Down. Out. Whatever.

THE "HYPOMANIA" I so thoroughly enjoyed disclaiming experiencing, which was most certainly REAL has almost entirely withered and died. Yesterday I was so tired I couldn't even watch Helen Mirren in The Queen (again) without falling asleep. So I went to bed in the mid-afternoon and awoke around ten or eleven PM not feeling good. Then I took a tiny bit of quetiapine (my antipsychotic, which I'm meant to be on at 300mg every day) and finally drifted off again after one AM. I had a dream about going on holiday to India with a geat group of friends. Only our hotel room was over a river and the vivd blue sea was fenced off for five miles with huge, bizarre plants growing along the beaches. The swimming pools all along the length of the road on which we were staying were all for guests of other hotels. I kept thinking of Louise and Tilly Bagshawe, the chick-lit writers and how terrifying it must be to depend for one's livelihood on something as capricious as the sales of paperback novels.

I woke up experiencing pervasive mental discomfort, induced by the dream, that carried on all morning. I only got up at 11AM. I felt too depressed to do anything. So I didn't bother showering. I was fully clothed anyhow and utterly freezing cold. So I went down the post office where the enormous queue was moving so torturously slowly I could barely handle being there. Then I phoned an idiot foreign drug dealer. I said "I'm just checking you're around," and he said "why you checking I'm around". He is so stupid. So I had to actually spell it out: "BECAUSE I WANT TO COME AND SEE YOU. I'LL BE ABOUT TEN MINUTES". I got on the bus feeling horrible. I saw this dealer. These days I get no pleasure or excitement from the process of scoring; if I feel anything I feel stressed and just wish I could be at home. So I got two "bees" for £20. Then I had to go to the needle-exchanging pharmacy where another drug addict was getting his and he looked at me weird, presumably because of my weird speaking voice. Then I went into McDonalds and that was almost unbearable. I had to wait for them to make my £1.49 double cheeseburger from scratch as I stood there, tired and sweaty and just wanting to be somewhere else.

Almost all the symptoms of hypomania have vanished, except for an occasional indistinct generalized feeling of excitement, which I thoroughly doubt another person could notice or pick up on. Music which only a couple of days ago induced in me sensations of highest exaltation is still going around my head but I only feel irritated by it. My own thoughts, if they are "racing", feel oppressive. They weigh on my brain. The bus-ride home took a hopelessly long time with sunlight not blocked by tall enough buildings, shining straight to the back of my brain and it felt like it was poisoning me. I drudged all the way up my own neverending street, tired and utterly freezing cold, not feeling at all good. Binky rang me twice today and I can barely bear speaking to her. So I got home and took two thirds of the heroin and ~ WOW! ~ I feel a lot better. The indistinct but torturous sensations of physical discomfort that I've experienced all week ~ even when feeling manic ~ have evaporated. And the horrible mental discomfort that I've only felt since crashing down is markedly reduced since banging up this gear. (Otherwise I wouldn't want to be typing any of this now.)

If you're wondering why all the indulgent details, this is for my own purposes. I want to remember exactly how mood swings really feel, in detail. My memories of the past two weeks are so fragmented, they're like a pack of playing cards thoroughly shuffled then scattered all over the floor. For all my complaints at the time that I didn't feel that high, I felt normal, I now remember last week as a period of massively elevated moods. My emotional reaction to music, lights and colours became so extreme it actually outdid Ecstasy. I might have compared my emotional upswings to MDMA or other drugs but they're never exactly the same. While the "hedonic activation" of MDMA is there, the "lovey-dovey-ness" is almost entirely absent. I'm thinking of writing a book about Mood Disorders ~ for sufferers and their families and for medical professionals looking for a more personal viewpoint. One thing I want to do is explain how to differentiate the symptoms and behaviour a person high on speed or coke might display in contrast to the far more expressive, expanisve and excitable highs of mania. One person we know was actually diagnosed with suspected LSD intoxication because one thing she said, among a great many others, implied that this was the case. This person, when she is ill, will speak aloud many of the ideas racing through her mind as if they are statements of fact. When I last saw her she also said she was having Jesus' baby and Sting's baby and that we couldn't go outside because of the snipers on the roof. The staff should really have known better.

Well I must go and extract £60 from Binky. She owes me money and if I don't get it now she'll only go and spend it on earrings. Or something.

Ukh! I've just remembered why I felt so dreadful this morning. It's only four days till Xmas, which I'm doing at Binky's mental health hostel; and I was wondering how on earth I'm going to cope...

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



FIND YOUR WAY MIX BY TEKIU TEKIU  ~~ "EMOTIONAL TRANCE"
BEVERLYBABE AND BUGERLUGS THIS IS FOR YOU...



NIRVANA: LITHIUM  ~~  THIS IS FOR YOU, ANNA GRACE ...





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

My Icy Living Conditions!

BLOODY HELL IT IS SO COLD! The milk in my fridge literally froze this morning. I kid you not. I'm not in any type of elevated mood. Or other mood. I'm just way way way too chilly. Except the heating in this internet caff's belting it out way too hot and now I'm sweating like a roasting swine! For all of you who missed it yesterday, here's an approximation of my "flying book" dream...

And here's a great whoosher of a tune:

BINARY FINARY 2000

♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫

Off My Tits on Tea!

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

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

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

♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫

Here's a really good tune:

WATERGATE: HEART OF ASIA

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

♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫

Bugerlugs' Secret: How To Make Clothes Smell Ultra-Fresh...

BUGERLUGS, my fellow heroin-addicted blog-friend gave me a tip on how to make my laundry reek overpoweringly of Fabric Softener. Add an overdose of this to the powder-drawer during the last rinse; then it will reek overpoweringly of "blue". True to her word, the only brand that really works is Blue Lenor. My local Sainsbury's sells "x4 freshness" and x"7 freshness". Only the first of these was on 2x750ml for £3 special offer but I invested in the allegedly stronger one anyhow. I had to sit through the entire rinse-cycle with pen, paper and wristwatch, timing and numbering each spin so next time I can know exactly where I am in the cycle.

Because I was so paranoid, I ended up adding two capfuls each to the second and final rinses. The recommended dose is only a half or one cap. But I want everyone in the vicinity of my specially-treated garments to go into near-anaphalaxis, so I didn't mind wasting a bit on a second-last phase that was only going to rinse it out. You have to be absolutely sure you're tipping it into the very end of the wash, otherwise it'll only get drenched out leaving barely the faintest aroma behind.

True to Bugerlugs' word, only Lenor is potent enough ~~ and it absolutely must be blue Lenor. She has experimented with every other colour and nothing else works. By the time the final mind-blowingly extended nuclear-strength spin was done, it was too dark to creep into the yard to peg them out, and I was terrified that fresh air might blow all the artificial "blueness" away.

So they've been on my Ikea indoor hanger. They smell OK, but next time I'm adding ten capfuls, just to make sure. I want people's eyes to water when they go near me and I want my entire flat to smell like Valium Marilyn's place. She spends the twilight of her days in a beautiful top-floor apartment reclining chaise-longue-style in front of panoramic HD cable television. I keep warning her not to fall out with her son, who pays the cable bill, because without National Geographic, Discovery and Animal Planet, life as she knew it would be over...  And her flat reeks of fabric softener too...

By the way, Bugerlugs: there is a most unpleasant warning on the bottle saying never to use Lenor on bedlinen or children's clothes and never ever to add it direct to fabric, as anything treated with their product becomes highly flammable. Offputting or what? ??~!?

I'm still sleeping marathon hours. I was in bed by two last night and woke up midday-thirty (I spend no time lying in bed awake ~ that is just too depressing ...) So I got straight up, put something on German television that I couldn't understand. Felt pissed off. And was back in bed within twenty minutes. This time I dreamed a lot. I don't like dreaming. I went back to Park Meadow in Hatfield, where I grew up. Then I was up again by three, not at all happy to be awake. I always think: if you have nothing to write then write nothing ~~ and yet this is a daily journal. So that is my non-diary for today...

Next time, maybe I'll have laundered more clothes. So wow. Maybe there will be something exciting to add to the record...

*

MUSIC
JEANETTE DIMECH: SPAIN'S BEST-KEPT SECRET
When I was ten and my Dad got remarried, he and my new step-Mum brought two of her tapes back from their honeymoon...

SOY REBELDE
"I'm a rebel"... this time with English subtitles...




EL MUCHACHO DE LOS OCHOS TRISTES
"The sad boy of eight"...




✔ ➝☨+*✔✔ ➝☨+*✔

(Bipolar) Mood Swings and Misinformation

TO SKIP to the main part, ignore the first three paragraphs...

I KEEP having recurring dreams about me on the first day of university and instead of signing up for lectures, checking out the library, shopping for books, I am down town, armed with the name of a contact I don't really know, and I'm on a quest to score gear. The entire dream consists of the never-ending rigmarole you go through in a strange town to get drugs off someone you don't know. Sometimes, when the dream gets completely ridiculous, I end up in a succession of increasingly lilliputian shops until I'm eventually curling into a ball to fit into a wendy-house-sized haberdashers. The dream ends and I've wasted day one of a supposed new life without ever getting my hands on any gear.

I woke up feeling panicky with thoughts of death. I'm not clinically "depressed" (well I don't think so). I've just been in a strange mood for days.

After a week with exceedingly poor sleep and barely any appetite at all ~ when it took all afternoon to polish off a plate of pasta ~ and me getting repeated bursts of manic or hypomanic excitement, my sleep and appetite have come back with avengeance.

Bugerlugs has come back from a mystical break in North Wales to constant depression. Like me she gets a lot of mood "issues". She sounds like she's bipolar, or at least cyclothymic. (Cyclothymia entails constant shifts between hypomania (that is: mild mania ~ no psychosis) and depression that doesn't meet the full criteria for a "depressive episode". I'm not a doctor, but if a person feels truly dreadful for days on end, especially if their sleep and/or appetite is affected, it probably is clinical depression, in which case she might be bipolar, type 2.

The difference between bipolar depression and the "normal" type is that a bipolar person cannot just pop antidepressants, which can cause the mood to switch poles or to cycle rapidly. Antidepressants are only ever used for bipolar disorder in conjunction with a mood stabilizer.

The self-help books and sites dedicated to bipolar problems will often mention that the condition typically goes undiagnosed for an average decade or more ~ and then proceed to spout the very generalizations and misleading statements that have long helped such a situation thrive!

For example, many sufferers dislike the term "bipolar" ~ encouraging, as it does, the idea that the illness is somehow a fluctuation between extreme happiness and sadness.

Mania actually means "excitement". Although they do typically feel "high", manic people are usually agitated and irritable as well, especially as the mania gets more severe. Euphoria and depression often intermingle or alternate speedily so that a severely manic person might laugh, cry and rage within the space of a few minutes ~ like a bad drunk.

There is such a huge range of feelings and behaviours associated with (hypo)mania ~ from increased energy, enthusiasm and creativity at the mild end of the spectrum to frenzied overactivity with incoherent thought and speech and delusions and hallucinations at the other that it is hard to generalize at all.

In the textbook form of the illness, mania and depression may follow one another, lasting months each, but there are usually years of normal (or nearly normal) moods between episodes. An average sufferer has "only" eight episodes in a lifetime.

But bipolar conditions can take rapid cycling forms with periods of high, low or mixed moods lasting only days or hours or minutes. Rapid cycling is more common in women, and more common still in people with substance abuse issues. Many if not most of the bipolar bloggers out there are rapid cyclers. Presumably the more of the time you experience manic-depressive symptoms, the more intertwined the illness will be with your own identity. Hence the preponderance of rapid-cycling bipolar bloggers.

It's fashionable to label the condition a "brain disorder", as if as separate from one's Self as diabetes or heart disease. But in many respects a disorder of moods must be a disorder of Self. We are our moods, after all. Descartes could more accurately have phrased his dictum: "I feel therefore I am..."

Not everyone with manic-depressive illness seems to want to present themselves this way. Anna Grace, for instance, prefers to portray herself as an Addict ~ even at the cost of attracting Haters ~ and even though she sticks loyally to her methadone, not touching street drugs for months at a time. Her bipolar problems are compounded by ADHD and a Borderline Personality Disorder, which make her mood symptoms even more unstable.

Originally I had wanted to post something to dispel the misleading generalizations about mood disorder that seem to congregate online. I'm not sure I have managed this.

Really, I wanted to write about moodswings as they affected other people; I'm bored of talking about myself.

What more is there to say about the type of "mental illness" where just about everything you think, feel, say or do can be construed as a "symptom"?

(Probably so much more, if the truth be told, that if I continued writing without stopping, I could die of old age in forty years' time with half the subject still not covered!)

So I will close the Subject here...

★ ★★ ★★ ★★

It has been boiling hot here in London. The weather Picture-Perfect. I hope you're all having a GREAT WEEKEND...



Illustrated: Bugerlugs is a breeer of Roborovski Hamsters; Anna Grace in the Rubik's Cube of time...



☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

GIVE ME ALL YOUR LUVIN' ~ MADONNA FT. NICKI MINAJ & M.I.A




☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

I Must Give Up

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

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

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

But anyway, they've all left me behind.

And here I am, trailing in the dust.





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