annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary

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Acid and opera

I’ve been doing Adriene’s 7 minute bedtime yoga, as recommended by K and I love it. Thanks.
At therapy today J gave me a piece of paper with reminders for what she wanted me to write about this week and I fucking lost it already and didn’t even look at it as I assumed I could look at it later, like now, when I’m ready to write. I know it was about the time of my young adulthood, before I had children. Incidents, stories, things to ease some form of connection with the person I was then. It’s hard, because I was off my head for most of the time I wasn’t at work, and for quite a bit of that time too. Hard to make a connection, I mean, with someone who’s closed themselves down like that. I used to go to the pub at lunchtime sometimes, on a Friday when I’d been paid. It was quite common then – in fact during my teacher’s training, the whole English department went to the pub on a Friday lunchtime and had at least one alcoholic drink. I was on pints of draught Guinness back in the day, but not when I had an afternoon of reading Silas Marner to a mixed ability bunch of 14 year olds. It might have been Sol then, or Corona – it was the 90s.
I’m sure stories and memories will arise but at the moment all I can remember is late one Friday night, when the pubs were shut and the streets were almost empty, standing on a particular corner with a group of lads – we were probably all 18-19 ish – under some trees on the edge of a front garden, arguing about whether or not I could have a tab of acid. They weren’t having it, none of them. From here I can see that they must have known at some level that I was fucking mental and the last thing I needed was taking psychedelic drugs that lasted six hours and had to be endured whatever happened. At the time I thought they were a bunch of greedy selfish cunts, treating me as ‘less than’ because I was a girl and I was voicing this quite loudly and vehemently, but none of them were shifting.
Later I did take acid, with the Spanish contingent who didn’t care one way or the other. On one trip we bumped into a girl I knew vaguely as she came into the record shop – oh, I remember, I’d linked her with my stepbrother in London who had a spare room and she was planning to move in there. She’d just been accepted somewhere to train as an opera singer and on this day invited us all to her house where she still lived with her parents. There were about five of us, me, Maggie and three Spanish guys. The acid started coming up while we were at her house. I’d used the loo so went to wash my hands at the kitchen sink. There was a big pan of murky water in the sink so I poured that away, only to find out it was chicken stock that had just been strained. She said not to worry, so I didn’t and we all went into the front room where she sang to us, operatic singing that just went straight into me like a physical object entering my system, but it made me laugh. Some part of me knew it wasn’t cool to be laughing like this but I couldn’t stop so after a while the others dragged me out and we all fell about laughing on the road outside her house, then wandered up the road and onto the forest.
I hope I remember some occasions where I behaved a bit better that this, but I may not.

12:26 a.m. - 25.01.24

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