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!

A Very Merry Time of Year!

HELLO EVERYBODY I've been having a moody time of late but I'm feeling absolutely fine now. Well almost. 

I saw Binky today and she thinks I'm still mental from the other day. I kind of had a lost weekend when the "Full Moon Feeling" (hypomania: which is when I'm high without any drink or drugs) hit me pretty full-on on Friday/Saturday night and I barely slept at all all weekend then did conk out and came back to life at 7 o'clock with absolutely no idea whether it was the AM or PM (it was 7AM).

Ukh I hate this time of year, don't you?? But I hope you like my dancing elf figure. Seriously this was the best thing I got when keying in "elf animated cartoon gif" ~ ha ha!

I was going to do Xmas with Binky but she "has to" do it with her Supported Care Home, so I'm pretty glad I got out of that one. It just would have been roast lamb + massive cab fares all for a day I don't give a French toss about anyhow... know what I mean?

But having said that I DO with you all the MERRIEST OF SEASON'S GREETINGS + AN AMAZING NEW YEAR IN 2015 XxXxXxX 

!!!!!!!

It's OFFICIAL: I'm a "LUNATIC"...

I HAVE LONG BEEN TOLD, by various readers of my blog, that MY MOOD APPEARED TO CYCLE IN TIME WITH THE MOON... Yet for some reason I seemed never to take this seriously. Perhaps it was because, usually, me and the moon did not make an EXACT MATCH... just a close one. And because I like to think of myself as highly rational and sensible and not liable to believe in old wives' tales, I didn't believe in this one either.

Except that for the past THREE MONTHS or so, I have glanced out of the window, whilst feeling uncannily restless in the middle of the night, and seen FULL MOON floating up there. And when the moon isn't precisely FULL, it's always WANING. Which matches the "lunacy" theory even more.

Because it's as if something inside me has been waxing along with the waxing moon. And though the moon turns a corner and starts to wane, I carry on waxing, so the restlessness or "mania" breaks through while the moon is waning... Hmmm.

Then I looked back to the most severe mania of my life. This broke out on Wednesday 17th January 2011. WHICH WAS THE EXACT FULL MOON!

That was the day I ended up in a mental hospital, having turned up at a dual diagnosis meeting in a floridly manic, psychotic state. Hearing things, seeing things. My head in utter cognitive dissaray. And from that day forth, it only got worse...

ISN'T THAT WEIRD..?

Yesterday I felt so terrible, that having done everything I had to (and long string of chores for Binky. Well, actually, one single thing. Which involved going up and down. And up and down. And up and down. The same fucking head-destroying high road. All morning. So I got home in a huge strop and took some drugs and passed out, waking up after 9pm. Then I slept again. All through the night. Getting up at 11 this morning.

And I'm writing a letter to my GP, saying "our relationship is not working. You do not seem to understand me at all. THIS is how it is. I could NEVER TELL YOU THIS with my mouth. So believe me. Because I cannot handle it when you try and challenge me. I'm dealing with things I don't want to be real. Then you tell me you don't think it's real. Which leaves me in utter confusion. I cannot work with a doctor who is not on the same page. Absolutely impossible for me.... I don't know.

Well anyway I just wanted to say all this. Now I have to go. It's nearly 4pm and I have to get home. Take care everybody... ;-)

PS: WHAT IS IT about the FULL MOON that does affect mood? Presently, researchers appear to be obsessed by some connexion with the light of the moon and elevated moods. But surely in this day and age of artificial lighting, the moon will make very little difference...? Personally I think it's MAGNETIC...

Daphne Guinness and The Creative Thunderbolt

HEY, I've been inundated by bright ideas. I have longed and longed for a grown-up, adult novel I could write and ~~ KAPOWW!!! ~~ last night the vision struck me like a thunderbolt!

Yes, I'm still working on the children's book. But my problem with kiddies' writing is that it's about four times as difficult as writing for adults. When I'm on form, I can knock out a page of adult fiction about as quickly and easily as I can write a personal letter. But children's stuff is much harder for me. You have to be more succinct. More captivating. More everything. And I realized that I would never feel complete, as a creative artist, writing for children alone. (How pretentious-sounding! (But how true!!))

I've had lots of good ideas for adult fiction ~ but unfortunately they have tended to revolve around the single issue of drugs. I do not want to be known as a druggie author. If  the book were a success, my readers are just going to expect more of the same, and will be disappointed if I make departures into more "respectable" territory. I know they will.

The other thing I could have done quite easily (or so I believed) would of course be to write a memoir of addiction and insanity. But that would be an even worse move. I've never heard of a memoirist turn novelist successfully. And because I only have one or two memoirs in me, my creativity would be limited to that. I'd far rather pour my horrible life experiences into novel-writing ~ where, shining through the lens of fictional character, the truth can be expressed so much more vividly, and explicitly ~ without breaching my own or anybody else's privacy. It's a paradox that the truth can be told so much better by means of fiction ~ don't you think!

I tried to pen a memoir some years ago. The gimmick was going to be that you expected a story of how I got drawn into this sordid world of drugs ... with an eventual tale of my redemption, cleanness and serenity. But there would be no happy ending. I'm still mired in drugs. I just go on using... possibly until I die...

Then, hopefully, I do, eventually, get another memoir on how I did clean up in the end. If I don't, then I hope my family would cash in by exploiting my life-story shamelessly. In fact, I would be pissed off if they didn't. At least if they do profit financially from my death then my life would have been worthwhile... know what I mean?

For so long I've been looking for a book to read and I couldn't find a good one. The only half-decent (fictional) reading matter of the past year has been Innocent Traitor by Alison Weir (based on the true story of  Lady Jane Grey, who in the mid-1500s, was Queen of England for nine days) and Martina Cole's Faceless ~ about a murderess released from prison after 15 years, trying to put her life and her past into some order... I don't think I'd make a brilliant thriller writer. And much as I love historical fiction (not historical romance ~ I hasten to add) I couldnt' write that stuff. It's too research-heavy. In my view, the entire point of fiction is that it is just that ~ fictitious. Both the stories I'm plotting out are my own tales entirely ~ they require very little research. I'm so grateful for the Muse being with me now. The Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, who was nothing if not prolific, appeared to have nothing but disdain for the notion of "inspiration":

• "There are those . . . who think that the man who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait till--inspiration moves him. When I have heard such doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn. To me it would not be more absurd if the shoemaker were to wait for inspiration, or the tallow-chandler for the divine moment of melting."
  (Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, 1883)

 Sitting down daily between 5:30 and 8:00am, he churned out an average 2500 words every morning before setting off to put in a full day at the Post Office. I agree, it's not necessary to be "inspired" to write every day. But inspiration IS absolutely necessary to conceive your characters and their story and to get the process moving. It's that inspiration that has been so lacking in me lately. And that's why I haven't written anything for such a long time...

I have been SO MOODY lately. Either UP or DOWN, but rarely anything in between. I stuck my head out of the window one night, as the Restlessness began, and saw a perfect Full Moon floating in the sky above me. I'm sure the moon has something to do with my mood swings. I mean, we all known how the term "lunatic" derives from the ancient belief that the moon was responsible for mania and madness. And the psychiatrists of today are STILL studying possible links between bipolar disorders and the moon... (manic-depressive illness has also long been associated with creativity, too ~ which makes something of a trinity between mental illness, the moon and the Muse... Hmmm.

O yes, and I kept having these dreams about a character called Daphne Guinness. Now I have long (vaguely) known that such a character is a key figure on the London "society" circuit. But to be honest I just assumed she was a talentless airhead ~ a rich nobody. Then I alighted upon a photograph in Vanity Fair magazine of an incredibly striking beautiful woman in the most amazing fancy dress I have ever seen (not the picture here). And I thought, "wow". So I looked her up and found out she is an artist who designs her own clothes ~ and what wondrous creations they are ... She even has her own fragrance with Comme des Garcons. Not such an airhead after all...

O well I gotta go. Did anyone else see WENTWORTH on Wednesday night? Wow that was hardcore. I was expecting something like an Australian Bad Girls... but this was seriously scary. Very well done, though...

HERE IS THE ENTIRE FIRST EPISODE:~

... and here is the original PRISONER: CELL BLOCK H

FIRST EVER EPISODE

BRILLIANT STUFF!

HAVE AN AMAZING WEEKEND EVERYBODY...

The Premiere is Over (Life Is Just Beginning)

HELLO PEOPLE. I'm still around. Still trying NOT to take Nasty 'Eroin. It's all nasty nowadays. So piss weak you're paying for nothing and I've regretted it every time. I feel no different off it than on it. So I might as well stay off it, I keep telling myself. I'm off it now. And I thoroughly intend to stay that way!

My head is full of such marvellous creative ideas that I'm more dissatisfied by my Actual Life ~ As It Actually Is ~ than ever before.

I've decided the best thing I can do is to put into operation a certain long-cherished idea for a kiddies' book. Then if some publisher takes it, and I write a few more, I might HOPEFULLY get enough dosh behind me to actually be able to launch my Main Idea (which is a concept for a glossy magazine) ~ like an atom bomb on to an unsuspecting World. Trust me, when they see issue #1, Condé Nast are gonna piss their pants and wish my magazine were theirs.

Years ago, I used to work for a large local newspaper chain, and one thing that taught me about the industry was that, in business terms, a magazine is essentially a load of adverts. Editorial is, in a sense, just  filler, because it's the ads that keep any publication afloat. These days they even have a proper name for it. They call it "content" ~ as if it's a vacuum sitting there, longing to be filled in. This isn't exactly true. In the type of book I want to do, there's a great deal of synergy between editorial layouts and advertising. In other words, the heavier somebody advertisers, the heavier they feature in our wondrous photoshoots.

So anyway I've been dwelling on that, in between feeling miserable, misplaced, mishapen. And sitting around wondering what I've done with my life. One thing that is becoming increasingly apparent is that Heroin has no place at all in my future. (As if I hadn't grasped that thorny fact many years ago...)

Every week I've been going to a closed group therapy session at the methadone clinic. Although a cynical side of me sees Group Work as a money-saving exercise, there is a massive upside to doing Group. That is, that I get to be privy to other people's secret insecurities. They're essentially the same as mine. Last week, between four of us, three, including me, appeared to be so miserable we wished we had never been born and were just waiting to die. I get a certain consolation knowing I'm not the only person to feel this way. In a sense, though, I don't care how I feel. As my old friend Clare Bony Arse used to say: "WE'RE ALL ALONE IN THE DARK". Which was particularly poignant coming from Clare, because she had such severe eyesight difficulties (Retinitis Pigmentosa) that she only had 0.5% vision. And there was a real chance that in the next few years she would end up 100% blind. A thought so horrendous that I refused to give it space in my head.

Some of y'all seem to think that I feel especially sorry for myself, as if my own problems and predicament are somehow worse than anybody else's, but this has never been true. I have always, always known at least one person ~ often several people ~ who were considerably worse off than me. I remember years ago trying to explain depression to a person who had almost no grasp on the subject. Everybody seems to think they know depression. But in actuality only one person in TWENTY ever becomes seriously clinically depressed throughout the entire course of their lifetime. So this person says to me something along the lines of "you think you're the only person in the world ever to get depressed" ~ which has never been what I thought. A friend of mine at university had a breakdown so bad she ended up wandering the streets homeless, face covered in snot, convinced her life was the centre of a Satanic plot. It wasn't "schizophrenia", as you might expect. It was just particularly severe depression "with psychotic features" ~ and the doctors treated her with Prozac. So THAT was my idea of bad depression. I never thought my own depression "bad", in fact I thought it didn't count. I never saw myself as "mentally ill" and I never used my depression as an excuse to get out of anything, until things got so bad that I had to drag myself into my doctor's office ~ by which time I was so badly off I could barely string a sentence together. My GP gave me a medical certificate writing me off for the entire academic term. That autumn, at the start of my second year at uni, I spralled down so badly I barely attended any classes at all, and certainly never did any work.

One afternoon they sprang a test on us (probably after weeks of notice, though I had no idea it was going to happen ~ + the marks went towards our final degree classification). I sat there for a few minutes, then wrote some obscenity across my paper in bold capitals and skulked out. It wasn't till years later that I looked back to this era and realized I was a lot worse off than I thought. I ended up dropping out of university, which completely knocked my confidence. Then I got a job and spent every waking our either working or on the way to or from work. Every hour I wasn't working or going to work I was fast asleep. In other words, really, I had no life at all. That's why I want to work again doing something I really believe in. If only I had something to do that I really wanted to do, I would never stop working. I mean, it's not as if I haven't spent more than a decade of my life essentially on a drugged-out vacation. I've had it with drugs and I've had it with living life on perpetual holiday. When I was younger I never, ever envisaged life as a layabout. Even at university, where I knew people who seemed to take pride and revel in their pothead, slacker existences, I never counted myself as one of them. I couldn't relate to their lifestyle at all.

I did end up dossing around quite a lot, but as I put it, I was at the time completely unemployable. I once (around the year 1992 or 1993) went for a job as a cloakroom attendant and I couldn't even get that. It wasn't that I didn't want to work in a nightclub full of pissed-up beer monsters (not my kind of place at all). The point, was that back then, wish zero self-confidence and almost zero social skills, I couldn't even pretend to muster the enthusiasm to get through an interview even for a menial post such as that... NOT good. If I've learned one thing Over The Years, I've learned how to put on a pretty good act. Nobody ever thinks I'm "mentally ill" now until I'm manic enough to appear High On Crack. Until that point I seem to come across either as happy, cheerful, full of enthusiasm or just a bit moody or morose. It does annoy me sometimes that nobody sees how desperate I feel inside ~ but in reality that is a brilliant skill to have in Life ~ and particularly in Business.

Of course most of my more recent problems are self-inflicted (though no junkie ever sees their life entirely that way ~ particularly not when they're lost in the thick of it!) Not until I've dropped the "H" for good and weaned myself off methadone, will I ever truly be able to go Forward. (Much as anything else, you cannot travel the world on Heroin (at least, I would never dare try and do such a thing) ~ and my single most basic ambition is to get the hell OUT of Britain ~  at the earliest opportunity ~ and to STAY OUT ~ FOR EVER!

Ukh I have gabbled on and on. The weekend has started. The dusk is illuminated by a hundred Turkish kebab shops. I have to go.

(Do you see now why I never wanted to write my memoir. I get so bogged down in it all, whenever I turn my attention in that direction. I'm only looking in one direction Today, and that is TO THE FUTURE!

WISHING Y'ALL A CHARMING WEEKEND.
AND IF IT CAN'T BE CHARMING
THEN MAY IT BE TOLERABLE!!

Elevated, Irritable, Expansive Moods...

YEAH, BINKY says I'm "high" today because I won't stop singing at the top of my voice and talking about Hammy (my 1990s late hamster) and Glodemer.(our late 1980s silver-&-grey coated family New Zealand Barking Dog who "looked like a seal"). Our family GP, Dr Grendle, said that Glodemer, who was only medium sized and had the sweetest nature of any doggie I have ever known yet had the deepest, roughest bark was a "New Zealand Barking Dog" ~ a kind of unofficial breed out there. But I just googled New Zealand Barkers and got nothing back so who knows... My sleep pattern has been horrendous. My last-but-one period of wakefulness began when I rose at 10:30pm at some time over the weekend. Then I stayed awake for a good day-and-a-half, if not longer. I was going to trot off to a Narcotics Anon meeting at 7pm on Monday night but drowsiness and exhaustion overcame me before I could leave the house (to my then sleep-pattern the meeting was at 5am anyhow...) so I went to bed at about five pm, slept for what felt like ages but I subsequently found out was only three hours. But even that tiny amount of sleep had totally burst the bubble of my lovely "elevated mood". I was very irritable, tired, acheing all over and starting to feel horribly depressed. I was also craving heroin strongly. So in the end I bought said heroin and did at least get a bit of kind of half-sleep. 

But I didn't sleep that well at all. I was up all night copying Italian Linguaphone dialogues into my mega notebook. Then I had to get to Binky's for 7:30 or 8:00am to lend her £50  ($78.25) I "need" to lend her that money as having blown so much on furniture I know I'll be Stoney Broke by next Monday, which is precisely when said debt is due to be repaid. I think my Druggieworker is in a bad mood with me for having thoroughly avoided her clinic for two weeks solid. Naomi, the Dual Diagnosis Nutter Club lady, who specializes in Nutter Junkie work, invited me to a Drama Therapy Group. Much as I love Naomi (because she calls me "amazing") and do enjoy acting from time to time, I cannot think of anything I'd less rather do when Seriously Not In The Mood than strutting across a public stage in the midst of angry public paranoid depression!

Yeah anyway I'm in Druggieclinic Bad Books for not having attended "MBT group" (which is a treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder anyhow and I don't have that). I don't want to go to these groups because I suspect their agenda is to deconstruct my coping mechanisms thereby eroding my mental health and sending me permanently and intractably mad! I'm not entirely sure how MBT is meant to work but if it IS going to undo my coping mechanisms ~ thereby leaving me unable to cope, then I'm seriously NOT INTERESTED!...

Oh, I forgot to say about my {inadvertant} "cruelty to pigeons" scandal! Yes I finally managed to keep my errant electricity cabinet shut only to discover, two days later, that a poor desperate pigeon had been locked in there all that time! It's true I DID hear intermittent desperate flappings at the door and yet every time I peered inside, said cupboard appeared to be bare. Until a good two (if not THREE) days into this saga when I finally opened the door only for a surprisingly healthy and rainbow-plumèd pigeon to make an instant flap for freedom the minute the door was ajar. Anyway, I opened my back balcony door the other day, it being a sultry summer's day and all. The door blew my door wide open and when I reached over to shut it, I noticed a brand new nest of long grass and a poor desperate-looking pigeon sitting on this nest. Yes! I have a pregnant pigeon living on my balcony! I know she is "pregnant" because yesterday morning, when she went for a flap across our estate, I could plainly see the gorgeous pair of pigeon's eggs left behind in her wondrously made nest... 

I wonder when they're due to hatch? And will I be able to tame one or both of the babies? Will they end up living in my house? And if so, will the sound of top-volume early-morning cooing finally drive me over the edge...? (Of the balcony...) Anyway I must flap off myself. I've a "dis-appointment" with my horrible new GP in a couple of hours' time which I need to psych myself up for... Last time we met he had the gall to declare that the mousy, depressed and very upset version of myself that he saw was somehow the "real" me (ie that despite claiming depression I was actually "OK" ~ I wasn't OK at all... So now I'm elevated I'm going to give that bastard one in the eye and let him know what I REALLY THINK ..

.

The Bluster, Guff and Parping Scandal!

WHAT BLUSTER AND GUFF was I parping on about yesterday? Did I actually say that I thought my family were somehow pretending to be worried I was going to drop dead from a heroin overdose? How patently ridiculous can you get?

I think what I would actually have meant was they were using the saying "you might kill yourself!" more as a turn of phrase than a literal truth. 

But even that is ridiculously self-absorbed and narcissistic. In the phrase of my old psychodynamic counsellor I would be "denying their reality". Of course they were worried about me. Worried sick. Just when they should have been coasting comfortably towards retirement I brought a dark shadow into their lives. For all they knew, whenever I failed to call for a couple of weeks or more I could have been lying dead on a pile of rotting mattresses, cockroaches scuttling in and out of my open mouth, in a rat-infested, rain-drenched squat somewhere. I can't believe I could be so self-centred ever to imply I didn't think they weren't worried to death about me. [That was never what I thought. Sometimes I genuinely don't know what I believe. I mean, I know I think a lot of things, but I don't know what to believe... I HAVE KNOWN ~ for a long time ~ that I was never going to die of an accidental drug overdose. Not ever. But who else can "know" that too... you know?...?

I had a lovely blip of Elevated Mood yesterday. All evening. All night. By 1am the Polish techno pop videos were blasting out whilst I "cleaned the house" (ie danced around with hi-tech ultra-trendy blue rubber broom in hand). Some fantastic traxx came on the channel (which is known as "Polo TV" and freely available via the Hotbird satellite at 13°E). I've noticed in the international scheme of things that Russian and Polish pop stars seem quite old, whereas South Korean boybands look living manga cartoon characters. Barely 14 years old and prettier than most girls. I have a Favourites List named "Hotbird Collection" comprising nearly 150 channels from everywhere where I do, or would like to speak the language. Or find the country interesting. In other words gerzillions of countries. Somaliland state television (the midnight folk songs are particularly entrancing.) Ethiopian and Eritrean TV with funky runic writing (they do believe the Amharic script is descended from ancient Yemeni runes). Afghanistan state TV. The American State Department International Satellite Feeds (about 40 of them, though I only saved 1). Three channels in Thai, including a gameshows/soap opera channel and a round-the-clock Buddhist chanting station in heavily accented Pali. Press TV ~ Iranian station in English which is probably what President George Bush feared Al Jezeerah would be like ~ antiestablishment, antimonarchist... etc. Hispan TV (Iranian movies and telenovellas dubbed into Spanish.) Italian QVC. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera.

I just bumped into the NA guy who thought I was high on crack a couple of years back when I was having my funky psychotic manic episode. We exchanged numbers and he promised to ring me in order to meet up for Monday Night at the church where Greg Arious and his GF go. (I'm avoiding Greg because he went into rehab where he kicked methadone, heroin, crack, and alcohol. But guess what..? No drugs left (according to his girlfriend). But STILL DRINKING. If things were the reverse, I wouldn't mind so much ~~~~~ but heavy drinking in the manner of Greg Arious ~ and his drinking really is completely out of control... that I cannot handle. Constant constant textmessaging basically trying to bully me into bringing gynormous bottles of ultra-strength white cyder. Three litres gone in not much more than an hour, then he's begging for more and trying to guilt trip me for having taken sensible precautions like having left a half packet of 10 ciggies at home. Making out I'm stingy because I smoke 30 ciggies a day derived from 10 long ones ("Superkings") rolled into 30... oh you know what people are like. Well NA Guy says I'm welcome to come and he doesn't waste his time or energy on no-hoping timewasters. ~~ Unlike me. ~~~ Which I take as a real compliment. It means he's looked into my eyes and seen Light.

I hope he doesn't think I'm "high" today because this is my second day HEROIN-CLEAN. I took 1.5x my script. Tomorrow I'm gonna try to live on my scripted methadone dose alone so wish me luck with that~!!

I know I probably do seem a bit high to the outside world but really I'm fine... I was up most of last night but really was too hyperactive to sleep. Eventually, just by staying still, I did manage to chill enough to slip into unconsciousness but it took hours and hours and hours to really feel like I'd achieved "proper" sleep and even then I was waking up at least twice an hour. So I slept from maybe 6am to approx 1 or 2pm. Which sounds good ~~ 8 hours. But it must certainly wasn't eight hours solid. It's only because I know enough about "insomnia" to recognize that time spent lying down relaxed with your eyes closed when time passes easily probably are periods of sleep. Just not amazingly good sleep... That I accept I got very much sleep at all... So I wasn't in a particularly good mood this afternoon and didn't want to go out. But Binky, very kindly, bought me a brand new pair of trainers (those are sneakers to you Americans) and she wanted to ceremonially give them to me. My mentalization group was cancelled anyhow (teacher sick) so after collecting my 30mg of highly addictive gloop I tubed it down to Bink's. Spent ages hovering on the doorstep only to be reprimanded by an African nurse who didn't even open the door. And yet she was insisting that Binky had just departed the premises.

Eventually Binky heard my desperate doorstep wailings. Blew her top and severely reprehended the dredlocked Ghanaian nurse. Because she's got Borderline Personality Disorder it took Binks a good half hour to calm herself down from all the Reprehending. I, on the other hand, was trying not to cackle too much! Then she ceremonially presented me with the Trainers. Dark Grey. Brand New. "Boxfresh" (as the kids say nowadays). Luuurverlyjubbelly! Binky commanded me to wear my brand new boots in temparate and cold weathers and the trainers in hot and I ceremonially agreed.

I was going to write something about how I felt. Why is that..? O yeah because of my "mood diary". Hypomanic blips all over the place. I'm really hoping for a good spell of Elevated Mood as that could hopefully mean that I manage to kick that nasty Killer Drug Heroin FOR GOOD ~~ how brilliant would that be??~?~!~?~~~

Well that's about all for today. Public toilets. Lavatories> pillories and stocks

 

Above: a neat and tidy pillory. This is NOT the stocks. A person sentenced to the stocks had the luxury of sitting down and his or her hands were ordinarily free, allowing some measure of self-defence; a pilloried person, on the other hand was forced to stand like this, head and hands locked into a wooden fram, a picture of helplessness. The pillory was for far more serious crimes (eg fraud, perjury, sedition, homosexuality) than the stocks (petty theft, drunkenness, etc). Baying crowds turned out in vast numbers to torment the unfortunate criminals sentenced to this form of torture. People sentenced to stand one hour in the pillory were frequently maimed or even killed.

 

 

 Housebreakers, muggers, child-abusers and retailers of low-quality or adulterated heroin should be pilloried and pelted with horse-shit like this ...

 PS can I point out that I heavily disapprove of pillories and torture...

But sometimes I do think that for the abovementioned crimes ~ especially housebreaking and child abuse, maybe the pillory should be brought back. The only style of unBritish justice I could possibly approve of would be Singapore-style caning on the bare backside (how demeaning for a grown man to be beaten on the bum like that ~ and it's supposed to be agony). Only if they did bring it to Britain it must be for BOTH sexes... and the stocks and the pillory. Otherwise I'm totally anti-torture. I'm pro-death penalty, however. I believe that for many human beings in many cases the death sentence would be kinder than life imprisonment... 

Yes I KNOW how funny my writings on such matters must probably sound. I can frequently reduce entire room fulls of people in group therapy sessions to gurgling, side-splitting roaring cackles of laughter and that's by telling the TRUTH of what I really think!

Ho Hum!!

Battle of the Clinics

MY (GP) DOCTOR  really did my head in this morning. Questioning me on and on about schizophrenia and did I really think I had it. Well being as I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS I can't know, can I? As for his other question "what could a psychiatrist do for me?" I answered "don't know" to that one too. As in my experience they do F-All.

Bloody hell I get so pissed off when people assume the depressed below-par me is the "real" one. This is what Dr Bastard seemed to do. Oh but if I'm even slightly Elevated then it absolutely has to be drugs or the spark-off point into real "Mania". The real me is the "hypomanic" me. That is the word Binky uses. That's what, as far as I know, the drs also say. I've already been asked by medical personnel when I was completely stone-cold normal whether I was "hypo" and I said NO. Because I WAS NOT. So what I believe and what drs believe appear to be at complete divergence. As for what is the real me, it's absolutely the "hypomanic" one. I know that means I'm disinhibited, indiscreet and prone to making jokes in poor taste. But that is far more me than the white mouse depressed boring suicidal version.

He also tricked me into admitting I wanted to kill myself and that I definitely thought I was more likely to die from suicide than any other way. Which I am afraid I do.

So then I go down the OTHER clinic (this time the druggie one), bump into my worker who says I don't look OK at all. So I go from seeming completely OK to not at all OK in the space of an hour.

Then, somehow, I got into talking about how terrible I feel. Completely druggie fuckup of a person I am. Using gear again and again and again. My heroin addict standards it's not very much. But it's still too much. Any gear is too much gear. I so much wish I was able to live without it.

As for all this mental shit and what is normal. Well that is the crux of exactly what does my head in. I believe in psychiatry about as much as I believe in Roman Catholicism. I happened to be watching a fascinating discussion on the Roman Catholic universe last night on a channel named Erde und Mensch. About "no human being being holy" (so why is the Pope titled "His Holiness" and "The Holy Father"..?) So while I understand Christmas and why people do it, I don't "believe". Likewise I don't believe in schizoaffective disorder. Or bipolar disorder. And really not inasmuch as they pertain to me.

I did reread the famous memoir An Unquiet Mind at one point and it's weird how the author Kay Redfield Jamison, during her time as a raving manic-depressive, came up with numerous reasons/excuses not to take lithium. But never one towards what I think: ... well maybe you feel that way because you're MEANT to feel that way. Maybe it's just natural and life really is that shit. She said that never even in her darkest hours, though she longed for death, did she regret ever having been born. Well I frequently do wish I had never been born. When I see such evil in the world, I wish I had never been born to know about such horror. I cannot take it in or comprehend it.

And as for suicide. I'm in absolutely no doubt that the present government would prefer me dead because I would save them money money, NHS money, other money. Money money. Better off dead. Absolutely.

ABSOLUTELY TRUE.

I can't believe I am posting this CRAP. Oh who cares. What else is there to post..??

Anyway: to my last post:~~

Are there really 300 language groups in London against "only 200" in New York..? I don't know. How could anyone know. Far as I know London is actually MORE of an international air-hub than New York, being more strategically located. I really don't know if there are more foreign people in one city or another.

Ebooks. Got no idea which one to buy. I'm going to look into that one right now...

What was I babbling on about here..? Can't remember. O well gotta go.

I think my methadone's going up AGAIN by the way.....kkhhhkhhhhhhhh ☹

Oh by the way I've started writing poetry. I've decided to become a great poet. Only written four lines, over 2 pages of scribblings, that seemed any good but ho-hum it's a start...

Ukh I sound like I'm all over the place. Pffffffff.... whatever.

O, and I AM taking the motherfcking medication. Whatever good that's supposed to do me... 

5:53pm THIS IS A REAL MESS OF A POST. IT doesn't explain my flow of thought which was to do with SOMEBODY ELSE ~ 2 somebody elses who already have killed themselves. And the horrendous aftermath of THAT. which is what i was talking to my druggieworker about as people drifted in and out...I am NOT DRUNK I have not taken any illicit drugs for 24 hours. And that's another thing: people always seem to see the On Heroin Me as MORE TOGETHER!!!!! would you BELIEVE THAT!!

Leather Sofas and Disappearing Beds!

I'VE JUST SEEN a leather 3-piece sofa I really like. Real leather. Just apply shoe polish to improve that dynamic sheen... Charity shop said they'd do it without the matching chairs for £95 ($145.93)  (it's £195 ($299.54) with 2 matching leather armchairs...) I said I can't put down a deposit now. I spent my last 30p (46c) on a Spanish novel called El misterio de la cripta embrujada ("The Mystery of the Haunted Crypt") by Eduardo Mendoza.  With the aid of my trusty Collins Spanish Dictionary and copious notebooks plus an entire pack of blue biros with which to copy out every single word I don't know or cannot guess ~which will be about 20,000 words!~... but when I've done this in German, my vocabulary expanded by leaps and bounds. I'm also looking out for the defunct and undeservedly out of print Penguin Book of Spanish Verse. + I also want the German and French versions. Poetry, they say, is the very best way of picking up a foreign language. Great for improving the vocabulario and nice and succinct. These Penguin books come complete with prose translations, so the need for three hulking great dictionaries is obviated.

Oh by the way did you know the Spanish word for "dark" is oscuro ~ as in obscure. Never knew that one...

Well I've just come back from visiting the nuthouse. Yet again. My mind is humming. Also the loud Scouse House I'm listening to isn't helping. I was in such a bad, paranoid, irritable mood this afternoon. Effing and blinding at every little thing. Depressed this morning. Hyper in the evening> at least Binky says I am. She says she can tell when I'm going into a "manic" one by the sudden addition of liberal sprinklings of the word Glodemer into my conversation. Glodemer being the name of our late doggie who had the sweetest nature of any doggie I have never known and looked like a seal with mottled silvery grey and black fur. I was absolutely gutted when she died of status epilepticus ~ constantly fitting out for hours and hours until her body just gave out. (This was all brought on by puppyhood distemper.) My parents kept saying they might have to have her put to sleep, but nature took its course before human intervention and she died under the cherry tree in our massive garden. A snow of white blossoms against infinite blue sky. The Japanese say cherry blossoms symbolize the all-too-terrible briefness of life. It was very sad. I felt much more upset over the death of this dog than any of my friends. Except one ("Lucky"). Can't believe Lucky went and died. She just keeled over and her organs failed one after another. Like a power blackout in a big city where you see block after block going dark. So she died. Anyway glodemer is my name for "cute". Japanese かわいい kawaii.

Binky is talking about my going into the emergency psycho clinic if I don't come down soon. I told her when I did go into ultra ultra hyperacute mania more than 2 years ago now, it took a good couple of weeks to get from where I am now (just moody) into extreme elevation with auditory and visual trippings and full-blown confusionality. I'm not anything like that now. It does sound like my carrier bags are whispering mysterious phrases at me as they rustle, but that's just me living out a children's book. Where deep in the enchanted forest trees have great gnarled faces and steam trains puff out exclamations like "Ready to go! Ready to go!" Life is a mystery. Everyone must stand alone. I hear you call my name. And it feels like home.

That's Madonna, darling.

Eddy : "Life is a mystery. Everyone must stand alone."
Saffy : "That's lovely."
Eddy : "Yeah, I hear you call my name and it feels like home."
Saffy : "Who said that ?"
Eddy : "Its Madonna, darling."

(From Absolutely Fabulous, Series 2: Death).

I can't remember what else I was going to put. Oh yes the bed scandal! My Dad is trying to deliver me a bed and just as he was trying to text me a junk mail text came through offering "great deals on both, 3 for £20, 4 for £25..." which I promptly ignored (it having seemingly booted my Dad's text out of my phone) and so I missed the delivery. Of the actual mattress. Because I was two annoying minutes from my house. (I think it is a mystically self-inflating mattress malarky thingie...) Bloody ridiculous. My family are fretting that it might never get delivered and go pinging off into some hyper-conscious censorious vortex of hyperspace where all the missing full-stops congregate in a great H-bomb fusion of transcendently transmogrified unaccented unaccounted accumulated power. Something like that. You know, the space in the Twilight Zone where all the Missing Socks find their long-lost loves. You know: their Sock Partners... Something like that. But It Shall Come. It Will Be Delivered. All Shall Be Fine. Glodemer said so.

By the way I just Googled "where do lost socks go" and someone else was talking about a space-time vortex ~ you see??!? I know I'm on to something here...

Well the weather here in London Town is still lovverly... I don't know. It felt horrid and cold this morning. But this afternoon FEEEEELLLS about 85F. I don't know that it is really that hot but it's such a fantastic evening. Charming as a Chelsea Bun, sweet as a Danish pastry. Curly as an Akita's tail...秋田犬 And just as Glodemer Furry.

Well I've got to go. Knowing my luck UPS are trying to deliver my dhinghy-bed RIGHT NOW!!!

Hey isn't this London animation cool...?

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

Remedy Transcendent Rapturous Sublime Life Is So Meaningful Why Was I Ever So MEANINGLESS For So Long...?

 I AM HAVING A PAKISTANI chicken pastry poof for breakfast. And it is a real poof. Every time I gnaw into it it exclaims "oh really, dearie ~ must you bite in so hard?!" etc. Makes me feel like a real lesbian. I decided to have a Glodemer Breakfast since leaving Binky at the gates of the mental hospital. I gave a nearly Brand New pair of shoes to another inmate called Lulille, who is a sweet old lady who got dragged in there for threatening her neighbours who she said were intertwined in a torrid Black Magic Plot against her. But at size 8s they're too gigantic for little old Lulille. I told Binky to give them to Manic Girl instead, but Manic Girl has disappeared. Probably pinging round the heavens on a magic carpet. Then I told her to give them to Bo Peep Little Miss Wrist-Slasher Borderline Personality Disorder but she's vanished too. She might get a place at Binky's house. Bloody hell, the two of them together. Alternately idealizing and demonizing one another plus everybody else. Emotional chaos 999.

I feel overwhelmed by emotion. Binky can't handle me this morning as I spent all night up listening to music and feeling manic.

Well life is going swimmingly up at 79 Pancake Towers. I've been watching South African soap operas on Oh TV (Sky 199) and Edge/Loaded/Controversial TV (Sky 200) (all about UFOs and Big Brother Girls slagging off Katie Price) but I'm tuning in with my German TV box so I get absolutely everything you don't have to pay for. Including QVC's "mosaics" and a feed seemingly into Sky News's back room where you can hear random people arguing on the phones. Oh bloody hell I forgot to watch Footballers' Wives last night (CBS Drama: Freesat 134, Sky 149) . I must really be losing the plot.

There is so much beauty in the world. I am dying of so much splendour, drowning in transcendent light. Olympian, angelic, astral, beatific, blessed, divine, elysian, empyral, empyrean, eternal, godlike, hallowed, holy, otherworldly, immortal, seraphic, spiritual, sublime, supernal, supernatural, transmundane.... oh wow. And raptures of delight!

And Beverlybabe and Anna Grace and Bugerlugs WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO YOU ALL..??!?

Bloody hell listen to this tune. It is transcendently beautiful.... Like being in paradise.

ARMIN VAN BUUREN: SERENITY
The 2nd one down ~ original mix ~ is particularly impressive...

VIDEO ft VAN JAYNE



ORIGINAL MIX



LIVE ORCHESTRA



And last but not least
THE CHILLOUT MIX...
... you can never have too much of a good thing

Hey I saw Doctor Lovelace yesterday. For the last time ever. Trust that to happen. First time I find a doctor who likes me, who is younger than me, who wants to understand me. Who is sexy. And I have to move out of her catchment area. She found out, by scrolling back through my notes, that I was on methadone and I said I hadn't wanted to tell her because I'd get treated different and she said "but I wouldn't treat you any differently" and I said I know. And now I feel so sad I want to cry. She also told me it is normal for bipolar people to feel high and low in the same day.

There!

OK: I'VE NOW OFFICIALLY MOVED HOUSE! 79 Pancake Towers, Walford, London E20 9LP. OK if I were an EastEnders character that would be my address, but they say you shouldn't give out too much personal info on your blog. Which means I'm pretty f*cked, what with my heroin confessions of yore and all... Well I'm TRYING not to use it. And not entirely succeeding. Hey and guess what? My mood, for the last several days has been almost entirely NORMAL. Not high as a kite, and not too depressed either.

I started keeping a mood diary, where I rate the highest and lowest I felt that day as well as various other factors such as manic feelings: racing thoughts, hyperkinesis, etc. It's something I'm supposed to fill in every day, though many days I don't. Takes about half a minute to scrawl out the answers, then every week or so, I plot my highs and lows on a graph. Very interesting. At the beginning of the year I was hypomanic and suicidally depressed on the same day for more than a week. A complete basket case. Then we see clear-cut euphoric hypomania with no depression. Then the hypomania declines and depression appears in a characteristic wedge shape. With me, the mania usually looks like a shark's fin (peaking very soon, then gradually declining, though you may see two or three sharks' fins in a row). The depression gets steadily worse day by day, hits an all-time low; then suddenly, the day after, I'm almost better. Interestingly the letter S for "suicidal" DISAPPEARS when the mood plummets past a certain point. Anyway the rest of these notebooks are full of the most drivellous rantings possible, usually composed while manic and to be honest I'd like to burn them. What I like the most about being hyper and high is that when I'm right up there, my old neurotic self almost entirely disappears. Also in depression beyond a certain extreme, I'm not neurotic either. But my normal boring personality is so insecure and neurotic I irritate the pants off myself, so what effect I have on other people I hesitate to guess at...

By the way, the whole point of the mood chart is to correspond one's state of mind with whatever shit life has thrown at you that week. Weirdly the news that I'd been offered permanent accommodation actually set off depression with suicidal ideation. I kept thinking of this flat and telling myself: Now I know where I'm going to die... (Which might well be true; because I ***should*** have lifetime tenure. And if I don't die in hospital, the odds are I WILL die at home. That's just statistics for ya. (But of course when I'm really desperate I fantasize about dying in other ways and places. Don't think I'd ever have the guts to put that into operation though...)

Binky is STILL CONFINED TO A MENTAL HOSPITAL for the FIFTH TIME IN LESS THAN A YEAR. I don't even know what is "wrong" with her. She seems completely "normal" to me... But! She was severely punished this morning for calling the doctor the C-word and isn't allowed outside. A 49-year old woman grounded for having borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia and being in a bad mood. Which has me running all over the place purchasing cigarettes, paying off her multiplicitous catalogue bills... etc. Being as my new place is two miles from the nuthouse I can't get there every day any more. Hey last Saturday we had an interesting ride in Manic Girl's car. Bloody hell. I had just remarked how "normal" Manic Girl appeared and why on earth were they keeping her in hospital for so long... Then we got in the car and I realized. I don't think I have ever whizzed through the sinuous streets of London at such extreme velocity. When we got to the post office, Manic Girl said "I used to work there but it was so boring I jacked it in and travelled the world for three months". I wish I could be that spontaneous, but I'm very cautious and boring at heart.

Of course I have heard back NOTHING in my great fight to get keys for all my doors and windows and non-Turkish satellite TV.

I'm living on cheese coleslaw sandwiches. It's that posh multigrain malted bread, so I feel most bourgeois nibbling on these whilst viewing Abu Dhabi TV (formerly sky 796 now you must tune to Astra 2 28.2 east 11662 or 11623MHz horizontal) or Horse and Country (Sky 280 not on Freesat) or The Peace Channel Urdu (Eurobird 1 28.5 east, transponder F1 upper, 12559.67 mHz horizontal (not on Freesat or Sky). Yeah I had a go at tuning my German TV box ~ the one that made me hit the roof when I tried to get Hotbird 13 east and was instead deluged with hundreds of irritating channels in BLOODY TURKISH ~ into the Sky/Freesat satellites at Astra 2 28.2 east. You get about 300 channels free-to-air, most of which aren't on Freesat, some of which aren't on Sky either. I do love my satellite television, hence this massive gripe with the council over negligently miswiring my Hotbird feed and giving me F*CKING TURKISH TELEVISION INSTEAD!! Don't get me wrong. I love most things Turkish: cheap under-the-counter tobacco, large lamb shish kebabs with all salad loads of garlic sauce bit of chili sauce for £5.50 and jewellery that is far nicer than anything else you'll find in the low-to-mid price range (though Indian jewellers are also good). But I DO NOT WANT TURKISH TELEVISION!!!

Ukh, all this ranting... am I going manic again? The mere fact that I think about mania, or remember what it's like at random points of the day, is often (weirdly enough) the first sign of its return. That and fantastic adrenaline rushes lasting hours on end, woven into the psychedelic fabric of life's rich tapestry...

" /> Bloody hell I'm hungry. I'm going to have to run to Iceland for something to shove in my sandwiches. Good job it's winter: because I have no fridge, I'm just stashing stuff out on the balcony. Where, by the way, a pair of pigeons keep mating. First thing in the morning and right in front of my face.

Righty-ho. Better leave it there. Hope y'all have a chirpy weekend...

(And if it can't be chirpy, then may it be chirrupy instead...)

Link: my right to satellite television under EU law http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-01-913_en.htm?locale=en

Illustrated: these apartment blocks are far too pretty to be anywhere in London ~ what you see is Neukölln in Western Berlin...

MUSIC: DOLLY PARTON ~ THERE

I used to listen to this when I was very little: it was on the album New Harvest First Gathering