Two types of twitching a welcomed this eve: the first is a memory of yesterday, of looking out across a club floor, where a potato band were playing, with recognisable naíf faces you could read every day of faked history from, and seeing that floor full of the spasmodically twitching heads of people who didn't really like the music, but liked the youth on show. Coming such a way to see a band who you know are no good, and then being lonely in tune to them in a crowd. What a pleasantly self-destructive way to pass the night. However Herman Dúne were harmonic enough, in a mid-west hassidic way - one of them even had peyers!

The second twitching was supposedly induced by the intake of substantial quantities of gaming-enhancing drugs, though no such effects were seen - supposedly they restore your concentration but hardcore gamers have no problem with that as far as we could see in our dead scientific study tonight - subject A took the pills (uppers, maintainers, and downers), subject B was a control and subject C (me!) got to drink lots of booze to see how it would affect his game. Results in the next issue of PC Format boys and girls!

]On the subject of old bloody bloom, so steeped in't that to go on is easier than to go back, my sanguinne obsession has taken up apace. Apart from using White Blood Cells as a metaphor for death (skullish colour, consuming phagocytes, etc.) in my copy, I also started the day with a bloody mary, and last night my nose bled all over my desk. ]

Apparently I'm a writer now, speciality subject staves. What do I think of that? I don't know. I'm happy sure, in that it feels like progress (even if it is only the next desk) but at the moment I could just collapse. I think its lack of air or light, and the continuance of my Leopold bloom obsession from yesterday (bought enormous quantities of bloody liver, and proceeded to eat with polenta and onions to disgust of veggie flatmate.) I've been back for 3 weeks,and I really, really need a big break in the countryside with air, a pub, and places to walk. Let me out!

O.
Watched the ring last night. Curse my febrile imagination (why is nothing else ever febrile, why are dawns always rosy-fingered, why are statesmen always overweight, and why is this line of questioning so familiar? So easy to adhere to the common language, the regular expressions that must go together - Proust had it, doing a Gormenghast, think about the coupling of words, and force-birth them into each other - grass not crisp or green or even velvety, but like boxed oxygen or low-lying sheets of putrid stomach lining... which brings me back to topic I guess.)

Watched the ring last night. Vituperate my unsleeping imagination, but I watched another laugh-a-horror afterwards, and came back to my lonely well-screened, bemonitored room. The walk back had been terrible (opening the door was difficult in itself) but to sit in my dark room with a vaguely glimmerborn black void of a screen pointing at me asleep was too much. I turned the lights on, and though my rationalisations, sorry rationality, said "horror won't come and get you", my bloody uncertainty, my godforsaken nihilism of belief, let me believe anything, leaving me awake into the wee hours, reading, gaming, but not doing anything that could let me think too much.

So. What I'm saying is it was a standard dull human night; avoidance of thought is our birthright, the way to cope with what comes after, and the futility of what comes now; bury it in the only worthwhile thing, the absenting of pain, and we draw it nearer without caring about the drawing down of these sad curtains.
O.

[BTW the last post was some sort of reference to my christmas party - I think - been a while since I've frequented these parts...]

[Morning after Christmas party] Mmm... funny how the bits of blood you pick out of your nose after a night's drinking look just like the bacon bits from Pizza Hut… I'm sincerely hoping that isn't just me. Also strange chipping your teeth (think it was on a bottle or something) and then finding yourself cutting your tongue on the newly sharpened dentine… Also strange walking down the street in a lighthouse jacket and dirty skipper's cap to cries of "hello sailor" and "mein Kapitan"… and the twisted vagaries of space filling

T.I.M.
That's what I call the architect of me downfall. Tim. Not as in my stepdad, though you can read something freudian into that if you want; you have a right to your opinion and I have a right to use your teeth as toecaps. No I mean Total Intestinal Maelstrom. These last two days I've been fountaining from both ends thanks to a Fillet o' Fish meal I picked up one stormy night from Maccy D's.

Now to help all you bowel-obsessives out there get your fix for the day, I'm going to hand you over to Professer S.R. Esser Sr. from the Pulmonary, Rectal and Oral Facility. He's going to explain to you what you should and shouldn't do when your guts are mankier than Long John's long-johns.

"Thenk you. Es en expert in disorders of the gut, colon end pencreatic trect, Eh thought Eh'd begin by simply giving you eh childish list of things you should end shouldn't eat when you're vomiting through your nuhse (Dan's note: actually just did that - neat party trick - well if your idea of a trick is clearing everyone out as quick as possible):
From best to worst... chicken soup, plen rice, BLT beguette, Egg-fred rice. Eh feel Eh've covered ull the food groups there. Enyone fency en enemeh?"

That concludes tonite's lecture. Eh thenk yuh.

"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.}