5am Chocolate Recovery

CADBURY'S WHISPA (x2) and Yazoo chocolate milk (x1)... severe chocolate craving. Despite the pill I'm not sleeping, waking up for ages. Been surfing since sometime before 2am, intermittently sleeping, (absolutely impossible to fill out a sleep diary for tonight I haven't the faintest idea how many hours)...

The drinking is around 3 cans per day at 7.5% alcohol in 500ml cans. I'm not "out of it" because I'm "drunk"; "alcohol is a depressant" as they loved to tell me. So not being depressed at all, being the opposite of depressed, I should be able to guzzle as much as I like, shouldn't I??! Or they shouldn't patronize us with such an obvious semantic "terminological inexactitude". Yeah I know I shouldn't drink. If I didn't think that I'd drink a hell of a lot more.

It takes some edge off me. Me who I am supposed to be (at last). You see inside every white mouse is a tigress roaring to get out. That's what my thought pattern was doing yesterday. Not me speaking in my head. Me ROARING in my head. I felt pretty hyped up, pretty good. I'd rather be a tigress than a tiger. You can have cute baby... cubs! That's the word. And aren't tiger cubs the cutest! Also tigresses are fiercer than tigers. What's the metaphor for fierce? Tigress, not tiger.

I've no idea what NA made of yesterday's speech except some scattered titters of laughter at the funny bits. Better than the reaction I got last week when I started ROARING. A jolt went through that room. That's the point, I wasn't "roaring" at all. I use that word in exaggeration and retrospect. I was merely making my point in a restful, easy manner.

But the woman I was next to, a reformed heavy pothead, is one of the kindest, brightest spirits I have met in that association (if I'm any judge of character: we've never conversed; I've only heard her share). I don't want her wary of me.

Now I'm going to have to go round making mental notes of damage to repair. Slight damage. Another way of repairing damage is by having a nice attitude. That one might do more. I say having... attitude rather than "being nice" I don't want merely to be as in being for a moment; I want to BECOME the best person I can be. And being on gear was scuppering that one constantly.

It also totally messed up any attempt at self-help. I mean the type of help discussed in self-help books, which in my view, if taken with a reasonable dose of perspective and moderation can actually help one affect constructive changes in one's life. I saw my existence as a means of change. Never wanted to be the same person at the end of a year as at the beginning. Wanted to be better. Gear messed all that up.

It's hard to say what heroin did to me that was negative, bar the obvious cliches.
What did it do? It blanketed my feelings, which I'm beginning to see might have been more intense than I realized. No not all the time but I look back and see myself at various times and think hmmmmmmm what was going on there? So it was self-medication as the clinic told me (not my expression)
I got heavily addicted. I cannot imagine being more addicted to that drug than I was at the peak. I relied on it utterly, not for happiness so much as bearability through life. To sleep, to get up, to eat I most definitely needed gear. It would feel weird, if I let it, eating without having a hit first.
What else did it do? Well something eroded my self-esteem like nothing else. So badly, at one point I had barely any left
It made me homeless
It killed my friends
The whole situation made me feel hopeless and I had no life to go back to and I hated the world we live in. Not strong ingredients for a good recovery.

Which is one reason I am not giving up on NA. My interpretation of their Ways is given below, one thing I've heard said a few times goes along the lines "my friend hasn't got a programme, but my friend isn't an addict"... in other words the friend is worse off, poorer than the Recovering Addict. Because Recovery means everything else good apart from just not taking drugs. That's what Recovery is. Recovery. It's what I want...

KLF FEATURING TAMMY WYNETTE: JUSTIFIED AND ANCIENT (JAM BY THE JAMS)
...this lot tend to get left out of early 90s compilations, nostalgia etc. theirs was by far the best non-ravey dancey pop of the time.... as an "art experience" they also burned £1,000,000 cash they'd made
A 99 is vanilla ice cream with a stick of chocolate flake shoved in at a jaunty angle...



SCOTT GARCIA: A LONDON THING
the proper video this time, Melody



SCOTT GARCIA: A LONDON THING
this is faster, the much more like original pirate radio mix

Bonjour!

HI FOLKS. I've still got goblins in the broadband so I'm at the internet place round the corner. I tried logging into my neighbour's system, but could't crack their password... Oddly though there are two networks, BTOpenZone and BTHomeFon that will let me, after registration and a costly SMS payment, log in for the princely sum of £3 for an hour, £5 for a day or £39 for a month! So what is this? Broadband for those who can't be bothered to get it installed? I was on mobile broadband before, which worked perfectly until ... GOBLIN ATTACK!
I could also take the computer to the public library, which is wifi'd up, but I'm afraid of getting infections in the machine... is there any risk? If so, what is it..?

WELL IT'S A ROCKY ROAD to recovery of any kind, as I'm discovering. Every time I try, or even think I'm somewhere near level ground some PERSON will appear, ANOTHER PERSON ~ SOMEONE ELSE will come in and throw everything up in the air, like a mad psychiatrist shovellng cows' diarrhoea in his rose-beds.
All I want is to be left alone.
And to feel OK.
My biggest, biggest problem with methadone is how lousy I feel when I wake up in the morning. Unless I can save the entire dose all day and sleep with it next to me,ready to drink at 4am ~ so I can get up before eight with the level in me high ~ then I will wake feeling like a block of ice, unable to get warm (yet sweating heavily if I wrap up) and craving craving heroin out of my mind while the methadone takes its one hour twenty minutes to come on. (Yet another thing I hate about methadone, it takes so very long to kick in, even if you've been sipping it faithfully for years.) You'd think that by the time I feel OK again I AM OK, but that doesn't usually happen. My mind's in so many pieces by this time, it never goes back together all day.
The worst days on methadone are such empty stretches of blank despair the only constructive thing I can do is go back to bed, cursing my body for ever bothering to wake up and wishing I could have some slider switch installed on the back of my head so that when I'm depressed I can sleep for 23.5 hours out of 24. And when I'm not depressed sleep not at all (sleep, after all, is a big waste of time if you have anything to do). When I used to work proper hours I never had any time outside work for anything except jumping in the bath, eating and going back to work. The entire rest of my life was spent working or sleeping.
I didn't have particularly good mental health in this period.
If I had only discovered heroin many years ago, I'd have gone on it then. Back in the days when the only cure I had for depression was cakes and cocoa and lying in my Arabian Nights style bed with about 15 pillows and eight quilts watching telly. I also used to smoke one cigarette a day. Just the one. Which I'd ponce each evening off the mandy secretary downstairs...
Then along came heroin, a far more efficacious painkiller. And life seemed amazing for a while. The first two years of full-on heroin addiction were like Christmas every day. I got to use my drug of choice morning, noon and night.
Of course I had to beg on the street to get the money to score ~ but even that was a novelty. And I was young.
And didn't look like a bloated, puffy old alcoholic ~ which is how I looked at my worst.
Anyway I decided to throw that life in the trashcan of the past. Still everything is going badly. (Actually I don't expect things ever to go well...)
And I must run. Else the goblins in THIS computer will time me out!
See yers all soon :-)