I WOULD HAVE SAID I CRASHED because since about 3pm I've felt increasingly lousy and it hasn't been fun.
I went into HMV, but nothing inspired me. Eventually I got Michael Jackson but 2 of the 3 discs play in black and white. If they're BOTH like that I assume they've botched an entire batch. So little point changing them. But I will. Nothing is wrong with my DVD machine. Everything else plays properly.
I got a Chinese takeaway but it's gross and I'm leaving it. I'm so greedy I will prbably want it later but it's grotesque. Undercooked onions. Yeurkh. I'm giving up on Chinese food.
Instead of buying heroin, which I only wanted to make me feel OK, I got 7 valium blues. I now have 4 left. I reckon i got ripped off because usually I can feel 1x10mg. Today i can barely feeel anything. I only took them to take something. I had 4 drinks but still feel no better. They're the new mandy cherry 4.7% vol cyder. Valium isn't an antidepressant it quells anxiety and I got HAD-tested years ago when I was far more prone to anxiety than today and came out "high depression; low anxiety". Anyway anxiety is the living pits. Far worse than anything i get. If psychiatry judged experiences on how bad they felt rather than how much of a mess they leave you, a panic attack would be judged more serious than any schizophrenia.
So that's me. All the films seemed to be about madness or they were TV shows at £40 a season and nothing at all grabs me. Michael Jackson was only for background music you can glance at. Also I wanted the full films of Thriller, Bad and Ghosts.
I could still get to an NA meeting tonight but frankly haven't the energy to walk to the bus. Plus you have to sit in a room full of junkies being contemplative, which I'm not. And I don't think about my former drug of choice ALL DAY the way I'm apparently meant to. And the well meaning but ridiculous advice I get to go rehab: you wanna see me go totally batshit crazy? Put me on a 10-day methadone taper. That will set me off like nothing else. So no, no NA today. Plus I'm fed up of hinting at my situation and getting a load of total barking-up--the-wrong tree platitudes. Most of them seem to believe I'm still using. Well they can get fucked. I don't need that. I need it less than ever today.
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
THIS MORNING... oh I am sorry; this AFTERNOON when I eventually woke up I was aching all over as if I'd fallen off a galloping horse the night before. What happened to me? I wondered. Then it came back to me: cyder happened! I went to the chemist's and got my methadone. Before that, I bought some more cyder: hair of the dog. (And it worked!) After the chemist's, I went to the cheapest supermarket in England, Iceland, and purchased frozen Chinese takeaway ~ satay chicken (in spicy sauce, not mingy stringy bits of chicken on glorified toothpicks) plus chicken fried rice ~ £3 the pair. Back at home I slammed 'em in the oven. And with a couple of generous pinches of MSG on each they tasted wonderful. Worthy of my local Chinese but at half price!
Very moving: Trainspotting overdose scene ~ Soundtrack: Lou Reed ~ Perfect Day. Yesterday, while my two friends were arguing, this tune came on television. They were talking about dead friends. And this tune and the subject matter and Tanisha's overwrought voice made me so emotional I nearly cried ... The Susan Boyle version you can see beneath my yesterday's post. This is the Lou Reed 1972 original (from the year of my birth!) ~ as introduced to a whole new generation in the film Trainspotting.
LOU REED ~ PERFECT DAY ~ TRAINSPOTTING OVERDOSE SCENE...
The heroin in this clip is too cloudy, there's far too much water in the hit and he's blowing the vein and/or partially missing it ~ you can see that. He shouldn't be bruising up so quickly.
ICELAND "ORIENTAL STYLE CHICKEN CURRY" tonight. Boil int' bag (but of course). And only £1. Much nicer than yesterday's noodles, which were a bit "school dinners". Very pleasant indeed.
The me-shaped hole yesterday means not only that I felt I had a place on the shelves, but (and this really surprised me) I could find nobody else writing like me. Most extraordinary.
I deleted a big rant about the state of modern publishing, but I deleted so much of it, I deleted my main point too, ha-har!
Well the Goods Train of Entertainment trundles on, I can't go on about it. Writing's for writing. Not writing about..!
Well this is a nonpost. Tomorrow I'll tell you a true furry story about Pandable my old hammy, which is really entertaining.
The mysterious illness I have had for over a fortnight is still diarrhoeaing out, intermittently and unpredictably (as I'm sure you wanted to know). I'm so tired. I'm not in my sick bed but a sick armchair. I slept in the sick armchair, like a pensioner, all day. Ukh.
MUSICAL INTERLUDE
In the VIP. It's not called "clubbing" for nothing. A club really is a club. Like any other social group you have inner and outer circles. Nightlife is hierarchical and full of snobbery. Do you stand in the endless line, or swan right in? Do you pay? Get a comp? Or best of all, are you on the Guest List?
Then once you get in, are you just one of the common, vulgar herd, or in the "proper" room ~ the VIP room.
I avoided such clubs like the plague!
In the VIP: WIDEBOYS & MAJESTIC (IN THE VIP REMIX) FEAT B-LIVE and BOY BETTER KNOW
The Streets: Fit (But You Know It) He wrote an entire album about Ibiza party isle memories. Kicking off with this track ~
I HAD a £1 Chinese chicken and noodles from Iceland. Boil int' bag. Hubble-bubbled away for 40 mins. Considering even a lunchtime combination box, a cheapie, is £3 minimum, for £1 this was amazing.
I checked out my nearest bookshop and found a glaring me-shaped hole where my books should be. Books plural, because I have a wealth of ideas.
Yes the project is moving at last! Like a creaky old goods train, it has shuddered to a start. The hoary old locomotive is belching diesel smoke and trundling wearily onwards ~ bringing cartloads of entertainment to the world!
Sorry I've not been visiting any of you very much at all. Nothing personal. But I must focus. I'm still not feeling too fantastic. My energy reserves are low and must be wisely invested. Talent ~ as I was banging on the other day ~ is not to be wasted!
Got to run. I hope you're all keeping well. Take care of yourselves. Just for a change, I'm trying to take care of me!
Who knows? One day this Me-Shaped Hole might be overflowing with amazing tales!
...were very nice dunked in tea the other morning.
Flapper usually isn't far from his cherry tree or the neighbours' luxury TV aerial 10 houses down. When he sees me he takes off... Flapper by name, Flapper by nature...
Chinese chicken curry is calling my name! But at £6.20 with egg fry rice it's too expensive, and it's too late in the day for a combination box...
I SPLURGED OUT on Chinese takeaway last night. Chicken ~ satay sauce ~ mixed vegetable fried rice. I felt awfully indulgent spending the 80p extra ~ £3 on the paltry amount of demoralized veg they throw in against £2.20 on "egg fried" rice, but I was in a liberal mood so I splashed out anyway. And didn't even curse myself for missing half of EastEnders in the process..!
The whole thing cost me £7.
How times change! I used to buy chicken curry ~ egg fried rice for £3 back in 1992!
That was just about the only nutrition I ever ate in those days, when white bread and jam was what I considered a tasty meal and our sinister landlord never deigned to fix our unworkable oven the entire 12 months we were in there. 2 students and me, the depressed university drop-out who was so unemployable I got turned down for CLOAK ROOM ATTENDANT jobs~!!
1992 feels almost like yesterday in so many ways... that year was the heartland of hardcore "rave", a scene that I liked, but was never really part of. I didn't have the right friends, liked the euphoriant drugs, but was far too depressed ~ clinically so: dragging myself back and forth between psychiatrists' and counsellors' appointments, spending all day doing not very much, and never making seminars (we didn't have lectures ~ a passive form of education like that would have far appealed to me the miserable state I was in...)
What I remember most about that time is absolutely hating being alone. My head was about as comfortable a place to live as a roofless burned-out house with boarded windows, no electricity and only rats and mildew for company. So I paid these visits on poor, unfortunate other students who must have cursed the day they made my acquaintance. This was student residences, so visiting unannounced wasn't quite the social faux pas it becomes in later years. Certain rooms attracted a nightly crowd of TV watchers/music listeners/spliffsmokers anyhow. And I sat there. And most of the time had nothing at all to say. Nothing. No confidence. No shared interests. No attraction or attractiveness. Why on earth I didn't just jump in front of a train back then and put everyone out of their misery I do not know... O yes I do. Because I was in Norwich, which is at the end of the line. How very symbolic!
I had a semi-fixation with heroin even back then, though I didn't take it and certainly wasn't fool enough or desperate enough to hang around the roughest areas of town to get ripped off.
Heroin's main appeal to me was those government "Heroin Screws You Up" posters which portrayed alienated youthful angst and said: Do you feel like this? Then heroin's for you! This is widely dubbed the biggest backfiring ad campain in UK history. I mean, I'm not alone in my experience.
The second appeal of heroin was the taboo. I kind of semi fell in with a crowd who thought they were awfully hardcore and clever to be experimenting left, right and centre with every new dance pill that came out, various lines of powders ... even ~ ooh! cocaine ~ which was ever so glamorous and forbidden. But if you so much as even mentioned smack, all this open-mindedness closed off. Which made the drug appeal to me even more. So in a way it wasn't peer pressure, but peer antipressure that turned me in the opiate direction. Though I never found myself near any such "scene" for several years after this university student disaster experience of mine...
Thirdly I knew heroin could kill me ~ and that heroin is a painkiller that makes you "high". Nobody could explain this high in a satisfactory way (which piqued yet more curiosity)... but I did recognize that heroin overdose was a painless "easy" death. In fact the first time I ever tried to score I was intent on killing myself, so I gave someone I knew could get heroin (I had met a "connexion" by that time) £50 and said get me as much as you can, fully intending to snort the whole lot and hopefully never open my eyes again. When he gave my money back saying he couldn't get it I was gutted and instead tried zonking myself out on sleeping pills and drink and drowning myself in the bath, fully clothed and weighed down with bricks and as many layers of clothes as I could fit on. But I woke up freezing cold and floating many hours later. Yet another failure.
All in all, re those only days, when I so hated feeling as I did I was prepared to take acid and have a horrible trip than feel dull and depressed as I was, I am glad in a way I never did find heroin. Because if I had, I am sure without any doubt that I wouldn't be alive and posting this now.
I was so sad the other night I googled some old "rave" anthems on my phone. This was one of the nights I was awake all night... and felt incredibly old (the music is now called "old skool") and saw how crap most of those parties actually were. (You had to be on drugs to survive one...!)
Anyway. How Chinese takeaway got me on to all this I do not know, but I have to go. It's pissing it down outside, the most gormless of days. Grey skies, drizzle and damp.
PS if you think a three-headed skull-tongue man is a "symbolic" not literal experience, you've never dropped acid!
BODYSNATCH: JUST 4U LONDON This one sounded transcendently beautiful at 4am on lots of "E"...
"MDMA: a drug so strong makes white men think they can dance ~ no wonder it's illegal":
It's not just the "cool moves" that are so appauling here... its' the thought that these people are in or nearly in their 40s today..!
URBAN SHAKEDOWN: SOME JUSTICE (why on earth it was called that I've no idea ~ those words are nowhere to be heard in this track...) "We live as one family" ~ ie "we are all together on E, E, E!!" ... MDMA/Ecstasy is famous for the transcendent feelings of "empathy and togetherness" it engenders (as well as flying euphoria and irresistible urge to dance) ~ This is what the rave scene was all about. Worst of all, some of us BELIEVED in them..!!! Not so much the druggie stuff but what seemed to be "behind" it all. What utter utter crap.
I went into HMV, but nothing inspired me. Eventually I got Michael Jackson but 2 of the 3 discs play in black and white. If they're BOTH like that I assume they've botched an entire batch. So little point changing them. But I will. Nothing is wrong with my DVD machine. Everything else plays properly.
