we are experiencing meatspace difficulties

service will resume shortly, once your host has completed its four-day stint of disgustingly acute withdrawal. i feel like death. the whole meat is shaking, not just my hands this time; i shiver constantly, i can't type right, i sweat like a pig even in a cool shower. it feels like my bones are collapsing in on themselves, muscles twisting in little coils. the next doctor who tells me this is no worse than a bad cooold is gonna get a junkieslap upside the head.

i suppose i oughtn't to be such a cunt about it, given that the withdrawal period is preparatory for my newest poison: a several-month course of Suboxone, better known as buprenorphine (bupe for you Yanks.) i finally got to see an addiction-specialising psychiatrist at the Integrated Drug Service, better known as the junk doc at the heroin clinic. surrounded by heroin-aged people, haggard and weary, i must have looked like the healthiest fucker in the room; the DHC i've been surviving on for weeks, while a child's drug compared to morphine, has its benefits. that has to be the first time in my life i've ever come close to looking like the normal one.

that said, the other junkheads then proceeded to batter me with questions and advice, most of which came in the form of "Fit's tha' on yer fais?!" and "Ah tell yehs, dinnae get inta this." why you would advise me thus, when i'm sitting right the fuck next to you in the clinic is beyond me, save for perhaps misguided parental instinct (i'm 22, most of them were about fourty.)

when i finally saw the dude, he was... remarkably understanding. did i want to give up? no, i said. that was fine by him, but in that case, why was i there? i wanted a stable, more cost-effective regimen to keep me fucking sane, i said.

he agreed. i stammered and stuttered like Professor Dawkins trying to be polite to an Ayatollah before finally saying, "You're gonna... give me... drugs." "Yes," he said. hence my current predicament and blessing - i have been scheduled for a maintenance course of Suboxone, which is medical jargon meaning they're going to give me junk and hope that one day i will get a frontal lobotomy and decide that i'm going to be straight-edge. they hauled me in a couple days later for blood and urine tests to determine a. whether my system is as fucked as probability says it will be and b. what level of trash DHC there was in my kidneys.

herein lieth the rub. Suboxone, as you'll see in the pedia, is one of the world's most powerful opiate agonists. great, you'd think, hail Morpheus. but its strength is its curse, so to speak; it's so good at activating opioid receptors that if there is anything else in your system at the time, the boxone will punt that off all the receptors and hog them all, resulting in instant, excruciating, lengthy withdrawal from the original substance. i can't imagine what withdrawal worse than what i'm putting myself through right now would be like, and i don't want to know. hence four days of turning myself into a shivering, vomiting, toilet-running mess.

i suppose in hindsight it might be quite amusing. the first day of lectures was today and i have run out of two of them to avoid shitting myself (not very gentlemanly), inadvertently made a Coke volcano by putting my rehydration salts into a bottle of it, smoked about six packs, and taken thirty milligrams of Valium, which ought to be enough to chemically restrain a patient in hospital. i also threw up once in a coffee shop and once into a dustbin.

now if you'll excuse me, i need to go smash my head into a door a couple hundred times. fuck this shit.

L