Reduction Usagio
Where I am at today this month this year. 12.5mg of metro is a lower dose than I have ever had before, I am fairly sure. It doesn't sound much less than 15mg, which I've been to 3 times before, but my body can surely tell.
The previous two times I spent a few weeks at fifteen - well, once, in 02 I think, I ended up in Thailand, crossing the border into Myanmar for, well, the term nefarious was invented for what I was doing there.
The other time I rang and saw my doc mid month, two weeks early, and jumped back to something like 40 or 50 mg. Dragging yourself way above the tide line on a beach after nearly drowning. Ten months of harsh painful reductions blown in one doctor's meeting.
So when S suggests tonight, again, that I arrange to increase my dose, I understand that while she is acting out of concern, a desire to see me not in pain, her advice is skewed. She should be telling me to suck it up, to battle on, to fight the good fight. Those are the right words.
There are few things easier than accepting a life of metro. Of going in to pick up a dose on your 60th birthday, just like you did on your 50th, your 40th and maybe your 30th. When I think that my years of using before I started with metro numbered less than five, and my years of using with metro number 15, I question its efficacy as a cure. Maybe that's my mistake, seeing it as something that helps you get off gabo, rather than something that maintains your opiate intake. It is called an Opiate Maintenance program, not an opiate Cure Program, so who can I blame but my own misguided hopes?
Thinking of making a short vid. Everytime I have a shot I'll just vid a 3 second exposure, try to stay in the same position with the same expression each time. Then when I get to some milestone, like $10,000 worth of gear, edit it all together and release it to the press. As an indication of current treatment programs' lack of success. Not like a cancer patient upset that there's no cure, more along the lines of 'If it doesn't work then why should I still blow my entire wage each week on the alternative?'
Ah, I don't know. Maybe I just haven't met the right people. Maybe there are thousands of Keats and Einsteins who just never hook up with the right personages who develop and encourage them, so they end up being dock workers or substitute teachers.
Other stuff:Reading - Gibson and Sterling's classic DIfference Engine. Victorian England where Babbage perfected his 'analytical engine', the computer's grandfather.
Missing - Pixies in a week or two, don;t want to be too trashed..
Listening - some Fall, some old Knox/T.D. videos on a great site - www.nzonscreen.co I think. Nirvana.
Love - Slept alone for ten or eleven days now. Trying to stay strong.
Work - getting very difficult to work on the second day after my last shot. First day the dwindling half-life of the shot plus metro carries me through. But day two, usually a day leading up t scoring, is harsh. Much harsher than anything in recent memory. A valium at work plus my dose doesn't stop sore legs and wandering mind. I still manage to get tasks done. But I plan this weekend to use Friday eve for the last tine so by Mon morn I am a little better. Not much sleep on day two - waking at 3 or 4am then staying up till I go to work. Car on empty always.
Watching - in addition to the above, been watching Sopranos from Season 1 again. Up to Season 6, will watch last few eps with S. Busted by Columbia pix for downloading Nurse Jackie..