Apologies to skreeworld followers who are mainly in to the photography. I do have a new laptop but have yet to figure out how to get my pictures on to it and on to my blog. There's a whole stack built up so one of these days there'll be a hundred odd pictures for you to enjoy. There's some belters in there too.
Back to the near death experience. I had been clean, more or less, for fifteen years but the heroin addict never recovers in a certain sense. Some never smile again. Your body has changed, your receptors have been altered and any opiate is recognised instantly. The smell of the stuff can turn a man. More curiously are the psychological triggers that daily come out of nowhere. Certain road junctions may remind you of where you used to score, a scrap of litter resembling some litter you lay stoned next to fifteen years back can bring on a desire to use. Certain people you can never see again. Certain writers you have to avoid. These triggers can be so innocuous to a straight person and at times it is hard to explain why you won't go in to a certain shop, drive a certain route, watch a certain film. These triggers are deep. It is way beyond free will. The crack habit I picked up at Richards had gone. And so long as I took my weird paths of trigger avoidance I was free from heroin. My crack use lasted six years and left me suicidal. It takes everything you have away from you. It becomes all important. Yet it is not physiologically addictive. It is purely psychological. Even a heavy habit leaves little trace after two weeks bar a few neurotransmitters rebalancing. For those who don't know the hit from a pipe of crack is instant. A rush of dopamine pleasure. Yet within seconds, before it has worn off the desire to redose is overwhelming. It is a horrible, masturbatory drug. Free base cocaine dropped to lesser version crack to what is around now, white, often with little cocaine in there, just some smoke able stimulant. All the older users I knew are now suffering crack lung or dieing of emphasemia.
Clean of all shrugs by now and with several years of sobriety under my belt I felt pretty secure in my drug free life. I had begun shortly after my mothers death, taking magic mushrooms and looking for marijuana. From here my teens were a blur of acid, psylocibin and cannabis. My early twenties were blighted by amphetamines. I had left school to go to Stonehenge festival so had no qualifications, this meant I had to wait till I was 25 to become a mature student. I smoked cannabis all through my college years, first at Shrewsbury and then at high Wycombe I gave up tobacco so would start the day with a pipe of hash and carry on throughout the day. I passed with first class honours which I am proud of as I was surrounded by posh kids who had enjoyed private educations or at least stable middle class families. So for the working class oik to beat them all felt fucking grand.
From here I spent the odd period of sobriety before ecstasy followed by the harder drugs came in. I'd done the lot, lived to tell the tale, and retired to a tea total life.
I don't think the drugs affected my work in too many ways. The cannabis at college was helpful in that it cut me off so as I didn't have to interact with the other students. I was in the workshop before anyone else arrived and didn't leave till kick out time at eight by which time the other students tended to be long gone.
Most drug users, all heavy drug users just about, are medicating against mental illness. I have not met a single junky without issues or a damaged life story. Self medication. Mental illnesses are not the simple categories the newspapers describe. Schizophrenia is not one diagnosis like a broken leg. It is a collection of symptoms. From hearing voices, belief in fantastic delusions to hallucinations, but two schizophrenics could , often do not have a single common symptom. It is a word to describe something we don't understand. It is about as medically suffisticated as saying "he's got the here bee gee bees". As yet we haven't a clue how consciousness works. We may know that certain neurotransmitters affect mood but we are a long, long way off knowing how a lump of grey meat can think. Some people think psychiatry is falsehood. A made up job where people operate like little more that shamen or voodoo witch doctors. I subscribe to this school of thought to an extent. We maybe, through cases like phineas gage, Alzheimer's and various cases of brain damage beginning to work our way in to the paths threading up to the foothills of the mountain range that is the understanding of consciousness but we really know very little. I suspect addiction will turn out to be a variety of different conditions. In the case of heroin in all likely hood the addict is deficient in endorphins, or their receptor sites struggle to accept these endorphins.
As for drug use in general, throughout history mankind has practiced getting out of it. Religious ceremony often involved the use of psychedelic drugs. The desire for the transcendent experience is as strong as the sex drive in some people. The desire to know what we are, what is reality, what is really going on? I have travelled through time, visited other universes. Isn't it a persons own choice to explore where they wish?
And then the bacchanalian drive to communal party. To drink and make merry. To bond. To share this experience we are so fortunate to have. No one knows what we are doing here but we ought to get together, have a laugh, and try figure out what we can. Life is so wonderful. Explore it, and be brave. Some will die along the way, but I don't want to scare you too much but we are all going to die. That's the one certainty.
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