Man In The Glass

I’ve used amphet for the last ever time since my last post. This is due to health reasons. Maybe this blog has been reduced to nothing more than merely the howlings of a rambling junkie, but I assure you that there’s a helluva lot more to my life than a bit of substance misuse. When you perceive Joe the Average Junkie, it’s usually crack ‘n’ smack you think he’s tweaked out on. How many ‘speed freaks’ do you know? I’ve heard it time and time again from all users alike – speed is dirty, speed is filthy, speed is a nasty drug. The jury has delivered its verdict. But is speed the worst? I’d argue that it is.

I’ve just done the whole Man In The Glass routine. That’s when you look into the mirror and promise yourself something. I declared out loud that I’m never going to ingest speed again for as long as I live. I’m surprised it’s taken me this many years to be able to do this. It’s almost as if I’ve been saving it. I’ve sowed a lot of faith and hope in this routine and didn’t want to waste it when I didn’t really mean it. It’s a big step to make a vow between you and the mirror.

Let’s be honest, I’m 44 next month, my jobbing career as an addict is reaching critical mass. It’s over, okay, it’s just over. There’ll be no more homely warm sessions where the world feels at one with itself, coming up off a double-bomb in privacy, sewed up in fabrics of fire cotton and passion cashmere, like a little gnome all happy in his little greenhouse. Now I’ll have to sit with life and face it head on. Which is what I’ve been doing quite a lot, to be fair. Sat there, no television, brooding, occasionally reading. Thinking back over my life. And now perhaps, thinking forward.

I’ve had sharp internal pain for over a week. The agony has been ridiculous. I blame the phet. It might have been a kidney stone. I couldn’t sit down, couldn’t lie down, couldn’t walk at one point. It hurt every time I breathed in and shifted position. For a scary moment, I thought it was going to kill me. Paracetamol and Ibuprofen could hardly touch this long-term chronic pain but I gobbled them anyway. I was too immobile to make it to the doctors. I wouldn’t have been able to sit in the back of a taxi to make the journey to A&E. I was paralysed at home and screwed.

So my connectivity has suffered and my volumizing has suffered, along with everything else. I couldn’t sneeze or cough without pain. My whole life has fell out of the window inside a week! It’s remarkable how pain changes your outlook. Now, coming out of it (the monkey is off my shoulder but the circus is still in town), I feel revitalised, radicalised, born again. I’ve re-evaluated my existence.

And re-emerged feeling POSITIVE. And dare I say it, euphoric!