OptiConfusion and Great Literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACEN OPTIKONFUSION: CLOSE YOUR EYES

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

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

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

Moods

WELL I WAS OK YESTERDAY. I cannot sleep properly. So I was awake half Tuesday night, then in bed again on Boxing Day afternoon. Then I couldn't sleep Boxing Day night either, despite having gone to bed after 3am. At about 5:30 I decided to get up again.

Then the fire alarm went off in the hall and made me feel really excited. Not irritable. Excited and high. I never used to get randomly excited until I turned officially bipolar two years ago. You see: it's changed my reactions to everything, including smoke alarms. I think the alarm's been going off, by the way, because of the water still dripping through the ceiling and that's buggered the electrics. Anyway I'm not manic. When I eventually went to bed at 6:30 I did sleep until about 2pm so that's 7 hrs 30. No real loss of sleep. And I woke up feeling depressed, ukh, and can you believe this?~~ went and scored two tiddly bags of heroin for £15. This after that supposed had my "last hit" on Xmas Day... Well, I did promise myself to give up for New Year and it's still only December 27th. I'm terrified of getting full-blown heroin dependency back, when I really cannot live without it and the methadone will not suffice at all, no matter what the dose. (I lived that way for YEARS.) The heroin hasn't lifted my mood today. I'm still dysthymic today. This means my mood is cycling in a low-grade way, or to put it another way, I'm getting "mood-swings" every day. I came down from hypomania on Wednesday last week (19th); Tuesday was the last full day of it. Ever since then I've been feeling up and down and sometimes depressed, sometimes excited. In other words, the symptoms have never fully gone away. I had a cup of tea at 5:30am and thought the tea was making me high. Until I realized the cup was full and I hadn't touched a drop.

In fact I just checked my blog. On Tuesday, December 4th I was complaining of feeling down. By Saturday 8th I was saying: I woke up at four a.m. and tried drinking hot tea to keep warm and either the tea or the lack of sleep has made me high and I'm feeling so good I don't NEED drugs. (Disrupted sleep is often one of the first signs of mania. As, of course, is feeling high.) On Monday 10 December I said: I've managed to switch myself out of depression by cutting DOWN my medication. Now I feel stone cold normal most of the time. Except when I get this weird meaningless feeling of excitement, which is really entertaining. But the main problem is IT'S COLD... FAR TOO COLD! And I'm drinking tea to stay warm and the caffeine makes me hyper and high. So I spent half the night playing All Saints songs on top volume... I mentioned feeling "excited" on Tuesday 11th, too. On Wednesday 12th, in my post "Off My Tits On Tea", I said: My mood is intermittently "up". Two cups and I was "speeding off my tits". By Thursday 13th I was saying: I'm not in any type of elevated mood. Or other mood. But I know myself well enough to realize that the mere mention of "elevated mood" meant I probably was in one, but the mood was uneven. (Otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned it at all.) On Friday 14th I was posting "I Wanna Job" ~ and I did. I must have been feeling very well indeed to be saying that. Between Saturday 15th and Tuesday 18th I was most definitely high and Binky was telling me I was "really manic". So the up-mood lasted two weeks. A week afterwards, and the signs are still there. But I'm not hypomanic now (overtalkative, overconfident, hyperkinetic, racing thoughts, distractible). I have to keep track of this, because I want to know precisely how this happens, what the first signs are, and the precise pattern. Oh, and I had one of those otherworldly experiences early in the morning, where bizarre thoughts are pushed right into my head: Num-num-num-yes. Num-num-num-YES! Making me feel I was going crazy. I didn't start shrinking or sprialling out of my body, however (like I have before).

O there's somebody watching porn opposite me. Why do these porn stars always insist on filming in houses decorated in grey and white with magnolia walls. To me, that is the epitome of bad taste. And why must it always be shot in the full glare of daylight. Are they afraid of shadows in Porn Land? Oh, she's taking it right up the dirtbox now.

Ukh: my mood really is uneven today. Half an hour ago I said I was dysthymic. But now I feel off my tits on black coffee again. I haven't had a single cup of coffee all day. I've had only one cup of tea since getting up.

Binky has still got my Xmas Present, which she forgot to give me. After going to bed and sleeping all through Christmas Dinner, which I forgot to mention yesterday. She said she hadn't slept in days. In fact, she claims rarely to sleep properly, complaining of "racing thoughts" in the night. I've no idea what she means by that. Lots of people say their thoughts are "racing" when they experience anxiety. But I had free-floating anxiety for years, and my thoughts never raced. In fact, I never had proper Racing Thoughts until I went manic a couple of years ago, and then they raced with such velocity they became unintelligable.

Here is a good description of my mental process during hypomania. But I wouldn't describe this as my mind racing. I'd say my head was flooded with thoughts, that I was thinking a lot. Not that my thoughts were racing. They don't "race" until they're literally on fast-forward and then, as I say, I'm already too maniacally incoherent to make sense of them.

Racing thoughts may be experienced as background or take over a person's consciousness. Thoughts, music, and voices might be zooming through one's mind. There also might be a repetitive pattern of voice or of pressure without any associated "sound". It is a very overwhelming and irritating feeling, and can result in losing track of time.
Generally, racing thoughts are described by an individual who has had an episode as an event where the mind uncontrollably brings up random thoughts and memories and switches between them very quickly. Sometimes they are related, as one thought leads to another; other times they are completely random. A person suffering from an episode of racing thoughts has no control over his or her train of thought and it stops them from focusing on one topic or prevents sleeping.
Racing thoughts, also referred to as "racing mind", may prevent a person from falling asleep.
(Wikipedia.)

Well I wish for New Year that I didn't have to Think about any of this any more. Or have cause purposefully Not To Think About It, and to feel exceedingly irritated whenever the issue crossed my mind, as it has often been wont to do. Because I consider psychiatry to be a religion. Like all religion it fascinates me. And like most religion I'm sure that 99% is UTTER HOGWASH!

Oh finally I saw the Downton Abbey Christmas special at 4:30 today. I missed the Xmas Day airing thanks to my totally disjointed sleep cycles.

Sorry if this is boring. I ought to keep my mood records separately, only I don't keep a journal. And if I did, I'd only keep misplacing it. Or getting paranoid about psychotic stalkers breaking in to read it. So I'd rather keep it here, if it's all the same to you.

Well CHRISTMAS IS OVER! I hope you all survived it satisfactorially. If anyone's up for buying me a present I'd like a nice-natured and chirpy peach-faced lovebird complete with luxury cage. Oh, and a new copy in hardback of the latest edition of Goodwin and Jamison's Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, only £71.25 from Amazon. (I'm writing my own book on moods. Hence my meticulous observations on my own...)

Well I must go. Good night all!

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...

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

The Issue of "Issues"... Plus the Issue of Heroin...

SO I took the pharmacological de-icer and felt instantly better for it, but the depression crept back and now I feel almost as bad as yesterday ~ and yet I'm on the gear as well! So now two negatives. Although just about everything looks "negative" when scrutinized closely.

My drugs worker is really pissing me off. Every time I come in there saying I feel down he says everybody gets down. And that he feels crap every single day. Patronizing piece of shit. So I said, Well I don't feel down all the time; sometimes I feel just perfect. A-OK. A1. And he had no answer for that one.

The other thing that annoys me is when drug worker type people try and get all psychological about it, as if I'm going to tell them what "issues" lie behind my negative mood. Whatever "issues" they may be, they must surely be ones that make me feel absolutely fantastic the rest of the time, when I'm not depressed. Or else, they are at least only part-time issues.

When I'm feeling bad, I'm not depressed "about" any one thing; I'm depressed about everything.

I'm using the word "depression" but really that isn't how it feels. If I didn't know what "depression" was, I'm not sure I'd even think of myself as "depressed". I would say that I felt sick and miserable, worn out. Overcome by some mysterious and indistinct illness, an affliction of the soul... That my heart feels packed in ice. Perhaps I would say I feel this way because my chickens have come home to roost. All I am is a miserable junkie. But I do not believe that if and when I ever do get off the heroin and off the methadone completely I will ever feel OK. I strongly suspect that I'll feel exactly the same way I do now but I just won't be an active drug-addict any more. I'll be a miserable ex-junkie instead.

Remember that in late 2010 through the spring of 2011, when the heroin supply in Britain had dried up anyhow (there literally was nothing out there to score, apart from dodgy white and brown powders containing very little to no gear at all)... That was when I really lost it ~ with mania, depression and psychosis. All of which had been building up in me for years. I was never altogether surprised to have a sudden and intense manic episode, because I'd been experiencing flashes of it for years. And for even longer than that I'd had intermittent and transient symptoms of what I now know to be psychosis. But I'd just feel strange and disembodied and sometimes hear voices. But it was nothing strong enough to require treatment ~ or so I thought. The first "voices" I ever heard were so indistinct, I couldn't even tell what they were saying: if I'd told a psychiatrist about this, I thought I'd have been laughed out of his office. It was only upon googling the subject that I discovered it starts for lots of people that way.

In my heart I feel lied to. By every well-meaning and probably genuine person who has ever tried to tell me that if I'd only kick the drugs everything would somehow be OK. It just never spun out that way. Example: I gave up crack ages ago. Crack used to sometimes make me feel intensely paranoid. But I've been far, far more paranoid months after ever touching the stuff than I ever was "on" it. The same can be said about depression and drink. I haven't touched drink in weeks. And yet this week I felt more depressed than in a very long time.

Interestingly, when I told the psychiatrist that drink actually made me feel better in depression and yet did next to nothing at all when my mood was already "elevated" he accepted this and didn't try to contradict me. You have to bear in mind that by this point I'd already reduced from the equivalent of more than a bottle of spirits a day, down to three to four double vodkas, spaced over twenty-four hours. So he said I was just "psychologically addicted to alchol". 

The effects of drink and drugs have become so unreliable ~ I never know how body and brain are going to react that I'm starting to feel there's just no point in taking any of them. Not just because they're "bad" but because they just don't work. Drink did used to make me feel better. But more recently it's only made me feel more run down and equally depressed. Heroin does something weird to my mood and I'm not even sure quite what. But common sense tells me that with my moods as unstable as they are, it's probably best to take nothing at all that's going to interfere with them.

Heroin, lovely heroin all-healing, all-destroying heroin; it's the last thing left and I just cannot drop it. I wish to God that I could, but I can't.

So I do not know what to do...


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


Not an original choice but what the hell

THE VERVE: THE DRUGS DON'T WORK...
This "anthem of a generation" wasn't originally about addiction, but about a person who is terminally ill... "hanging on for dear life," literally...



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

Attacked by a Psychic Circular Saw in the Night

I HAD another otherworldly experience in the night. This time a circular saw of syllables came and sliced right through my mind; it was saying "numnumnumnumnummm". You see this is what happens when I stop my medication. I took an entire pill last night. But I'd taken it before the num-nums came on and it didn't stop them. I just wanted to sleep... and I got my wish. I slept twelve hours last night, then managed another four this afternoon. It's so cold there's little point getting out of bed anyhow. And I've been feeling so depressed. Every time my phone rings the nasty noise "goes right through me" and I hide it under the bedclothes. I tried Glossy Magazine Therapy, when you leaf through fashmags like i-D, but with every flick of the page, the glossy paper whispered words to me. It was kind of poetic. Ukh: am I going mental yet again? I thought I was mental last week. Well I did afterwards. Now I just think I'm depressed. Just because i-D magazine is talking to you doesn't make you barmy, surely..? I mean, maybe i-D is just a bit talkative as magazines go..?

I note by scrolling down my blog that I left my body and went spiralling into hyperspace exactly a week before the "Circular Saw of the Num-Nums Episode". So maybe there's something going on here: a weekly celebration of surrealist psychiography perhaps..? I know a doctor would call these "dissociative" or "psychotic" experiences. But to me they are real experiences. They feel more dissociative than psychotic.

I hope Anna's porkshire is OK. There's been NO NEWS of her doggie Elle since the cancer op last week... They say No News Is Good News... but why does this feel SO BAD~~?

******************************************************************************************
DO YOU THINK there is any connexion between Num-Nums and Mu-Mus?
IF SO ~ perhaps Tammy Wynette would have known...?



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

Binky Telling Me I'm a Cuckoo Clock ~ Plus: "A Bitch Called Sandy"...

BINKY keeps telling me I'm "really mad" and I keep telling her I'm not. I mean, I'm not paranoid, not depressed, not anxious even and so what if I feel high nearly all the time? I'd taken heroin in the night and hadn't slept so when I went round Binky's at 7:45 this morning, I was a bit hyper. I was trying to think up names for my fabulous clubnight and she kept getting offended by my wonderful ideas like "Slut Vagina". [I would never give my club such a vulgar name; it just seemed like a good idea at the time...] And when I took to recording random snatches of conversation. So for a while I was thinking of naming my star-spangled party "Are you on that toilet for long? Because I really need to go." ~~ I think that would be a brilliant name! The other top two favourites were "Gnome Brigade", "Dillory Pillory" and "Itchy Swines".

So what does Binky mean when she says I'm mad? She seems to think I ought to know, but I don't. Everyone in her house is insane anyhow, because it's a psychiatric half-way house. And yet when I loudly said I'd been hearing voices in the night again ~~ and I mean all of two voices saying no more than two words each ~ nobody was willing to take on board the fact that yes, I might hear the odd voice now and then ~ but no, I most certainly am not clinically crazy. Especially compared to the rest of the nutters I know.

Grizzeller, the one guy in Binky's house full of nutty girls is in such consistently slow motion that if, for example, you wanted to visit the house at 9am and knew he'd be the only one in, you'd have to phone in advance at eight to give him enough time to shamble along the hallway and get the front door open. Now that is bonkers. I am not!

When I was talking to my very young and beautiful GP, Dr Lovelace about the inconveniences of psychotic breaks and happened to opine that "hearing voices is supposed to be a sign of madness," she quite inaccurately corrected me saying, "well, hearing voices is a sign of schizophrenia". Well yes, of course it can be that, but it can also be a sign of bipolarity, a sign of psychism (clairaudience) and a sign of nothing at all! I'm really surprised Dr Lovelace doesn't realize that 15% of bipolar 1 patients hallucinate. Hallucinations are not, per se, signs of schizophrenia. In this country we have a national Hearing Voices Network brimful with people experiencing daily extra-sensory perceptions and the majority of them claim not to be mad, and do not experience the symptoms of psychosis (paranoia, incoherent thought, great difficulty engaging with life).

The British Mental Health Foundation obviously know their stuff. Binky insists all her voices are absolutely accoustically real. Well many of mine aren't. When I really was mad they did sound exactly like invisible people speaking next to me, but nowadays they're more like random words precipitating from an idea-saturated atmosphere into my consciousness:

It is also common for people to hear voices as if they are thoughts entering their mind from somewhere outside themselves. This is not the same as a suddenly inspired idea, which people usually recognise as coming from themselves. These thoughts are not their own and would seem to come from outside their own consciousness, like telepathy.

This isn't precisely my experience, but it's similar.

When I tell Binky I may be "just a bit hypomanic" she says, "you've been hypomanic for two weeks now". And when I point out that hypomania is just very mild mania, she says, "then hypomania is mild madness". You see?! Every move I make I'm already snookered. That girl has been in the mental health system for far too long and she knows too much.

Then she takes issue with me for wondering aloud what is wrong with other nutters and why they act the way they do. Well that's just me being me, I'm afraid ~ always fascinated by what makes others tick...

Hey! I'm not doing Christmas alone with an Iceland sweet chili chicken pizza this year because I've been invited to Binky's for Xmas Lunch with all her cuckoo-clock friends. How brilliant is that?! We're even allowed vodka, which has been banned for the rest of the year after Binky got me to buy two half bottles, drank the lot and then ended up lying in bed throwing a near-delirious pity-party of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. It was really not pretty.

Speaking of alcohol, I idiotically went and wasted 95p on a can last night which I mixed with my Polish fruits of the forest drink. I had one single sip and now it's sitting in a giant mug untouched and untouchable and I don't know what to do with it now. I'm very much into the waste not, want not philosophy and cannot in all good conscience pour it down the drain. Like I've said many times ~ although yes, I did used to drink enough alcohol not to be consuming any nonalcoholic drink at all and to be getting daily blackouts. But on the other hand I never had that "once I start drinking I won't stop until I'm passed out cold" thang going on, like most alkies seemingly do. I was your archetypal "top-up drinker" ~ drinking to keep a moderate level of intoxication going through every waking hour. Not to plunge myself into oblivion. Even with the drugs, most of the time, I wasn't using gear in pursuit of unconsciousness, but as an escape from pain. Now that I'm no longer in constant psychological pain I feel far less need of the gear. See it's all deep, psychological and mysterious.

At yesterday's anti-drugs group we had a cheeky chappie with what are nowadays termed "mental health" troubles but what always used to be called "emotional problems" ~ from what he said, his primary problems appeared to be anxiety and depression. This might very well be the "vanilla" version of mental illness, but let me tell you, anxiety/depression is just about the most unpleasant psychiatric affliction going. It's much more unpleasant than manic-depressive psychosis and of course the doctors take anxiety far less seriously than psychotic illness, which makes no sense, as severe anxiety is far and away more intolerable than any psychosis I've ever experienced. The doctors never, ever take it seriously, and they will not prescribe anything for it, except drugs along the lines of Prozac ~ which always made me many times more agitated than I'd been before. Anxiety doesn't generally agitate me. When it was severe, I was frozen in terror. As the psychologists say, it's "fight, flight or play dead" ~ which is very true as I always played dead. Though I've never seen a person with an anxiety disorder fighting. If anxiety really did make you fight, the mental hospitals would be full of people with panic disorders under Section for fighting instead of "flighting", or playing dead like me!

Anyway this guy with the terrible affliction happened to mention to me something about confronting the issues that have caused or fuelled my past depressions. What issues is he talking about? Do I even have any? Binky says yes I do; I said, "do you mean my massively unstable self-esteem?" and she said yes. But post-psychotic trauma aside, I'm not sure I have the type of issues that a skilfull counsellor could tease out of me so that in the future I'm going to magically not be depressed. I'm not sure my depression is like that. If it were mostly issue-based then how come the first sign, and usually the most prominent symptom is massively increased time spent asleep? Can a thorny tangle of emotional hang-ups really make you sleep more? And how come half the time I actually feel better than usual? So my mood is now elevated ~ and what has become of my issues now? Are they actually making me feel happy? Or is another set of personal hang-ups doing that? Or is it just that when I'm on the hypomanic side simply more in touch with my own fabulosity and that's what makes me feel fabulous all the time? Because that's what I think is going on...

Righty-ho it's ten past six and I have to go to Iceland to get a sweet chili chicken pizza. Writing about it has made me wanna munch it! With cheese-flavour coleslaw as a side-order. I luuuurve cheese coleslaw! I barely slept last night and must catch up before I fall asleep at the screen...

What's happening with Sandy, this humungous great tropical storm they said might flood or flatten New York? Is it really that bad? And why, if it only made landfall around midnight London time. With the time difference currently a mere four hours, that means New York was OK until eight at night their time, so why close down the subway and the stock exchange all day yesterday? Also, with New York being so low-lying, I don't understand why they hadn't long ago built seal-up-able subway and road tunnels to prevent any storm-surge getting into them... I woke up yesterday morning feeling so incredibly repentant for having been too excited about the idea of a giant hurricane hitting a major metropolis and not having my thoughts with the householders and the businesses who will suffer because of it. I can sometimes be incredibly shallow and I really felt guilty for having not taken Hurricane Sandy seriously. Also I wrote a comment to my fellow-blogger, Syd saying "so you live in South Carolina? Isn't that the land of hurricanes?" ~ no sooner had I said that than that Sandy appeared and I was terrified that Syd would get blown away because of what I'd said.

So all isn't right in the world. I keep thinking of all those people in New York, New Jersey and so on who will be dealing with massive flooding and power cuts. I mean, it's disconcerting enough when the power goes down for just a couple of hours and it's candles time and no television but what happens when a whole metropolis goes down for days at a time?

I used to be in touch with a recovering addict named B Melons Lemonade, who was right in New Orleans and actively addicted to heroin when Hurricane Katrina hit, destroying not just the infrastructure of the city we all think about, but its drug supply network. B Melons was so traumatized by events that she went down with a pretty nasty case of PTSD which is by all accounts one of the nastiest mental illnesses going...

I pray that New York and everywhere else in the path of this so-called "Frankenstorm" will be OK... 

Night-night everyone, wherever you are ~ and BE SAFE!...

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