Going out was a total and unmitigated failure, veering at times towards full blown catastrophe. Actually that isn't true at all. There was the usual amount of hijinx and high spirits, but I guess I just expect too much from these things. I've had better luck trying to start a fire by banging two old bits of newspaper together.

I often wonder about the about the purpose of these ritualised Friday nights. We gets our clown paint out and our mask face on and then spend the rest of the night trying to slip into a skin that's a little more comfortable. I guess it all begins to feel a bit empty. The people start to feel like hand crafted ceramic shells. Christ! you think. Did I just piss down my leg?

Very probably. And after that things almost inevitably start to slide downhill. Perhaps taking that acid wasn't the smartest move in the playbook. There's no one around to talk to. I mean there's plenty of conversation about to be had, there's jokes to be told, first impressions to be made, indeed a thousand different ways to embarrass yourself, but all that shit is like a miniature side-salad when what you really want to bite into is a rare and bloody steak.

Come to think of it, there was one interesting thing: if you ever want to make someone light up like a skyrocket, when they're in love, ask them about it. I tried this a few times, a few different people I knew, and you can immediately see everything else drops away for them and they smile and talk freely and you get a sense of something wonderfully genuine and warm. It's nice to hear their stories, but what I like most is that they forget themselves and it's real.

That's what I want man, the raw and tender moments when whatever prehistoric thing that swims beneath the cool dark pool of us comes up to surface and draws air. You get it in fist fights and when people forget themselves in love or lose control in grief or are overcome with any emotion strong to enough to temporarily break the bonds of self-restraint. Maybe it's a little crazy to wish that life could be like that all the time, that everyone always be filled right to the brimful with a terrible and relentless sincerity—to demand every single second exist as a poignant drop of milk and insist that every word splashing across our ears be a careless spill of umber.

Cos that's kind of how I want to live, with all the dials on this machine fixed firmly at eleven. I want to live as the raised voices of childhood. As a cry. Or a shout! An unending unyielding invincible yell, sounding the fire siren; that things around here are TOO DAMN QUIET. Of course I am guilty of exactly the same level of banality as everybody else I accuse, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Strange, that authenticity has grown so rare, or that I feel it to be so, that it seems worth my while to consciously try and seek it out. These mass produced and manufactured shades with the names picked from the thesaurus leave you, ultimately, with a sense of profound dissatisfaction, and of loss, they will never be as good as the real ones, but the old colours are gone now and we have only the descriptions in our encyclopedias to go on.

I feel we may have misplaced an important and necessary set of keys, somewhere. Or that I have.

WOMEN: Too difficult, too weird to figure out, too damn complicated and just too hard in general.