Aquano's Blog: December 2010

Happy New Year 2011

WE HAVE WORLD WAR III style fireworks going off on both ends of our street. Strains of Auld Lang Syne waft up from downstairs...

I'm not alcohol-free, but I'm probably sober enough to drive, for once..(!)

MAY THIS YEAR BE WAY BETTER THAN THE BIG-O-SHYTE OLD ONE!

VAGATOR HILL TOP (ANJUNA) GOA
2005 New Year's Eve (looks more like New Year's Day to me).
I've been here, New Year's Eve 2001:~<
The second tune is way better than the 1st

HOLYMEN: SIMON SAID
If you've been out all night (ooo you young people!) and require some psychedelic acidic visuals, have a look at this. One question though: what on earth are you doing reading my blog??
Akh, this tune has a weird oppressive beat. I just like the picture:

Clearer

THE MAIN AREA OF MY HOUSE is beginning to approach normality. A cluttered normality with an Everest Heap of clothes in the middle, books to one side all higgledypiggledy because there's too many to stack up... there's still a week's worth of cleaning and clearing to go.

It doesn't quite look like the photo, but it will do. When I win the lottery and move.

Graffiti Letter A | Graffiti Alphabet A

Sketch graffiti letters A cool style

Ice

Too much to drink at 3am

AKH! ALCOHOL. Alcohol alcohol. I've drunk past a week's worth of alcoholic units in the past 24 hours. Her Majesty's Chief Medical Officer suggests I may safely drink 28 units, that's 280mls neat alcohol, in the course of a week. (Never a day.) Today I've had past 30, that's 300mls neat alcohol. 4 litres of white cyder. Akh. I am not proud.

In my youth drink was the most boring drug known to man. (That is: known to me.) Never in a million years was I tempted to knock back spirits (or even beer) in the day. Even down the bar I was as happy with lemonade as beer. Alcohol-free beer was good for me. Strangely, the student bar didn't stock that one...

My point being: I was never much of a drinker. Yeah: I got drunk a couple of times. Cross-eyed and unable to walk drunk. Stomach scrubbed out with a Brillo pad because you haven't eaten all day and don't know how to take care of yourself drunk.

The worst hangover I ever had didn't correct itself for three days. I drank a lot of cyder that night.

(Cyder becomes a recurring theme.)

I only got into drink because I thought I needed Dutch courage to beg passers-by for money. My sign said "HUNGRY PLEASE HELP." I made sure I never ate before I went begging, so my sign was in every way true. I never ate in those days until last thing at night. One meal a day. I thought skeletal looked good. Looking back at nasty snapshots I looked like crap.

Of course I was begging because I was broke. I was broke because I was on heroin. Drink and heroin made ready partners. Right from the beginning my Big Complaint about gear was that it was no longer doing it for me.

That was a big reason I put myself into rehab. I didn't appreciate just how much gear actually did until I took it away. Then I started to fall apart in an ugly way. Then I ran screaming back to the gear and all its fluffy cosiness.

And that was why I could never tolerate methadone. A friend once told me 60mg was equivalent to a £10 bag IV. At the time I thought: Nah, 60mg's worth way more than that. The druggieclinic give out 10mg to equate £10 gear (0.2g) as standard. But that's ridiculous. All these years later I can accept: my friend was right. When the gear was good, I could barely hold myself on 100mg. That was without a script ie I had no double habit. I would sweat heavily, even go into cramps on methadone at "high doses".

The methadone I bought came in the form of Physeptone pills. There was no question of anybody interfering with it. (Street-bought "juice" is very often watered, if only slightly.)

It wasn't until this Great Heroin Drought that methadone ever held me properly. Certainly better than the crap-arse gear going around a few weeks ago. Way better.

So as heroin's hold has faded, alcohol's has tightened. And I want out. I need out. I've had enough of intoxicating substances. It's time to go it alone.

I don't know how I'll do it, but it's time.

If you go away

I'M STILL clearing up. I'm hoping to get the worst of it done by tonight, then I have one clear room. Not completely perfect, but within the bounds of "normality"... At last!

I've thrown away one black bag full of empty sin bins, and I'll have another black sack full of full ones for the exchange! I'm so looking forward to turning up as Junkie of the Year. Not.

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD: IF YOU GO AWAY
This tune just came on tv. I like:~

6 months

Congratulations Caroline- you've made it halfway around the calendar!

Sketches Graffiti Alphabet B

Examples of some of the sketches graffiti alphabet B in the paper. Maybe you can use it to simply look for the style of graffiti letter B. The following six B style graffiti letters different:

3D sketch graffiti letter B

Graffiti sketch letter B with color

Graffiti sketch letter B with a green border

Sketch graffiti alphabet B with bright colors

Sketches in black and white graffiti alphabet B

3D sketches in black and white graffiti alphabet B

Pics

Driving in the country (Muldersdrift, Johannesburg)

Toothpaste stains

I GOT UP AT 4:30 this morning. I feel like I could do with a year's more sleep but there you go. After smoking lots of cigarettes, trotting down the shop for smoked mackerel, Hovis bread and 2 litres of cyder (I'm cutting down) plus my

tropical fruit juice (supposedly it's as good for you as eating veg, but I find that hard to believe)... after all this I scurried back home and wasted an hour watching BBC's early morning news and rubbish. The guy presenting used to be ITN's royal correspondent but I can't remember his name. Nick something. Being royal correspondent meant tilting your head slightly and inflecting the voice all sentimental-like whenever mentioning the Queen Mother. I was never convinced the Queen

Mum was quite as kindly as portrayed. For one thing HM the Queen appeared, from the vast distance I view her, to be completely under her thumb. Since her Mum's death she seems to have become much more of her own woman. Her fashion sense appears to have improved immensely. The Queen is the funkiest-dressing old woman alive. With the exception of Rosie, the Trance granny who made luminous laurel crowns. I met her at the Warp club (Rosie, not the Queen) under an enormous railway arch round the corner from the London Dungeon, but I had seen her picture in the music press. She was famous for her octogenarian psychedelic ways.

There is a bevy of sparrows down my road. They live in a hedge and chirp their tuneless little heads off every morning. Cheep! Chirp! Twit! Twat! Twitter!! They say. My nightingale, who used to live in the nearest tree to our house is still on migration in West Africa. He or she won't be back until the spring. I know it was a nightingale because I matched the bird by appearance and song. The song was amazing, it tweetled and twittered all night like an LSD canary. I kept my window open especially. O man those sparrows are chirruping LOUD this morning. Sparrows all but disappeared from London about 15 years ago. They used to hang out in flocks along with the pigeons in parks. Even today, though you see them more, they're rare.

HEROIN! I haven't used any since I non-used the other day.. how many days clear am I now..? Seven days. I scored on December 23rd. Just checked me blog. That's the convenience of being a blogger. I know the day and date I did everything. Now I'm off to get my methadone. They're usually open by 8:30. I took half as much methadone as usual yesterday and today and am not feeling it so far... does this make me Addict-Invincible or will a horrible rebound come and slam me with creepytime withdrawal..? I bet it will. But there ya go. I want OFF that crap. The sooner the better. Chemical slavery. Heroin without any fun at all. I hate it.

I've got to go. Those sparrows are distracting me bigtime.

This is the twit-twit jug-jug chirrupydirrupydoodles song of the nightingale:

WOW I can't believe this, this is ROSIE from the Warp on film!!!

Warp Club London 1999: on lots of lovely MDMA hippieflipping I accidentally took 2 Mitsubishis at once in here, fell asleep and woke up flying through the roof. That was a good night (well morning: the club finished at 9pm so I never usually turned up till 6 or 7 in the morning)...
The place looks sparse because it was probably 11am by the time this was shot, and there were at least 5 more rooms of equal or bigger size, it was a HUGE club...
... ukh was the dancing really that terrible? I must have been on drugs!!

Illustrated: wow! a sink dirtier than mine! BBC Breakfast with Dermott Murnughan and Sian somethingorother; HM the Queen, looks good in a hat; a nightingale

Meet Nubia

NUBIA was one of the best pet fishes I ever had. She was a Borneo Sucker or hillstream loach. These stealth-bomber-style fishies live in shallow pebbly streams where they zip along the shallow aerated water, sticking to rocks as the tumult swirls about them.

Relative to her size, Nubia must have been the fastest-moving most agile swimmer I ever had. The lady at the fish shop was totally exasperated trying to catch her between two nets in an empty tank as she pinged back and forth in great commotion. She looked like a flying ribbon.

Nubia lived in a special cave that I built her by hollowing out the gravel at the front and placing a flat piece of slate over the dip. Here she spent her hours of repose, happily suckered upside down ignoring the world (it takes all sorts). She didn't seem too offended when I picked up the rock to have a good look. She just stayed anchored down. And then whooshed away in a flurry of bubbles.

We had an air filter streaming against the glass at the side, and this was her second favourite place. She was a strong enough swimmer to actually move vertically downwards against the air-and-waterflow.

Loaches are my favourite sort of fish. They skulk about in the shadowiest, most secluded zones of the so-called community tank, eschewing the company of other fish, preferring to dart about very quickly at selected opportunities. They don't eat fishfood, but feed instead on algae on the glass, which means you should never place one in a brand-new tank or it'll starve.

It took me a while to realize that Nubia's most striking characteristic was one I'd previously attributed to a trick of the light. Sometimes she seemed to go light and then dark as if a shadow were passing overhead. Then I realized she was actually changing colour, more according to mood (so I assumed) than anything else.

How amazing is that.

So there we have it. The Borneo Sucker: the most amazing fish known to aquarium-kind!

Male Sewellia lineolata and Gastromyzon ctenocephalus having a scuffle on a cobble (as you do). Well as gripping viewing goes it beats Larkrise to Candleford hands down:~

This is what I look like Anna

THIS is why I say I'm in a mess, Anna.

When I look in the mirror I see Worzel Gummidge.

I am in a terrible mess.

Worzel Gummidge looks better than me.

At least Worzel Gummidge got paid for being on TV.

PS this is what I look like in drag:

I wouldn't want to meet me down a dark alley!!

Graffiti Alphabet in Used Tins

Example of making graffiti alphabet in used tins. Graffiti to the bolts in order not to disturb any origin. Other than graffiti on a wall can also be made in tin cans as above. More creative when making the decorations. Able to sell and make money. Maybe I'll do it someday. New Graffiti

Clearer

CLEARNESS IS SLOWLY STARTING TO APPEAR! My cluttered home is steadily decluttering. It's taking a LOT longer than I would like. I think it will take another 10 days to get things totally clear but the rate I'm going it's going very well.

I can't sleep and I'm exhausted. As I said I'm not doing anywhere like as much clearing as I'd like... but it IS being done. I'm so glad.

Everyone have a look at my cat video below; it's fantastic. I like the way he keeps patting the cat and that seems to palcate the poor purrer as it's wrapped in paper with a bow put on its head ...

Illustration: a 1940s housewife would go nuts in my house

Memos from South Africa

Photo taken while visiting the Lifestyle Nursery during drive in the country side of northern johannesburg towards the muldersdrift area. Are'nt the flowers just beautiful? And these fish - some of them were just sooo huge. I love Koi fish! I hope you all are having a great finish to 2010...I do miss you all and hope to catch up on your blogs sooon.

2:48am Cleanup

UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS has just just finished on reapeat. The original was only on a few hours ago. This was a classic TV serial about servants and posh people in a London townhouse from my childhood. Now the BBC have brought it back with the same actress playing Rose. If you're across the Pond and get BBC America, watch this, it's A1 costume drama. I like a good costume drama but it does have to be good. Upstairs Downstairs is even better than Downton Abbey. Next week that dreadful Larkrise to Nowhere is back on I cannot stand that.

I've been watching night time television. Prince Charles showed us his bird-chirping garden. The feathery little entertainers were singing their tiny hearts out for the heir to the throne. I'd like a garden like that, but I'd go for 10,000 acres, not just 15.

Now enough about television I have just had pasta in Lloyd Grossman tomato sauce. My Mum bought me the pasta sauce. Normally I'd buy Ragu. A Ragu means you can have five times as many tomatoes as weight as they're evaporated down in an oven dish. Welshcakes Limoncello probably knows how to do this. Her Xmas dinner pictures at her friend's house are amazing.

Now I'm in a buzzy mood. Having woken up feeling vile and dire. Like death warmed up. I said I was cleaning and I did have a stab at it but I basically felt ill so I went back to bed in the afternoon and slept till 9pm. Now I'm up and racing nicely. No I have NOT been taking amphetamines or any other drugs. It's just a natural mood swing. I'm only drinking for medicinal reasons. Keeps the jangly edge off. Now I must go I have to scrub this ******* floor. ******* houses. ******* landlord. ******* life. **** **** **** ****! See I'm being awfully prim by depriving you of my obscenity tirade.

I have to go. Keeping moving keeps me UP. And UP gets the cleaning done. I am crystal clear and shining. Gotta move gotta move gotta MOVE MOVE MOVE MOVE MOVE!!

Do you like my blue smiling face? Isn't it amazing. Blue is the best colour. There's nothing unhappy about blue. Blue is a high by itself. Cool blue ....

4:14am: a catalogue of freak accidents in the US. 8 homeless people burned to death in New Orleans, 5 teenagers asphyxiated in Florida motel, 8 injured in ski lift disaster in Maine ...

Oh yeah and a riot at a Moscow airport due to no de-icing spray (no: staff probably drank it!)

HOW TO WRAP A CAT FOR XMAS
This film, with 4,000,000 views so far, provoked "outrage" among humourless animal charities who seem to spend most of their existence flailing about for something to be upset and offended about. I hope they really got their money's worth from this because it's hilarious:

Works Of Art Such As Graffiti Alphabet Letters

A design alphabets driftwood on the wall of the Copper Creek Inn, near Ashford, This is not a photo az graffiti alphabet, but works of art from driftwood cool alphabet taped on the wall.

Still here

I WENT TO BED AROUND 3AM, GOT UP AT 7:30AM. I felt dire. I spent an hour in a chair, knocking back methadone and three huge wine glasses of tapwater. I drank so much last night I was actually (slightly) hung over. Buying white cyder in 3-litre bottles was not the good idea I thought it was.

I barely get hangovers now. Somebody told me this has to do with opiate-dependence and I think they were right.

Actually I spent more than an hour in that chair. More like three. Finally at approaching quarter past eleven after two more enormous wineglasses of Hair of the Dog white cyder I'm starting to feel OK.

Everything I said in that earlier post "Gun to my head" was (unfortunately) true.

I got a comment from Gattina just now. Gattina is now a grandmother. She lives in Belgium with her Italian husband. Is German born, but speaks French (and English). In fact she speaks four languages fluently plus Dutch*, which she always says she doesn't speak, but if I can follow it just from knowing German and having studied a tiny bit of Dutch, I know she can. Notice I say "follow" not "speak".

She says I have to do what I have to do and in my mother's words Take Responsibility.

This is the crux of the problem: that's exactly what I tell myself! So why won't I listen?

Anyway who cares about listening; it's doing that counts. So I'm doing what I have to, albeit far FAR more slowly than I'd like. Chucking everything I don't need out out OUT.

*Gattina's grandson lives in Amsterdam and the northern part of Belgium speaks Flemish or Vlaams, as they call it, a dialect of Dutch.

Snowpocalypse 2010 (mala Ondoy)

Humagupit kagabi ang first North American blizzard of 2010 dito po sa aming barangay. Sumilip sumandali ang haring araw kaninang umaga, nawala at umuhip ang hurricane-force winds sabay bagsak ng mabigat, malagkit na snow. Palakpakan ang mga bata at matanda dahil walang pasok sa school at opisina. Suspindido din ang mga lipad ng mga eroplano at saringola.

Bandang hapon na ng tumila ang blizzard of 2010, nagtambak ng labing-dawala hangang dalawanput-isang pulgada ng snow. Mas mataas pa po ito ke Picabo.

Halos magkandahika at inabot ako ng dalawang oras sa paghuhukay ng aming karag-karag. Basang basa ng pawis ang lolo ninyo.

O my gid! SAGINAW talaga! Ibalik ninyo ako sa Pilipinas!

A Gun to my Head

I'M IN TROUBLE WITH MY LANDLORD for being too scruffy. At least I think I am. Downstairs told me this. Downstairs and I do not get on. This is the trouble I have and I can tell you but it doesn't make anything any clearer or less How It Is.

Last time I was in trouble with my landlord (my old landlord) basically for living in a mess, for not coping. A way worse mess than this one, the day I had to go down the council to sort out my housing I had this weird feeling, as if someone had put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger. Instead of feeling pain or stress I just felt unreal. I could not engage with anything. I knew what was happening, but it was not real to me.

That is how I feel now. I should be in a frantic scrabble to clear up, but I'm not. In a way I don't care about anything at all. If I get chucked out I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to go on holiday. Or vacation, to you Americans. I will take as much methadone as I can carry. I know where to buy it so I can get a week's supply up front at high doses. This I will cut down drastically on the road. Detoxing makes me hyper. Hyper makes me pace. Pacing is walking. I can get a lot of travelling done by detoxing. If I feel suicidal I'm lucky because there's snow. I need only go to sleep outside and I might be lucky enough to die. But I'm not into dying, as I said I'm going on holiday. I won't say where because people will try and follow me or spy on me. But I'm going.

If I stay here I will turn my home into an operating theatre. But I'm almost hoping to get chucked out. Because I'm fed up of my old life. The problems and non-problems I thought were caused by heroin seemingly aren't. I always knew this was the case. Heroin was only a mask, masking the reality of a person not coping. I don't need heroin to dissociate myself. I don't need heroin as an anaesthetic. I only feel real pain in withdrawal or extreme mood states. My ordinary depression is usually mild enough just to blank me. Most of the time. But I have a nasty tendency to cycle through various mental states and into one when I realize with full weight and intensity What I Have Done. And then I feel very deeply negligent and sorry. Sorry for the hurt I have caused others. And sorry for myself. Usually I don't feel for myself, but sometimes I do, and I hate feeling anything.

So I can live without heroin. Heroin was just a waste of time. I want off these opiates, they're only disabling an already disabled person. The sooner I'm off them the better. If I get made homeless I will have an A1 chance to come off because I will be nowhere near my methadone pharmacy, nowhere near the drug clinic or my "loving mother" who only wants to salve her conscience ~ or the rest of my family who do love me but I pity them for it. I wish I could kill their pain without killing them. (Maybe they would be better off on heroin!)

See I feel sad now because I have written the words of a badly messed up, lost person and I feel that. I can't accept that I am that person. Because if I could I would already be working not to be like that and I cannot do it. I try. I do try, but something invisible and very powerful, like bulletproof glass... something stops me. I wish I had never been born. I hate knowing the World. I don't care what the world knows about me, but I don't want to know the world any more. I never asked to live like this. I never asked to know what I know. I am the sort of idiot who would have bitten that forbidden fruit in Eden. I know. Drugs like Ecstasy, acid, ketamine, mushrooms opened up an understanding of something that is inexplicable to someone who hasn't been there. A kind of knowledge of good. A vision of paradise (on Ecstasy especially). So did heroin: an understanding of Evil. And a desperation you never knew was possible. And feeling it every single day for years on end.

I don't want to know. I don't want to know anything any more. I wish the anaesthesia would come back.

Ridding

I GOT RID OF ALL MY NEEDLES. I cleared two drawers full of drug-rubble. The towerblock-shaped yellow sharps bin is full. I filled three smaller bins with more needles. I'm determined to clear as much as I can today, but I feel tired and basically ill. I need more energy.

I have one drawer to go but it has more "normal" stuff in it. I hate dealing with drug paraphernalia, as it makes me think of drugs.

Literally everything I have that I don't need is going. Like I say I do need more energy because I'm exhausted already. But I'm not giving up. I'm fed up of living in a dump.

Bubble Graffiti: Purple Bubble Graffiti Alphabet

Alphabet in bubble graffiti letters

Bubble graffiti

Purple bubble alphabet graffiti on the wall store. Graffiti dominant with cool purple color. Graffiti street art.

Riddance

I WAS IN A SERIOUSLY ANTIMETHADONE MOOD yesterday wasn't I? I was despairing that I'd ever have a life on methadone. I'm not sure I ever will but I

can try. And if I can't do that, I can get rid of the methadone. Not sure how I'll survive, but I'm determined to try that too.

My current priority is to clear my house, which is in a terrible mess. I have rubbish rubbish rubbish. Stuff I've picked up on the street ~ furniture. A television set also retrieved from the street I haven't even plugged in to see if it works. Clothes, sheets, crap all tangled and strewn. I have about 30 black sacks in readiness for the Great Chucking Out. I threw out quite a lot last week. This week the rest Has To Go. I'm setting a time limit of New Year's Eve, by which time my home shall be gleaming like an operating theatre.

Does anybody know a magic cure for unhappiness? I google stuff on depression and get the same useless DSM Diagnostic Criteria. I don't care about that rubbish or whether it's genetic, environmental, drug-induced or all three (probably all three). I want to know how to get Rid. Along with all that Rubbish. Rid Rid Rid.

Good Riddance, Bad Rubbish!