WELL IT'S BEEN NOT MUCH OF A DAY. I barely slept last night I'm happy and unhappy and annoyed and not annoyed and on drugs and not on drugs (ie I haven't taken any since this morning and that was because somebody else paid). From tomorrow onwards it's no drugs for me. I can't believe I backslid so ridiculously. I'm highly annoyed with myself.
So here's some birdsong to strains of drum & bass. MY LIFE KEEPS CHANGING... it certainly does.
It's Sunday night and I cannot wait till all this is over and Monday has begun. I loathe Sundays, absolutely hate them. All time pits day of the week ...
Fabio and Grooverider* played this on their jungle sets on Kiss FM in the early 90s. I spent ages seeking out this tune and found it at last:
VAN KLEEF: LIFE BEGAN CHANGING I like the birdsong
*Idiotic DJ Grooverider was arrested with 2.16g cannabis at Dubai airport and sentenced to 4 years prison. Unfortunately no public whipping, which he wholly deserved. Considering most tokers ~ bar the most selfish type ~ pass this most noxious and evil of all drugs to their friends, and that cannabis can induce psychosis within two minutes of ingestion, that sentence is very light indeed. They say the only case of death from cannabis involved a kilo-block of hashish falling from a high window and striking an unwitting passer-by in Morocco. What they fail to mention is the living death cannabis induces in its more sensitive users. I can't believe they dealt with this guy so leniently. he even got a pardon 10 months into his sentence. Heroin addicts ~ who merely self-medicate the unbearable darkness of being ~ are treated like the scum of the earth. Just goes to show how The Rulers of the Dark object to any escape from the misery they impose on those who dwell on earth.
WHY are Sundays so bloody miserable? Do not tell me I'm bloody miserable. Sundays are miserable. The rest of the week I distract myself from the world, on Sunday I can't. I'm having no difficulty sleeping now. Slept all night, all morning.
I watched Ugly Betty. Well that one's going downhill. I think the comedy came off with Betty's braces. Wilhelmina was pretending to be an alcoholic this week. Then that ended. Then something worse came on. I can't recall what it was. Then my mind turned to my dealer round the corner, and a £20 note. I still have that note on me, so no worries there. Usually I'm penniless on Sunday. That dealer got fed up giving me tick, because I wanted it every week. Heroin was the only thing that made Sunday tolerable.I'm put off heroin not just because I lost a huge chunk of life to addiction. In this time I achieved nothing, except that I learned to speak better German. I achieved this by ploughing through books when stoned, looking up every single word I was not 100% sure of in a dictionary. I must have looked up some words 30, 40 or more times. I also started a blog in German, which is awfully phrased "today I go shop, I did buy tea bags. Since two year my hamster die. I not no more eat tea." That bad. And probably that boring. So that's my one achievement.
What puts me off gear most is how truly dire it got. Not just the blank gear (ie not gear at all) but the last stuff, which kept me near-comatose for days on end, but not due to heroin, due to an "unregistered compound". My suspicion, by the way, is that this compound was leaked from a drug-testing lab and produced in the ilk of establishment that churned out mephedrome (meow, 4-methcathinone), a legal high that really was like coke plus ecstasy (I tried it) and was banned in Britain earlier this year. I'm blaming whatever was in this for that mental episode. The further away I get, the more out of it I see that I was.
Back to methadone. Like an idiot I had forgotten to drink it, in fact the dose was 6 hours overdue (twice daily dosing). I drank it, fell askeep for another three or four hours and woke up without the slightest urge for heroin. I suppose I'm not allowed to say I'd rather die than take heroin as that's suicide talk. Suicide talk is like the rubbish strewn on the ground after a tornado. It's crap spewn out of my drug-infested psyche.
Well I can't think of anything else. There's only an hour and 45 minutes till Sunday is over. I wish I was in Germany, they're an hour ahead. Less Sunday can only be a good thing. See ya Monday...
DWARF HAMSTER PUP 2 DAYS OLD
That early 80s song Words (under the Tunnel post) is apparently French. I never knew that. With the exception of Vanessa Paradis Joe le Taxi and Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg Je t'aime... moi non plus this is the only French pop song I know.
I AM IN A BAD MOOD. Been that way day. Can't snap out of it (I'm trying). I just went to the Chinese takeaway. If the trek there and back and the crap with having to bish bash bosh eye contact, pulling face into smile all that crap etc works as aversion therapy then I'm not bothering going again. I only got it because I was indulging a greed craving. Don't feel better for having eaten anything.
I was asked yesterday why I am so hard on myself. Well if someone stuck you repeatedly with drugs of all varieties, lied to you, contantly made promises they caved in on at the first opportunity, made you depressed, drove you cuckoo, tried to kill you twice and made you and your house a complete mess: would you like them? Would you TRUST them ever again?
WOKE UP at 3:30pm today, wishing I was a robo-hammy*. Somehow, if I could curl up, like a furry pingpong ball and have another hamster gnaw my fur for me, it might be OK. In robos being groomed means you are bottom of the pecking-order. I don't care about hierarchy; hamsters don't use heroin. Mass-grooming-wise, robos are the opposite of Russian hamsters, where the youngest smallest one washes the oldest biggest one. The old one died and the young one was there, carefully taking care of his body. It was heartbreaking. When Bashful robo died, Spherical, the last one, kept dragging her body across the cage to put in the nest. I moved it out. She knew this, and dragged it back. Perhaps she was trying to bury it. I kept it in there overnight. Perhaps this gives hamster-closure..?
Well this is crazy. First, on methadone I do not really feel inclined to do anything bar the utmost necessities. This is not what is "supposed" to happen. I thought people on methadone got their lives back. No glimmer of that, so far.
It took me so long to get up I missed Iceland, source of £1.50 Chinese chicken fried rice. So I went to the takeaway for £3, £3.50 mixed vegetable fried rice. It was to go with Iceland £1.50 Satay Chicken Curry. I could have done with a vegetable or two. But: CLOSED! They didn't used to close on Sunday. Maybe somebody has died. NO!!
Then I hung about on the street corner. No gear! No Chinese!! This is beyond the pale.
I didn't feel cold when I woke up. I am not clucking. The methadone is holding me, though the time was approaching to take a second dose. But I still rang a dealer. I knew he would answer but would have nothing. I know him well enough. Nothing's going on, is it? No mate ~ you know I'll let you know. I know, well, take care. You too mate. Things must be rough! At least he's not trying to sell rubbish.
Dose 2 on methadone is drunk. I'm OK now. I don't get why the urge to use is eating at me. It was doing the same thing on Friday. I didn't score then. I have not tried to score since Wednesday. If I can get today out of the way with I will have spent just £12.50 this week on "B". A record low!
I'm still broke. Food (£40 maybe!!) Socks (£6). Andy Warhol book £10 (and it was 2nd hand! I felt really "clean" devoting this much to an old book!!) Whatever else... O I know what it was!! Cyder at ... quite a lot per day, considering it is 79p a can. My drinking has slidden downwards since the beginning of the week. Very high Monday. (High enough to impair my memory, reading and writing ability considerably.) A bit lower Tuesday... and down down down to maybe four cans yesterday. Every single one was mixed with fruit juice. This lowers to alcoholic content to that of pub beer, about 4.5%. But cocktail is like a very nice alcopop. Highly addictive!
OK I'm not going to any Chinese takeaway now. Something called "chicken tikka lasagne" is in the oven. The Chinese takeaway expedition was partially a mission hoping I might bump into a drugdealer with heroin. (Fat chance of that!) Or "heroin" (higher chance).
I found an article by the way, exploding the myth which anyone who uses will know isn't true, about glass, brick dust, curry powder, bleach in street heroin. To those not involved (good on you!) let me explain: if you smoke it, glass and brick dust will be left behind at the top of the foil. Real heroin runs in lines. It melts and the vapour is inhaled. (Not set on fire, as in smoking a fag.) Curry powder would smell exceedingly strong. Bleach would also reek, and probably go black and smoulder. In a spoon, again glass and brick dust would be left at the bottom. Nothing except truly microscopic particles would get through a filter and into a syringe. The 1ml insulin syringe most addicts use has an integral needle only a THIRD of one millimetre wide on the outside. The passage inside that needle would be minuscule. Curry powder would reek very strongly when cooked up. Bleach would also smell strong, plus it is alkaline and would mess up the reaction with vitamin C or citric acid, which breaks down brown (or occasionally white) base heroin.
Drought-wise, the word here is it's WORSE THAN EVER. Though I just heard from Bristol there's good stuff there. (Will it last?) The news is here.
People using in the 70s always told me you just had to put up with shortages that lasted a couple of days or so. In the 80s after Middle-Eastern "brown" became the norm (imported in much higher quantities than the old "Chinese" gear) there were more users, especially in the north where heroin hit large housing estates for the first time (v early 80s). I was told, incidentally, that because you could chase it from foil, some people really did believe that "brown" was some new kind of hash! Well you believe what you want to believe... Anyway drought-wise, point being, shortages were still more common than they have been lately, though they corrected themselves quickly.
The three great waves of heroin addiction in this country were: 1. late 60s/v early 70s, mostly middle and upper-class bohemian types. Main centre of the trade was in Soho. Also South Kensington (which, if you're reading on distant shores is very posh). Heroin was very much a minority interest. Outside London you'd be very lucky to find it, except perhaps in Liverpool 2. early 80s. Brown didn't hit Britain in any amounts until the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979). Suddenly it was "all over the place" and people didn't know what to do with it. (Smoking heroin was unheard of, here.) If they couldn't get citric acid, or vit c for injecting, lemon juice was used instead, which really can cause to fungal infection leading to blindness (one rumour that is true) 3. Mid-late 1990s, the price of gear suddenly halved at street level. Bored or frazzled by uppers the rave generation turned to it as a comedown-soother or merely as a new drug. I am of that generation. With "ecstasy" pills appearing in all variations, some rumoured to contain heroin anyway (an almost certain lie). LSD made a resurgence in the early 90s. Cocaine, formerly the "rock star's drug" made its presence felt pretty much everywhere. Used to trying new things, to this generation, heroin seemed a logical next step, to those (like me) who were "just trying it once" for "the experience", then "just trying it again" ... and so on. Curiosity, as they say, killed the cat...
Now one last thing. UNUSUAL HEROIN WARNING
If this drought doesn't sort itself out, there's a chance that heroin from other parts of the world than Afghanistan might make its presence felt here more than it has done recently. The stuff I'm talking about particularly would be China White, Colombian White heroin and Mexican Tar.
If you encounter gear that smells of vinegar, it might be one of these. Heroin comes in three basic forms, depending how far along the manufacturing process it is taken.
~In Britain our heroin is normally heroin base. It's normally brownish, as y'all know. Sometimes known (esp. online) as "Number 3". It smokes well from foil. Injecting this requires addition of a fruit acid, hence citric/vit c. White heroin base is also manufactured, and can be very pure.
~In New York City, and the Eastern United States, as well as Australia and other places the gear tends to vary from a very light blond/yellow/beige colour to pure white. This is heroin hydrochloride, aka "Number 4", designed for snorting or injection more than smoking. "China White" is usually from Burma. Most heroin in NYC is said to originate from Colombia. Cocaine, of course, is Colombia's most famous product = Coke is popular here = Heroin could make its way over in mixed shipments. This type of heroin is EXTREMELY STRONG with purities at manufacture in the high 90%s (good Brown is 70-80%). It can sometimes resemble crack. If it smells of anything, it tends to smell of vinegar. It is mixed cold in a spoon, or gently heated. If it needs vit C, it ain't China White!
~Mexican Tar appeared in Los Angeles in the 1980s. It's black and sticky and heavier than the gear we're used to. Has a strong vinegary smell. The hash-looking stuff we sometimes see is not "tar", which is stickier. Tar is banged up by cooking WITHOUT CITRIC. It's black (or brown) because the Mexicans cut corners in the manufacturing process, swapping chemicals, leaving steps out. UK dealers probably wouldn't know how to cut it, so if it hits the streets, it may do so at import-strength. BE CAREFUL. I have heard you can smoke tar from foil. It may spit and sputter more than ordinary Brown, because it's damper, but it's still supposed to smoke. Far safer than banging this into your veins.
~Lastly there is a gear called MEXICAN BROWN (powder). Smells of vinegar. Said to melt into a tarry substance when hot (e.g. kept all day in jeans pocket, as ordinary B wouldn't). Doesn't require citric for injection. Sometimes snorted. May not smoke anything like as well as our "B". IF YOU FIND UNUSUAL GEAR, TAKE CARE. GO EASY.
Please don't be tempted to inject, just because something won't smoke. It might not be one of the types of heroin just mentioned. Snorting is safer, but has still killed people. Contrary to popular belief, you can die chasing. A batch of 80% B killed a girl in Bristol in the 90s and she chased the killer dose from foil.
Bear in mind all our tolerances have fallen. Whether using on top of methadone or using just "variable" street gear, if anything of knockout strength comes back, that's what it might do ~ KNOCK YOU DEAD. Please take care.
Hope this isn't too much of a mess. If I edit, I'll never post
Sorry this goes on and on. Emails I should have got to by 9pm. I feel like a dr's surgery. Appointments, appointments. Everything behind time! Thanks for all the comments, I will answer as many as I can ...
*robo-hamsters are the tiniest hamsters in the world and curl up pingpong-ball sized. I used to have them as pets (see below)
MARIANNE FAITHFULL INTERVIEW ~ 1994, her autobiography had just come out
I GOT a phone call from a psychotic nutter friend of mine (with 3 concurrent diagnoses) ~ at first she pretended to be from the kebab shop. I knew it was someone mucking around but couldn't work out who, so I hung up.
She was quite a good friend of Mr Man ~ Mr Mephedrone, who chucked himself in front of the tube train and died early this new year. I told her that even though i didn't know him very well, I think about him every single day. (Which is true.) She said yeah, and she has nightmares of his mangled body every single night.
This woman has the very worst personal history I have ever heard. Abuse, neglect, horror. Psychosis in adulthood. A lifetime of major depressions. Plus a personality disorder to boot. I don't know how she survived. I just don't get it.
Anyway when I told her I hope to get counselling at this psychiatric centre ~ where it's not time-limited to periods of 12 sessions, I mean what can you achieve in 12 sessions?? I only STARTED making any sort of progress last time on two years plus a 6-month extension. This stuff has to be longterm. And I think about Woody Allen and think, does counselling or therapy help anyone at all? Or is it just a tail-chasing exercise..? Or a psychological version of staring at one's own eyes in the mirror and saying "you're so beautiful". I have grave doubts about counselling's effectiveness and what it's used for. And I used to get peeved immensely when my old psychodynamic therapist used to ask me how I felt about her ~ ie of "transference". Something weird happened in our relationship and I confronted this distant (yet close) and clinical (yet warm) woman and got totally under her skin. I know I did. She said one week I turned up, after the 4-week August recess and was crying in the foetal position, yet I can't remember any of it. She kept saying "I think you need more help than I can give you" ~ meaning a psychiatrist. But I had deep distrust of those note-takers who, I believed, would only hold up what I'd told them against me.
Anyway I told her my new nutnut doctor said to me he would have a word with the guy in charge of the Deep Psychiatric Counselling Centre about me becoming a patient there. And she told me "that's where you go when you've got a borderline personality disorder. And I shivered, because that label has risen its ugly head yet again. She also told me she thought I had clinical depression. Of course she isn't a trained mental health professional, but this woman has spent enough years of her life in psychiatric institutions to know a profile when she sees one.
In a way I don't care WHAT name anything I have or am might be. In the past I have tried to avoid any sense of labelling and pretended to be fine when I wasn't fine at all. But this approach never worked, never got me anywhere.
Many nutters wear their diagnosis round their neck like a gold medal ~ and THAT I find disconcerting. So I don't know what to do.
I have another nuttydoctor's appointment in a month's time... so THEN... we might see...!
It's the most wondrous springtime weather and I'm off to get a Mauritian Vanilla cheesecake from the Morrisons best range (£4 if I remember right) ~ I've been craving it all weekend...
The cherries have yet to blossom... I can't wait till they do. They are the Japanese symbol for the passing nature of life and death... our old dog died, fading slowly away under a profusion of pink blossoms. I never wanted her to go. She was grey like a seal and used to open her boze and say "HELLO!" in the squealiest posh accent. You could poke her sides of her mouth and she would "BO" this way on demand...
I SAW THIS 1998 film (that I would have assumed was by Disney but actually it was Dreamworks) on BBC1 this morning. So entertaining:
A trotterdonkey green parrot flies all the way to Los Angeles looking for his long lost owner, finds self in a parrot donkey derby along the way, then finally comes home (coooooo!!)
Apparently Paulie is a "blue crowned conure" by the way, technically not a parrot, if you look at the lorikeet-like bill...
Paulie Trailer:
Taco Stall Musical Performance
PS: The proper name for a Parrot is POLLY. "Paulie" is pronounced with a long O ~ quite a different sound. How on earth Dreamworks managed to mix this up is beyond me... It caused me a LOT of difficulty Googling, that's all I say...
And talking of entertainers, here's a hyacinth macaw talking... look at that fearsome beak! They can apparently crack coconuts unassisted!
MY MUMZY came round this afternoon. By the time she arrived my place looked like a bomb had gone off in an Oxfam shop ~ scattering piles of ragged clothes/etc to the corners. I also put oven cleaner on the enamel hob. And then panicked. And quickly got rid of it, using carrier bags on hands because I'd no rubber gloves and the instructions make it sound like a more noxious version of nitric acid crossed with rycin. I still wasn't sure I'd got it all off after three goes and lots of water. Half expected to find a dirty great smoking hole when I got back ~ with a baby gremlin's eyes peering out from the rust... Anyway it was nice and clean when they got there. Except the floor looked like someone had thrown an illegal rave in a barn. Mopped-up mud everywhere (from where~??!?) And so on...
Do you like the Queen's picture. Look at those emeralds! Not just round her neck, but on her head..!
Did you know HM the Queen is supposed to have a jewellery safe 14 feet high in her Buckingham Palace bedroom, full of countless pieces belonging to Queen Mary, the Queen Mother... and so on and so on down the line... only a tiny fraction of which she ever wears (what a waste on the ones that never see daylight ~ that's what I say!) When Diana married Charles, her jewellery was only given to her on loan, on the basis that when she became Queen, she'd be custodian of said pieces anyhow... I do like a good bit of jewellery, me ("jewelry" if you're in the United States of America). Never wear it. Jewellery on men, when it's not sharks' teeth or rave beads etc looks distinctly dodgy at the best of times. But it's lovely to look at. I was into doing jewellery design at one time. There's more to it than meets the eye ~ everything must be carefully sized and measured for one thing... It was fascinating. Jade Jagger does it for a living. Not, I am sure, that having an international rock star for a father gave her a bunk up that particular career ladder... I'm sure not!
Anyway, back to today, we had a charming Greek dinner and she bought me some chocolate and museli and I'm going to post up Pingu at the Dentist if I can find it ~ hope y'all had a cheery weekend. My novel's coming on swimmingly... Goodnight all!
"Diana, Princess of Wales" (as she was "supposed" to be titled...) lovely sapphires...
"BANNED PINGU"... Can't find Pingu at the dentist; but "at the hospital" (see under Penguins, yesterday) is similar... whyever this was banned I'm not quite sure... and why the Scandinavian subtitles I've no idea (we never get subtitles in English, do we and they're gabbling BabyFinnish...) this one's trotterdonkey enough...
... o I get it. The jokes here are in the Swedish/Danish... e.g. "get me your strongest whisky" etc. I can just about make some of it out...
... o no they're not.
o how rude! One of them's peeing on the floor now!!...!!!
This BBC short, played between programmes was never intended to be a commercial pop video, but was released (so they say) purely to answer public demand...
MADONNA ~ VERAS Spanish version of You'll See, which is a really good tune with a really good vocal: The English lyrics sum up my attitude to relationships:
You think that I can't live without your love ~ You'll see You think I can't go on another day You think I am nothing Without you by my side... You'll see ~ somehow, someday...
TRAINSPOTTING I haven't the patience to read a book in Scottish and the film annoys me because it doesn't tell the "truth" about heroin... it leaves so much out!
OVERDOSE I had a heroin death-wish for such a long time. Eventually I had to confront the reality that I HAVE to live. Don't even know why most of the time. Just have to ....
WELL IT'S BEEN NOT MUCH OF A DAY. I barely slept last night I'm happy and unhappy and annoyed and not annoyed and on drugs and not on drugs (ie I haven't taken any since this morning and that was because somebody else paid). From tomorrow onwards it's no drugs for me. I can't believe I backslid so ridiculously. I'm highly annoyed with myself.
