Ecstasy
Mood:  d'oh
Now Playing: 4am hard trance...
Topic: Drugs

Funny, I had a flashback yesterday (just before I started getting harangued by all those nasties), a flashback not to drugs but to the 4am music at some of the Brixton Academy nights I used to go to...

Now I've got to keep this posting quick as I'm dying to go out and get a fag to smoke. Honestly I've only had two spindliest rollies since ... I dunno... 4am, actually!!

Well, I just "listened again" (because I missed it the 1st time) to a Radio 4 prog called "E Generation at 40":— one can find it at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/progs/listenagain.shtml and select E Generation...blah blah.

One piece of rubbish they highlighted was a slide of a brain so corroded by MDMA ("E") it had holes in it. Bloody great big ones. That was shown on the Oprah Winfrey Show. This the Radio 4 programme's toxicologists debunked as absolute nonsense, ("media misinformation").

They came up with some interesting seeming findings ("seeming" bc the research is ongoing as the course of people's lives). Any cognitive deficits the E does give you seem to be permanent. One expert was even talking of a permanent 3-point IQ-loss. They also hinted that boys might get more messed up mentally by cannabis while with girls it's E that's more likely to do their heads in, which was interesting because the two people I've met who had panic attacks (ongoing) after experiencing E were both female. They said females might be more susceptible to adverse affects from psychostimulants. Which I found intriguing bc it's a fairly well known phenomenon that girls can take far more cocaine than boys... and they don't want to stop. I don't know why.

Lastly I'll tell you of an MDMA experiment on rats. The rodents had Es popped into their mouths (actually I'm assuming this; I don't know how the methylenedioxymethylamphetamine was actually administered) but anyway, once the rats, fitted with electric sensors "came up" they just plodded round and round and round and round and round the perimeter of their containers... whereas normal rats pinged about everywhere and rats on speed did the same as normal but twice as much in the time...

Right I'm going to go because nicotine (not to mention a certain other substance) is calling me...!

See yer later,

Gleds

Good Morning
Mood:  chillin'
Now Playing: Barely Consciously...
Topic: Chinese Mouse
Good morning everyone. I am sat here rather tired out and nicotine-deprived. Mousey's in his nest. The proper one with cotton wool and sawdust, not the one called my elbow. -ey by the way is not to be confused with Mousie, my French friend who you will see leaving messages in here. I think French Mousie has always known about the Chinese Mousey. I wish I could introduce them. But my scanning abilities are rather dire and my last attempted rodent photo session was a disaster. I got loads of close-ups of a hammy with a dead worried face. (Yes, even hamsters can look worried. I have the proof on Mother Hubbard's mobile phone.) Perhaps one day I will manage to get a nice picture of the Chinese Mouse and I'll email it to the magickal village of Plumpiemousie where the midnight colours are inverted and all is funky, yet never druggie. Such an amazing place...

Wednesday's Proper Posting
Mood:  incredulous
Now Playing: incredulously... people!!-- gaah!!!
Topic: Daily Doings

MY PROPER POSTING for today. Yes I conked out again with my little Mousey up my sleeve. Mousing around, up and down my sleeve, whiskers all a-tickling me, push-push-pushing with his nose. Then, as I say, settling down to yet more extended hours of sleep. Funny, but when he’s intent on rambling somewhere more interesting, even if I put my forearms vertical he climbs up the material with ease, pops out and climbs on my hands, hangs over the brink of my cuffs, judging ever more cavalierly the distance for a leap down…

   I’M GLAD I’M AT HOME. Am not too much of a fan of the Vast Outside most of the time.

   People! Bloody people!

   The girls in the bookshop were sweet, wishing me happy new year. They know me well from my times last year when I went through a great deal of the Wordsworth Editions £1.99 Classics range. Ordering titles, one at a time, through their computer. Leaving me with half a shelf full of half read Victorian fiction. Anna Karenina I'm still tackling gamely. I adore that book. It's just that I have the attentionspan of a gnat that makes the concentrating upon all 850++ pages rather difficult.

   Then I’m leaving the booksshop when a Greek voice accosts me and two deranged eyes. A Local Psycho, who used to call himself my friend, demands £1. So he can go get a drink. I said no. Then, two glassy inner –spiralling eyes met mine and a rant — “I saw you with my friend (what friend?) in the off-licence (liquor store) this morning. What off licence? Don’t laugh at me. Next time I see you I’m gonna hit you. What’s wrong with now? Does he know my really puny left hook?

   (MY RIGHT HOOK, on the other hand, even Charles the Schizophrenic Boxer admires my right hook. He tries not to look pained when, standing palms out, he allows me to smack them fearlessly.)

   [I've just read this back the next day. And who was supposed to be fearless. Him or me?]

   So Zorba doddles off. I brave the local supermarket. “Brave” is the operative word for their most recent “StoreD”, in an Alzheimerian feat of confabulation, remembers calling me into the back room of a prominent high street pharmacy accused of theft of what I later identified as a £25 copper antiarthritis bangle. What else annoyed me in this incident was that nobody had witnessed me even touching said bangle (that’s because I hadn’t). A new and rather thick member of staff had merely witnessed me stand beside the empty packet as I perused camera batteries (I needed a new battery for my oldfashioned auto-advance film camera.)

   “Look, just put it on the table now and you’ll get a banning letter (banning me for life from the shop? For doing nothing? No thanks.) and we’ll leave it at that,” said Mr StoreD in a voice so reasonable I almost felt silly having to contradict him and tell him the truth. The harsh unpalatable truth that someone who looked like a junkie had actually, for once, not stolen the item in question. He didn’t like this. Once I’d emptied my every pocket, turned my bag inside-out, proved beyond doubt that no £25 arthritis bracelet was in my possession, I pointed to the luxuriant bank of CCTV monitors and challenged him to prove the “crime” on them.

   My invitation was immediately declined.

   What gets me the most about this episode is that the guilty StoreD remembers my face (though he assumed I’d forgotten his for I blanked him so effectively on so many occasions), remembers the accusation, yet affects to have forgotten my innocence. He even started getting quite lairy with me last time he caught me in this unnamed supermarket, ejecting me for “theft” of a single carrier bag. My friend Valium Marilyn’s had split so I was only doing a favour. He threw me out as if I’d been apprehended committing grand theft larceny. Well and truly in his element he threatened me with “the back room” should I dare set foot inside the hallowed sliding doors again. When I told him that the “last time” of which he kept reminding me, I’d actually done nothing wrong and he knew that, his eyes flashed with inner fury and he growled to , “Get out of my face.”...

   Thankfully no security appeared to be “on” this evening so I braved the supermarket, got all me food. Feeling well pleased with myself I breezed outside ony to run slap bang into Crackhead of the Century imploring me for £50p. Come on, just 50p I know you’ve got it.” I pleaded poverty and hurried to the busstop. People!

   Fair enough I used to beg up change. But I never begged “off my own” (why ask someone who has nothing?— that makes no sense. That is taking the pee-pee.) Also when I begged I sat down. In the end, I had so many “regulars” I didn’t even need to ask. The money came of people’s free will. If someone didn’t want to talk to me, so be it. I ignored them. And I got very little trouble because of this. C of the C, on the other hand, seems to have a bashed-in face nearly every other time I meet him. Which is far too frequently for my liking.

   And here endeth today’s posting. People! Ukk!!

  

The Daily Nothingness
Mood:  spacey
Now Playing: Ding-Dong-Ping-Pong-Pong-Pongs
Topic: Daily Doings

Wednesday 3^rd January 2007

I DO FIND IT AMUSING when I type these postings out on Word and the program presumes to (a) understand what I’m trying to say better than I can say so myself or (b) (most annoying of all) corrects my grammar. It even dove (or should that be “dived”, I prefer “dove”, I think it’s American English but still, I prefer it. Yeah, it dove in and informed me that my Revised Standard Version Bible quotation from Isaiah for the new year was ungrammatical. Honestly!

   Right so I’m meant to tell the nitty-gritty of my sad life. Sainsbury’s. No beef sausages. Exceedingly annoying. (I’m no swine-o-phile.) I’m getting loads of green underlining here. Bought “Healthy Options” wholegrain fresh and soft and bendy tagliatelle. Not your junkie Value baked beans and shoplifted bacon fayre, I know, but I’ve made more effort to take care of myself of late.

   Last night I conked out (addicts don’t just sleep, they conk out fully clothed for the night and call that sleeping). Yeah so I conked out with hammy out. In my hands he’s learnt to dive up my sleeves where he mouses around for up to twenty minutes before settling down to sleep. Yes, up my sleeve. And it being night, I fell into deep unconsciousness with said rodent nestling in the crook of my arm. (Hamsters are nocturnal, but this one just sleeps morning, noon and night; I’ve never had a pet like him.)

   When I awoke thinking “aaagh! He’s pinged out!” he hadn’t. He was just clinging (no doubt still unconscious) to the inside of my clothes. As I said, he is a very odd hamster. Chinese hamster if you want to be precise. He makes my sleeves his own domain then runs away from my hands when I try and get him out. Usually for some practical reason, like I’m popping down the shop. Sometimes I just think, well whatever and take him with me. He doesn’t mind.

   Now I’m trying to think of something more exciting to tell you. One of these days I shall get round to telling about my home detox. At my parents’ house. Unannounced. That was some chaos and a half!

   Meanwhile I’m signing off for now. Take care, folks.

Gleds

xx

Naltrexone
Mood:  vegas lucky
Now Playing: Ultra Clean
Topic: Drugs Treatments

NALTREXONE—for those who've got clean and want to stay clean.

(It's similar to the naloxone component of American Suboxone.)

Extract from a leaflet on naltrexone (Nalorex).

Treatment Choices

There are a number of drugs that can be prescribed to help you if you are dependent on opiates like heroin. Naltrexone is a drug that people who have detoxed can take to help them stay opiate-free.

   There is not, and never will be, a “magic cure” that can stop everyone taking opiates.

   However, the drug treatments, and help from the services that offer them, might be able to help you make any changes you want to make.

   This leaflet is one of a series designed to help you understand what you can expect from the different drug treatments that may be on offer.

Heroin-free

Naltrexone is prescribed in the UK under the trade name Nalorex. You can take it if you want to be completely free of heroin and other opiates. It works by sticking to, and blocking, all of the opiate receptors in the brain.

   Before you take the first dose of naltrexone you must have been completely heroin- and methadone-free for seven to ten days. This is because if there are opiates in your system, the naltrexone will very quickly remove them from the receptors, and send you into instant withdrawal.

Protection

Naltrexone can make coping with difficult times and high-risk situations easier because you know that if you take heroin, it won’t have any effect.

   You take naltrexone as a tablet and, once you are stable and used to taking it, you can take it just three times a week to give full-time protection against the effects of heroin and all other opiates.

Other drugs

Naltrexone doesn’t provide protection against cocaine, tranquillizers or alcohol — so it is important to make sure these drugs don’t “replace” the heroin.

Implants

There has been some publicity given to naltrexone implants which are inserted surgically under the skin and give up to three months’ protection from opiates. However, these are experimental and are usually only available form a small number of private doctors.

Side effects

Sometimes people on naltrexone suffer from anxiety, stomach upsets and sleeplessness. But these feelings and physical symptoms are common following opiate detox  — whether you are on naltrexone or not. If you do get these symptoms, discuss them with your doctor before stopping treatment.

Stopping treatment

Many of the people who start naltrexone treatment stop within a few weeks. This is sometimes because of the side effects, but more often it is because they realize that they don’t really want to completely stop taking opiates.

Overdose

You will be at very high risk of overdose if you stop taking naltrexone and start using heroin (or other opiates) again.

   It can be really hard to measure how tolerant you are. A few days after your last naltrexone tablet, you may be able to take as much heroin as you used to — because there is still some naltrexone in your system. Then, just a few hours later, the same dose could kill you — because the naltrexone has all gone.

   If you do stop taking naltrexone, and go back to using heroin, it is important that you don’t inject — with lower tolerance you’ll get a strong enough effect if you chase it.

   Using heroin when you have been drinking alcohol or taking other tranquillizers *like Valium or sleeping pills) also increases the risk of you dying from an overdose.

 

You can get more copies of “Treatment Choices” from:

Exchange Supplies, 1 Great Western Industrial Centre, Dorchester, DT1 1RD.

Tel: 01305 262244  Fax: 01305 262255  Email: info@exchangesupplies.org

 

Written by Andrew Preston and Jon Derricott. © Exchange 2002. Third edition 2006.

www.exchangesupplies.org

Exchange—tools for harm reduction.

On Reflection
Mood:  not sure
Now Playing: for the Death Penalty for Paedos
Topic: Life Story

ON REFLECTION, I’m starting to feel a little paranoid about the post I put in the other day “five things it’s worse to be…” My point there was supposed to be (and I was writing to myself as much as to anyone else, I don’t call this “Confessions” a “blog-journal” for nothing) — even if you’re a hopeless junkie (and drug addicts adore feeling sorry for themselves) you can count your blessings. Many of us are relatively well in mind and body (I’ve been more ill mentally than I ever was physically).

   What I wasn’t trying to do was to demonize AIDS patients as comparable to rapists or Satanists. All the five points have my sympathy, that was the point of the piece. I wasn’t ridiculing anyone.

   As for the sex offenders, we hear so much about paedophilia etc I feel almost afraid to go near people’s kids sometimes… talking to a young child, what if people get the wrong idea? It’s sad but like many others I suppose, I feel I must stay away.

   A case in the news recently involved a very young little girl having a bath upstairs in her home. A man sneaked in the open front door, took the child out of the bath, ran outside with her, drove off and abused her in some way, dumping the poor frightened child the other side of town some half hour or so later. He got sentenced to life — good. That was a truly monstrous thing to do.

   When I was about ten (and I had very blond and distinctive hair) I used to go to a railway footbridge to wave a Silver Jubilee Union Flag at the trains which would honk loudly in reply (especially the express trains). One day I had only just got there when a man I had never seen before approached me from the other side of the bridge, called me by my right name and said he was supposed to collect me.—!!

   I told him he’d got the wrong person and this man (very nervous-looking the whole time) went away. And I went safely home. I’ve wanted to get that off my chest for some time. Every time I think of it that memory does my head in. I wonder: what if? (This guy looked all wrong. He had nervousness in his eyes like he feared what he was about to do. I saw that. No way on earth was I going with him.)

   Well. What can I say? Telling that story makes me feel kind of shaky inside. I ask myself whether he really did have badness on his mind... I do feel sorry for people who feel compelled to do stuff like that. I know how it feels to be compelled to do something others disapprove of because I take hard drugs. I always used to be anti the death penalty. Now I believe it might be kinder to kill the paedophiles off and put them out of their misery.

New Year's Day 2007
Mood:  chillin'
Now Playing: Well, not Auld Lang Syne, I'm all Syned out...
Topic: Daily Doings

NEW YEAR’S DAY: I woke up at 3 or 4pm. As I said, I was going to go out “panhandling”like I used to… couldn’t bear to go back there.

   A middle-aged man on a sleeping bag was sat by our nearest cashpoint begging in the pouring rain. He is still there this evening. He looks miserable as sin.

   I tried to score but my current best dealers were (a) not answering and (b) hung over in bed. My phone was down to the last 60p in credit so I told man (b) to come round and not to be too long about it.

   An hour and a half later when I was tapping in my “detox” post, below I rang man (a) who picked up only to waste my last bit of talktime telling me he’d be “on” tomorrow. So had to txt man (b) saying call me or I’m on my way up the road.

   Having given (b) ten minutes’ grace, I called my dealer #3 who said come to a certain park (same as Xmas Day) which I duly did. An almighty rainstorm began to chuck it down. Of course right in the middle of this and just as I’m approaching the place for #3, man (b) calls back informing me he’s near my house: too late, mate, I’m not there. Sorry.

   Soaking wet and glad at least to find his “runner” lurking there, I handed £10 to a shadow beneath a plane tree.

   I trudged home in the cold and wet. And rather than ringing man (b) back as promised, I indulged in cyder, fresh (paid for) tobacco and beef in black bean sauce and egg fried rice from my nearest Chinese (about ten doors away from mine). I have all amenities here.

 

Laurie thank you for answering my Americana questionnaire: Come on all yous other Americans. Roll up! Roll up! Get answering! Anyone else from any other part of the world, just say where you’re from and answer my 7 questions anyway. I’m interested to know about the junkie life abroad…

 

Ta!

 

G

Detox Centre
Mood:  not sure
Now Playing: More Cautiously than I used to.
Topic: Drugs

DETOX CENTRE

ON MY WAY TO A FRIEND’S place earlier (yesterday, on New Year’s Eve) I met a working girl I know who was after an early “punter” (it was only 4pm) but everyone down there knows her). She’s the one who gave me the Chinese-Indonesian-Vietnamese-Tagalog-Hindi-&-Thai-speaking mobile phone I’m using at the moment. She was off to a “crisis emergency detox” at the time.

   Now I’m not going to name names as what I’m about to tell you did happen about 3 or 4 years ago. But there are facilities, open to all and London-wide for crisis intervention and drug detox. These are self-referral facilities. (“Intervention” doesn’t carry the more American sense of “verging on felony kidnapping-type affair”.) As I said this facility I applied of my own free will to go to takes drug addicts of all descriptions (in London, that means heroin and crack).

   I was the only one in there (at the time) not addicted to crack (I did do it but infrequently, perhaps a couple of times a month) and I had the bad luck (as I saw it) to have to share a room with one guy coming off crack but not heroin (he slept like a baby the whole time) and another on both but I believed he was exaggerating his habit a the meagre methadone they gave out seemed to get him stoned. I had to get extra meds as the doses weren’t holding me. In both the places I’ve been I was prescribed extra meds. I’ve had the dubious honour of being “most clucking ‘client’” as they call us nowadays.

   My best memory of the crisis detox was watching Gladiator on their wide-screen telly. All being in detox and feelings running high we watched the film in silence, in a darkened room. The hairs were prickling on the back of our necks…

   My worst memory was the snotty psychiatric nurses from the “staff bank” (nursing agency). In hospital they dish out drugs like there’s no tomorrow. Anyone diagnosed bipolar or psychotic who gets wound up enough to lose his temper gets wrestled into a five-point restraint, has his trousers forcibly pulled down and is injected IM with haloperidol, flupenthixol or whatever the chemical cosh of the moment happens to be. These staff came here with, fair enough, its no caffeine at night policy. But they tipped lavender oil on our pillows and encouraged us to sip camomile tae as if these things, which only affect the impressionable (in my opinion) will have any effect at all on a system scrambled by heroin and crack. I’m sorry but that’s ridiculous. The only effect herbal teas can possibly have on a withdrawing addict is a negative one — in that as I say they lack caffeine which can make an anxious person even more wound up. I found the “no meds except blind methadone” policy ridiculous. They could have given us chloral betane and zopiclone to sleep. And they could have given me something a little better than charcoal biscuits when, due to withdrawals, I was sick everywhere. Charcoal mops up toxins from the stomach. No toxins were there. I was detoxing from intravenous heroin. The charcoal just gave me black diarrhoea next morning.

   Unwaware of their particular way of doing things I began to feel quite ill in the night. My eyes were running. Constant yawning. I felt not and cold all at once. I had the pouring sweats. Everyone told me I was in withdrawal (half the place was up at 3am because nobody could sleep) and at first I didn’t believe them because on a (then) £40 a day habit I’d taken about £7 worth of heroin at 7am and 50mg of methadone before coming in to the centre. These together, I hoped, would hold me till 9am 24 hours later. No such luck. By 4am the methadone was no longer holding me at all (heroin, which keeps you “straight” for 8-12 hours, had long worn off). Wanting to be direct and honest with the staff I had told them exactly what I used each day and what I’d taken. (Many addicts exaggerate up to get more meds, but what’s the point in that, I reasoned, if you’re there to come off?) The night staff refused to believe I was ill for quite some time. They even queried what I was talking about when I told them I was hot and cold at the same time (a classic withdrawal feature).

   What had not been explained to me was that because this place is a self-referral crisis centre — “clients” arrive with no medical papers confirming their addict status — nobody can give medication until the “client” is in blatant withdrawal, which can mean feeling very uncomfortable indeed. People have died in prisons/etc having lied about their status hoping to get stoned on the meds for “an easier time.”

   A couple of other events occurred during my 3-day stay to give me rather a low view of the place. I don’t want to slag the place off too much because, as I say, this all happened about 3-4 years ago and much could have changed since then.

   What all this did show me was that I wasn’t “ready” to quit… If I do end up in rehab again, at least I know now what questions to ask about the regime…

Cusp of New Year
Mood:  celebratory
Now Playing: Auld Lang Syne!! Still!
Topic: Daily Doings

CLOSE TO THE CUSP of New Year’s Day; I am tempted to go out begging the revellers for change. But that would be going backwards a few years.

   Sad as that may seem, I can’t do it. Also my gut feeling tells me to stay inside. I have my methadone. I’ve drunk quite some quantity in advance to prevent that nasty phenomenon of waking early feeling sick, like I did this morning. I was barely over the cusp of withdrawal — just a bit under the weather…

Happy New Year
Mood:  cheeky
Now Playing: Auld Lang Syne
Topic: miscellaneous

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2007 EVERYBODY!

Love

         Gledwood

                              XxXxXxX

Pre-2007
Mood:  lyrical
Now Playing: Auld Lang Syne (still)...
Topic: Daily Doings

NEW YEAR’S EVE and I’ve cut down smoking… not because of any New Year’s Resolution, though one friend of mine threatened to quit and I said (truthfully) that I’d do so too — if it happens. No, my lack of tobacco comes from rain (that has destroyed the local dogends collections) overzealous street-sweepers sweeping all the best butts away and my being too poor to be able to afford to buy any. So I’ve been on about five or ten a day, which is nothing to me. I had a cig just now, it gave me such a head-rush! People pay £5 to get something like that off crack! And mine came free courtesy of an old lady at a bus-stop…!

    As you can see I’ve altered my colour-scheme. I would like to know whether people think it really is better…

   I’ve been trying to send Happy New Year’s messages to everyone I know but have had problems getting through to the following: Micah — because Junkylife seems to be “down”. Ruth — the comments box won’t appear (and I keep getting the most extraordinary popups from your site). Istanbulwitchy — yours will only allow comments from googlers or blogspotters which I’m not so please alter the settings, I’d like to be able to talk to you! So a Happy New Year to all the above plus everyone else and thanks for all your support.

     Re my longed-for hits-counter, I’d still appreciate all the tips and info anyone has… especially if there’s a Tripod blogger out there… Please keep the instructions coming…

    I’m off now for Sunday lunch and a huge session of nature programme watching at my mate’s house… See yers in 2007.

   And let's hope the new year is tons better than the old one!

 

G.

xx

SADDAM
Mood:  incredulous
Now Playing: tearfully - boo-hoo!
Topic: News Views

WHEN I WOKE UP yesterday with the radio telling me of the last moments of Saddam Hussein as he approached the hanging scaffold… turned down the offer of a hood, bowed his neck, calmly accepting the noose… exclaimed, “God is great!” — his last words — then:— WHAM!

   I was always against the death penalty when I was younger… (What if they got the wrong guy?)… more recently my mind began to change. Saddam Hussein kept alive in Iraq would always be liable to jailbreaks from his mobs of “insurgents”…

   But I have to admit, and I’m hardly Saddam’s #1 fan, that of all the things to feel on hearing of his death, I felt tearful. Why? Why do we feel sad when anyone dies? It’s often because of all that person didn’t achieve and all they were not. That’s why when someone like Mother Theresa goes, having lived a full and worthwhile existence, barely a tear is shed. But someone with a troubled life, someone like Princess Diana… see what I mean?

   Well, that’s my theory.

Diana
Mood:  mischievious
Now Playing: Candle in the Wind '97
Topic: News Views

… Incidentally, re Princess Diana and the Royal Family it amuses me the way they seem to be viewed by the foreign media:— almost as celebrities who don’t make films or records. Very modern Paris Hilton/Lindsay Lohan-type celebrities. Has Lindsay Lohan been in a film? Has anyone seen it?

   Our Queen is our Head of State much as an old granny becomes head of a family Since the Queen Mum died a few years ago our Queen ticks both of these boxes. She is loved and respected by a vast proportion of the population in a way I’m not sure Republic-dwellers could fully understand.

    An American President gets at most eight years. The former Irish President Mary Robinson (in a figurehead role more equivalent to that of our Queen) had a regal bearing but she only did the job for a few years.

    Queen Elizabeth II has reigned since 1952 and was well known to the public of course (as Princess Elizabeth) all her life up to then. We have seen how a woman perhaps not the most naturally gifted with “star quality” and charisma has performed the duties to which she was born with rare dignity, escaping the kind of scandals in which practically every other member of her family became embroiled.

    Diana was dangerous because while she was alive and popular she attracted public sympathies and support that might otherwise have been directed at Charles and the Queen. (Although there were signs that her popularity was perhaps just starting to falter when she died.)

   The Queen is little interested in her popularity ratings and though her “star” might well be at an all-time high today, there have been periods in history when the Royals weren’t all that popular at all.

   It is often said that in an ever more rapidly changing world the Queen provides Britons with a sense of constancy and stability.

   Perhaps it’s a paradox that as we gradually enter a sci-fi-comes-real style of future, the Royal family are becoming more indispensable to us than they’ve ever been in this present “Constitutional” age…

HELP!!!
Mood:  irritated
Now Playing: extremely irritatedly, as I just said.
Topic: miscellaneous

PLEASE HELP ME!!

I know someone out there can.

All I want to do is install a hit-counter on this blog, so I'll have some idea of how many folks come tiptoeing across my innermost confessions...

I've found the hit counter. I know how to highlight, ctrl+C to pick up then ctrl+V to set down again.

I opened my html editor. I was unable to scroll through loads of <g.obble/dygo%ok> crap as only one paragraph of <r/ubbish> was showing.

Please, does anyone know where I'm meant to paste the technical code? How do I do this? Someone must know. Loads of you lot have counters on your blogs. You must at least know someone else you can collar — please force them to answer me!

Or if you cannot answer yourself, tell me where I can go on the net to find out...

Many thanks.

PS What do you think of the new darker, less-glary blue? Answers below, please...

American Quizzzzzzz!!zzzzzz!
Mood:  quizzical
Now Playing: Who Wants to be a Millionaire...!
Topic: miscellaneous

SOME PRETTY TRIVIAL QUESTIONS ON AMERICANA-DRUGANA

We see so much of the USA in films, exported TV-shows, etc. But what’s the real America like? I haven’t a clue. And, wondering how a junky's life compares, I found myself posing the following questions:—

1 — Is the j-word mostly spelt “junky”?

(Told you this was trivial, didn’t I?)

We tend to spell it “junkie”, that’s all.

2. What is American heroin like?

I’ve heard of this “tar” (Mexican black tar H—?). Is that literally black?

What colour is it cooked up?

Is China white easy to get hold of?

(Our gear is nearly always brown (that’s why our dealers call it “B”,) Even when it comes as grey lumps like catlitter it still cooks up brown.) You don’t ever get “tar” over here & China/Thai white is rare as hens’ teeth.

3. Are fresh works (needles-syringes) easy to get hold of?

4. Is it true if you OD yourself the hospital/911 emergency are likely to call police on you?

(That wouldn’t happen here unless you were under-age, or some equally dodgy factor was involved.)

5. Is that crystal methamphetamine really as widespread as the media would have us believe? Our speed over here has always been amphetamine sulphate — it’s weaker; must be easier to make or something. We are apparently starting to see crystal meth… but I’ve never come across it… but then again I don’t do speed…

I’ve seen cleaned-up addicts filmed in rehab and even one month clean they looked terrible. A month off heroin & crack and most people look so okay you wouldn’t guess they were a recovering crackhead junkie…

6. How popular is ecstasy? I’d estimate that out of my generation (I’m 34—gaah!!) about one person in three has done it. They used to say a million (or was it 2 million) people in the UK took it every weekend. I used to love it at a club or party when you’d get someone dead straight in real life getting down & funky on the E-E—E-E/E/E•E\E-E\E-E/E•E-E•E%!¡!¿?!!! vibe. Yeah, man. It was like living a really happy dream and sharing it with my friends. (“We are E-E-E-E!”) (The only problem was certain distraught comedowns. Like someone had grabbed my dream, shook out all the pixie-dust, given it a good kicking and used it as a toilet-cum-ashtray, then slammed all this rubbish back in my head and made me suffer the ashtray of doom brains all week long.) Tuesday Blues, they call it… Blues? What an understatement.

… Then Friday night comes and whee-heeE-E-E-E! Back up there!

7. What’s the consensus on George W Bush? There isn’t a consensus? Okay, what do you personally think?

Okay, that’s enough questions for now.

Anyone who knows the answers and can be bothered, please post ’em in a comment.

Ta!

IT COULD BE WORSE...
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: counting my blessings...
Topic: Lists

IT COULD BE WORSE…

New Year’s as good a time as any to count our blessings.

Here’s five things it’s worse to be than addicted to drugs…

 

5 TERMINALLY ILL — Okay, some of us do have HIV or severe liver disease from Hep C-like viruses, alcohol or both. But a good many of us have little or nothing physically wrong with us. (Many hep C+ people are asymptomatic.) I count myself blessed to be unscathed — considering the risks I’ve taken (and all my friends seem to have the virus) the plain fact that I managed to test hep C negative has to be a miracle from God.

4 A SATANIST — Junkies may be evil in the eyes of the world, but we’re not that evil!

3 PSYCHOTIC — If you’ve ever literally lost your mind due to drugs, their after-effects or mental illness or both, even for a short time, you’ll appreciate, as I do, that sanity is something to be cherished.

2 A SEX OFFENDER — What is it that possesses a grown man in a “civilized” society to lurk in dark alleys waiting for an unsuspecting female to victimize? I do not understand this.

1 BORN IN DAIFUR/RWANDA/anywhere else where you’re likely to be mutilated or killed just for having the wrong religion or even just being born into the wrong tribe...

AS YOU ALL CAN SEE, I'VE CHANGED MY BACKGROUND COLOUR TO A DARKER BLUE to reduce "glare". If I knew how to install poll gear I'd to that now and question yous that way... but I don't.

 So would you be so kind as to give your opinions in the comment box below? Does it look better now??

I need to know!

Many thanxx

Gledwood

 

From "Alien", from the NA Blue Book
Mood:  special
Now Playing: Serenely, of course!
Topic: Serenity

A NUTSHELL: FULL OF ADDICT’S THINKING:

 

A FEW MONTHS BEFORE I found the programme, I was working in retail and found a wonderful supplier for my habit, my manager. Now all I had to do was to make it to work. In fact, all of a sudden, work was not all that bad. I began to work fourteen-hour days. It was my perpetual and ultimate connexion, and life became more blurry every day. I found myself doing things for drugs that I didn’t want to do. But I did anything that I had to do to stay high. Using became so much a part of my routine that, at one point, it was accepted behaviour to cut lines of cocaine on the restaurant table. I became oblivious to the fact that what I was doing was illegal. I never could figure out why it seemed like people were always staring at me! I remember thinking, “God grant me the power to change the people, places, and things that do not agree with my way of thinking.” I could never figure out why this world would not devote itself to making me happy.

 

  

From “Alien”, p165, Narcotics Anonymous “Blue Book”. ©1988 by Narcotics Anonymous World Services, Inc., Van Nuys, California, USA.

Tel: (818) 773-999

Fax: (818) 700 0700

www.na.org

 

 

A Poem for a New World..... from the Bible; Isaiah 11:6-9
Mood:  lyrical
Topic: Quotations

My poem for the New Year 2007...

 

An extract from the Bible, telling of a time when this world we have to endure now has passed away. 

 

 

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid,

And the calf and the lion and the fatling together,

And a little child shall lead them.

The cow and the bear shall feed;

Their young shall lie down together;

And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

The sucking child shall play over the hole of the asp,

And the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den.

They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain;

For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD

As the waters cover the sea.

 

                                                                 Isaiah 11:6-9

Post-Curry Recovery
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: Not Hungover!!
Topic: Daily Doings

RECOVERED QUITE NICELY from yesterday. After getting all wound up with nerves. (I’m not used to going out to nice places any more.) What was I so worried about, meeting my own brother-? We had a great time, curry and all. I had been drinking quite a lot that afternoon, but thankfully had sobered a little down by the time we actually met up. Right this moment he’s aboard a jetplane… When will I see you again, Bro? (Hopefully this time next year!!)