is now my fourth day here, and above you can see a shot of my bed at Rookies Cafe and Hostel on Jevrejska, not far from the city centre with all the mall areas and cute shops and restaurants.

After nearly 5 months in Amsterdam, I had got used to a bunch of things and now everything is all up in the air, of course. They say that moving house is one of the top 5 stress situations in life, I think it's just below the death of a friend or relative. My finances are in a bit of a jumble and got much more messy after last night, and the reasons for it getting like this are old, irritating problems that I have had since I was 21 years old in Canberra.

Back then, I was living with a lass I met in the psychedelic trance scene in the Byron Bay area, well, I met her precisely in Byron Bay. We moved to Canberra after some silliness involving growing weed in the closet and both of us started working as prostitutes. Hey, probably nearly nobody has been told that... I have a pretty chequered past, shall we say... No, I am not gay! But even back then I knew that gays often get infatuated with me, which is really really annoying.

Caffeine

Anyway, it was in a brothel that I and my lass were working at in Canberra, sitting around in the waiting room, that I developed a caffeine thing. Caffeine does terrible things to me, but I had no idea and in my house, which was Seventh Day Adventist, caffeine is banned. I rarely had more than one cup of coke in a year back then, and I didn't really like it. Coffee was even less liked by me.

In fact, the eventual messy breakup, that involved some broken windows and several visits from the police over the disturbance, was in part facilitated by my caffeine addiction, combined with smoking weed. I lost a lot of weight, because too much weed and caffeine combined destroys my appetite, I got down to 55kg, you could see far too much detail of my skeleton. I looked in the mirror and I was looking at death.

Alcohol

Next, after I broke up with the girl, I got a job for a while in a government department doing data input for a financial database. I eventually ended up staying in the apartment of one of my girl's infrequent clients - he always asked for lots of insults and teasing (and no sex, in fact), my girl's best mate in the business was his favourite. She ended up dead gassed herself with her boyfriend's car a week into getting off heroin.

The man was a chronic alcoholic. He routinely drank probably about 500ml of whiskey in cola, usually in a mix in a can, so let's say about 2 litres of this mix every night. I picked up the habit, though I didn't drink that vile blend, instead I was into this super strong 7.5% cider called Strongbow White ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strongbow_(cider)#Discontinued_brand_extensions ) - ok, there was an 8.5% one as well, the weaker one had lemon.

I also progressed then from coca cola in the waiting room to 'V', an apple-flavoured guarana/b vitamin type drink.

Back to now

So, anyway, since then, I have struggled with all these things. I generally have found that cannabis reduces my intake of alcohol, and caffeine increases it. I smoke tobacco as well, and alcohol makes it very difficult to stop because of the way it dulls my judgement.

Away from the coffeshops in Amsterdam, I have been adjusting to not having a smoke most days. In Amsterdam I probably drank about a litre of standard beer 4-5 times a week. The coffee was free but it always ended up ruining my afternoons, and with the schedule at the drop in centre there, with an hour closed around lunchtime, myself and my russian friend Andre would usually go to a park nearby where the police don't ticket people for drinking in the park.

The reason why I am talking about this is because last night I found my favourite kind of beer, dark beer, a Montenegro specialty, I forget the name, but it's much like Cooper's Extra Stout or Guinness Stout - 6.5% alcohol... It seems to be just at a level where I start to get stupid after a litre.

For some reason as I was watching the crazy price movement of the SBD last night, I decided I was going to try and buy some. I'm not sure exactly what I was thinking, and that's the problem... I sent €500 to bitonic, through a blocktrades exchange code that turned into SBD, and out the other side... 321 SBD! Yes, still the same value now, I locked it in by selling it for steem, and now, to add more stupidity to the mix, it's sitting in Poloniex waiting for them to get off their butts and complete the withdrawal back to my account.

It's horrible, horrible dejavu - I ended up doing something equally stupid when I was back in Sofia before I got locked up, in this case I tried the arbitrage game with bitcoins, and they ended up locked for like 6 weeks in an MTGox account. 2 months after that happened I was nearly killed in an arrest by special police who had been fed a juiced up story by the detective running the case that said I was ex military. In fact, my health at the time was so bad probably if someone jumped on m back like that cop did now, it wouldn't break any ribs, back in 2013, they broke 4, and I literally could not turn myself over once I was face first on the ground with my hands cuffed.

Resolution...

So, today, I didn't go and get an energy drink. Instead I got this massive hamburger from a shop just outside the alley this hostel is located in. It was cooked on charcoal too... I remember in Sofia seeing quite a number of 'Serbski Scara' places, where they cook meat on grills serbian style, I never went to one... but I suppose that's going to be a bit of a favourite for me here. That burger was YUGE!

I simply cannot let this nonsense continue. The caffeine has to be banned, I have to go all mormon on this. It does me absolutely no good at all, it makes me liable to drink, it makes me extremely anxious, overly talkative, at times sleepy, and then sleepless, and I am pretty sure that it is priming me for a cardiac arrest, in the first couple of months in Amsterdam with the free coffee I started getting pain in my chest (not heartburn) and high pulse and blood pressure, it was quite painful. It's going to kill me if I don't stop.

Stopping the caffeine will also stop most of the drinking. And then maybe I can stop smoking. This little trio of legal drugs are a recipe for murder, in my opinion. Cannabis causes me some small problems but this combo is killing me.

The settling process

So, although I've made a bit of a hash of my finances, just having had a little bit of a look at rental prices here in Novi Sad, I should still be able to manage something. I am so kicking myself over this stupid mistake last night. It'd be probably justice if the Steem price now tanked hard and I ended up on the street again for being so friggin stupid.

But hopefully I can get something sorted out. I am getting more work done on my servers here now, I even have published it on github. A friend has been in my ear about getting into learning the Go programming language, and I'd looked at it before and found it interesting though I didn't go very far with it.

But anyway... It's very nice here in Novi Sad. The weather has been fairly good, and this hostel is virtually empty, I think I might now be the only guest. The price at the moment is €10/night, which is not much more than the cheapest apartment I can rent.

After last night I'm nursing my wounds and bearing with a hangover and I'm just going to focus on relaxing, I have been driving myself too hard, when I get in a mind that I must do something, I forget about everything, to eat, even find it highly irritating that I have to go to the toilet or drink water... I just work work work like the Devil is whipping me to keep going...

The one thing that would help me a lot right now though, is if I could get a loan backed by my SP. The money is coming in, week at a time, but in the meantime I am spending more money on rent than I would be if I was settled in an apartment. But I think I can bear with this. The hostel rent won't go up until May anyway, and if I can manage to eradicate my daily routine of caffeine, alcohol and nicotine, maybe I have a shot at making some good decisions for once.

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We can't code here! This is Whale country!

Vote #1 l0k1

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_{(note, my username is spelled El Zero Kay One or Lima Zero Kilo One, all lower case)}