I ever sat down. I told him the mess was my attempt at tidying (well that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it).

With all the mess cleaned up and the lake mopped up (caused by a dodgy fuse that made the fridge go off nearly all weekend causing a mini Lake Baikal to accumulate under the washing machine) and a new light in the bathroom, which I nearly brought the ceiling down trying to change, the place is looking wonderful.

My sleep has been seriously all over the place. My appetite is down. My moods are swirling. I've been feeling very anxious and a bit hyped up. I've been trying to keep a journal of my feelings but they're so all over the place, just writing about them makes me very supset again. I'm not "depressed", but three things happened in the past week that upset me greatly and this is what triggered all that heart-stopping anxiety that has been killing me so un-softly.

I realized that one person, who I thought I could trust, doesn't understand my viewpoint at all and doesn't really respect my feelings, probably never has, and wants me to take a course of action that is dangerously irresponsible. I got a message saying DO NOT TRUST HIM. And though I doubt the Messanger's motives, I sadly realized this message was accurate. I've received frightening messages before, and they also turned out to be true.

My feelings around Binky are confused, too. I say I'm confused; she's seriously confused. Binky has a lot of health problems, her body is collapsing. O, and to add insult to injury, we both have common colds. But because she's more fragile than me, she has a chest infection on top.

I just deleted a load of stuff on my mixed feelings on her torrential emotional torments. But it's not fair to write like that behind my friend's back. And as I say, my feelings are so swirled up, it's hard to say what I really think. Anything I put now I may disagree with in half an hour's time.

My family think I should make new friends who are sane and clean; but frankly, who would have me? I feel so comfortable around psychiatric patients because they seem to accept me for who I am. The junkies certainly don't (and the ones who did are all dead). The old "Nutter Club" that I used to find so supportive (before it was axed) was actually a Dual Diagnosis group for addicts with severe mental health problems. It was the one support group where I felt I could speak freely.

This is my biggest problem: I don't feel I have the support of anyone who really understands me. I do have the support of my family and they try to understand me. I don't know how successful they are. A need that was uppermost when I was younger has started to resurface; a need to be Understood. Perhaps behind this is my own need to understand myself. With so many conflicting emotions and moods in strange admixtures, it's hard to say what I feel about anything.

I feel in need of some kind of support, but I'm not getting it. I do have an official Support Worker but I get the impression that, like so many others down the years, he thinks my problem is that I just don't give a shit and just need to pull myself together. Well I used to think that, too. Whatever I said, that is what I actually thought in my heart. Then I tried to pull myself together and found I couldn't do it. And I don't know why.

My family, the only people in this crazy world who I do trust implicitly, seem to expect that once I'm finally ffree of all drugs, and this of course includes methadone, then my turbulence should resolve.

Well if it does, I don't expect anything to happen straight away. Various NA members have told me that the first year Clean is a real challenge. Moods and emotions no longer blanketed by opiates burning brighter than ever before. The rehab I emailed some months ago with brief details of my situation and meds emailed back saying the methadone might actually be acting as a mood stabilizer (though it doesn't feel like it is). So that, without it, unless they up my psyche meds I'm likely to be more unstable than ever before.

So I don't know what to make of any of this. Anyway I'm not scared of getting clean. I've spent about 30% of my life addicted to heroin. Which means that 70% of that journey was travelled without chemical dependency. Contrary to stereotype, I never got hooked on my drug of choice until 28 years of age. So I have vast experience of living and surviving without needless crutch of opiates and there is no doubt in my mind that I can survive again. I don't expect it to be easy; but I don't expect it to be too difficult, either.

Before Heroin I was a much more complicated person than I am now, with a poor sense of self-identity. But I have matured despite my drug habit (which some addiction experts say never happens). People who knew me back then say I'm so much more comfortable in my own skin. Even my old drug worker from about three years ago seemed astonished at the change in my demeanour. Perhaps she's seeing the swtich from constant low-grade depression to constant low-grade hypomania... But perhaps not. I think it's something more. Despite everything I feel more at home with my Self ~~ turmoil and confusion aside I'm far happier now than I was even two years ago.

They say the longest journey begins with that first step... I just hope that finally I'm stepping in the right direction...

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MOBY: HONEY (LULU ROUGE)

I love this video...

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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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Off My Tits on Tea!

I'M SUPPOSED to be keeping a diary of my mood. My mood is intermittently "up". Yesterday I had a single cup of Typhoo tea (I state the brand, in case it comes to light that a case of mass tea-spiking, with cocaine and amphetamines has occurred, because I certainly felt like I was speeding) I was high. Two cups and I was "speeding off my tits". I only kept drinking the tea because (1) I really like tea (2) I really like being high (I only avoid caffeine like the plague when I'm depressed because then, if it does anything at all, it's likely to make me feel horribly anxious and because I consider morbid anxiety to be the worst of all mental conditions, no way in hell will I go near caffeine then!... Anyway by two a.m. I'd had about five cups of tea (spread over the course of the day) and I really couldn't sleep. I went to bed for two minutes, realized sleep was impossible and so get up and spent the rest of the night watching a DVD that I couldn't even remember buying called Against the Wall, about a prison riot and reading the NA Big Book. I started at the decaffeinated coffee but frankly it tastes horrible so I gave that up and went back to bed around six a.m. and slept. But I was up by 11:30 freezing my arse off (literally).

Oh by the way does anyone else wake up repeatedly in the night to see swarms of flies at the curtains? On closer inspection these "flies" turn out to be a swarm of miniature books (hardbacks) flapping their covers merrily to stay aloft! I'm not kidding? Why does this happen to me? Is it because I'm not taking my medication? (I was depressed last week and wanted to induce a mood switch, so intuition told me that drastically reducing the dosage might achieve this and WOW I was right!) Does anyone out there actually think I should be taking psyche meds? Because a lot of people seem to think that I shouldn't. I don't mind hearing voices. I like it. It's like free entertainment beamed direct to the mind. As for visual hallucinations ~ they're always a plus. I mean, think of all those kids spending their hard-earned money on strange pills and trips ~~ and yet I get the effects for free! (Similar efffects, not exactly the same as any drug.)

Well I'm NOT hypomanic. Because ever since getting up I've felt stone-cold "normal". The high mood is intermittent. So har har har to my doctors if you're reading this I'm not mentally ill! (Again.)

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Here's a really good tune:

WATERGATE: HEART OF ASIA

Illustrated: my books fly facing the other way up...

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"You're Frozen When Your Heart's Not Open"

I WAS GOING  to name this post The Bipolar Porkshire as there was this furry blonde doggie (a porkshire cross) at the supermarket howling and baying and groaning and moaning and hollering out as loud as possible in doggie language and I kept saying "are you a furry maniac?!" and the doggie bayed back.

I only feel human today because I went and took heroin this morning. Before then I was frozen... as Madonna would say, my heart was not open. Or as I would say, I was drifting downwards towards worthlessness. I've had enough moods of such extremity to be able to say that mood and value (plus personal self-esteem) are inextricably linked. And I've been falling from over-valued to valueless. Sorry to put it that way but it's true.

I hope y'all are feeling better than I do. And I hope you don't need to take an illegal class A drug in order to just feel "normal". Methadone doesn't make me feel "normal". If flat, depressed, hollow, empty, meaningless and worthless count as normal then yes I've been feeling very normal indeed.  

I'm going to attack my druggieworker next week and demand to know if he really feels as terrible as he likes to say, why doesn't he just top himself? I would, if I felt that way. The one single reason why I hang on is my elevated opiate tolerance. If I could only get off the methadone, and hence reset my tolerance to that of an ordinary "opiate-naïve" person I could deliberately overdose and have a good chance of success. I'm not saying I want to kill myself now. But I do wake up in the morning wondering why on earth I should go on. Questioning why I should get out of bed. If it wasn't for next door's workmen drilling right into my wall and a phone call that woke me at 10am I might still be in bed now. There was nothing at all worth getting up for. Even visiting the heroin dealer was more stress than joy. If only I could go to a tree in my garden that grew heroin, ready purified and wrapped up, that would be so much easier. Or get it from Boots the chemist's at 30p a gram, china white. If only the world were more accommodating to the hopeless drug addict.

I think that's the first thing you learn at NA: that the world is not out to help you in your quest to perpetuate your drug addiction, and that as a recovering addict the biggest key to success is to negotiate life on life's terms... ha! If only I could put my money where my mouth is, instead of pumping it straight into my veins... things might be so different... See, I say this, but I don't really mean it. Life without heroin has only ever been worthless ~ or if not, blank, or psychotic, or hypomanic, or hyper-manic. All of the above.

Right I have to go; I'm running out of time. Have a tolerable weekend and Take care, all of you...


MADONNA: FROZEN



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20 mls of methadone is holding me!

YES I FEEL FINE on 20 mg methadone! A miracle has happened! How amazing is that. Once upon a time I needed more than a hundred to feel even borderline OK. But it holds me well enough now that I can leave it till 3 in the afternoon before bothering to take the next day's.

+ I went to NA last night. (+ left before the group hug ~ ukkkhhhh. I keep forgetting about the group hug. If I did remember, I'd never want to go...)

Also I met an NA member on the street yesterday evening (that's what prompted me to go). He said I had changed beyond recognition. No longer having hair running alive with cockroaches. That'll always do the trick. (Also the first time he ever saw me at NA I was in a full-on manic episode; EVERYONE assumed I was high on crack ~ the suspicious bastards!) By the way when I died me barnet white last year it got rid of all my dandruff? I also heard hair dye kills nits. Which I caught about 3 or 4 times during the course of my heroin "career". I might even have caught body lice (off the local Crusties) (can't they (the lice, not the crusties) infest the hair too?) but I never would have known it because back in the 90s I washed my clothes every single day. Yep I was Washing Machine Man. Even today I don't use a laundry basket; I put everything that's been worn straight in the machine.

Yesterday I got rid of a huge Murderer's bloodstain (it did look like I'd been doing home butchery) from the left leg of my jeans. I soaked it in a lake of Easy washing liquid plus spray-on stain remover, until the brown blood was curling into the yellow (lemon flavour liquid).

Well I have to go now. Time's running low. I think next time I go down the druggieclinic (Monday) I should test heroin-free. That will be a first. (Not that I've never tested clean. By the way my first EVER clean test, in more than 7 years of continuous methadone prescription, was LAST YEAR!!) I haven't tested clean since I've been back at my old clinic, that's all.

RIGHT I'VE GOTTA GO.








Have a charming weekend Everyone...

*******

AND NOW FOR SOME MUSIC

SUGABABES: SHAPE
This haunting tune is actually by Sting. But I think the Babes sing it better...




*

MOVING ON

I'M MOVING HOUSE!!!


Back to where I really belong!!

Where the shops stay open 24-7 and there's foreign exchange students galore plus amazing television reception!

Best of all, the new place is on the ground floor, with full access to the back garden!

And there's a washing machine ~ thank God.

Plus I can go back to my old methadone clinic, where they know me and where you can actually see a doctor if you're ill. Basically I can't get away from the old place fast enough.

My landlord's handyman has moved half my stuff. Only the itty-bitty things are left: books, CDs, papers, kitchenware and sundries. I'm skipping the Seroquel (antidepressant/antimanic/antipsychotic that zonks me) tonight and staying up as long as it takes. Mark, the handy van driver, will be here for me at 9am sharp.

Once I've moved I'm going straight back to my old druggieclinic to beg an immediate transfer. Wish me luck ...

Only downside to the new area: it's so rife with drugs I've picked free heroin and crack of local pavements on numerous occasions...

On the plus side, the new address is in walking distance of five NA meetings.

I'm not sure: should I take my empty hamsteries with me ? I could hide them in a giant tartan laundry bag ... (If he sees them Mark might report me to the landlord for keeping pets.)

I'd better go and get packing... I am too excited for words!



PS: My  hearing returned last night, stayed  with me for half an hour this morning until I sprayed the ear and DMMMMMMMM!! (Tinnitus sound.) I'm instantly deaf again! And stayed deaf all day, until I accidentally burped with my mouth closed: this popped my ear and the hearing returned more crystal sharp than ever! Tell me if I'm being illogical, but doesn't this imply a middle-ear problem? My hearing is gradually getting worse again, but I'm scared of deliberately popping my ear... How could one spritz of fine mist, a fraction of 1ml of medication, make me so profoundly deaf all day? I'm wary of using that spray again until I see a doctor on Friday... Who might finally reveal what is wrong with me!

Still deaf... and a post on drugs, addiction, heroin, crack and mephedrone (meow meow), psychosis, depression, bipolar and other aspects of post-addiction mental health ...

THE "MENTAL" SECTION starts after the ***asterisks***...


BECAUSE of my infected ear and continuing deafness, I have made a second doctor's appointment on Friday. Thursday was out becauseI've a hospital appointment with the Consultant who will hopefully explain to me why I am growing a left breast and turning into a woman. I found out last week that my regular GP is still in training. She told me my eardrum is most definitely not ruptured, but seemed surprised that I was not in pain due to the extent of the infection. My hearing in that ear is very muffled. I have tinnitus loud enough to hear when I'm out and about during the day ~ above the traffic and even above the hubbub of screaming little brats and foreign students who come into the library for the free internet. I remember a time when the only type of communication permitted in such places was stage-whispering and even then one was liable to being sternly shushed. I have to say, I find whispers ten times more annoying than murmured conversation. Neither of which I would probably be able to follow in my current state of decrepitude. I dropped the wallet containing all my plastic cards today and didn't notice. Thankfullly I found them all scattered across the floor in my doorway. Had I dropped them out of doors I wouldn't have had a clue. I definitely need this ear treated. The warning noticed on the products I have been using are doing my head in. Otex (peroxide drops) for breaking down my ear wax are not to be used in cases of ear infection, which stressed me because although I felt no pain, I did suspect an infection, but had no way of confirming whether or not this was the case. Gut feeling said I was infected, and the doctor of course confirmed this. The present antibiotic spray insists it is not to be used in cases of perforated eardrum, which the doctor says I haven't got, but instinct tells me I have. So I've goto to wait three days to find out whether I've been inadvertently harming myself all the more. A quick Google on the issue told me that use of the wrong spray can actually cause nerve damage! The doctor's first choice wasn't even available and won't be stocked anywhere for at least two weeks. The dark side is telling me I won't ever get my old hearing back, so I might as well learn to live with dropping crucial possessions, mishearing and not hearing, and the sensation that half my head is stuffed up with damp and putrefying worm-wriggling cotton wool.

 Even if the infection does miraculously clear by Friday, I'm afraid the deafness won't. I'm wondering when it ever will.

 A drug-dealer called about an hour ago. When I said I didn't want his wares I'm sure he called me the c-word before hanging up. But even in my good ear, my hearing is so bad, I'll never know ...

Instead of wasting another £20 with him, I went round Morrisons for stuffed pasta and cheese, cod in parsley sauce with finely chopped broccoli, chicken saag (that's Hindi for spinach) masala and naan bread, Heinz baked beans and baby Hovis wholemeal bread and cloudy lemonade (contains acesulfame K and aspartame on top of sugar, but barely any soft drinks I know don't...) and so on and so on. Two full-to-the-brim carrier bags for £21.50.

Then into the library and a perusal of Christopher Ciccone's Life with My Sister Madonna, a memoir of unmatched bitterness. Starting off as her backing dancer, then "dresser", a job he says entailed little more than picking her sweat-drenched underwear off the floor, he went on to design interiors for her multiple homes and to help plan her world tours. The book is a catalogue of Madonna's inconsiderate behaviour. The biggest irony is that her marriage to the British film director, Guy Richie, that put the biggest wedge in their relationship, was all but over by the time this book was published. he took the money ~ and surely it was a six-figure sum ~ and any chance of a reconciliation with his sister was permanently scuppered.

This gradual methadone detox of mine ~ five days ago I dropped from 25mg a day to 20 ~ is going too fast. I have constant indistinct cravings for heroin and, contrary to my resolution, have used it after the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, twice. So I'll think back to this year as "the time I was giving up heroin", rather than the time I gave it up. Ho-hum...

I know I cannot use on top of such a tiny script . Any use of heroin now is helping me mess things up royally. I can't get my head round the fact that I can never take that crap ever again. True, I'm falling out of love with the "B", as we call it here, more and more as the weeks sail by ~ but the relationship is never over. Long ago I got my head around the fact that "your last hit is the one you never take" ~ meaning that for the rest of my life, heroin shall probably remain in the category of Unfinished Business ...







*******
Then again, I have an enormous collection of drugs relegated to the trashcan of times past: Ecstasy, magic mushrooms, ketamine, crack ... every mindbending substance in fact, bar heroin. Actually, if the druggiepixie could magic them into my hand, none of these substances, with the possible exception of crack, because I only gave up regular use three years ago, and because most of the dealers sell crack as well as heroin and because most hard drug addicts in this country are actually more into crack than heroin, if the truth be told... none of the old drugs are any temptation any more. The last time I took anything remotely like them was when a heavily personality-disordered acquaintance [he had borderline personality disorder] sorted me out a free sample of some candy-odoured white powder he declared to be a "legal high". If it's legal it can't be any good, I opined. Oh, this is great stuff, he assured me. But he was very vague when I tried to find out what it was called. it's like E and coke without any comedown, was as much as he would say. Thee-and-a-half minutes after snorting a weighed fifth of a gram in two nose-burning lines, I was already high with a euphoria that climbed and climbed for another twenty minutes, plateauing out for three hours, then gradually diminishing to leave my feet back on the ground. it was like Ecstasy, except with a real kick to it that MDMA lacks. Incidentally, it's this quick kick that tends to make drugs more addictive. I felt weird for days afterwards. Then I found out it had been 4-methylmethcathinone ~ mephedrone, which is a chemical cousin of the intoxicant in the Somali chewing leaves known as qat (or khat) ~ hence the media-invented street name "meow". Mephedrone was banned by the British government in April 2010 ~ too late for the man who had supplied me. Trapped in a cycle of escalating compulsive self-administration, he'd developed a florid paranoid psychosis. Allowed out of the psychiatric ward for "a walk", he'd ended up at the King's Cross tube station where, following a suicidal impulse, he flung himself in front of an underground train and died. Crippled by loneliness and a dearth of mephedrone following the ban that April, his best friend (my friend "Perky") who had a history of speed psychosis and post-opiate withdrawal depressive psychosis, locked herself away and took all the psychiatric medication and all the methadone she could get her hands on, all at once. And she was found dead in her room.

That's two people I know who were killed by a "harmless legal high". Just knowing that has been the final nail in the coffin of my Chemical Mystic Years. It's no coincidence that I think that if anything kindled the full-on psychotic episodes I had last year, it was the psychedelic and Ecstasy-type drugs with which I experimented in my 20s that caused the damage ~ not the heroin and crack to which I was addicted in my 30s. I believe the psychological damage caused by heroin takes the form of an acquired weakness. Just as a healthy person who confines themself to a wheelchair for ten years will gradually waste away, eventually becoming unable to walk; so a person who relies on heroin to survive life will become psychically vulnerable, so that predisposed individuals put themselves at risk of psychotic episodes in the months after heroin and/or methadone detox. I went psychotic after the switch from heroin to methadone (proof, if any more were required, that methadone is no true substitute for heroin). My late friend Perky, spiralled down into psychotic depression after giving up the methadone ~ several years before she finally killed herself, having relapsed and  ended up on methadone yet again. I've haerd of a lot of people who developed psychotic illness after coming off opiates. This seems to be because bipolar disorder and schizophrenia tend to first become manifest in the late teens and early adulthood ~ precisely the same time a person is most likely to incline towards drug-experimentation. Opiates do seem to have some antipsychotic effect [see links below], meaning that in vulnerable people, the mental condition can remain masked for as long as opiate addiction continues. When the opiates are withdrawn, the severe mental illness ~ which was always there in the background ~ comes blazing to the fore, giving the impression that heroin or methadone caused this illness, when in actuality they held it back for many years.

Many of the life stories I've heard in NA talk about severe mood swings in the first few months lived "clean". But this doesn't mean every newly detoxed addict is "bipolar". Classic full-blown type 1 bipolar disorders involves swings from clinical depression, where appetite and sleep are markedly affected ~ not just mood ~ to clinical mania, which usually has psychotic features along with the other hallmark symptoms such as severely racing thoughts, extreme distractibility, physical agitation and/or hyperactivity (which means it's practically impossible to do a 90-minute NA meeting without constantly going outside to pace back and forth and smoke cigarettes) accompanied by great garrulousness, grandiosity and/or paranoia and a marked decrease in the need for sleep, so that many manic people can go for days on end with no sleep at all. A truly manic person is very obviously "high" and/or extremely agitated and irritable. If you turn up to an NA meeting in such a state, people will naturally assume you're on something. They certainly did with me much to my vexation!

There is a less extreme form of bipolar, known as type 2, where the patient never develops full-blown mania but instead has episodes of milder hypomania, as well as clinical depression. This is the fashionable type of bipolar disorder that celebrities like Catherine Zeta Jones go down with. It never involves psychotic episodes and, in America at least, is often diagnosed retrospectively, without the doctor actually witnessing the patient in a hypomanic state. It is this type of bipolar disorder that many critics suspect is being overdiagnosed.

Bipolar ii is still far more severe than the mood swings experienced by the average recovering addict. Many addicts, in my experience, do suffer from "emotional problems" which are frequently both the cause and effect of their addiction. When these problems are extreme enough to warrant psychiatric attention, they tend to take the form of anxiety and depression, not psychosis. In fact, anxiety and depression, with a touch of obsessive-compulsive behaviour, is what I suffered from in the early years. I've always been prone to paranoia, too. Of course cannabis-smoking never helped there. I only smoke ordinary cigarettes today since I got addicted to the tobacco component in spliffs ...

Is it true, by the way, that Americans roll their joints with marijuana only? Wouldn't this blow your head off? I remember finding a big bag of weed in a nightclub. It happened to be lying next to the Aphex Twin, Richard James, who was DJing that night. I told my friend Tommy Tired "I've got the Aphex Twin's grass!" Of course I don't know it was his, or even whether the Aphex Twin has ever been into grass. Suffice it so say that Tommy, a heavy smoker, had run out of fags. So we went for a walk from Hoxton through the City of London (the financial district), puffing on incredibly potent skunk-only spliffs. I was so stoned I heard my most private thoughts reflected and echoed off the great glass panes of the empty office buildings. We got so "mislaid" it took hours to get home. that was the last bag of grass I ever owned, and that was back in 1996 or 1997. I'd already given up smoking cannabis on anything like a regular basis back in 1993.

Well, well, this has been a long post. If anyone happens to stumble across me at random, I'd love to hear from you. Please comment, even if just to say hi. You don't need to log in to comment; you can just click the name/url option, or go anonymous... Take care everyone.

And if anyone does know about ear infections, please tell ~ how long do they usually take to clear up? I haven't had one since the early 90s, and have no idea...

Heroin, Methadone and other Opiates as Antipsychotics LINKS:~

Methadone reduces the need for antipsychotic and antimanic agents in heroin addicts hospitalized for manic and/or acute psychotic episodes

Methadone and opiate drugs: psychotropic effect and self-medication

Morphine as an antipsychotic







*******

MUSIC:


DJ SAMMY: HEAVEN, STEVEN FOSTER MIX
This is quite a nice bit of trance...

GRACE: NOT OVER YET, TRANCE MIX

Mount Trashmore

I HAVE JUST CLEARED UP an entire mountain of rubbish. It has sat there for months on end, towering out of an armchair. At the top were bedclothes. In the middle, lots of old receipts and papers, plus rotting food that I couldn't even identify. At the bottom, endless cigarette ends were mingled in a white powder that I took to be salt. I'm not very good at housework.

I found some good NA leaflets in all that jumble. I was about to throw out one on meditation (surely the most boring activity I have ever tried), when I looked again and saw it was on MEDICATION. The gist seems to be that mental meds are fine; methadone is fine, but a person on methadone  doesn't count as "clean".

In the fridge I have some 25p stir-fry. it's mostly beansprouts, so if I don't use it today it'll go off. Hey I could have thrown it into that mountain of junk. It would have been totally at home there, mulching gradually down for months on end.

I'm going to try frying it with as little oil as possible. Usually I seem to add far too much, producing "vegetables in grease". Maybe I'll get some 25p chicken noodles. See how that goes.

It's still boiling hot. Last night was so "sultry" you could still walk around in a teeshirt past 11pm.

Right I'm off.

The Long Road To Recovery

AT LAST I had a proper appointment down the druggieclinic where I have a new worker named Fanny. I gave a clear "suck it and see" style oral drug screen and my methadone at long long last goes down to 25mg per day. I am pleased as punch. Nothing depresses me more than a flat methadone dose with no end in sight. If methadone is there to make me feel "normal" (whoever told Ann Widdecombe MP  it was a "state-sponsored high" was barking up the wrong tree entirely. Almost without exception, addicts on methadone continue using herin on top at every oppotunity for years on end. They tend to do that because methadone is NOT making them high at all! It takes an exceptoinal quantity of willpower to give up heroin, even with the dubious "assistance" of methadone.)

... Anyway, as I was saying, if you're going to feel "normal" on methadone, you might as well reduce the dose and eventually live your "normality" without the need for any chemical crutches ~ prescribed or otherwise. I'm fed up of having an elevated tolerance to opiates so that, even on about 35mg of methadone, as I would have been then, the Co-dydramol the hospital gave me for those broken fingers was rendered ineffectual. 10mg dihydrocodeine is equivalent to just 1mg methadone. Of course the 500mg paracetamol (acetaminophen) in those pills still works. So I might as well have bought myself a pot of paracetamol and saved the dihydrocodeine for someone who really would have benefitted from it.

I don't want to have to ask permission ~ and give at least a fortnight's notice to the methadone clinic ~ just to visit my Dad's side of the family, who I grew up with, yet haven't seen in about eight years. Last time I mooted that idea I was told I'd only get four or five days' prescription in advance and then have to pick up the remainder from a local pharmacy in a gossipy Welsh village. No way!

I'm still a drug addict as long as I'm on methadone. I still sweat far too heavily ~ even worse than I did on heroin. The hot summers I used so much to enjoy in childhood are nowadays a slow torture with me perspiring heavily, despite having taken multiple layers of clothing off.

I turned up (late) at an NA meeting last night and had to squeeze into a packed-out, fusty room in pitch darkness. I felt too sweaty, dirty and paranoid to stay long and so left early, telling myself I'd shower for longer before next time ~ and make sure I had fresher clothes on.

Narcotics Anonymous take the view I do, that you're not truly "clean" until you're off all drugs, including drink, and are no longer dependent on methadone. NA is the only place I know to meet clean friends and God knows I need some. I've decided to get a sponsor, work all twelve steps and follow the programme for at least a year, just as soon as I'm finally OFF the methadone.

With NA you only live "just for today" ~ which echoes Jesus Christ's declaration that "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof" (Matthew 6:34).

NA advise that newcomers attend ninety meetings in the first ninety days. Again there's little point putting in this level of commitment until I'm totally off  the methadone and able to engage with the programme 100%.

An alternative twelve-step programme that has piqued my interest is Dual Recovery Anonymous ~ DRA. They are oriented towards recovery for drug addicts with psychiatric issues of any type. Most of their meetings are in Central London, so I haven't been yet. But I'm really looking forward to checking DRA out.

Whether I end up joining NA, DRA or both, finding the right sponsor is going to prove a tall order. Your sponsor is like a teacher, someone who guides you through the programme, somebody to turn to in times of trouble or confusion ~ and you supposedly have a lot of them in your first year. In effect, they're a kind of mentor.

I found an NA friend who said he would sponsor me more than five years back, but I wasn't ready to clean up; he wasn't ready to sponsor anybody. Yet neither of us knew this until we were put to the test. It ended up with him dropping out of our local meetings just to avoid me. And me continuing to use heroin and crack and white cyder just as before. My only progress since then has been to knock the crack on the head, cut the heroin back from nearly every day to once every week or two, to cut my drinking to less than a third of what it once was. I'm now a methadone addict, not a heroin addict, and my new prescription is less than a fifth of what it was less than a year ago!

So I'm on the way out. I'm going so slowly, slowly, it drives me crazy whenever I think about it. But slow and steady is the only approach that's going to work for me. By the first week of June, I'll be down to just 20mg per day. I try not to think about any of this too much. I just keep my eyes on the goal. The very idea of being Clean is faintly terrifying for me because it's unchartered territory. My whole life yawning ahead of me, empty and unfulfilled. I could do anything: yet what shall I do? I want to be off the methadone and want to be off all psychiatric drugs too. Then at last I shall know how I really feel. Most long-term addicts say they feel worse in the first year off methadone than they did on it. But most long-term addicts are not bipolar. One upside to my moods is that they've often swung contrary to circumstance. I'm hoping my hard-won Cleanliness if ever, however I attain it, might spark in me a lot more energy than I currently have, along with a better mood.

I don't want to be manic, I want to be happy. I'm yet to meet a happy drug addict. Getting off all drugs is the only thing I can see to do that will truly give me a chance.

And though I'm determined not to fall into a pit of brooding, I now see clearly that dabbling with heroin was the single biggest wrong move of my life. In fact, it's the only big mistake I've ever made. I've lost twelve years to that crap and I'm not willing to lose a single day more.



God grant me the Serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
The Courage to change the things I can,
And the Wisdom to know the difference ...














******* 
And now for a musical break...

OT QUARTET: HOLD THAT SUCKER DOWN
BUILDS LIKE A SKYSCRAPER MIX +7%
Speedier version of the track I posted yesterday...

 MADONNA: POWER OF GOODBYEMJ's VOID MIXThe Power of Madonna!  

I Must Give Up

I HAVE to give up drinking ~ yet again. Most day in the past week it had gone up to 3 half-litre cans of white cyder 7.5%ABV. That's 11.25 alcoholic units (112.5mls neat alcohol) per day. The days I didn't drink 3 cans, I drank 2. Today I've had one, and I'm leaving it at that. Three cans of that cyder amount to approximately 1050 Calories. That's way too much.

Last night  dreamt I was in my friend Rebsie's dank and derelict house. Possessions were strewn everywhere, or packed into boxes. Rebs is in rehab still, coming off a 30 year plus drink and heroin addiction. In the dream our other friend, Mother Hubbs was in the house, helping to pack up. In real life Hubbs is clean and thin enough to be unrecognizable.

Whereas I was once the one leading the way ~ the only person I knew even to have been to an NA meeting outside prison or rehab; and the only person who thought he wanted to stop, even if my outlook was delusional. Now only one of my old group of friends uses heroin ~ and that's only once a month. I know one other person who takes heroin every week and somehow seems not to be physically dependent. That person is the exception to numerous rules.

But anyway, they've all left me behind.

And here I am, trailing in the dust.





 OT QUARTET: HOLD THAT SUCKER DOWN 
BUILDS LIKE A SKYSCRAPER MIX