A Wonderful Day!

I FEEL BETTER TODAY... but only because I have "used" ~~ yet again. My feelings have been all over the place. And painfully so. On Monday afternoon I was wondering about crying. I'm doing a group therapy thing called Mentalization, which is really difficult to explain in a nutshell, but it's about not assuming what others think and mean but to ask them. That way, the world might be a More Understanding Place.

Anyway there's a girl with Borderline Personality Disorder (not Binky ~ she has it too) ~ who can talk coherently and cogently about her inner emotional incoherence. It seems she comes from a similar place I do. Where you cannot think, see, emote or feel from any fixed point but are so constantly in flux that you never know where you are (and others just assume they know where you are). I'm not at all sure I would ACTUALLY have Borderline Personality Disorder (which mostly affects females anyhow) but when I took the online personality disorders test (my biggest fascination in psychology is what makes us Individual and what makes us Different) I scored highest on "Schizotypal" (about 86%) and "Borderline" (about 82%). Each time. More than a year apart. ("Normal people" score about 35-40%) You can see my Personality Test result toward the bottom of my sidebar.

My GP has totally done my head in. Sitting there shuffling through a wodge of papers from the methadone clinic, he seemed to be saying, in effect, that I was just a scheming, manipulative junkie piece of shit who had probably just hoodwinked a shrink because both times he saw me, 3 weeks apart, I seemed "pretty OK". (First time my mood WAS as normal as it ever gets; second time I was definitely depressed and I'm NOT flattered when anyone, least of all a dr thinks that depressive person is somehow the "real" me. Come on! I think there's a bit more oomph and jizz to me than that!

My druggieworker, who says this GP "is a good doctor", doesn't want me to do it (which makes my paranoid side feel they're somehow in cahoots) but I'm writing this GP a letter. It's far FAR easier for me to explain the inexplicable in writing than by answering somebody else's questions which cast me adrift more than anything else!

But what really gets me is that that doctor, among all of them, is supposed to have a "special interest in mental health"! Well he doesn't seem too interested in me! Barely looked at me. Didn't seem to be listening either. What I got, was that he was trying to be a smart-arse, asking the same questions twice. If a person does try and catch someone like me out, who tends to get lost in a billion viewpoints from a trillion details at a quadrillion nanomoments then of course he's going to get different answers. Because I never feel the same way twice. And like I say, I cannot hold on to anything like a single, fixed position. Heroin really SEEMED to help sort out the chaos in my mind and emotions. But without it, I'm cast adrift. Even when I do take it these days, it doesn't seem to "help" the way it used to. (Yet another reason to stop... of course!)

On a much better note, we went shopping this afternoon and Binky was so lovely. She bought me new boots, new jeans, five new pairs of socks, two teeshirts and a new jacket! Jacket and jeans were second-hand. The rest were brand new. How kind of her is that! She wanted so say thank you for the way I looked after her when she was marooned in hospital...

OK it's getting late and I must dash. It's a bank holiday weekend so I hope you all have a good one, wherever you are in the world and even if you DON'T have a special Holiday Monday like we do! ("Bank holidays" are British public holidays.)

MOZART'S TRANCED-UP LACRIMOSA

This version is clearer

And this one (arguably) "funkier"...

HIGH TEA: Feelin' Good and My Theory Behind It

FEELIN' GOOD. Yup, I do feel OK. PROPERLY OK. Not semi-down, not half-depressed and tired but PROPERLY OK.

It's true my sleep cycle has gone and cycled off into a ditch somewhere because since about midday yesterday I haven't been to bed at all. I don't follow any "New Age" philosophy, but one author who's into such stuff says on sleep loss:

Sleep deprivation somehow acts as a blanket neurotransmitter re-uptake inhibitor. Your brain stays saturated with neurotransmitters leading to elevated mood and euphoria.

I have to say I never found that true in the past. Sleep loss has never made me anything else but REALLY KNACKERED. The sleep loss I get now happens BECAUSE THE ENERGY'S ALREADY THERE. Other way round!

My mood feels THE WAY IT SHOULD to me. I don't think it is elevated. It is Normal. What has gone up is my energy. I stayed up all night last night writing in Spanish.Afterwards, I've decided I'm going to master Italian, Romanian and Portuguese too. And to perfect my French. They're all offshoots of Latin, so it shouldn't be that hard. It's said that it's easier to become fluent in four Romance languages than to master Korean (or presumably any other Asian language)...

I have some theories, based around realizations that came to me fully formed (not as the fruit of interminable pondering) that don't exactly weave together into a magic carpet of Enlightened Truth (they're not meant to ~ they're my Pearls. So I hope that by alluding to them below I'm not casting them before swine...(!)

Earlier on ~ both this morning and yesterday ~ I thought I was High  ~ until I realized I couldn't possibly be, because I hadn't taken anything... But I had! I'd taken tea and tea is laden with caffeine, theobromine and so-on. Stimulants. I've had two cups of caffeinated tea today. Yesterday I had one tea and one coffee. I now drink Nescafé decaffeinated but I can still feel hyper on just that. Turns out there IS caffeine in decaffeinated coffee. Just less of it.

I've tried drinking Cup-a-Soup as an alternative, but that's laced with MSG and that perturbs the brain's glutamate receptors (inhibiting them, as far as I know). There is a connexion between glutamate, GABA, serotonin and dopamine ~ the two main monoamines that regulate mood. So I'm doing myself in there as well. Sometimes I switch to lemonade. My folks point out that most lemonade is chock full of aspartame and acesulfame K ~ both of which are "sources of phenylalanine" which has a supposed mood-elevating property. (Aspartame has also been implicated as a causative factor in a whole range of mental disorders.) Well I absolutely loathe the taste of artificial sweeteners so the lemonade I drink is Sainsbury's own, which is sugar-only. But sugar is well known for making kids hyper and I'm nothing if not a big kid. Which casts sugar out the window too...

Which leaves me with plain drinking water. Sugar-free, non-calorific and (presumably) undrugged ~ water is actually one of the Greatest Energy Sources of All. Water is a compound of oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen being, of course the very breath of life itself. While hydrogen ~ as the lightest of all elements ~ is fundamental to the most powerful nuclear reactions in the known universe. The sun ~ a humungous ball of liquid hydrogen ~ produces heat and light via continuous nuclear fusion... has been doing this for about 4,600,000,000 years, and has an estimated 7,000,000,000 years of fuel left.

Controlled nuclear fusion is the "holy grail" of nuclear scientists. If we did ever manage it, we'll be able to power the entire planet on just water. Human blood is 83% water. The Bible says that our life is in our blood. Water is described in the Bible as "living".

I don't know how I did it, but I have accessed a special source of energy and power not open to or attainable by most other people. I think in the future all humankind will drink from the same Fountain of Life. Hey maybe I got a little sip in advance...?

This is a time of Rising Energy. Spring is springing as we speak ~ can't you feel it? I woke up one morning last week and, despite feeling otherwise completely horrible, I felt this weird sense of light behind my eyes... in my head... I don't know how to describe it but I get it every year and it makes me feel "weird". OK, I know people who live Down Under can't. But everyone else...? Does anyone get what I get? This semi-migrainey sensation with ultra-intensely saturated field of vision and a sense that the weird flickery multicoloured visual effects of migraine "aura" are just about to intrude. I had this for about four days straight. Right before (and especially behind) my eyes, the building blocks and motifs of the phone game "Edge" were everywhere. So some days I was seeing the computer game on the pavement as I trotted to the methadone chemist...

Yes: I think I had been playing Edge a bit too much. I completed level 46 and that's the top level.

(Edge is a game where you roll a cube around a surreal world. There are no baddies and you don't have to shoot anything and that's why I like it. Your "enemy" is the edge: fall off and you die and have to try again. But it's really really really addictive... and it reminds me of a recurring daydream I used to have as a child... Very psychological...

Well that's all I have to say. Somehow it has taken an hour to write something that came to me in a flash earlier on. I AM going to try sleeping. It's supposed to be good to sleep it's just that... sometimes it seems such a WASTE OF TIME. You know what I mean?

Oh I just remembered I'm due down the druggieclinic tomorrow where I've 99% persuaded a lady called Marjorie to be my new Worker. Me and my old worker don't really click. The missing 1% is all down to me. I have to remain abstinent from heroin or Marge won't have me. Ukh: I'd be so ashamed if I used and she found out. Marjorie was BRIEFLY my worker in about 2009 when I really wasn't tuned into cleanliness or sobriety in any sense of either word ~ so we didn't click at all. I'd just sacked Maple Syrup ~ bullying Bitch Worker From Hell and found it hard to open up to or trust anybody at all who worked at a methadone clinic. Marjorie has been Duty Worker for the last few weeks. This means she's the person you see when you miss your keyworking appointment. Or if you're like me and your worker never makes the appointments to start with then vanishes off sick with no explanation. (I think he's got "Depression" by the way. Everyone seems to be depressed nowdays...)

Uuuuuurrrrrr... I've lost my thread. Yes ENERGY and LOTS OF IT. Back again. I wish I could Return to the Source and STAY THERE. That's the big reason I gave up on drugs of the Transcendent variety. The gates of paradise are opened. The E-pixie grabs that pot of gold at the rainbow's end and pours it out all over you, bathing you in stardust. Then come Tuesday morning you're bedridden, crying, totally distraught and feeling lied to. What was so wonderful has now turned to shit.

What I want from life is some value that lasts for ever. I'd rather have just a little bit of that than a whole load of Money. Though to be honest, it would be nice to have the money too...

OK I hope my musings weren't Too Amusing. I've got to go and find another Pot of Golden Pixie Dust...

COMPUTER GAMES

There is something intensely dreamlike about computer games. The kind I like are relatively sedate and do not require lightning reflexes!

This is the one I'm talking about. EDGE. This is the PC version. The phone version has the theme music but no other sound-effects...

POOYAN プーヤン (Konami Arcade game: 1982)

I got the top score on this down our local arcade. And doesn't it look incredibly primitive 31 years after its conception...? I was only good at it because you go up, down and shoot. I LOATHE games with complicated controls.

JET SET WILLY (Platform game for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Programmed by school boy Matthew Smith. Released 1982).

This was only fun when you nobbled it to get infinate lives, protection from death by falling, cured the "attick bug" and neutralized the "sprites"... really great fun. I used to spend hours just wandering around....

Diet Tips Required

I GOT UP AT 2 O'CLOCK this morning. I know that's a bit early but I went to bed early too. It is a blue and white day ~ sun and clouds. My mood has gone down to normal. It must have gone up because dance music that sounded amazing a couple of days ago now sounds very average indeed. (Not to mention childish, a lot of it...)

I left for the chemist at 9am. Got there in menopausal sweats. I had to take refuge in the library. There was a man in here earlier, slumped over in an armchair, snoring heavily. He was sternly reprehended by two members of staff on two separate occasions. I made sure I got a front row seat for the second reprimand when he was ordered to leave under threat of the police.

Two hours have passed (I wrote this at 11:20). The methadone is working. The sweats have gone. My mind is about as crystal clear as it ever gets. I can focus on books, magazines, etc, once again.

By the way, I blame my mental condition on methadone. For years heroin flattened my mood and relieved depression; the second I dumped it in favour of methadone in late 2010 I was floridly manic and hearing voices! Whether or not the methadone actually causes these mood swings seems almost immaterial; the fact is there are other opiate substances that could be prescribed that can and will attenuate them. Frankly I consider that brain-dead drug clinic's continuing compulsion to prescribe methadone instead of something less harmful and less addictive, like morphine pills, nothing short of clinical negligence!

I was so exhausted, not to mention bored, in the early hours of the morning that I seriously considered popping a Seroquel. For all its other crimes, that stuff does zonk me out. In fact that was one of the problems of being on it; it left me feeling half-dead most of the time.

My main passions at the moment are to finish that dratted children's story that seems to be dragging on and on, and to think up a way of acquiring an keeping a whole flock of lovebirds (well, 4 would do, or even 2 or 1 ~ the man in the bird shop says you CAN keep a single lovebird, especially if you let it out to flutter all over the place and ride your shoulder ~ then it falls in love with YOU!)

Does anybody know of any good ways of losing weight? I'm right at the upper end of my ideal weight range (approx 200 lbs, 14 stone or very roughly 90 kilos) and feel like becoming stick-thin again.

I went all day yesterday on just one stick of garlick bread (+ 2 cans of cyder). I had the other garlic bread stick at 7am. Being as I barely ever do anything at all, my body should not NEED thousands of Calories. Which reminds, me, I must buy 2 litres of Morrisons' 55p lemonade...

I just read in a book titled The Diet Delusion that the overweight tend to consume a greater proportion of their energy in the form of carbohydrates than the thin. I pretty much live on pasta. Luciano Pavarotti attributed his own tubbiness to pasta. Cripes, I think I had better add smoked fish to that shopping list. Just the thought of fish makes me feel starving hungry. But I'm going to hold off eating it all day. When I was thin, I used to feel vaguely hungry all the time, and enjoy it. The feeling of power and control I got from habitually under-eating made all the hunger worthwhile. Plus I just got used to it. (Both eating less and feeling distantly hungry pretty much all the time.) I still weighed a good 9.5 stone (133 lbs/60kg) back then (in the late 90s) so I was hardly "anorexic". My point is, if you really want to get thin, I've found you must go on a perma-diet, consuming only savoury food and no sweets, and as little of that food as possible. And if you do feel pain, you must learn to enjoy it. If ANYONE has any diet tips and advice for getting and staying as thin as possible for as long as possible... PLEASE TELL!!

APOLLO: DANCE (DS MIX)
when I was in my "expansive" mood this got me as high as a kite... it's the ONLY music from that period ~ all of 2 days ago ~ that still sounds good to my ears now...