OptiConfusion and Great Literature

I GOT SOMETHING IN MY EYE today. Literally there was a black dot on my iris and my eye felt weird and dry (not hurting or streaming with tears) but there was definitely this black speck literally stuck on my eyeball and no amount of finger-on-eyelid manoevring would persuade it  to go. So I spent £4.26 ($6.60) on a bottle of Optrex (I only needed the plastic eyebath as I've got two bottles of Optrex at home from when I last had to go to Moorfields eye hospital in central London for another "mote" that was stuck (inside the lid) for about 18 hours and I couldn't stop crying. That time, the lady turned my eyelid inside-out, poked it with something like a posh cotton bud  and said "this is the offending object" and it was TINY. This one was even smaller ~ but how weird that it should be stuck ON the eyeball. And literally refused to move. I kept thinking I had been speared by some non-painful miniature thorn. I don't know. It was really doing my head in. Of course the Optrex made me cry like a baby and everyone was staring at me when I came out of the public bathroom at the doctors' surgery where Binky had to get her dicky legs looked at. She needs TWO knee replacements and they say she's now old enough to go through with the operation. Because fake kneecaps only last twenty years they'll make sure you're nice and old before they put them in. Then when you reach the stage where those fail too and you completely lose the use of your legs you're hopefully decrepit in so many other ways it hopefully doesn't matter as much.

Anyway I decided to follow Handy Cotton Bud Lady (to those of you on American shores, a that's a "cotton swab") ; went into the toilet cubicle, rolled toilet paper into a twist and stuck this on my eye and hey presto the unmovable "nonexistent" black dot came straight out.

Well I've been in a VERY FUNNY MOOD  recently.  I wake up mulling thoughts of suicide in a fairly distant type of way .... then  I'm hyperactive and can't stop talking IN A VERY LOUD VOICE~!!!

O and by the way, Doctor Lovelace, my GP who I kind of fell in love with ... well she kind of looks like a more beautiful version of Myleene Klass. Just thought you should know that.

Errrr, I don't know WHAT I came here to say but that's about it. Don't worry  or get too excited; I'm not about to commit suicide . I just meant I have been feeling pretty crappy. Some of the time.

And I'm still in a piss about this Turkish television connexion. I'm thinking of turning up the heating to maximum, buying a load of kebabs in and inviting everyone I know round for a Turkish Evening ~ complete with bloody TURKSAT TELEVISION that I get but don't want .The council man wrote back pretty much telling me that if I wanted TV in German and French (for educational purposes) I should just stick a dish up. Oooo that's very naughty . The council won't like that. But I AM thinking up ways of fixing illicit television reception equipment to the back of garden chairs or on poles fixed into giant plant pots ~ then the dish hasn't been "installed" . It just happens to be sitting there. As for the bloody great hole I have to get drilled in the wall to line in four "LNBs"  ukh I don't know. But in readiness for this Bullensheiße I've taken to learning how to line up a satellite dish all on my very own . Which is extremely complicated seeing as said apparatus must be pointing at precisely 19.2 degrees east of south (which somehow works out as an "azimuth" of 155.8 and precisely 28 degrees off the horizon. Well I don't bloody know and what the MotherF is "azimuth" when it's at home..??? Well I'm determined to learn this shyte. Hey did you know you can hide a satellite dish in a binbag and it will still work ? Wow the possibilities are endless. This is for "Astra 1". Hotbird is a totally different satellite (at 13 degrees east) and Hotbird is what we're supposed to get but no it's bloody Turksat. I can't believe I am ranting on this subject yet again. It just winds the living crap out of me whenever I turn my television on. What am I saying? I barely ever "turn the TV on" . I'm one of those people who has it blaring out 24-7 (yes even while I sleep)  .Hence my severe irritation at the Turksat Scandal. Yes I do do other things apart from listen to television (  I don't actually deign to watch it THAT  much...)... in combustation of this I bought a whole load of books this afternoon. Classic texts . They are:

 Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway ~ no idea what this one's about but it's supposed to be good. Virginia Woolf, by the way, is the ONE SINGLE FAMOUS PERSON I can think of  who had full-blown psychotic bipolar 1 disorder with florid auditory and visual hallucinations, like me (rather than the Trendy Celebrity Version  of Bipolar , which is type 2 ~ that means a person might become very severely depressed, but their manic episodes are never severe enough to make them totally lose the plot. Anyway...

DH Lawrence: Sons and Lovers  ~ we did this at school. His best prose is lusciously poetic  but his worst is absolutely terrible...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment ~ this seems to be the only really good novel Dostoyevsky wrote. O and by the way he was heavily in debt throughout most of his life ~ and got paid by the page . Which should be ravingly bloody obvious to anyone who 's had the unpleasant experience of reading this guy 's worst crap .

Ivan Turgenev: Fathers and Sons  ~ absolutely no idea what this one's about , but it's meant to be an alltime classic of Russian literature. (I love Russian books.)

Tilly Bagshawe: Friends and Rivals ~ can I say in mitigation that this was only 50p. I hate chick lit but for some reason the cover grabbed me.  I'm going to give it to Binky. Also her novelist sister Louise WAS probably the best-looking Tory MP in history. Before she went and retired prematurely... akh. The Dr Lovelace of politicians and she too had to go!

John Keats: Complete Poems ~  it's such a shame this guy died young. He could have been one of the greatest poets of all time. Ode on a Grecian Urn is one of the greatest lyrics in English. And yes, Ode to a Nightingale was supposed to have been composed in an opiated daze....

Yeah that's my books. The whole lot cost about £14.50 ($22.46) . Brand new.

Well that's about it. Gotta go and FIND SOME CARPETS for my echoing concrete shell of a home....

Ukh and can I also say YES I DO SEEM TO HAVE MOVED INTO AN EX-CRACKHOUSE.  Everestine piles of red bills ... Bailiffs' cards pushed through the door. Two drunken junkies turned up at 7am yelling for the previous occupant  and when I said he no longer lived here she just yelled "LIAR!"  and a loud crashing noise echoed up the stairway...                                    

By the way if there are unwanted spaces here  , it's just the computer throwing a fit  . I don't know why......

ACEN OPTIKONFUSION: CLOSE YOUR EYES

I used to love this "song" ....

 Close your eyes... forget your name... forget the world ... forget the people... close your eyes and go insane...

Illustrated: Kurdish national costume; Myleene Klass ; Turkish national dress (Turks and Kurds are DIFFERENT don't ever mix them up!! ~ Kurds come from KURDISTAN, part of which lies within current Turkish frontiers...!), Louise Bagshawe aka Louise Mensch...

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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Why "everyone is bipolar" today

IT'S BECAUSE OF ANTIDEPRESSANTS: THIS article explains more...







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AND NOW for some music.

This Bedtime Story remix, including the specially made video, was played on giant screens at her concerts, while her Madgesty smoked a fag in the back room. Or did whatever she does in the intermissions... I think the mixing's by Orbital.

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 ...







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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







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MUSIC:


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

GRACE: NOT OVER YET, TRANCE MIX