Black Doggerel

I remember it vividly from when I stopped using heroin: that slow surge back to life of passions dropped on the journey. ( Cut for verbosity )

So the doctor thinks I either have post-viral fatigue syndrome or possibly a thyroid issue. Today I went to have blood drawn so they can check thyroid functions. I don't have words for how much I was dreading this. I never had easy veins to start with, and I destroyed what little there was very thoroughly during the junkie years, so that getting blood out of me is normally only slightly easier than pulling hen's teeth. What normally happens is that the first nurse will stab me five or six times in each arm, fail to find a vein, call in a different nurse and sometimes a third, and eventually they'll send me home with both arms bruised and sore from wrist to shoulder with instructions to come in next week so they can try again. When I had my dental surgery they put the drip in my neck because no one in the entire hospital could hit my arm veins. That's how bad they are.

So I'd warned them about sucky vein access when I made the appointment, and they smiled serenely at me and said "Don't worry. We have Ying." I gave them a funny look and went "...Okay. Whatever."

Ying turned out to be a dry, quietly-competent nurse that made it hard even for me to be anxious in her presence. She felt over both my arms carefully before she so much as touched me with a needle and bugger me if she didn't hit the vein squarely on the first damn poke. That's never happened in my entire life with anyone, professional or otherwise, not in those veins.

I have typed more words today than I have in weeks. I seem to be having a good day. This has been driving me batshit because I haven't had the energy for IM conversations. I've been staying out of the Khimeros chat; I've tried, but one of the side-effects of feeling this shitty is that my brain-keyboard filter is holed and shaky and it's too hard not to get snotty with people. So I'm only talking to people who don't tend to piss me off and who understand if I say something tactless by accident. It's made me slightly stir crazy, but most of the time I've just been too fucking tired to care.

This is likely to continue for a while yet. Today's been a good day, but I've had a lot of days when the combined effort of hitting Post Comment, stringing an intelligible sentence together and then typing it has been more than I could deal with.

In other news, Spike is still licking his elbows. Also, I have liquorice allsorts and rhubarb-and-custard boiled sweets, neither of which I ordered - Tesco sent them as substitutes because they'd run out of the toffee I did order. I love the way internet grocery shopping occasionally produces these little serendipities; the rhubarb-and-custards are a bit harder than I really fancied but man, they taste good. And liquorice allsorts are complete love, especially the pink and blue sprinkle-covered liquorice jelly cushions. Though admittedly it's more usual for them to send me filthy camomile tea when I ordered blackcurrant or ginger or fennel, but still.

Today is my Dad's birthday and I feel vaguely guilty that I didn't remember till my sister posted something about it on Facebook. He was never very good at remembering birthdays either, mind you.

/end ramble

I dreamed that I found a stash tin while I was cleaning, and inside it there was a big rock of crack cocaine. Like sex dreams, drug dreams always wake you before you get to the good part, so it ended with me searching my flat for something I could improvise into a crack pipe.

I want to wash my brain.

Holy fucking shit, there need to be warnings or something to prevent people with addiction issues from getting their hands on fucking Neopets. It was all right just pootling about posting messages on our funky Guild message boards, giving each other humourous anonymous gifts of fish and half-eaten fruit and taking spins on the free stuff tombolas. It was all light hearted and jolly and we got together in the dotpetchat and giggled about the stupid swearfilters and swapped tips. It was shiny innocent pastel-coloured fun.

But that's never enough, is it? Not for the likes of me. I had to go and start in on the fucking Altador plot, didn't I?

Suddenly the Neopets experience went from passing joints round in a roomful of giggling friends to trudging around town all day trying to score heroin when no one has any. Any sane person would give up after two, eight, twelve, sixteen, thirty-two hours of calling dealers and getting told every hour to try again in another hour, or two, or three, or getting told to walk five miles to a meeting place where the dealer fails to turn up again and again and again and again. Wouldn't they? But that's a place in my mind where I'm not remotely sane, and I'll keep going till I drop, long after I know it's pointless, because I've got that deadly, unshakeable optimism that breaks all of us gamblers and risk takers in the long run.

There is a good side, I suppose. At least Neopets doesn't cost real money and, unlike heroin dealers, it's got online help forums. Phew.

In other news, one of the cats just scared herself, all the other cats and both dogs nearly shitless by switching on the vacuum cleaner. My bad. I usually remember to leave it switched off at the mains. But it gave me the best laugh I've had since beating silverblaidd up in the Battledome with a wet snowball.

( Edited: these are my damn neopets! )

Ahhh, fucking wonderful. I suspected something last night when I took the dogs out at midnight and there were two men wanting to come in. I knew they didn't live here. They were polite enough, but they had... that look. It's like the fucking Dark Mark and I felt mine fucking burning.

I knew it for certain this afternoon. I walked down the hallway and there were two KitKat wrappers - the ones which come wrapped in actual tinfoil - and a small piece of crumpled, dusty plastic bag lying on the floor.

Reflexively, to confirm what I already knew, I touched the plastic to the tip of my tongue. I wished I hadn't afterwards... I was spitting in the bramble bushes and scrubbing my tongue on my T-shirt but I couldn't clear the taste away. I got back inside and spit and gargled, spit and gargled, spit and gargled again. It made my lip numb and my stomach churn in pure fear and loathing. I spent five fucking years scrubbing that taste and smell off myself, and now, here in my fucking safe space, one of my fucking neighbours is shitting it on my doorstep. I want them out of here, I want them gone, I want them fucking dead.

Small mercies. The Kitkat wrapper means whoever it is is smoking it and not fixing. That means there won't be dirty needles lying around the place... at least, not for a while. I hope.

Good stuff happened today, for which I am soulshakingly grateful. It helped take the taste away. I can't talk about it in the same entry as this. Two different worlds.