My teeth are rotting in my mouth, and all about me flash the ominous comets and unfortunate omens and the potent stinking entrails of disaster. Still I guess, it could be worse; I could be drinking chartreuse, or else be one of those poor wretches so crushed by social expectation they are unable to express their personal twisted kinks and peculiar and very private infatuations with life. Never been much of a problem for this particular storm cellar obviously—I am incorrigibly unable to keep my trap shut even in the best of weather.

What is really happening? When did things go so horribly wrong? Gangs of impolite youths now roam our suburban shopping malls begging for cigarettes and bus money. Ordinary, decent, law-abiding citizens are afraid to go to sleep at night for fear of having nightmares. Something should be done. I say we hold a town meeting, host a seminar, inform the parents of the potential moral dangers possibly involved. The necessary steps must be taken, a bristle of far harsher penalties drafted into law, strict curfews enacted and social responsibility enforced and absolutely no broken rules or broken windows or any smiling on a school day allowed! without explicit permission from the governor or his closest deputised relative.

Grass won't grow on concrete, only in it's cracks. Wild, multicoloured growths tend to flourish only around the edges of things, clinging to the gaps, concealed nooks and overlooked crannies.

Lying awake at night, too wired to sleep, too fried to write, my thousand yard star fixed blankly at the back of my eyelids.

In the morning I wake up and have to cut another hole in my belt cos my pants beginning to fall down. Still quite a fat fuck overall but noticeably a lot less corpulent than I used to be. Regular doses of pharmaceutical grade central nervous stimulants are certainly not the healthiest way to lose weight but they're definitely extremely effective. Speeds up your metabolism, acts as an appetite suppressant and keeps your brain sharp. A little too sharp sometimes, liable to cut yourself up with all that hyperactive mental trembling. A small price to pay I reckon, guess I'm getting a bit sick of having a “great personality” People self-report that they value all kinds of crazy feel-good disney qualities in a partner: intelligence, a sense of humour, compassion and kindness yadda yadda yadda but scientific studies have shown the reality is much simpler and also far more shallow.

The rules might suck, but if you want to win the prize then playing the game seems like the only option available.

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.