I like watching other people fall in love. Especially the burning bonfire of emotion that happens near the start. Even from a distance the reflected heat can be enough to warm your hands by, and if you still have a little soul left in you then you really can't help smiling. Seems to me falling in love is the closest we ever really come in timbre to a sustained note of joy. Generally the tempo of our changes in pitch is rapid, a brief semi-quaver of happiness and then it's back down again into the monotonous drone of the pipe-organ. You can draw out the aching spool of misery practically forever, a sharp thin line of piano wire stretching straight from moment of birth direct to your death, with very little effort required on your part, but a period of intense, almost overwhelming bliss that may last for weeks... months! is rare and too infrequent. Even in times of overall contentment and relative abundance it's more like the quiet simmer of a morning birdsong than a molten hot furnace bursting lava from your chest.

Even with the aid of chemicals, even with the various artificial sweeteners now provided by modern organic chemistry even then such feelings are fleeting, fast of foot and wary of capture, and afterwards you do pay, you pay very dearly for a trophy that ultimately turns to mist and memories in the space of just a few hours.

Whenever I'm feeling isolated and alone seeing lovers strike their sparks together always seems to rekindle my flickering spirits. If your pockets are full of nothing but your hands sometimes seeing a rich man strut and preen about the town in his freshly pressed tails and immaculate top-hat will just make you feel that much horribly poorer. In comparing ourselves with other people we tend to turn up the contrast knob on the television of perception, and are inevitably left to wonder what accident of fate left our greys bland pink, whilst all their colours, amplified a thousand times, now glint and glisten like Indian emeralds. It isn't that way with love, at least, it isn't for me.

Perhaps it's because we manage to mask so many other of the basic building blocks of human experience, we can attempt to hide our sadness, or our anger, or shame, when it suits us to do so, but love, being truly wild, love, that fine featured beast, love wants us to climb the tallest spire of the brightest star in heaven and sing out our romance to the entire world at once. You can definitely recognise the signs when you see it—doesn't need to be a full-blown case either—maybe someone just on the cusp, the beginnings of smitten. Normally we only talk about empathy when something bad happens: you say your cat died yesterday, and I of course will empathise sincerely, but how much better it is to feel empathy for someone else's joy! I remember how sweet the juice from those grapes taste, and I once felt as you now feel, and all things being equal I will one day drink that wine again.

Now I don't know about you, but I am generally so ripe with my own thoughts that I fill the whole earth with them, they walk around and talk like men I am that completely and totally absorbed in my own pitiable self-consumption, but shit like this shakes my tree a little and makes golden apples roll to ground. Working backwards from that strong and wonderful emotion we quickly find that everyone grazes identical animals on the village commons of the heart. Your loneliness is our loneliness, your disgust and laughter and rage and compassion are ours also to share in.

We all dip our cups in the same deep well and drink from the same clear water. There are certain things that, while perhaps not fixed rigidly in the sky like the constellations of the zodiac, remain, nevertheless, resolutely universal.

I always regret taking BZP after the fact. Have been awake for nearly 48 hours.