WELL YESTERDAY WAS FUN. NOT.
I was depressed and stressed and my life is a mess. My house is a mess, but I'm cleaning that up. I'm a mess but that job is near undoable. Notice I say near. Because I will do it, no matter how hard or long the job.
I didn't sleep on Sunday night so I felt crap yesterday. Due to tireness I started hallucinating again, but not very much, and only mildly. That's the only good thing about sleep deprivation, mentally spinning sideways. I never thought there was unything unusual about this wandering my tired brain does, until it wandered right out of my skull, down the road, hopped on the tube, flew from Heathrow to America and Cape Kenaveral ~ then blasted up to the moon a couple of weeks ago! The fellow astronauts, by the way, apparently just thought it was a weird kind of experimental walnut blobbering about in zero gravity with them ...
My friend Valium Marilyn is depressed too. She hasn't been at all well. She's hibernating on pills in front of an enormous widescreen television.
I asked her whether she wanted to score Valium, but it was down to me to get it and there's been a lot of fake about, I didn't want that responsibility. I'm pretty sure the last lot I got was fake. Unless you can get tolerance on 10mg a day, 5 days a week, all throughout the second week, the pills were duff. So I got 6xtemazepam 20mg for far more than I considered reasonable, but I thought what the heck, it's better than heroin.Then I didn't take ANY pills and slept from 4pm until 2am. Went to bed. Slept through till 9:30am. Didn't want to get up. Slept another 2 hours. Woke up at 11:30am. That's a good 19 hours' under. Fast asleep. Without any drugs or pills or excessive methadone. I didn't need methadone when I woke, but I took it, to avoid Heroin-craving.
When Heroin crosses my mind now I just think of the Misery I'm moving away from. No visualization is required. I associate Heroin with Homelessness, Poverty and Misery.
Heroin did hold me together better than anything else has done. So the Depression-type misery I feel now is just me without Heroin. In the end I felt it with or without Heroin anyway. Heroin took the edge off, there's no doubt about that. But it didn't even do that well in the end. That's how I knew it was time to stop.
I used an outside event, a drought. Originally I assumed that this would be a False Paradise. That if good gear ever does come back, I'd go right back to it. But that's not necessarily true at all.
For months going on years I had genuinely wanted OUT. I just couldn't get out. Now I am out, albeit thoroughly dependent on methadone, I'm staying out. I also obtained enough clarity to realize people DO stop heroin due to outside forces. Marianne Faithfull ODd herself, fell down a flight of stairs, broke her jaw and went from hospital to rehab. No painkillers. She was in such pain, but assumed this was just the pain of living without drugs. Then they realized a splint of bone was unset and had to put something resembling a guitar sproket to tighten the broken jawbone. That the pain of a broken bone can ever be taken as "normal" should tell you something, if you don't know, about how hard life actually is for an addict without opiates. Example 2 is from another memoir: Kate Holden's In My Skin*. This is very slickly written and ultra-succinct (due perhaps to a good editor, I don't
know how much she edited herself). Though it's a very good read, in a way the story is annoying in that she skates over certain issues, never lost anyone she loved thanks to drugs, never ODd, never had an abscess and so on. She never ponders her personal failings. She explains pretty well the descent into addiction but is unable to explain how she came out. Perhaps that is inexplicable. I can't explain why I don't want heroin, either. But her turning point was that she and her boyfriend were on methadone anyhow but using heavily on top. Around Xmas, she told her boyfriend, who depended on her utterly to pay for his drugs, that she was going to her family for a week. She continued working at a fairly upmarket brothel daily. One morning she awoke with him in the room. She told him to get lost and he did. But not before fishing all her money and a week's supply of Heroin out of her bag. And away! Personally I think this served her right, and she never offers a protestation to the contrary. But she did use it as her Turning Point. To take the methadone, carry on working. Stick to the juice, with one aberration, and keep working as the methadone went to zero then nothing. The money she saved paid for a long trip to Europe.
Last example: BMelonsLemonade came off heroin in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Four years later she's still clean. You can read BMelons' blog here: hashishdreamsandheroinnightmares.blogspot.comSo there we have it. It is possible to take an Opportunity and harness a willingness you never truly believed you had. No matter how much damage or devastation it has caused elsewhere, you can use a disaster to your own advantage.
If I'm not living proof enough, imagine BMelons clucking through that hurricane!
The only other thing that happened yesterday was the Broadband Goblin stole my internet stick, and scurried off down the high street singing "Skippadeedoodar-skippadee-day!" hopped on the Chinese Takeaway roof, said something extremely obscene in Cantonese and then vanished. Not that Gledwood would be stupid enough to put a computer dongle in a pocket with a hole in, or anything... So I had to get a new one for nearly £40 from Argos. Considering £40 used to buy a gram and a bit of heroin, and that this was usually gone well within a day unless I carefully hid some from myself, I'm not too upset about shelling out £40 ($60US).And I still have 6 sleeping pills, untouched.
Anna Grace is having a **** time over "near" Chicago (Wisconsin). Depressed too. Very depressed. I hope it's soon GONE Anna.
*You should be able to read a bit of In My Skin by clicking here.
Without launching into a big critique of the book, it provoked a mixed reaction in me, but it is still one of the best drug-memoirs I've read.
The UK edition looks like this.
You can read BMelons' memoir extract 1 here (heroin sickness).
And extract 2 here.
Am I the only one watching that dreadful Holy Land Xmas story tripe on BBC and loathing it? Are they actually trying to make it a parody of the Life of Brian?
Everyone has issues. Everybody’s miserable. I have a suspicion every character came with a social-worker file type “backstory” detailing how their mother didn’t love them. Lots of unholy conflict. Even the three wise men are borderline arguing… Akh Xmas! Doncha love it. I’m off for more Morrisons Best Mince Pies. Yumyumyumyumyummmmm!
Did/does nobody like Rebecca Ferguson, by far the most superior contestant ever to appear on the X-Factor? If Beautiful wasn't good enough, here's Candle in the Wind, Show 7
