A Writer's Thoughts in the Summertime...

IT'S A CHARMING SUMMER'S DAY here in London. I've heard  London is the place to be now, for the international super-rich. The reason? (Apart from the British government's lame tax regime for non-domiciled residents?...) The mild climate. Yes! The precise thing we Brits profess to hate so much ~ and emigrate to Spain to avoid is now our USP for billionaire aliens!So people from India, China, Arabia etc come here for the far far more tolerable summers (much milder than New York, or Paris even). Having said that, on the hottest days, London can get unbearably muggy and really tense and close and horrible.

I had a silkwood shower this afternoon, so I'm supposedly clean. But I'm sweating like a swine again. I'm dying to reduce my methadone down from the current 30mg dose. I'm also giving up the other stuff (again). Yes that horrible crap called heroin is still in my life, to my eternal shame. I really do feel shamed to be a heroin user, heroin addict, whatever you want to call it. And I do realize just how lame it sounds to say "I don't take drugs any more. Oh ~ except heroin. Oh no! I don't take drugs, only heroin." How thoroughly pathetic.

I've been very busy, not sleeping and writing intellectual novels. Well, I've written 1¾ stories. I like to call them novels. I've got to get my computer fixed to type them up properly, so I can send them off. I was going to self-publish, but now I'm thinking of at least trying a "normal" publisher first, y'know. See if they offer any money for it. Because I'm really really broke. Hey wouldn't it be exciting if a real publisher did take me on as their next big thing.

Oh and for the person, I can't recall exactly who you were, who told me I was delusional and that I couldn't even write anyway ~ you haven't even READ my writing. Judging somebody's prose fiction by what they put in a blog is like trying to assess somebody's singing voice by listening to them speaking. I would say my strong points as a novelist are my characters and their dialogue, also I write a "classic", slightly posh style of prose which I hope would set me apart from the modern "trendy" type of writer. None of this will ever come across here in my blog, because my blog is only ever a first draft dashed off quickly. Often I don't even read through what I've put before clicking "publish". So no, you really CAN'T judge a person's novels by their blogging. Example: Jeffrey Archer is a multi-million selling novelist, but his blogging prose is unremarkable. In fact, the best writers usually do write rather pedestrian prose. I far prefer this to the "aren't I witty/aren't I clever" "literary" type writing, which might be good in short extracts, but is wearying in the extreme when you have to tackle an entire book of it. I only ever read "commercial" fiction, I can't handle modern "literary" novels ~ I find them too pretentious by far! 

Years and years ago I did a course at uni for one semester entitled "writing a novel" ~ for which we all had to submit a long short story. My teacher, who was a Booker-nominated novelist, said to me she particularly liked my work for my memorable characters and striking use of language ~ so there you go. I hope that augurs well for my career as a "famous writer"..!

Anyway I must go. Hope you're all enjoying the good weather... if the weather IS good where you are. Beverly Babe you've gone and put your blog on invited readers only and I haven't got an invite. But I'm sending you Sorbitol-flavour kisses here. Be careful; if you eat too much of it, Sorbitol can give really severe diarrhoea-y runs! (I take sorbitol-based methadone, so I should know!)

LINKS:
PEDESTRIAN PROSE by Bestselling Writers...
Their blogs
Danielle Steel
John Grisham
Jackie Collins
Barbara Taylor Bradford
Stephen King
J K Rowling

Illustrated: various of my favourite Famous Five books in Continental languages...

HAPPY FULL MOON/THIRD EYE OPEN!

I'VE BEEN DOING ART and it's opened a kind of interdimensional artistic third eye. I went to the London Graphic Centre where I bought a Pentel Manga Pen (synthetic brush loaded with Chinese ink cartridges). I keep seeing art with my eyes open and shut. But my art facility has increased drastically. I can see how to draw things I couldn't draw before. Though I'm still getting used to wielding an Asian brush pen, which can draw from marker pen thickness to fineliner in a single sweep. Swift, confident strokes are required, otherwise the drawing looks very shaky indeed.

I nearly had a nervous breakdown last night. My brain started racing out of control. I don't know why it does that. Then I found out it's full moon at 09:28 hours today, Universal Standard Time (which is London local time). So maybe THAT has something to do with it. Anyway, at another point in the night, I nearly had a panic attack, because someone upstairs dropped something like a penny on the ceiling. Yes I was feeling that sensitive. Now I feel hyped up, but I feel depression about to crash back again at any moment so I don't know WHAT's happening with me. I keep feeling like I'm going to end up in the nuthouse. I have felt that way off and on for over a month. But I do my writing and art instead and I'm still not in the nuthouse, so SOMETHING's working, hey!

Gotta run. Happy full moon to y'all!

NOTHING LIKE A GOOD DONK

2013 DONK MIX

Photocopying hell

PHOTOCOPYING! If Dante had written the inferno in more recent years I'm sure he would have included use of the photocopyer to reproduce more than 10 sheets at any one sitting on A3-A4 reduce setting. Ukh I have copied 40 manuscript pages at a sitting, twice. No I tell a lie. I WOULD have got to page 80 today, had the library not closed. So as it is, I'm only on page 65. I have to copy this document to send to someone who can tell me their opinions....

I'M IN A REAL FLAP of a bad mood. Got into a tailspin this afternoon about something exceedingly petty (but VERY important, in the scheme of things) that I can't go into. If I could go into it here, then it wouldn't have got me in such a flap. Just one of those annoying things that, frankly, I wish I could afford to pay somebody to do for me. You know, the trivial petty things in life that personal assistants/managers/lawyers do for you. I worked out recently that had I been born an 18th century aristocrat NONE of my present-day problems would exist! They are ALL to do with having to have the volition to run the meaningless minutiae of my own life, which of course I don't want to. Like washing my socks. Washing clothes. Cleaning house. If somebody else could do that for me, I'd be absolutely fine. But as it is, those nut-doctors would put it down as "issues with self-care" or some such nonsense.

ANYWAY back to writing. I'm about to start book 2 in my amazing "better than Harry Potter" series of entertainment! How amazing is that!!!

I've got to go. I'm too irritated to write any more. Really starting to feel shitty and depressed. I'm just glad I can put a deceptive brave face on. People who think they know me think I'm OK. I'm not OK at all.

Feeling Better: not so depressed/still writing "great literature"

FINALLY the fog of "depression"/whatever you wanna call it (feeling unamused + sleeping 12-16 hours per day EVERY day... yes THAT is lifting. O and when I did get up "early" (eg 8am) thinking how well I was doing, not only did I feel absolute stygian gloom, barely able to function at all, but I'd flop down on the sofa, maybe a couple of hours later, after I'd done all I had to do for the day ~ getting methadone, buying shopping in etc, so the rest of the day was comparitively "optional" then BAM!! straight to sleep and catching up on every single hour "lost" plus EVEN MORE! ~ meaning I just couldn't win. I told my GPs (both of them) and they nodded understandingly. They certainly didn't try and imply if only I had more mettle and forced myself to stay awake I'd somehow be all right because I wasn't all right. The less sleep the LOWER my mood went. It was horrible. ANYWAY this is all finished now and I'm currently on 9 hours. My mood today has actually gone UP. I'm really excited because I found some yummy blue soft cheese (Cambazola) to put in my French baguettes, which I eat nearly every day. Or is it because I'm busily writing the most amazing children's book of all time? I don't know!

Ukh. As for my brilliant writerly idea... I REALLY need a good "literary agent" with whom to discuss this stuff. My family are good, but really just as clueless as me when it comes to the wherewithalls of publishing. I haven't the faintest idea how that industry works and I need someone I can bounce ideas off who is NOT my publisher, because I feel I should produce (and hence publish) my stuff in a certain way, in a certain order of appearance. Maybe I'm sounding a bit mysterious here: what I mean is, I have so very many ideas for stories it'd take me at least the next five years to write them all. That's if I took up writing full-time. Currently I'm only writing ~ really ~ part-time I haven't the physical energy to scribble away at this hobby of mine full-time.

(Most of the time when I'm "writing" I'm actually watching True Movies 2 on Freesat!)

I was watching French television last night (as you do when you're supposedly writing an intellectual novel) and this brilliant prison drama came on called Unité 9 ~ far better than the present-day rehash of Prisoner Cell Block H they're calling Wentworth. I also saw a good courtroom-cum-prison drama Anybody's Nightmare, starring Patricia Routledge (Hyacinth Bucket) on True Entertainment. The real-life story of Sheila Bowler, a middle-aged, middle-class music teacher falsely accused and then convicted of the murder of her frail and elderly aunt. That was really good too.

You know as I'm getting older and becoming an accomplished intellectual novelist, I can watch TV drama and think "no that's a cheap shot; they should have focused more on that character, added an establishing scene here, rejiggled a bit there, done it this other way". + when I read other people's books I'm constantly blue-pencilling other writers' prose  (I do it enough to my own). I got Sharon Osbourne's latest memoir Unbreakable from Morrisons for £10 (Binky thinks this is the biggest self-indulgence, spending £10 on A book!) ~ no ghostwriter is credited, but some of the prose, at its best is top-drawer. Paul Burrel's book A Royal Duty doesn't credit a ghostwriter either and that's amazingly well done, considering the lengthy, convoluted story he had to tell and, in the words of her brother, Earl Spencer: a woman I am so proud to be able to call my sister, the unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana whose beauty, both internal and external, will never be extinguished from our minds. 

I once tried penning my own memoir ~ a "misery memoir" as my own tale would be labelled ~ and I can tell you it is NOT easy ~ not just recalling your own life in brutal close-up, but detailing precisely HOW and why one thing led to another, what was said by whom and how it made you feel. The misery of my own memoiring made me so depressed that  I gave up in favour of fiction. Then I gave up writing for grown-ups because I was so fed up of the shitty world I would have to portray (+ too uninspired to write anything approaching a full-length book), and, in the end didn't even want to feel obliged to reproduce swear-words in print, that I finally gravitated to children's fiction, perhaps the one single arena of innocence left in this dark and nasty world ...

Ukh, every time I post I seem to be writing the same thing. Yes I'm writing a story. By £1 shop pen, on WH Smiths lined refill paper. But I can't tell you what it's about! It's not finished.

OK I've got to go now. Hope you're all OK. Take care y'all...

Illustrated: (upper) WH Smith's "wide-ruled refill pad" ~ what I use for the composition of great literature..! (middle) Cambazola ~ soft and spreadable blue cheese (lower) Dave Pelzer's A Child Called It, to date, the most successful "misery memoir" of all time...

VIDEO: AGATHA CHRISTIE

Most successful author of all time with agglommerated sales of (allegedly) 2,000,000,000(!!!)
Her detectives Poirot and Miss Marple are still on British TV every single week. Mistress of the "whodunnit"! Her books seem incredibly "creaky" by today's standards but she's very popular on television. Her detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple can be seen on British screens every week, and new productions based on her 66 mystery novels  are still being made.
Her play The Mousetrap is the longest-running stage production in recorded history. Opening in 1952, it's STILL GOING after SIXTY-ONE YEARS!!!

AUDIO: ENID BLYTON INTERVIEW
She was the most successful children's author of all time and one of my favourites. When I want "inspiration" I read her Famous Five books, which are delightfully PI (politically incorrect!)
Her prose might be rather plain, but it's really readable.
Americans seem not to have heard of her, but she's a pillar of British culture. Very famous indeed within these shores!

. 

VIDEO: BARBARA CARTLAND (WITH JAR JAR GABOR (WHATEVER HER NAME WAS))

Barbara Cartland is supposedly the second-bestselling British writer of ALL TIME

(Have YOU ever read one of her books? I haven't!)
In her final years she was knocking out one slim historical romance per fortnight ~ publishing 24 titles per year, each of which would sell a million copies around the world. Frequently appeared on British TV extolling the virtues of vitamins and reprimanding the modern proclivity to sex before marriage!

A Frantic Post

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

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

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

I'M SO EXCITED!

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

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

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

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

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

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

HARDHOUSE ACADEMY 7TH BIRTHDAY, BRIXTON ACADEMY...

¡Quiero aprender español!/+ my "love affair" with HEROIN: how it REALLY BEGAN!

YESTERDAY I DUG OUT my old £30 ($44.70) Spanish Linguaphone course and had a bash at hablando en español. I did moderately well. Spanish is "cognate" with French (both languages being forms of "baby Latin") and I have a French A level (higher school certificate). But a lot of the little words you'd use day-to-day are different. Eg bed = le lit = la cama; apple = la pomme = la manzana; town = la ville = la ciudad; suitcase = la valise = la maleta and so on. Other day-to-day words are cognate with the French but not English eg customs (at the airport) = la douane = la aduana. But the higher vocabulary is similar to both English and French eg electricity = l'électricité = la electricidad; Liberty - Equality - Fraternity = liberté égalité fraternité = libertad igualdad fraternidad.

As far as I know, Spanish is the easiest major language for native speakers of English, after Italian (Italy is one European country I'd really like to go to. The Hungarian support worker at Binky's halfway house says the Italians "have everything: beautiful countryside, beautiful art and the cities: Venezia, Bologna, Milano, Napoli, Roma...

All I have seen of Spain is a tiny part of the Costa del Sol around Málaga: Mijas Costa, the (inland) clifftop town of Rhonda... I have spent just under an hour in Madrid, where I left the railway station to wonder at the vastness of the city stretched out on the plain below me as far as the eye could see... oh yes and Algeciras and the boat to Tangier from where I took the trains to Marakech, Fez, Rabat and Oujda but my 1991 Moroccan adventure is another story...

¡Well my depression seems to have cleared! ¡And I actually felt a rush of Spanish-induced excitement! ¡¡Wow!! ¿Do you like my Hispanic upside-down punctuation marks? Bloody hell I'm glad that shitty mood has cleared. Some days last week I was starting to feel truly horrendous. I phoned my folks who seemed to think the dismal voice was drug-induced. But I was wide awake and a hell of a lot more cheerful than before I banged up smack just to make it through the day.

I'm engaging with groups a lot better at the druggieclinic I attend. I'm not sure methadone is "working" for me as well as it's meant to. I told my worker that if I can't make an improvement I'm thinking of going to a private clinic who will prescribe XR Morphine Sulphate Tablets (MSTs as they're known on the street). My worker said that any improvement is down to me. Fair dos, but methadone is supposed to be a "heroin substitute" and if staying off the gear is really such hard work, requiring iron willpower and I feel so drastically better on street gear then the methadone really is NOT substituting for heroin at all. It's just masquerading as a substitute. It's hard to get MSTs on the NHS in the UK, but in other countries like Austia and Australia they're used routinely as the second-line treatment for patients like me (there are a lot of them) who don't take well to methadone treatment. MSTs are time-release pills, taken twice a day. I have experience of oral morphine in syrup form. I drank about 240mg, fell asleep in the late evening, and woke up feeling about a hundred times better than I'd ever felt waking up on methadone (which usually entailed a gasp of panic as my body, supposedly held on the "substitute" drug, cried out for lack of heroin. I didn't "gauwch" (no heroin-induced stupor) and I wasn't "high"; I just felt perfectly OK. They like to tout methadone's "lack of heroin-like 'high'". But nobody I know talks of a heroin "high". When you're as opiate-dependent as I am, heroin is a drug for survival. Junkies who want to get "high" will pipe crack ~ and I haven't done that in a long long long long time.

My biggest thing against MSTs is that other people, on coming off methadone or suboxone ~ neither of which make you feel very good ~ say they feel "really depressed". So depressed, in fact, that two people I know ended up back on methadone/suboxone within weeks of detox and a third went screaming back to heroin. (That was Lucky, my good friend who died.) I do feel really depressed (episodically) on methadone. My hope is that, in sticking with a drug that makes me feel shitty as methadone does, I'm facing the inevitable misery upfront ~ before detox, rather than after... (There is some logic in this?... Surely...) That the transition from very little methadone to none at all will be easier for me and less of a psychological (not to mention psychiatric) step down...

The final matter is that ALL my severe mental problems flared drastically and really came to the fore the time I gave up heroin for many weeks, living on methadone alone. For all I know methadone could be causing all this manic-depressive psychosis. And at its peak it really was full-blown delirious manic psychosis ~ with me so incoherent I couldn't even speak English. At all I didn't even know it was possible to go crazy like that.... If I DO find out methadone has caused all this I SHALL BE VERY UPSET INDEED. And will seriously consider suing the clinic for malpractice. Because I SAID how dodgy I felt on methadone and NOBODY EVER LISTENED. 

My prospective new worker says MSTs are completely out of the question and says if I need to up my dose of antipsychotics that's for my GP to do. Well I don't see that I need to see a GP to take even MORE drugs to counteract SEVERE side-effects of another drug (methadone) I never really wanted to be on (would never in a million years have chosen that if the clinic had offered a true range of alternatives)... oh I don't know I'm just really unhappy on my progress on 20mg methadone. I should be far happier. Should be 100% clean and off all drugs by now (somehow I knew that was never going to happen).

I suppose my point is this: having seen over years many people of different ages, intelligences, backgrounds etc doing pretty much the same on methadone ~ ie, they take it when nothing better's on offer but as soon as they can get their hands on heroin, they do it. I've seen old people blowing their pensions on gear. Then they go back to the clinic thinking they've failed. Well MAYBE METHADONE HAS FAILED THEM! All I know about methadone is I WANT TO GET AS WELL CLEAR OF THAT SHIT AS FAST AS I POSSIBLY CAN. I hate it, resent it, LOATHE MYSELF FOR COMPROMISING ON A DRUG THAT IS WELL KNOWN TO BE EVEN MORE ADDICTIVE THAN HEROIN AND HARDER TO WITHDRAW FROM! (The clinic never told me that little fact before putting me on it ~ another thing I might sue them for.)

And you know, with a convoluted life story like mine, it's very difficult to remember the precise whys and wherefores... well:~~~ THE TRUTH ABOUT ME AND HEROIN came to me yesterday morning, first thing on awakening. The ONLY REASON I ever asked someone to get me heroin in the beginning was that I was so unhappy I wanted to kill myself.I truly was dead-set on dying. ~ And I knew heroin overdose was supposed to be the nicest way to die. You fall asleep and never wake up. So I gave an Indonesian man (one of the few non-students I knew) £50 to get me half a gram (back in 1992 heroin cost £10 a point and if he could have got it for any cheaper than £50 I didn't begrudge him pocketing the difference. I fully intended to snort the whole lot in the bath. If I didn't OD, I hoped I'd drown...

A few days later he came back to me saying he couldn't get it (couldn't be bothered, more like). I still had a ridiculous, botched attempt at overdosing and drowning myself. It obviously didn't work (well I'm still here, aren't I?) But about FIVE YEARS LATER this same person sold me a £20 deal of powder cocaine at a rave in Norwich (only time I've ever scored snorty coke) saying he "had a bit of brown in a drawer" if I'd like to come back to his. Of course I was round like a shot ~ I'd always wanted to sample heroin purely out of curiosity. He was dealing the stuff by then and said I could have as much as I could smoke. So I smoked a full £20 deal, which astonished him. Then I went home with another £20 deal. And that was my introduction to heroin. My point being: if I hadn't sincerely wanted to kill myself I'D NEVER HAVE GOT INTO HEROIN TO START WITH. You see ~ IT WAS ALL ABOUT DEATH TO BEGIN WITH!

I'm sorry to end on a negative note. I'm thinking maybe I ought to write out my life story. I find telling the truth distances me from the facts. I want to be as remote from them as possible... I'll retell my life to avoid EVER RELIVING IT AGAIN. I mean, it doesn't matter if no "real" publishers are interested: I'll dump it on ebook, told by "Anonymous"... (or "by Gledwood": whichever).

I'll leave my closing paragraph to Google Translate:~~

Entonces, espero que tengas todo bien. Lo siento, no he visitado ninguno de vosotros. No he estado alrededor. Me siento mejor ahora. ¡Guau, me siento bien de estar vivo!

So, I hope you're all well. Sorry, I have not visited any of you. I have not been around. I feel better now.Wow, it feels good to be alive!

Illustrated: Rhonda; Mijas; 30mg morphine XR; methadone bottle; methadone 20mg;  brown heroin; death; e-reader ...

LINK: WHY METHADONE DOESN'T WORK (Guardian newspaper)
 

Methadone is a highly addictive synthetic opiate, more addictive than heroin and harder to withdraw from, but it survives the digestive system and so does not need to be injected. Most addicts loathe it. They call it green gunk and grimace as they swallow. All of today's addicts have been coming to the pharmacy for months, some for years. And that's the problem.

And what of those heroin addicts not in treatment? They visit me regularly for clean needles to inject filthy brown street heroin. There is growing evidence to support treating these long-term relapsing addicts with pure heroin. A blueprint for the requisite regulatory changes has been created, but until the laws are changed they must remain thieves and prostitutes, rather than patients, victims of legalised social neglect.

Working Out What to Work At

I'M IN A FUNNY MOOD TODAY ("today being yesterday, Friday). I got to reading books and listening to music and watching Helen Mirren starring as The Queen (yet again) last night and didn't realize how late it was until I saw the foreign satellite box was showing me a time of 2am. Then I went to bed in hat, coat and scarf (because it's that cold and I can't afford to keep the fanheater belting it out all night)... only to wake again at FIVE A.M. unable to sleep. I thought I needed more methadone so I drank that... and went into a long internal rant of the type I usually only make when I have some serious complaint I want to make (usually to the methadone clinic) or some ranting blog piece I want to post but the computer isn't there and I'm rehearsing what I'm gonna say. Or I'm becoming manic. I carried on ranting in a most irritated fashion inside my head till past eight o'clock and then distracted myself by phoning the DSS ("DWP" as they call themselves now) to find out when my benefits are getting paid. Suddenly, at the sound of a kindly human voice, I was most cheerful and chatty. I'm now getting my money on Tuesdays, not Mondays, which put me in terror of the electricity running out on Emergency, so later that morning Binky lent me a tenner.

When I'm on my own I feel stone cold normal. But whenever the phone rings, or I'm in the company of another person ~ whoever that may be ~ suddenly I'm acting and feeling half-drunk: lively and verbiose. I just wish I could keep this good mood going all the time. [And I'm trying to keep careful track of my moods: hence these notes.]

I got to musing about my True Job Prospects (and not the illusiory ones; I mean, if I truly had my pick of professions I'd go for Head of State (obviously ~ and not for a mere four years like a poxy American president ~ it would have to be a lifelong position to suit me... if not hereditary). And if I put my talents to full use, I'd be a bestselling writer. Plus a magazine editor and publisher. And a maker of fine fragrance. And a jewellery designer with lines on sale via Bulgari (for the real stuff) and the home shopping channel (for cubic zirconia). My other ambitions are to design a bestselling board-game and a computer game. To appear in a French film. To release a hit single and make an album. And to become a great poet with my works appearing on teeshirts, mugs, fridge-magnets etc (far better way of making money out of poetry than books! Who buys poetry books nowadays?) And to make bestselling poetry CDs with the poetry performed against a backdrop of whooshing ambience with chirping birds, whalesong etc in the background. These are just a handful of my ambitions. And they are real ambitions. You can think what you like, but with half a chance I will go for them all ~ and I'm fully intending to contrive that chance myself.

But failing that: working for someone else. How the hell am I meant to explain on whatever form I have to fill in (and surely it's NOT the initial application form; that would be just too brutal) that I'm supposed to be a schizophrenic manic-depressive? Who the hell's going to want to employ me then? That's why I need this chat with the temp agency. I'm going to walk in somewhere and give the unvarnished truth (no drug references though, and no medical details except the names of the conditions, of which I have to inform potential employers, in order to qualify for protection under the Disability Discrimination Act 2005. So I was thinking about this, and musing on what the hell would happen if I suddenly became manic enough to believe I can say and do precisely as I please no matter who's watching? Or so depressed I can't be bothered to change clothes or shower for weeks on end? And my life and the prospect of anything better seemed such a morass that I switched off and switched the TV on instead...

Somebody somewhere, please give me some perspective on this. I'm not really mad, (...) right~~? I could go mad again... or I could not. I still hear voices every day, but they're not the ultra-real voices ~ utterly indistinguishable from a real person right next to me telling me things wonderful or irrelevant about myself and the world... I know my voices now are not accoustically real. Example: yesterday the following information beamed at me from the pavement: You are looking wonderful! So I told the pavement, Oh yes I know ~ even if I do say so myself! But I knew this was a psychic dream, not the reality of ordinary people. As long as I can keep the two realities: that of relatively low-grade "symptoms" and that of everyday working people, separate then surely I should be fine enough to work amongst the People myself..?

What should I do? Should I follow my heart, my head or my Dreams? I want to commence writing a novel. But which novel to write? I have ideas for at least four that I could pen tonight. And another ten more ready for next year... I'm only hampered by a wavering sense of morality plus my own inextricable laziness. But ~ ha! ~ come to think of it, I know what I'm writing: VALERIE: THE PRISON EMAILS ~ my "respectable" Australian heroin-addicted narcotics-trafficking housewife and mother's outermost rants.

OK so it's all settled ~~ but before I get a book advance big enough to buy a four-bedroom flat opposite Harrods, should I get a "normal" job too? And can I even do one? The more I think about it, the more terrified I am. I remember office politics. And I remember the stultifying culture of enforced "normality" that prevails in the corporate workplace (two of my old jobs were with large corporations, the type of place that uses its own custom-made software so a weeks' IT-training is required before you can really begin...) Akh. Ukh. I don't know I don't know I don't know. And the British system is NOT kind or understanding to anybody who ever needs to vacillate between work and benefits (which I really wouldn't want to do, but face it there's a chance I might HAVE to...) plus I haven't even considered the fact that I'm still on methadone, still sporadically chipping at the Heroin, still not clean from that drug. I don't drink. At all these days. And I touch no other intoxicating substances apart from heroin and caffeine (the caffeine gets me way more out of it these days anyway)... what am I going to do? And what if I have a cup of tea at work and it makes me suddenly go bipolar?

SOMEBODY GIVE SOME ADVICE, PLEASE!

Music ~~~~~~~ Barber's Adagio for Strings
I love this tune...

William Orbit/Ferry Corsten mix



Longer version of the same (sans video)



Sung version by the choir of Trinity College, Cambridge with transcendently beautiful, mind-expanding cosmic visuals by NASA



Illustrated: Birds of Paradise animation...

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Monte Carlo Cool

I HAVE JUST ENDURED yet another session of crapping on about drugs in a group. It's so exhausting having to be respectful of other people's sobriety when really all I wanted to say and ~ ha! ~ I did say it was ~ WHAT'S SO WRONG WITH TAKING HEROIN ANYWAY? The only thing wrong with it, as far as I can see is that it's too expensive and illegal.

So when I was put the inevitable question: So why do you want to stop? And do you actually want to stop? I said Well I wanna stop because I'm so BORED of being a junkie and besides it's socially unacceptable and now I'm old I wanna be respectable and not just a great inflated raving hypocrite who still uses on the sly (like Valerie, Australia and the world's Greatest Housewife Heroin Dealer).

Also I intend to become the Andy Warhol of my generation (and I'm not put off by being "old": old, after all, is the new young). I wanna do something new with my life and I don't want to do it on drugs. By Andy Warhol,

I mean the Andy Warhol of children's books. Something like that. Also I want to become a great painter because new canvasses can go for millions these days. Also I plan on becoming a shameless social climber. Well I want to meet interesting people: great artists, fashion designers, photographers, writers, polar explorers and the like. I'd like to meet a real live titled aristocrat ~ just for the novelty value. I've never knowingly met a true upper class person in all my entire life. The crème de la crème of international society shall flock to my fabulous club nights. They will be like a more glamorous Monte Carlo version of Studio 54 (I won't live in London when I'm rich ~ the taxes are too high). I'm also planning to go into business setting things up and finding things for people with too much money and not enough time. Example: if Elizabeth Taylor were alive and wanted to dispose of her Bulgari emeralds on the quiet, I'd broker the deal for her. (Why do you think I want to mix with the rich and the fabulous? To make money off them, of course!) I'd specialize in houses, yachts, planes, art and jewellery. All the stuff I really love! I might also set up an introduction agency for billionaires who want to find heiresses who aren't gold diggers. That would be a good one. I'd make my introduction fee a cool quarter million euros ($322,450.28)... Would that be too much? Or not enough? I don't want to sell myself short...

Anyway back to the drugs. Boring, huh. No more drugs for me. I haven't used for two whole days! Or three actually... maybe... whatever... I can't remember.

There's not much else to post except my elevated mood is falling! How terrible is that. I hate feeling human and fallible and normal. I actually deigned to pick up my writing last night and the last page I wrote was amazing. I wrote it when I thought I was in a hurry or couldn't concentrate and it just goes to show that genuis is unreliable. Because usually when I write something I think is marvellous it turns out to be crap!

Here's some hardcore trance music. Do you know I've just found out the music I really like is called "hard trance" ~ how pathetic is that? To love something dearly your whole life through (from 1998 onwards) and not even know the name of it? As per usual the first track is crap but about 4 mins in it starts getting good (that's the "Dreams" track I posted up before). And I really like the one after it that sounds like aliens in the forest sawing away at a Giant Redwood-sized magic mushroom....



Illustrated: Monte Carlo; Andy Warhol; Elizabeth Taylor's Bulgari emeralds that I want to sell...
BTW: the whole lot went for $24,799,000 (£15,871,360/€19,095,230) ~ which I suppose is a reasonable price but I'm sure I could have got more... but hey if I took just a 5% cut of that, I'd have $1,239,950 (£793,568/€954,761.50) ~ not bad for a day's work...

♥ ♢  ♧  ♤ ◘ ♫☺♥ ♢  ♧  ♤ ◘ ♫☺♥ ♢  ♧  ♤ ◘ ♫☺♥ ♢  ♧  ♤ ◘ ♫☺♥ ♢  ♧  ♤ ◘ ♫☺♥ ♢  ♧  ♤ ◘ ♫☺♥ ♢  ♧  ♤ ◘ ♫☺♥ ♢  ♧  ♤ ◘ ♫☺♥ ♢  ♧  ♤ ◘ ♫☺

Fictitious First Attempt

I'M TRYING MY HAND at writing fiction (again). I'm writing for children, which is, in a way, even harder than writing for adults. Nothing I put seems well enough put and everything I say I want to hack around and say again differently. I used to think I had some mastery over words but now I'm not so sure. I don't think I will ever be "the greatest". (Nearly everything I do I want to be the best at ~ at least, this used to be the case...)

My one goal now is to be the best I can at writing like "me". One thing I do have going for me is that I am a true original. I have deliberately avoided looking at the competition because I already have ideas for more than five books and I don't want to be influenced by current fashions. So far I have only written about four pages.

I cannot waste my life any more. I have to get this down and perfected and IN PRINT.

Despite this my mood feels a bit low and dismal. It feels like midwinter is right around the corner ~ which, of course, it is.

Well I've got to go; I have nothing else to say online. I'm saying it all on paper. I hope one day finally to get published ~ and I mean properly published by real publishers who know how to promote books right around the world in all the major langauges.

But before that I have to write the bloody thing.

OK I'm off. Bye!


Illustrated: part of Roald Dahl's original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory manuscript...




music...


PENDRAGON FLOAT, NOTTING HILL CARNIVAL
I hate the carnival. I have been about four times and never had as much fun as I thought I would.
But I did used to love Pendragon...



MARK SINCLAIR ~ PENDRAGON ~ THE FRIDGE, BRIXTON



******************************************************************************************

On Coping Styles...

うつ病への対処の方法
THE LIBRARY BOOK I have been reading, Madness Explained by Richard P Bentall, outlines four common approaches to dealing with depression.

They are 1 Rumination or brooding on one's problems 2 trying to solve the perceived source of one's difficulties 3 distracting oneself away from depressive thoughts or feelings and 4 engaging in potentially risky or dangerous activities that raise the mood.

People sometimes seem to mistake my explanatory style of blogging for my habitual thinking style. Which it is not, at all. Usually when I'm depressed there's no straightforwardly simple change I can effect in the short term that will get me away from the consequences of my problems. So my usual coping style is most definitely number 3 ~ DISTRACTION ~ and this is why I've been known to spend such ridiculous lengths of time pinging about the internet, thinking about anything except that which bothers me when I'm offline!

As I say, people tend to assume that the rather ponderous or analytical way in which I tend to express myself to others reflects my personal cognitive style. A couple of years ago (probably 3 years ago: before the psychotic manic episodes and schizoaffective diagnosis) the mental nurse down at the methadone clinic, on hearing me out for several hours, seemed to assume that anxiety lay at the root of my problems and gave me factsheets on how to deal with obsessively worrysome thoughts that were basically addressed to the person I used to be nearly 20 years ago!

I saw a psychologist when I was 24, who gave me a formal mood test that revealed high levels of depression coupled with low anxiety. By this time I had given up caffeine and the constant anxiety that had plagued my young self had already mercifully vanished...

So Wow! Distraction is good ~ and ~ Wow! For once in my life, I'm actually doing something RIGHT... !!

But Dr Bentall did point out that the Distractional Style that works so well against my depression is one of the very worst possible ways of dealing ~ surprise surprise ~ with bipolar mania! And is likely to make the manic state, marked as it is by extraordinarily high levels of distractability, even worse.

SO NOW IT'S YOUR TURN: CONFESS!

How do you deal with depression? Do you fit neatly into any one of the four coping styles?

1: Ruminating and Brooding
2: Trying to directly solve the perceived cause of your bad feelings and low mood
3: Distraction away from depressive thoughts
4: Engaging in potentially high-risk activities to raise your mood...?

Come on, answers in the comments box:~
PLEASE CONFESS NOW!

PS: 21:30 hrs. I've just realized that just about everyone is going to say they try to solve the root problem first, if they can. So please answer assuming that step has been taken: option 1, 3 or 4...

PPS I also realized that committing suicide could be interpreted as taking option 2.( However misguided that may be...)

anyway... ANSWERS NOW, PLEASE!

The Beautiful Lovebirds

I SAW a pair of lovebirds today. Outside the paper shop, chirping merrily back and forth, then eyeing you suspiciously if you ventured too close. It would have been kinder to the birds to hang them higher up. Birds feel distinctly uncomfortable when they have to look up at copious random passers-by. Even if they are oo-ing, aah-ing and cooing all over them.

My local birdery once had a single lovebird on sale. If you get just the one, it falls in love with YOU. I would love to have lovebirds. (They're no more expensive than budgerigars!)

I had an appointment at the drug clinic this morning. But it's two weeks until my script runs out. So I rescheduled for next week. I'm getting a new worker. I hope the new one is as kindly as the old one. And I hope he's more efficient. He was supposed to be getting me an appointment with mental health services when I was suicidally depressed. About TWO MONTHS ago. Though I never told him exactly how bad I felt. I'd never trust a drugs worker any further than I could throw one!

The real reason I wanted to get off methadone so badly, by the way, was so that I could die Clean. ~ No risk of having to do Cold Turkey in the afterlife!

My dose is currently a flat 30mg. Next time, I might ask for 25. Dead or alive, I still want off that repugnant crap!

I keep getting symptoms of mania. Racing thoughts. Pacing back and forth. Laughing fits. Cannot sleep at night. Valium Marilyn thinking I needed the loo because I wouldn't keep still. My other friend Greg Arious convinced I'd been at the crack. Even his highly annoying and insulting paranoid schizophrenic friend thought I was off my head on drugs when I hadn't taken ANYTHING. I told Greg Arious it was a NATURAL HIGH. Something with which most drug addicts are completely unfamiliar!

We all got free Chinese dinner last night! The paranoid schizophrenic was very generous.

As for my mental "state" ~ it's not even hypomania. My mood is pretty normal most of the time. Sometimes [in the past] some of the signs appear then disappear as quickly as they came. Doesn't mean it's necessarily any "episode".

I am determined to focus my energies anew on my children's book. Haven't penned a word for 3 days since I came to a standstill where a piece of well thought-out dialogue was required.

Still I was up till at least 5am last night so I could have written it then! My mind was crystal clear by that time. But I ended up reading the Famous Five and actually being able to follow what they were doing. When you can't even focus on a children's book [like the night before!] then your attention span has gone pretty terminal! They've just found sunken treasure. Julian and Dick are heaving it out of the river, while the girls look passively on! The creaking 1950s dialogue has me doubled up in laughter.

Well I have to go-go. Too many things to do!!

SAK NOEL ~ PASO (NINI ANTHEM)




SAK NOEL ~ PASO (CLUBMIX) beauty pageant video

 

 ALICE DEEJAY  ~ WILL I EVER

 

Rehab

I HAVE FINALLY DECIDED TO ENTER A PROFESSIONAL DETOX UNIT to come off the remainder of my opiate habit. This should happen in 4-6 weeks. My prescribed methadone is at a flat 30mg daily (no longer tipping down on a 2-weekly basis) but I'm using a good 10-15mg (bought on the street) on top of that. Reason being I used heroin every day for over a month, giving myself a double habit that I now have to wean myself off. I didn't DARE tell the clinic about this. I trust them little enough as it is. All I'm doing is pouring out that extra juice in the early hours, and making sure I pour out less and less each day. Until eventually I'll be back to that flat 30mg. I cannot WAIT to get off this noxious gloopy crap as quickly as possible. Originally I wanted a "community" detox because I felt the longterm gradual reduction would suit me better. But what it's actually turning into is a type of ultra slow low-grade torture. I'd rather do 10 days of hell in the unit and come out squeaky clean than weeks and weeks of semi-suffering. My biggest problem previous attempts at rehab was that I didn't sleep AT ALL. Everyone claims not to sleep in rehab. Well I can tell you, they did. Because I stayed up all night watching them doing it. I was lonely and suicidal and couldn't even talk to the night staff, because the night staff had been working all day and needed the sofa to sleep on.

The difference this time is in the wonders of Seroquel (quetiapine) which I'm currently not taking because it didn't make me any less moody, didn't stop me hearing "voices" (which were mostly nonsense syllables and echoes; I only hear crystal clear voices when I'm ravingly psychotic) and basically made me ridiculously tired all the time, despite the fact that I took the entire dose at night. Well the advantage of Seroquel is it does make you sleep exceptionally long and deeply. So I've decided to stay off it until the day I go in (when you have to declare any outside medications you're on). Then I'll go back on the full dose, which should knock me sideways. Meaning I might, if I'm lucky, sleep like a baby throughout this entire nightmare they call "detoxification". My worker told me the entire thing should be over in ten days. Ten days to freedom! Imagine that!! I can't wait. I now have as full a plot as one can ever hope for in advance for the KIDDIES' BOOK I'm going to write. Because it's an animal story it really has to be for the 6-10 year old range, though it will be a proper novel, not a picture book. Novels in this category rarely exceed 15-20,000 words so I should be able to produce a workable first draft within a month. If only I can sit down, focus and WRITE THE DAMN THING. I know from past experience that self-discipline and routine are the key to producing any manuscript. Not inspiration. Inspiration is what you need to get yourself going. Discipline keeps you going. Currently I have the inspiration. In fact, I'm on a high. I'm planning my story to be one of a set of at least three, because children like serial characters. Of course if I could I'd write 20 or more books in the same series, but I'm planning on producing three in a row. That's only about 45,000 words, about HALF the length of an entire adult novel! I can't tell you what my tale is about. Except that it's going to be brilliant. (But of course.) I've been reading Michael Jackson: The Magic, The Madness, The Whole Story by J Randy Taraborrelli. I love Michael Jackson. For years he has inspired me to greatness. Perhaps some of that magic will rub off on my book? I hope so.

Oh and my friend Paddy Paddster gave me his Webster's. For over five years I have been dictionary-less after my old landlord threw half my possessions on the street and my beloved Chambers got stolen. My vocabulary has suffered no end. I used rarely if ever to encounter words I didn't understand. Now I'm coming across them all the time. I know Websters is an American dictionary, but who cares? I'm pretty sure I know the differences in spelling, which for a children's author are crucial. The matrons of Middle England would never tolerate their offspring being entertained by stories printed in transatlantic prose! Oh and last but not least I stubbed my toe so badly on a metal security door that my left foot is bathed in blood, the sock stuck fast and I could barely walk. The toe isn't broken, neither is the nail, though it does feel that way. So I'm in the wars yet again. Apart from that I'm in a really good mood today. Finally and at long long last an end to my drugs nightmare might be in sight! Wow!! PS WHY DOES THE NEW BLOGGER REFUSE TO RECOGNIZE NEW PARAGRAPHS? What do I do to paragraph out my work like an ordinary person? If anyone knows the answer PLEASE LET ME KNOW..!!