The Great Heroin Rip-Off Scandal!

I VERY NEARLY got ripped off for four bags of vulgar brown heroin this morning. The normal guy, who is just running for somebody else, said his man had "no B" but not to worry, he'd get it off somebody else and could be use my phone. So he rings up saying "can I see you and are you still doing the usual for £40?" And then I asked what are you making out of this? And why would you want to help me out anyway? I mean, he usually acts all friendly and promises that if I come to him with nothing he'd be only too happy to "bail" me a couple. He also pulls this "I'm only on cannabis" act ~ then asks couldn't I sort him out with 100mg of methadone. So he's one of those closet smackheads. Dealing in the stuff and using it daily and yet unwilling to admit, even to someone like me, that he has a raving problem.

So I queried: Why are you doing this for me? Surely it's four for £35 and you're keeping the fiver? And he said oh no, it's four tens for forty up here and the dealers never give discount (well mine do! Except the man who's supplying this one and I only pay £40 for four bags because they always used to be nice fat ones ~ and they're not even that any more so I don't know why I bother...) So he's claiming to be making nothing on the deal, except when he introduces five new customers to this new guy, he gets a £10 bag free.

And then I realize, not only is this guy running up the road with my money, but he also has my phone! I can be so dizzy in the morning. And then what appeared to be a crackhead and a dealer showed up, which really put my back up because I know this crackhead of old and when he started waving a handful of gear and crack at me I wasn't impressed. "If it's so amazing, you go and smoke it yourself!" I said. I grabbed the runner who still had my money and had to wrench my £40 out of his hand. Then the "dealer" started yelling at me by name, telling me to come back because he was serving up. No dealer is ever that desperate to sell. The paranoia always outdoes the money-grabbing, and it's just not cool to look that desperate for a sale. This guy did have the dealerly look about him. Tall and dressed in new-looking sportswear and the right colour skin (mixed race colour ~ I've never in my life met a heroin dealer with blue eyes and blond hair). But his eyes were so obviously drug-frazzled that I just kept on walking.

Then the runner comes back ~ junkies are nothing if not persistent ~ and keeps saying Just wait with me and my guy will sort us out. But my nerves were far too jangled by this point to waste any energy pondering who was in league with who~ and I hadn't liked the way he was so friendly to the crackhead. And how come the crackhead just happened to appear with four bags in hand right at the wrong moment? Which he was way too over-eager to flog to me. Crackheads smoke crack. They don't want to sell it unless there's something wrong with it! And that was another problem: the "drugs" he had: two heroin, two crack weren't what I'd ordered anyhow ~ I won't touch crack cocaine at all these days. It's far too vulgar. So I kept on walking and the £40-and-my-phone guy was running after me saying What are you doing? And I said Tomorrow. Tomorrow. I'll come back tomorrow. So then he swore at me because he is foreign and I vanished into the main shops...

Eventually I did score, off the guy I always used to go to. Once my dizziness had cleared, I worked out that of course Mr Runner guy was intending to pick up five tiddles for forty, keep one and pass on the four to me. So why couldn't he just tell me that? It would have made far more sense. So I scored off another guy I'd never seen in my life (old number, new man ~ the usual guy was in prison) I gave £30 for 4x10ses ~ the bog-standard price these days ~ and then I disappeared back home. It was such a chill morning, yet because I'm a junkie, my back was pouring with sweat, which is so gross...

Ukh: my elevated mood has fallen down. How terrible is that? I spent all last week insisting I wasn't hypomanic, I was Just Fabulous ~ so I MUST have been hypomanic. My mood was most certainly Up, but the Symptoms: the hyperkinesis, racing cognition, "decreased need for sleep" etc were all very minor and that's partly why I didn't believe I was mentally ill. It's true I did start Hearing Voices in the night ~ but Hearing Voices is NOT a symptom of hypomania ~ so how about that! I only think of it as a sign of madness because everybody else thinks so.

I could say here "and what's so wrong with going mad anyhow?" but I don't want to go up that path. When other people go mad there's normally a LOT wrong with it. A lot of ridiculous and bad behaviour and ranting and raving and all that but when I was mad [last year] I just thought I was fantastic. And yet did feel this inner desperation that something was badly wrong and yet I didn't know what... I mean, I was fully aware of meeting the diagnostic criteria for mania because only an idiot wouldn't, but I felt deep need of a label I could throw in people's faces: "IT'S THIS!" Talking of madness, I only KNOW that terrible crackhead with the four bags in hand because I met him in the nuthouse years ago! He gets incredibly "prang" ~ that means paranoid ~ so why on earth he insists on continuing to pipe the crack, I'll never know. He only seems to have Drug Psychosis, but his mum, so I hear, is the full cuckoo-clock schizo ~ you see it's all in the genes. I get my bad genes from my mother's side. She gets recurrent depression. Which gives me an equally elevated chance of unipolar depression and bipolar i disorder. See? No wonder I went crackers! My uncle, her brother, was an inverterate drunken gambler. One of my cousins was chucked out of school for toking Mary Juana, another called herself "the Coke Queen of South Kensington" and had a boyfriend who wanted to lug over a kilo from South America until she reprimanded him and told him not to... My other cousin is two nuts short of a fruitcake... Oh man they're all crazy. You see, it's all bad genes. But I'm the only manic-depressive junkie in the family. I wouldn't call myself a black sheep. I like to think of myself as a golden sheep with wool that twinkles in the night because when I'm Elevated that is just how I feel...

Well now I'd better go. My electricity needs topping up. My house has gone beyond chilly and into that Damp n Dank phase where it feels like a dripping wet mine-shaft ~ most unpleasant.



Right, here's some charming psycho-active trance for y'all... The music's very run-of-the-mill ~ not a single good tune until 12 mins 22 in ~ and again at 14 mins 55 and 31 mins 09 ~ but hey you can watch the kiddiewinks dancing... (And what terrible, half-hearted dancing it is! Surely this can't have been filmed in the UK~?, because the Brits are far more up-for-it than this!)



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Out of the Darkness...

初めまして。お元気ですか。
いいえ、元気ではありません。
 
WOW, I had a bad day yesterday. A really bad day.

It started off with my having to drag myself out of bed, still drugged up on quetiapine (Seroquel) my antipsycho pill (antimanic, antidepressant, antischizophrenia) that I'm meant to pop every night but had stopped for a few days when I'd realized my emergency back-up supply was drying up and I'm unable to get a repeat script till tomorrow. And then I'm asking that my dose be increased from 200 to 300mg. Because 200mg just is not working. It doesn't stop the loud thoughts I hear in my head ("thought insertion"). Or the mood swings.

I had been very moody all last week. Wave on wave of depression. Plus little flashes of hypomania. Resulting in weird head-states where I stayed up half the night feeling high and low at the same time ~ it's a bipolar thing. When that simultaneous high-low gets more severe and more intense so that you're clinically manic and clinically depressed at the same time, it's labelled a "Mixed Bipolar State".

One day I went up the road to get clean 1ml drug needles. Not one but TWO ordinarily reliable chemists informed me they had run out of 1mls and only had the 2.5ml syringes that take on a detachable orange needle that is 0.5mm rather than 0.33mm thick. Too big for my fine veins. And it makes you bleed twice as much. So I stamped home in misery and anger, telling myself on the one hadn that I felt so bad because I was so disappointed, that it wasn't clinical depression at all. And on the other that I was VERY ANGRY that my antipsycho pills weren't stopping me feeling so bad, because I felt Terrible. I told myself it would just clear. Sure enough it did clear. My mood magically lifted, lifted up and lifted higher so that I whizzed round the supermarket at top velocity singing Barbra Streisand songs, manoevring the Ragu-stacked trolley like a boy racer on speed and pretending to be an aeroplane: "Papa watch me fly..!" I stayed high for hours afterwards.

Anyway yesterday was my appointment with my drug worker. He seems to be the most clued-up worker I have ever had. And he also happens to chair the Monday morning antidrugs group. Although I hate such groups, the people who run them always seem to like me, because when I'm on form, I don't exactly hold back from expressing my opinions.

Yesterday I was not in any fit state to face a room full of crackheads who I didn't know. I felt too paranoid to let anyone look at my face, let alone share any ideas with them. I let them know how displeased I was whenever they tried to coax me into speech. (There were not one, but two drug workers at this meeting.)

So I sat there all sullen, restraining myself from running out the door. They kept on trying to get me to talk. I wasn't having any of it.

I had already made a commitment to myself (not the group) to attend the entire course of ten or twelve meetings. But I don't think I'm going to see this through. At ninety minutes they're far too long. I told him afterwards that if I can't stick with a TV prog or a DVD that long what hope do I have in a rambling group session?

I've fucked up my treatment by using heroin ton top of the methadone and told him this afterwards when we were alone in a little room and he was asking what was wrong.

Alone in a little room was all I ahve ever wanted from keyworking sessions. I am not willing to reveal the secrets of my heart to rooms full of crack-addicted strangers.

Well what are you doing keeping a blog then? I hear you enquire. As I say I do not want people looking at my face and here you don't see my face, you see a tubby little Golden Hamster. Trust me, if I could show up to Group looking like a furry little Hammy, I would.

So that is yeasterday and I'm tired. I'm not sleeping properly. I spend all night propped up in bed, surrounded by Japanese courses and Barbra Streisand discs. I no longer try to sleep when I can't. The Nytol didn't work. The quetiapine has run out.

Sorry if this is intsnsively boring. Really I don't want people looking at me or even thinking about me. I just want to disappear.

初めまして。お元気ですか。
いいえ、元気ではありません。

Sorry sorry sorry. I'm sorry for everything. I'm feeling a bit better today.

Last night I cheered myself up a bit bywatching the Jennifer Anniston film The Good Girl. About an unhappily married woman in a dissatisfied life who mees an even unhappier loner played by Jake Gyllenhaal. And their adulterous affair brings her no happiness at all. I watched it twice.

Here is my favourite clip. "Ladies ~ liquid drain cleaner. Two for $5. Shove something clean and new up your filthy pipes..."





It's 5pm. I'm exhausted already. Is "depression" really an "illness" or just an Excuse? Or is it even a Disease ~ a Brain Disease ~ like some of the more offensive webites like to say?

And PS while we're on the subject what is this new slogan BIPOLAR IS NOT CRAZY I hear? I came across it two or three times while trawling bipolar blogs last week. Considering that the condition used to be called Manic-Depressive Insanity and that at the peaks and troughs of depression as well as mania, sufferers routinely become completely delusional, hear voices and see visions. Not to mention becoming over-excited to the point of delirium, or depressed into catatonic stupor. All I can say is if THAT isn't crazy then WHAT IS?

Kay Redfield Jamison, bipolar sufferer, famed psychological researcher and professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, described severe mania as "as crazy as it gets".   

The list of bipolar sufferers who have made notable contributions to literature, music and other arts is too extensive to reproduce here. But there are barely ANY famous schizoaffective or schizophrenia sufferers.

But HERE is a story of inspiration:~~~~~~~

Eleanor Longden, 27, achieved the highest mark ever in her BSc Psychology from the University of Leeds last year... despite suffering from severe schizophrenia since the age of 18...


 
 



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