Do you know, I worked out ~ if we got a worldwide circulation of 2.4 million across the three regions of North America, Europe and Asia and charged the same rates per reader per page as Vanity Fair and Vogue, and we achieved an average 100 pages of advertising per issue, we could pull in $500 million a year ~ about £320,624,899.20. How incredible is that~??!?
Have I got my sums wrong? Surely I must have...? I heard US Vanity Fair charges about $212,000 per page for a circulation of just over 1.2 million. And that British Vogue charges just over £20,000 a page for 210,766. These figures sound just too luscious to be true... Are they true..?? Can anybody tell me..? Maybe the costs of running a glossy monthly are sky-high also? Who knows. All I do know is that in the beginning I'm going to have a really hard time getting anything into the magazine. And then with the passing of time and an increase in readership and the achievement of iconic status, I know that people and products will be lining up to get in. And then I'll remember everyone who did me some favours back in the beginning...
Wow: I'm in a better mood today. I can see the light once more. Last week I was drowning in depression. My friend Binky said to me "if you need to talk about it, I'm right here at the other end of the phone" ~ but it wasn't like that. Me talking over my depression, or wondering what "issues" are involved ... is a bit like a person with influenza wanting to "talk over" their sore throat and fever and putting their acheing muscles and nausea down to "issues". The depression is just something that comes and goes irrespective of any issues or non-issues (or magazine issues).
My druggieworker was a bit annoying today saying "we all get down now and then and I never feel perfect" so I countered with the declaration that I do feel perfect sometimes. I don't feel down all the time. I get low moods and they come and go. I do not have any kind of depressive personality. I never told him about the psychic voices accosting me in the night, because that would be "mental health" ~ and methadone clinics seem to know next to nothing on that issue ~ and I'm not up for educating them.
I think I made a good point when I mentioned that most junkies are miserable anyway and he said yes, their lifestyle fuels the misery. And I said that I suspect that although heroin is relatively benign as drugs go ~ yes it is deadly in overdose, and of course it is highly addictive ~ but heroin is not associated with paranoid psychosis the way coke and speed are; it doesn't mess up a person's head the way too many Es or trips might. But I'm certain it does something to a person's psychology that is not good.
All clichés contain ingots of truth: so the "miserable junkie" stereotype doesn't exist for nothing. I'm sure heroin itself assists most ably in making unhappy people more miserable still, and I think part of this is pharmacological and not just the consequences of dependency upon a drug that is expensive and of uneven quality and illicit and soul-destroyingly addictive. I think something else is going on, something nobody can quite put their finger on. And I think it has something to do with what Narcotics Anonymous like to call "spiritual bankruptcy". I believe most who have been there know the place only too well, and even if they were articulate enough to give a description of living in hell day after day for years and decades, they wouldn't want to retread those paths of memory or to relive or re-experience or even think ever again about the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
I know the reason I want to stop this drugtaking is that a life of chemical slavery is mind-cripplingly dull, drab and boring. That my life has fallen into a pit that I not only want to crawl out of ~ I want to move on in every possible way. I was not born to waste away in a junkified morass of squandered potential and life unlived. I want so much more...
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