How are you? Oh I'm just fine like wine thanks, dandy as candy and sweeter than sweet. Sometimes it takes a little something to quell the tongue lashings of the storm inside, a little something extra, over and above a few kind words and cup of hot cocoa. Since they no longer dish out the valiums with every box of cornflakes it now appears it's the poor old gin for me. Oh yes my friends, it's going to be a crier tonight.

This shit always comes in waves, the black walls rear up with a roar and come crashing rising crushing down, but always, thank god, eventually, inevitably crumbling away into a pirouette of insect husks and then receding slowly back into the ocean: I know this. It will pass, it always does, but in the meantime... you gotta cope somehow.

How about you? Are you ok? As for me, I'm okay some days and not others. Loose like a wild dog or a spring wound tightly. There's no equations with any predictive power for this problem-space. They say that science is quietly at work in the back room with a dental drill and a collection of anaesthetics whittling away at the unknown, removing superstition and destroying the mystery, but if you take everything we don't know about anything put it in a bag called spirit, all of psychology and sociology and semiotics and emotion, well then that's a motherfucking heavy bag and hard to lift one handed.

We all got to push our own Sisyphus shit ball, 'cept he had it easy, because for us it's uphill both ways. It ain't that the load on your shoulder ever really gets any lighter, just that some days you are simply stronger than others. And that's the stab and the thrust of it. The quick and the cut.

A question I often roll through my fingers is, are we alone? Or more correctly, am I? So I approach this question from various directions, attacking it like a swarm of magpies and most of time I conclude that no I am not alone, no you are not alone, no one is alone cos between the twin together of the we of us no one can possibly be totally cut off. We got too much in common. And I hug this thought to my chest like a teddybear, But there's quite a steep, you know, conceptual last step between some glorified brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind and then actually feeling it.

Sometimes your at a party or whatever, and everything is going fine, and everybody is your friend, and you are *in* that moment, and you feel connected, loved, hand in hand and mind in mind with the people around you. And sometimes you feel quite the opposite. Like a true intellectual (or some half-assed approximation there-of) immediately I want to attack this problem analytically, bleach it down to the bare white bones of symbols it contains and then solve it with a stroke of calculus.

The march of technology has been so successful in every other area, and for science to be successful it must first abstract away, move from the ordinary, everyday concrete world of things to the purely symbolic and easily manipulated. Buildings are now ultimately mere lines on the architects blueprint. Money lives in the platonic world of numbers.

More gin? More gin. Let's both just agree that I'm a terrible, terribly horrible person and, you know, move on. I had more shit to say re: various subjects but, you know, something came up. All I needed was a little self-respect, just a leetle bit. The tiniest smallest smidgen would have made all the difference, but, uh, then again here we are are. I mean, just look at me: I'm a fucking champ, I am a bright and burning star—the six time undefeated champion of the entire goddamn universe, you know I spit from the hip and shoot rainbows from my mouth. Look, honestly, I'm just glad I provide some point of comparison. Makes me feel useful. At least, you can say to yourself; go on, whisper it; I'm not like that.

Ah man, it's your pity that hurts the worst.