"Moood of blind destruction tonight. Anger popping on surface like lead bubbles. Wise to stay away tonight – I’m going to do stupig things if I left to myself, if let to get properly drunbk…"

[An evening spent drinking and dancing, with itchy knuckles. A morning spent in the company of Steps, S-Club and idolising Robbie Williams]
I wish.

Hey brain.

Three things there were,
Frankincense, Gold and Myrrh
brought before a sham god or king
(after the magi had been a-hawking)
and they fetched a very fine price:
eternal insurance was on their dice

For those who know less than they ought
a bottle I'm drinking of finest port
if you think, for alcohol it's a touch late
insight that provides of my mental state
Three more things I present
Of times past, thoughts long spent

Frankincense. Last night and this morning Bath was shrouded in fog like frosted glass. Every light glimmered as if through a new medium, my love for neon was renewed, and the thick gray curtains engloved every sound. I sat in my apartment after all were long asleep, and started thinking about where I was going, and my niggling fears. Very mobile is the fog, it seeps into every part of me.

Gold: all that glitters is not. Looking at the cult of celebrity again (which I promised to do, sometime long ago) I came upon Celebrity Big Brother, the tribute to our moden heroes and heroines. In olden times the hero was king for a year, at least ceremonially, during which time was treated with due respect and deference before the end of his arc Then he would be sent to join his god. The method for this is surprisingly humiliating: he might be defeated in a chariot race by his rival, sacrificed on an altar, or be cuckolded by his wife, the high priestess. Nowadays our modern heroes are retired to public humiliation, crushed by the expectation of their failure, and this program is the culmination of this, the recreation of the endless cycle. This half of the show kills careers: the normal Big Bro generates them, so they'll never run out. A great program idea, being eternally self-maintaining.

Myrrh is hardest to write about. I was profoundly disturbed tonight when I picked up an old dictionary of mine for a browse (I was eating linguini, scotch salmon, and bored) and found it was one given when I left junior school. It had been signed by many people who I don't remember, and three times by my first girlfriend. I remember nothing of that time, and only a little of her. Now this could turn into a sad lament for lost love, but there's another time for that. What I'm worried about, o mio, o mio, is that I realise now my memory is kaput. Shot. gone. I remember nothing of two days ago, let alone ten years ago. It's like I don't really live here. Facts I remember clear as day, or at least can make up clear as mist: 1989 Berlin wall. Spinoza was a lens-polisher. As demand decreases, so does price. But friends of ten years ago? What I had for lunch yesterday? Nothing, nada. The little deaths of ideas and people happen constantly in my head, drawing the big one nearer. Myrrh. We all know what it means.

Remind me sometime to tell you about memory-palaces. They're worthy of anyone's attention.

Nice to see that the BBC is at least professing to make an effort at the public service ethos it's supposed to uphold. The great Britons series, while confirming the hideous mental shallows of a great part of the nation, also indicated that the media have not suceeded in erasing all culture from our minds. If you think about it, the current TV and tabloid output probably simplifies things for the average person, as when you talk to them they have much more of a grasp of complex issues, or are much more capable of grasping these issues than the papers would indicate; there's a reminiscence of Socrates and the slave-boy . This has worried me, that the media who cliam to be supplying 'what the people want' are in fact dictating to them what they want, something a true broadsheet should never do: a true review should state 'if you want x, then this supplies nn% of x.' A tabloid (and increasingly a broadsheet) dictates, you want/believe x, then get thee y.

And so the Great Britons series, began with the public, and asked "what it is that you like? We've never bothered finding out before. :$" This is why I was so surpised because it began with a few dumkopf decisions like Michael Crawford and John Peel, but mainly focussed on actual great britons, that those educated in specialist fields would themselves point towards as great. Myself I have trouble pointing towards a great briton, as firstly my greats, apart from shakespeare, cromwell and john lilburne are all foreigners - nietszche, proust, flann o'brien, spinoza. But I was pleasantly surprised by the people's intelligent choices, and cynically satisfied by the plethora of media whores filling up the screen, professing love of actual heroes out of our time (apart from little lost Alan Davies, and his John Lennon, who I felt sorry for, and Rosie Boycott who I would gladly see impaled on the o'ergrown stake of her manipulative ego.)

I do somewhat suspect Isembard Kingdom Brunel was chosen only for his name though...

Become the thing you hate you will, hmm. It's been a long time since I wrote but there's a certain comfort in that statement. The black and white mythos of Star Wars can dandle you on a white-plastic knee and tell you such things, but the fact is we oscillate between so many things from day to day, that to point to us at any one point is to point at the hated and the loved in glorious union. Or at least some of it. The horrible stultified Lucas stuff seems to indicate that change is bad, very bad, and only the lucky, or blessed will come through it.

Now I'm no shining example of a progressive chap - though I profess it with all my might, my petty mind captured by the baublous idea of liberalism, I flee from challenge more than the next man - yet I have an ideal I'd like to reach, and many I'd like to avoid, and I see their development and retardance in myself every day. Whether it be toryism, that persistent patch of clear skin amidst Cromwell's glorious warts, or arrogance, the scourge of the shy man, they all pop up in the copure of a day. Even my blessed, carefully cultivated, dull calm gets roused into mild insanity daily by the most trivial things... this is the thing of which character is made, of the constant unwilling undevelopment of man under random circumstance's whim. And for this reason, for this rejection of the black and white, I embrace it. I long to be (unconsciously for a change) the ignorant, non-thinker, non-writer that my slow mind lets me be when sleep is missing from my stock, the lard-arsed tory twat, or the arrogant social monster, back-slapping and grimly gleaming my eyes at folks, a steel grin rivetted on my face... and every day I'm all of these things, to proud chagrin.

{above is gibberised plastic. Or plasticised gibberish. whichever, avoid it.}

They say a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. Thankfully I don’t know who ‘they’ are, so I guess I’m relatively safe. This week I have been mostly involved in skulduggery, piracy and random acts of violence. Which is all fine and above board for a games journo (which I’m starting to claim I am, a little prematurely perhaps.) Past this though lies my other behaviour this week, something that can only be classed as politicking… ahem… sorry, I appear to have a bad taste in my mouth… job arriving that I must apply for, yet want other job, that could also be in the pipeline… and I have been playing up to all factions. It seems to be totally reprehensible, yet also the natural self-preservation thing to do.

Damn. I left this on my desktop for two days while I was out at a training course. And I happen to know that people have been on my computer. Shit. I also happen to know that I left the job I hope to apply for open on the desktop as well. Ah well, they had to find out somehow.

Strange it is, hmmm. Tonight for the first time in months with the aid of friends I overcame my fear of clubs, those dens of sedition, and went dancing. And in dancing I seem to have been invited to apply for a job I have a good chance of getting, if I swot up on my games and subbing over the next couple of weeks. It terrifies me, but I have to apply. Though another friend is trying to arrange for me to get a job on his mag (implicitly) I feel if I reject this job, I won't get any other. Yet it commits me to staying in production, something of a poisoned chalice that. Yet it's a games mag. Perhaps I should just wait and see, but waiting gets you nowhere, and in rejecting this the portcullis falls to all other routes with same mag. Freakin hate the word but proactive I must be. Inner tedium seeps out like water under door.

Also have been leaked secret that cannot be spread, yet relevant and pertinent to my situation. Demand internal is to use to my advantage, result internal (once qualms/morals added in) is secrecy.

Welcome to petty politics. Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

There's a nice thing. My walk to work (sounds like a 1930s soviet/1940s UK slogan - Walk to Work! - accompanied by picture of Stakhanovite male striding into picture) is becoming a theme of these posts. One of my two routes takes me across a pedestrian iron bridge that's almost as wide as it's long. Under the bridge flows the Avon. Now I was wondering at and through bath late last night, after the fireworks finished (though in my *crazy* life they never really stop - tch!), and I looked down at t' rain on t' river. It had a thick foam floating on it, presumably churned up from the weir upriver, and the rain was attacking it, making endlessly pockmarks on the rivers face, surrounded by islands of yellow scum. And I just looked at it, and stopped and stood there for ten minutes watching it. Something gets me about decay and decrepitude, rusted iron, and hollowed buildings, and, it seems, floating scum.
It was just one of those Amélie moments: Daniel aime la pluie sur des fleuves, le néon sur le macadam noir, le sentir des racines sous pied (Daniel likes rain on rivers, neon on black tarmac, the feel of roots underfoot.) Somthing holy, even for a heathen like me.

Blog, blog, blog.

It is an odd position to be finding yourself in, when your back's no longer to the wall, and yet the day job is still meant to be in a state of panic. That said I'm utterly exhausted now, and yet its bonfire night. I should be wandering around in undknown muddy darkness with people I don't know watching bits of cordite produce light in the sky above. It's the bonfires that get me - fuck the twinkly fairy lights they chuck up - I want to be in wellies, knee deep in a field, eating some diseased bowel product of a long-dead animal (sausages) watching a fire the size of a house, and probably containing enough wildlife to maintain a petting zoo, incinerate the faces of the prats who press too close.

That's the meaning of bonfire night to me - warm, broad, fiery alienation.

One frickin piece of freelance keeps coming back to haunt me. Didn't have time to do it properly, and now every few seconds I get flashbacks to it. Such a hideous piece of work, the game and the copy I was forced to write. S'called Far West, and I plead that friendly bombs come and rescind it's creators' right to life. It got worse as I played it, and then even worse when I realised it wasn't an awful game, just dull. Gack.

Terror of a day now graying out behind me. I frickin hate getting things quite that wrong - reminds me of university days, and my lackadaisical attitude back then. Not that I'm any better now, but it's lazy with self-knowledge this time around.

Oh I'm knacker'd again. Everything feels like I'm swimming through fog, my memory fails me every other second, I find myself lost thoughtless just standing or sitting. Another late night of mind-blocking work - an excellent way to stop all the thoughts that rush in when work everyday, the million things I ab-so-lutely have to do before I can sleep that night, none of which ever get done. I meant to learn to drive, to dance to sing. Well drive anyway, but it's never gonna get done. Can't remember where this was going now. Bollix.