RALPH FRIDGE MEGAMIX

RALPH FRIDGE MEGAMIX 

I really like this music.

Beauty and Bipolar Moods in London Lovely London

IT'S A CHARMING SPRING AFTERNOON IN LONDON... 

I went into Town on Sunday. The place was fresh and twinkling all over in the golden morning sun...  it was as if someone had waved a magic wand over the city and teleported me to New York or Paris ... except this was LONDON, my own gorgeous lovely and adorable town. I'm always pleased to see tourists in great numbers coming to see my own private and personal territory. It's really flattering. And London is such a wondrous place. I walked from Holborn station all the way along Oxford Street past Bond Street and Selfridges.

I had a poke down New Bond Street, which is where all the designer stores and diamonds and ultra-high end stuff is to be found: Tiffany, Cartier, Harry Winston, Boucheron, Boodles, Bulgari etc etc. There's nothing like a nice 17 ct blue diamond on a Sunday morning twinkling it's head off in the London sunshine as far as I'm concerned. I wish I had someone to buy all these blue diamonds for. Come to think of it, I wish I had a couple of hundred million or so — y'know, to purchase all these blue diamonds to begin with.

I WASN'T on psychedelic drugs last time I posted; just very very tired and my brain feeling very UGHKHkkkhhhhy indeed.

Did you know Binky thought I was a crackstable still? "Crackstable" is my nice word for a crack smoker. Of course I'm not on crack. She did admit I was probably hypomanic  on these supposed "cracked out" occasions. LOADS of people have accused me of being on coke when in fact I was on nothing at all, except a naturally Elevated Mood. It IS possible to BUZZ on nothing except one's own private neurotransmitter collection y'know!

Talking of ELEVATED isn't this an effing fantastic track....




Hey I have great news I shall be BACK ONLINE before very long at all as I'm hopefully getting my OWN COMPUTER BACK. Not the same one as b4 but a wizzy new and improved version...

Did anybody see the bipolar documentary on Channel 4 last week? They showcased 3 sufferers. Paul, who was in the luscious grip of psychotic mania, a Welsh lady called Siân who had "bipolar 2" the supposedly "mild" type (it just means you don't hear things or see things or get delusional on the manic phases, which are labelled "hypomania" meaning "below mania". Lastly we saw Ashley, who was pingponging rapidly between "hypomanic" and "depressive" symptoms.

Philippa Perry, the psychotherapist who presented the show, said she believed the term "bipolar" to be a little too wide to encompass all that's crammed under its gargantuan roof these days and I agree. Ashley to me seemed more like a borderline personality disorder case than truly bipolar. True bipolar swings aren't usually triggered by comments a person might make. In fact when you're being really bipolar you can often feel totally insulated from other people's shit all together.

I've seen borderline personality disorder up close. It shares with bipolar an extreme instability of the emotions but that IS the difference. Borderline is an emotional condition; bipolar is a mood condition. Moods underlie emotions. In depression, emotions can become paralysed; in mania a person is extremely reactive and yet, paradoxically, there's a huge "don't care" component when it comes to the feelings of others.

I do reckon that there's more going on than the mere throwing of a genetic switch. And I think a bipolar state is more than just a drought or surplus of dopamine or serotonin. They sometimes theorize about a "manic defence" (and she alluded to this in a rather oblique way). The Manic Defence hypothesis theorizes that in order to avoid being slayed by negative feelings, a person instead becomes manic, grandiose and euphoric. I believe this may very well be true. But what the theory doesn't explain is why only one person in a hundred will ever experience full-blown mania during the entire course of their life. Why is it that some of us become manic, yet the overwhelmingly vast majority of us never do?

In the 1980s, when I was a teenager, I remember the term "manic depressive" being used amongst ordinary non-medical folks to denote a person who was (or had been) extremely depressed. The concept of pathologically elevated moods was quite alien to the public consciousness back then. Perhaps the younger and more chemically "enhanced" or "altered" generations have more experience of their own mood elevations to be able more easily to sympathize with maniacs and hypomaniacs... I don't know. But going back to "manic depressives"... the big irony is that all the worst cases of depression I've known or known of were without exception people with ordinary "unipolar" depression (ie these people had never in their lives been hypo/manic). Bipolar CAN involve episodes of extremely intense depression. The difference between "unipolar" and "bipolar" depression is said to be that bipolar depression tends to be shorter-lasting and when it does go away the person isn't necessarily "well"... they could well be on the way up to mania.

Anyway I'm more interested in computers of the silicon-&-plastic type than the vagaries of the human biocomputer at this point in time... I have some tech-related questions to anyone with an answer...
1. what package do you usually use for wordprocessing? Is Windows Wordpad any good?
2. what software do I need for audio/video editing? I'm talking about simple stuff, eg if I record myself giving a speech and want to chop out the boring bits, or use parts of a take-2 interspersed with take-1, that sort of thing... what package would I use for that?
3. if I want to make "photoshopped"-looking video (ie to put in surreal special effects) what package would I need then?
4. can anybody recommend a good printer for printing out text in black and white? Are lasers still better than ink jets? Because they always used to be. Laser printing always used to be waterfast, which is an advantage when you're an inveterate cocoa drinker like me and get runny ringmarks on everything...
5. what advantages, if any, do MacBooks have over PCs?
6. if I think up a 6th question I'll let you know
12 MAR 2015:
YES QUESTION 6 I'M LOOKING AT THE LENOVO M30, has anybody got any comments on this laptop?
THANX FOR YOUR HELP!

I HATE METHADONE! // BLAH! ETC...

I'VE RETUNED my satellite box (the 28.2E Freesat box). Suddenly I get 100 extra channels. Some have appeared multiple times, eg I get Renault TV (yes, by the Renault car co) 7 times in a row. Loads of stuff seems to be in Hindi and Arabic

and they're too lazy to put up English subtitles. People babbling in foreign languages really annoy me. That's why I put such an effort into learning foreign tongues. Because people talking over my head really piss me off. Eg when they make scathing comments about me in the local shops (I did used to look like a real A-grade junkie) and they don't think or don't care that their attitude is so blaringly obvious even though their words are encrypted. German/French/Spanish etc TV from 19.2E doesn't come till tomorrow.

Back to the satellite TV and bloody hell! Half the channels look like they are filmed in somebody's garden shed with a cheap Athena poster backdrop. My three favourite ones are Olive TV ~ people ranting away in African French; Sahara One which isn't North African at all, it's actually in Hindi but the programming looks really good. I really want to speak Hindi now. Abu Dhabi TV. And a channel showing mainland Chinese soap operas with Chinese subtitling. And the news from Taiwan. I can tell the difference because mainland china uses simplified characters, Taiwan uses the much prettier traditional ones. Also the Taiwanese seem to enunciate much more clearly than mainland Chinese. There was a hilarious soap opera on earlier. Some woman had a tantrum. Threw her clothes on the floor and stamped on them. Very un"Chinese" behaviour. Then they ended up in a Beijing medical clinic. I know this because I was able to read the sign behind them.

I saw a beautiful Korean film called Poetry the other night. About a woman coming to terms with an Alzheimer's diagnosis while coping with her wayward grandson. Korean is a bizarre language. It's said to be the most difficult of all major languages to reach perfection in. (What is perfection anyway?) It sounds like a cross between Chinese and Japanese. And the handwriting looks majorly weird.

My ear is growing deafer by the day. How can you get infection just from wax? I do. My ears get really itchy, right on the inside, which is why I was poking around in them to start with...

Tomorrow my methadone goes back to "normal consumption". That is, I take the bottle home and swig it when I like. The clinics will not hear this (basically because they don't give a crap about anyone's wellbeing) but finding a time when it's convenient to pick up the methadone and a time you want to drink it that coincide can be difficult. Especially if you want to knock it back at 4am. I asked the last place why, if they insisted on observing me drinking it, wouldn't the chemist deliver it to my door at this hour and my old worker just laughed. I wasn't joking. It's bad enough they treat heroin addiction with methadone in oral form, not injectable heroin, like they should do. But to expect someone to go on an hour and a half diversion every day (that's what it took to get there, wait AGES for the chemist to bother to serve me) then go back... that was beyond the pale. I felt so ill I usually had to spend 2 hours in the public library waiting for the dose to reach full potency. All the while knowing that the drug dealer on the corner would give me something that worked straight away and twice as effectively. Even when the old clinic eventually let me take my dose home they STILL insisted that when I collect two doses I must drink the dose for that day under supervision. I found this patronizing beyond words. When my old worker told me this was the arrangement I flipped my lid. But there was nothing he could do. Like the Irish gypsy, who I used to repeatedly bump into on the way in and out, once said they were "really backward". I'm much happier on 15mg than I ever was on 120, 130 or more. Because I know I'm only 15 steps from freedom. I cannot understand how any addict can "like" being on methadone. You have

ALL the disadvantages of being on heroin, except the financial one. If you have an car accident, 5mg morphine will not touch the sides. (By the way they CAN provide effective pain relief to a heroin addict if they want to: the main options are titrated diamorphine hydromorphone or morphine (whatever), ketamine, an epidural or spinal block or induced coma (propofol) ~ if they don't play ball, sue for clinical negligence.) I'm itching for a chance to avenge myself on the system, so if I were mistreated, I would. If you ever want to travel you have to ask permission (and that really gets my goat). You're still an addict, still a junkie, still beholden to a chemical and the people who supply it. And they are LESS amenable to persuasion than drug dealers. Too scared of breaking the rules. I was far happier on heroin than I've ever been on methadone. The one single lonely thrill of the present situation is being able to see THE END in sight.

I don't know how I got on to this rant. But hey that's what I'm thinking. Anna Grace is lucky in that American methadone clinics seem to open at midnight. My ideal methadone-drinking time used to be in the early hours, so that come daybreak, the dose was going full-on. If it wasn't, the chances were I would score rather than go through the rigmarole of picking up the dose. (The last clinic offered a list of about eight or ten clinics for an entire massive outer-London borough: the present one deal with twenty or so. That are far easier to get to as they're in proper urban London).

Well anyway I'm going. Want my advice? DON'T TAKE METHADONE. If you are a drug addict, get IV diamorphine instead. Jump before an express train. Do anything to avoid methdone. Best way of avoiding methadone is never to experiment with heroin to begin with.



Illustrations: from the film Poetry. She's holding up an apple because she wants to write a poem about it.....

DONK: I seriously disapprove of the cannabis leaf. (Biggest waste of time, waste of money, waste of space drug there is ~ why the hell anybody feels the need to get paranoid and concussed by a herb is beyond me but anyway have a listen.)



THIS is way better...



✔ ➝ ☨ ☨★✔ ➝ ☨ ☨★✔ ➝ ☨ ☨★

PS FOR YOU ANNA GRACE: FOLLOWING THE BETTY BOOP COMMENT ~ HERE'S BETTY BOO (WITHOUT THE P)

Dazzlingly Lucid!

I HAD A CRAZY morning. I noticed I felt a bit hyper and high yesterday afternoon and I went higher in the night and ended up copying out pages of Japanese characters. I couldn't sleep a wink. By the mid-morning my mind was pinging all over the place. If you want some entertainment, go see the post I put up around 11am. My mind was overwhelmed with ideas but I just could not compose myself to compose a coherent post and I was racing so fast I lost track long before fingers on keys could even attempt to keep up. All the while I was running lower and lower on time. Eventually I just had to click "Publish" before I got timed out.

By the way, the micro-pigs were relevant. For some reason I felt it necessary to say in Japanese, would you like to be a micro-pig, or a stream, or a dwarf?

I can't spent long here; I'm going to try and catch up on lost sleep, but I have the distinct impression my sleep has switched poles. Lately my sleep disturbance has grown very extreme. By my calculation I spent more than three quarters of the weekend unconscious. Not just duvet-diving to avoid the world (though I was doing that too) but hibernating in bed, sleeping deeply all through the day ~ and the night as well.

The doctors' surgery annoyed me this morning. I put in my repeat prescription request for my antipsychotics early because I seem to have lost a week's worth of pills. The form came back covered in highlighter pen saying it was far too early and alledging that I must have been bingeing on my own medication. This was signed by a doctor I have never seen and never want to see. When my friend Pinky also registered at this surgery, she was unlucky enough to see this Doctor Arse, as she is called (by me), who saw fit to question the value of prescribing her 750mg of Seroquel XR (which costs about £70 or $100 a pack) when dirt cheap alternatives like haloperidol with its loathesome side-effects cost pennies (and no wonder ~ that's all it's worth). Then she queried Pinky's fentanyl patch with the special dressing that stops it peeling off. Without fentanyl (an extremely powerful opioid analgesic) Pinky would be bedridden and in agony. She needs a knee replacement. Many days she can barely walk.

O man my attention span is still in bits; I forget where I was going with this.

Instead of buying heroin I've been buying CDs (I did buy a tiny bit of heroin but it did precious NOTHING). I got some pretty banging tunes by DJ Tiësto and a weird CD for £1 brand new that appears to be blank (no wonder it was cheap) I also bought Adele 21 thinking it must be good because so many people have bought it (it's outsold Michael Jackson's Thriller in the UK). How wrong I was. I hadn't realized Adele was behind that awful dirge "could have had it better" ~ if I'd known that I'd have gone nowhere near it. I gave it to Pinky and did a good salesman job saying I might detest it, but four million other people can't be wrong. By the way that woman has packed on so very many pounds she managed to go seven months pregnant without anybody realizing ~~ Adele that is, not Pinxx.

Today I bought Madonna's True Blue ~ a real 1986 blast from the past. Plus something called Everything Is Wrong by Moby.

Now what was I going to say?

Yeah I keep getting extreme mood swings. In the last seven days I've been hypomanic at least twice. Plus this morning I had full-on mania. Well it's better than being depressed. I cleaned my toilet with bleach, did the cooker top with shower cubicle spray (pound shop best) and cleaned my sink. My kitchenette is gleaming.

I'm giving the antipsychotics a break. There's nothing wrong with an Elevated Mood. Obviously I'm hoping for more Elevation. I did get fed up of people throwing me funny looks this morning. What a paradox: on no drugs I go highest of all.

Actually, come to think of it, that is completely crazy. How can they call a condition where you don't just feel Better Than Well, but Better Than Ever a psychotic mental disease? That's ridiculous.

Well I've got to go. Sainsbury's are selling Lloyd Grossman for £1 so I got Italianesque gunk called Puttanesca "I love this delicious combination of sun ripened tomatoes [what other kind of tomatoes is there?], black olives and anchovies," he drones. ~~I've got a plate of stuffed mushroom pasta fantasmagoria'd with the stuff. I lost my appetite last week. Which is all to the good. Quetiapine is notorious for turning nutters into great fat wobbling tubs of lard ~ I'm pretty sure I still weigh at least 185lbs (down from 200). I might ~ shock of shocks ~ actually lose a few lbs instead of packing on more pork.

I must dash. Lloyd Grossman's literally calling my name. Ukk ~ OK, not literally; I forgot for a moment there that I'm a schizo. If I did hear voices today they wre so mixed up in the background of bizarreness, it was mere more disquiet drizzled over mass-peculiarity.

These are two of Moby's best tracks. Very good.

PS I actually took a proper shower this morning. Instead of a glorified stripwash. Wow, I must have been feelin' good ☺.

Before you ping away, do go and be entertained by the manic crap I avalanched this morning. BTW in Japanese I was asking, what would you rather be, a little river, a little pig or a little person.

FEELING SO REAL



BRING BACK MY HAPPINESS

top tunes!!



Illustrated: a tub of lard ~ what Seroquel turns you into...


☺