what is this reality con?

Between 2001 and 2009 I kept an old school livejournal.  I wrote some good stuff and some utter crap.  I wrote a lot in the final phase that I set to ‘private’ due my own emotional health and the mental health of my flatmate and that of a really wonderful person he was treating like utter crap at the time:  Um....can’t see most people giving a rats ass but for anyone who might......here we go......these have never been made public before!!!!!

Ennui 7/6/2008:I'm drinking Chinese beer left over from Christmas while exchanging alt-rock gems typing away on MSN. I wanted to write something deeply profound about the double edged sword of intelligence regarding intelligence. I wanted to talk about how I perceive it as racist and demeaning I find the present Post Office campaign and how I think it is trying to mis-sell the post office so the masses turn against it, making it easier for the private sector to move in (with a non demaning media blitz already pre-planned - no doubt). I wanna talk about how the Brown government is so anti-democratic pushing ahead with ludicrous plans for 42 day detention. I had such good intentions. And I'm going to end up sailing the seas of whimsey and irrelevance. I suppose I could and should mention that bar maybe one person, after tomorrow I'm the only person in my immediate social circle without a tattoo. I've been vacilliating about what I should do since 2003. I have lost literally tens of conversation hours perched over pints discussing this. Maybe the point is you should just do it and ask questions later. Sometimes I guess its possible to over-think things........ Right now I'm wondering whether I should crack open a Tsiingtao beer. I know I will so its a rhetorical question to myself I guess. The tutors who gave me such crap a week or so back are now telling me my work is wonderful. My personal tutor wants "a word" with me. I'm gonna survive all this I suspect. I suspect won a high stakes bet. I should be glad. However............. I'm still gonna get a hauling over the coals and I handle criticism badly. I also know that come August I'll have no reason for doing anything. I'm confused and I'm at a loose end. I think I need to embrace the metaphysical, read a few books and go to a few free partys. I dunno. Since the age of 22 I've been playing catch up - trying to catch up with my peers. Now, stood at the threshold I find I don't give a rats ass. Chasing it gave my life some meaning and now I've caught up and the old, nihilistic Si is re-emerging. My father hated his job. he had a heart attack at 49 from the stress. He has a philosophy that one should always work and yet he always hated work. That always struck me as a little dumb. If my father is anyway like me it is because he is the opposite of me in everyway (INTP vs ESFJ). I have two pieces of art in mind at the moment. I'm thinking of "Clerks 2" and I'm thinking of the final ever episode of "Father Ted". Ultimately, is better the devil you know better than progress? I guess I can't mean this in a work context. I could never do support work again. I was crazy and I had been crazy for several years. I was burnt out. It had got to me and I couldn't have got through those years without marajuna, alcohol, rock&roll and my friends.......every day at work was like a ritual humiliation for me. I guess its in relation to people. guess I don't wanna leave my people behind. Out of everyone I've ever met they're the people I realate to most and I don't think I can face a professional world where I have to where a fake fucking mask......and deal with phoneys and have to behave.........even for 30k. I don't relate to professionals. I don't relate to "suits". But I can't stay the same for ever. i don't wanna grow too distant from my people but what if thats necessary? On my birthday I had this dope fuelled vision that "all this" was coming to an end. In a way I guess that it is but I don't feel like a "grown up" and I don't wanna be a glorified cop I just feel confused. I've killed to get to this point. I've pulled off minor miracles and having almost "won" I just feel like shrugging my shoulders and walking away. My heart isn't in it anymore. i need a new game......but what? So who am I? What do I want? What now? These are always big questions for anyone. My counsellor suggested that I should do law. Frankly I'd be happy with an I-pod and a mop right now if people kept out of my face and I could have all the beer and music that I wanted and a curry at the end of the month. When I worked in secure welfare I realise that I related with the kids far more than I did with the staff or the society that mandated the program, so to speak. I don't have a cop mentality. I have way too much sympathy for the devil............ I think I'd like a pHD. i think I'd like to lecture sociology. I think I'd like to be some kind of cultural commentator. My first task is to make sure I get my MA. My second task is to stay sane. I'd like to make a little money and read. I wanna chat to everyone I care about. I wanna have fun. I need some time out. Maybe I need a break from formal learning. I can most definitely see a trip to Paris and Amserdam on the horizon. Thers no easy answers. i'm soft and runny under all the scar tissue. I'm just an overgrown adolescent. More than anything I guess I want to find someone I can have a laugh with and dedicate myself to the new version of MarioKart.............. It'll sort itself out. Lets survive this bullshit and have some fun................ But I do feel sorta lost.

Notes On Eating Alone 9/6/2008

I’m sat waiting for my Sudanese potatoes to slow cook. I’m listening to the first Strangelove album while occasionally furtitively glancing at the football (Poland vS Germany on TV). The football is the European championships. I couldn’t give a rats ass rilly but it reminds me of falling out with RTJ four years back. I discovered that he had been “seeing” my ex for a considerable amount of time whilst on a trip down to London to watch a few matches of the European Championship with him. Due to the nature of our friendship and the supposed mutual understandings I had with him – the friendship had to end there. This still bothers me on a daily basis but pretty much, I think I did the right thing. Even though I still experience the whole episode like an amputation and mutter about it in private all the time. That fucker was the one person I’d really confided in about what had happened. I don’t think you can safely and sanely operate when you have Judases loose in your inner circle. I learned to cook for several reasons. One was to impress my ex but we split long before I got any good at it. Secondly, I turned veggie about the same time as I started that relationship.........and I think you need to know how to cook if you don’t wanna poison yrself on chips and cheese et al. I also ended up being house chief at 15b, this generally entailed preparing veggie food unhygenically and putting chilli and curry powder in everything (including and especially baked beans). Being able to cook gives you options to process all the obscure stuff you find in the yellow sticker sections of supermarkets. And for vast swathes of my 20s I was very poor. Come to think of it I pretty much am now. I like ethnic markets as well. The big warehouses in inner city Manchester. I like exotic ingredients, Okra and Plantain. I like the smell of cumin and coriander. I like cheap and massive tubs of Tofu, industrial packs of TVP............I like finding cool recipes from obscure cookbooks and punk rock zines/websites. I only feel truly creative when I’m cooking. I like putting fresh ingredients to the sword. It induces order and ritual into the day. I feel like a god or something. I actually feel happy for a while. Theres something very zen about it. I usually get chance to listen to a couple of albums in there entierity. I like to start of with something LOUD, before switching to something a little more metaphysical (some acoustic goth, some Tom Waites or Leonard Cohen............mebbe even some Jeff Buckley or a little emo) It always saddened me so few of my friends are veggie are even wanted to eat collectively. I eat alone all the time and I think this is probably one of the saddest elements in my life. I think this is why I wander around Manchester eating remaindered sandwiches or I eat Falafel in greasy Lebanese Kebab houses. It makes me feel like I’m in the movies and if I have to eat alone I guess it would rather be in a fantasy world rather than in mundane, mudane reality. How would ‘Amelie’ eat a cheese and roast vegetable sandwich? Thats the sort of question I ask myself. Sudanese potatoes are waxy potatoes slow cooked in a spicey sauce for several hours before lime juice, fresh tomatoes and crumbly feta is added. Its very filling. Its garlicky and spicey as hell. I’ve got some red wine and blueberrys for afters. Well I’m totally alone. And I’ve got a difficult week/fortnight/month ahead so I guess this is as good as it gets right now..............

A certain Emptiness (10/6/2008):

I’m playing internet scrabble. Its gone 1 am and I’m sober. For the first time since moving into my present abode I have a tidy room. Things go on. You don’t even get the gist of what the hells going on in the wider world, rilly. You just want confirmation its nothing to do with you and you can be only 85% certain that it isn’t. That other 15% is a bloody heavy worry burden – though. Theres nothing on TV. No music I can think of resonates with my present state. Maybe a cup of green tea woud help? Just for once I feel I’d like to be proved wrong about myself and the world. On the coffee table next to me there is a book about Willliam Burroughs and one about the Bang Bang Club, both of which have been dissected, in my customary style, with highlighter and expensive pen up to about p50. In an ideal world I’d have played the last month differently. But my situation is what it is. And you can only work with the maps you’ve got, even whilst drawing up new ones. I’ll finish uni with an MA in two months, despite the air turbulence I’m presently experiencing. I’m no angel but I honestly believe I am one of the more or less good guys............ I don’t know whether I’m too harsh on myself or not harsh enough. I suspect that I’m probably both. Half of me feels like going on a rant about “joy being a revolutionary act” but my bed is calling me

Drill For Absentee: 10/6/2008

The sick summer sweat sticks to my flesh like a fever as I wait for the night to hold down the Celsius so I can relax. I play word games on the laptop purloined from my father. Empty rituals to kill dead time. beer at midnight. A tea before bedtime. Oh god I'm institutionalised I watch TV programs on a bisexual sexologist who scandalised Victorian England (Richard Burton). I own several of his translations of works of Eastern literature. Our experts and intellectuals have lost all sense of romance. I want Indiana jones with maxed out brain, body count and lakes of jissom. What have we got? The social sciences and literature seem to have lost their romance. Our scientists aren't mad any more. The beats, the post modernists, the Marxists all démodé. You’d have thought maybe things would have got wilder after the sixties, with the info revolution and chemicals that blew peoples minds wide open. Alas, no. We buy books at inflated prices written by technocrats for wannabe middle managers or else just safe boring horsecrap or “designated” classics. Thats why I love second hand bookshops. I like the danger. I adore the smell of rotting paper. I love the romance. Everythings so safe now. I want a sequence of words to set my world on fire. I need spontaneous verb combustion. Facebook friendlists sometimes hit me like a roll call of the ghosts of Christmas past. In a subculture, in a city the size of my city, as you get to the outskirts of the suburbs of the grey city of middle age I increasingly think the law of six degrees of separation applies. Could I get to anyone I ever loved or hated within 5 leaps on a social networking site? I wouldn’t bet against it. How many punches should have I thrown good and hard? How many loves were never loved? I dunno. I am a fractal and the pattern is set and repeating however the view may look from here. I bought a couple of cheese twists and a remaindered bottle of chocolate milk from a city centre supermarket on my way home. Scally kids talk in another language that locks out the middle classed and middle aged and I dream of parallel existences with happier endings and additional brimstone. Mundanity contrasted with unrealistic visions of love and conflagrations. The crap I’ve eaten is convulsing my stomach.

What I’m writing is very different to what I’m thinking about 11/8/2008: I've got a couple of big posts coming so forgive the likely paucity of words here. My Grandma died yesterday. She loved me. Since the age of 16 I've found it hard to accept that love. She wound me up. She has been in agony for many months and her mental faculties have been on the wane for the last few years, Her passing is a good thing. I haven't cried, I feel weird. The whole of yesterday will become one of those dream sequences permantly burned into my dream world subconscious to be replayed, remixed and referred back to. Everything feels a little Donnie Darko. That probably makes no sense at all.

12/6/2008:  42 days Of Dolphin Suicide

Still not had chance or privacy to write the entries I want to. I've just been a little freaked out by this account of apparent mass dolphin suicide. Jeez what can you say when Dolphins are doing that stuff. I've been sent a little under by the text of one of the kiddy books lying around for my niece/nephew at my mums entitled "Baby Penguin" "Baby Penguin lives in a cold place Baby Penguin eats fish Baby Penguin can't fly Baby Penguin Can Slide On The Ice" The government has managed to pass its fucking retarded law on 42 day detention. Other countries that have suffered from terrorist attacks manage with far less. The US has a two-day limit; Spain five days and Turkey seven and a half days. I've said it before, theres something really rotten brewing in this country. Normalish service to be resumed shortly.

2/7/2008:  Bad Lieutenant: Spent a lot of time on the couch re-reading Rimbauds "Saisons D'enfer", and listening to last two Pixies albums. Last night watched "Bad Lieutenant" and "This is England". The latters depiction of racism was painful to watch but it is a great piece of cinema. Come to think of it most things released by Warp Films tend to be really good. I'm off today, so I've been shopping at B&M bargains in Belle Vue because everything is cheap. I've walked around the European markets in town and nabbed as much free cheese and bread as I can. Its too humid. I don't like the heat. I've been feeling the loveless/fin d'epoch blues badly. I've just managed to magic enough money to last me another month and I hope to magic a little more but I do have to face the fact I will have to work again soon, for real pay and real bosses who can make my life hell if they choose to and crap like that. That sucks. Not looking forward to that. Theres nothing I want to do THAT much. I'm lazy. For the last 8 years I've always had a guiding mission ie avenge the failing of my BA. Well thats done. I'm confused and moderately down at the moment. Its July. Who am I in October? Losing faith in counsellor quotes no1: "One of my friends once said to me that one of the reasons nobody will go out with me is because nobody wants to talk about nuclear war on the first date" "Who said this to you and when?"# "I guy called Lee, when I was 19 in my first year of uni" "Well that was valid advice at that stage in your life. Your older now. I'm sure theres a lot of girls who would like to talk about nuclear war............." oh dear. oh dear. oh dear.

29/6/2008:  A better day – a banal entry

I feel better today. My clothes are soaked and it didn't rain last night. Eight pints and I sorta think I know why.............. Last night I saw lots of old friends and managed to make everyone baulk with a comment about fisting. When people take the piss out of me in a certain kind of way the temptation to take "one step beyond" always persists. I got so drunk I talked utter bilge. Tonight, all else being equal I'll be watching My Bloody Valentine which fingers crossed should be awesome. I've done a lot of French study today. I'm giving up alcohol for a while. I have an MA to finish and a massively reduced bank balance..................its gonna get tight!

28/6/2016:  Reification Romance:

I think this is a low seratonin day. I got dog shit all over my parents carpet. My phone is 13 miles away. I have a slight nagging headache. I feel confused over my immediate future and a little scared about my finances. Its humid and I don't like heat. I sip tea and try to decode the news in French. I was informed this morning that someone I know has run into my delightful ex. Besides her side was the ever punchable former best friend of mine RTJ. They're running a record label now. Its spiteful I know. Immature and spiteful but I'd really hoped they'd split years back. I shouldn't care less but its knocked the wind out my sails totally. Untrustworthy motherfucks. The rest of this rant is likely to reflect even less well on me. Thus I shall change the subject pretty damn sharpish I wonder if China is ther answer? Are there any answers? Is my concept of love nonsensical and unrealistic, romance reified into bullshit? I dunno. I'll get my MA in the next few months and I'll be back to -1 square one. Raindown alienation. Leave this country, leave it................ My contingency plans were contingent on things that weren't contingent. I've had a good run. I mean I've had relatively cheery couple of years by my standards. But the dreams got to end. I need a new angle. I knew from day one all I rilly wanted was my MA as cheap as possible. I virtually have it. Now I need a new adventure. The empty cardboard toilet roll tube awaits under the final few notes of the bankroll.............. I thought that if I put my heart and soul into my chosen career I'd start to feel excited about it but I just feel a little burnt out and unwilling now. I think I might be heading with a show down with my father and myself over all of this. I want the tools to help myself and my friends, or anyone else I might encounter according to my whims. Two years of training welded to 10 years of experience and I can't even do that. Not sure I want to be interfering in peoples lives, while being bullied from above for shit pay. And I can't drive anyway. i'm dreaming of foreign fields. Wanting to grow abroad, is that a growth fantasy? Or an escape fantasy? Or both. realism is painfully depressing. Once the soul crawls out its slumber, realism doesn't strike meas particularily realistic! Most love fails. Everyone days and every last one of us still wants to believe in happy endings. The bad guys win. We're all shafted and yet everyone believes that somehow they might be the exception to the rule. Build a shrine to Quixote and run away from yourself............. My learning mentor started talking to me about "is's and oughts", I immediate quoted Kant, Weber and CBT back at him. I'm back to being awkward Si again......... You can't help my observation You can't help the hate that it brings You can't help my absence of faith You can't help my everything He seems like a nice enough guy. he complemented me on my high level of social skills. I said that merely compensated for my low emotional intelligence. He complemented me on my study skills. I silently complemented myself on my ability to bluff. He gave me a big speech about finding what I really wanted to do and then stream lining myself and going for it. I agreed with him and then pointed out that his pep talk was almost a verbatim rip off of the speech Mr Anatolli gives Holden in "Catcher In The Rye". As a former English Teacher I knew he'd get the reference. To be fair he has a point. I don't know what I want to do so I find it to give a rats ass. What I want to do is study things all day and just do what the hell I want. Thats isn't very realistic. He agreed with me that the world of work is mainly exploitation predicated on bullying. He also agreed with me in part that education is provided on a "useful to interests" basis rather than what is actually interesting or useful to the individual. I went on a rant about careers advisors and how they'd forced me to take various sciences at A-level when all I wanted to do in that field was Biology. Don't get me wrong these (expensive to the taxpayers, just like my counselling.......) sessions might do me some good, but its all about trying to make me shift rather than the world. Thing is that I'm a stubborn motherfucker and would rather the world shift to accomodate me and if I choose to change, I'd rather it be on my own bloody minded terms. When people pap onto me about "positive mental thinking" I jus hum Bad Brains............. Bottom line. I need a new adventure, one which pays better than the last one. i think I may have to leave a lot of this behind. i wish I was a musician. I wish I could meet someone who I just perfectly resonated with but I guess thats my sense of reifacation romance kicking in. i'm too unique for my own good sometimes in some ways.

27/6/2008:  Safer Than Sorry

Saw old friends last night and downed 5 pints in an hour. They hadn't changed and nor had I. I'm still the fly in the ointment and "crazy" Si. I tried to be on my best behaviour. I started the ranting at the one minute 30 mark. Somehow the NHS have granted me a voice recorder and PC along with mindmapping software. I got sent to a second level of assessment for Dyspraxia testing. After it was assertained that the effect of my co-ordination on my handwriting/organisation could be problematic. Possibly. They sent a learning action plan off. I got everything in it which I was told wasn't likely to happen.........I'm a little shocked and sheepish about he whole thing. I've been thinking about the whole Dyspraxia thing. I don't have a severe case. I do have problems with nervousness and anxiety, building up relations with girls, learning to drive and my handwriting and organisation is attrocious. I did have massive problems learning to swim and do up my laces as a kid. My body language can be a bit squewiff (and was far far worse as a kid) and it took me a fair bit of practice for me to catch/run in a straightline, histrocially I'd say about 70% of my close friends are dyslexic...........but this kind of stuff is true of a lot of people. The thing is are these things just normal personality quirks or are they something else or a combination? On one hand I wouldn't be suprised if I am dyspraxic but but I wouldn't be suprised if I'm not (hence when talking about this stuff in an official capacity I'd use the word 'horseshit', I end up talking about something theoretical that I'm not convinced of the existence over as if it was real and as two seperate psychologists who hardly know me tell me its real, so it is.............). This just reminds me of thinking about (bi)sexuality at a certain vunerable age and that was a headfuck too.........anything that fucks with your paradigmic image of yourself is a headfuck. Period. Especially if you can't be sure whether the thing disturbing your concept of self image is actually real or not. The voice recorder is for lectures. The PC is for mindmapping software. My laptop is actually my dads and he may ask for it back and my desktop is so old it won't run the latest mindmapping software. Apparently borrowing a PC from the uni for the duration of the course would cost the NHS as much as them buying me one.......... I was told I wouldn't get any of this. But it was standard procedure to apply........... All of this came about because I got sent to dyslexia testing by the uni an age ago and was told to come back for further testing if I hit any further problems. For various reasons I was coming apart at the seams just after Christmas and had a few late submissions and so took them up on their offer.......... I can never work out whether theres nothing up with or whether there is and I'm in a small amount of denial. I'm sure there is a soupcon of drama queen-ism there, but then again I think thats true of a fair proportion of the people I care about. I have had a number of dyspraxic friends and people who have had dyspraxic friends tell me they think I am dyspraxic.......I dunno. people say lots of things........ The worrying thing about dyspraxia is that there is a high co-morbiodity rate with dyslexia and Aspergers, neither of which I appear to have............and ADHD, which is a possibility, I suppose. Ultimately all I wanted was an essay extension. and I got a permanent one.............I do think they've overreacted but I guess they have to be safe rather than sorry. Is there something wrong with me or not? I dunno. I do have anxiety, nervousness and paranoia. Yet again only moderately for the most part. There is textbook evidence to say that could be tied into dyspraxia........... Ah fuck it. I'm a human being. Relatively healthy and soon to be heavily qualified. I'm a little confused and shell shocked. Who isn't? My own existence remains a mystery.................all existence retains a mystery. Aw shite I'm spouting quasi-mystical crap again. Part of this rant has been sparked off by the hour I spent with my learning tutor today. But I'll write about that tomorrow.

26/6/2008: DJ Dark Thoughts: Wet. I see my face the colour of grime and bruises reflected in dull elevator aluminium though I know it can't be that way. I'm thinking misanthropic self effacing thoughts with a psychadelic edge. I push my trolley through town. Distribute merchandise which signify other people are having a better time than me. I keep murmuring about cutting the face off the world. Its one of those days where if I thought any higher powers existed I'd consider deicide. Presently I'm eating penny chews in the shape of teeth. Teeth with the texture of gums destroying my teeth. The alpha males will inherit the Earth and everything worth having on it. The meek, the geeks, the only thing they'll ever inherit is the Earth we're buried under. Reviewing my medium term strategic decisions. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Tonight I will see old friends for the first time in three years. I've risen higher and fallen further than I ever thought was possible. Where do I stand compare to then? On balance a little better but my comfortable little fox hole is about to be shelled out of existence. Its time to find a new scam............... On facebook I'm #1 most enviable person in my social network. I'm enviable? Me? Jeez I must have missed that meeting. Fail a degree, get fat, run out of cash, work in a job you DESPISE for 7 years, go crazy, have your condoms go out of fucking date before you even get a snifter of a kiss. Enviable, ha ha ha............. I have a brain, I have a dark sense of humour. I'm well read. I'm relatively even tempered apart from that 10% of the time I get mood spikes. And people can never tell anyway. I have a way of masking it and continuing to operate...... Yeah I have my freedom and yeah as far as I know I've got my health.......... but.............. Enviable? Its a bloody strange world. If I'm the frigging enviable one what does that say about every one and everything else???????? Richey Manics exhortation in Smash Hits to kill yourself when you were 13 when I was 15 really made an impression on me. I upset my father some months back because I told him that I'd suffer from low level depression for the rest of his life. I think he's been depressed all of his life but his belief system, his social milieu won't let him acknowledge it.......... I can't believe I'm typing this in work..................

25/6/2016: Logomancer: I float through placement. I'm functional but don't really care. My imagination floats high above the mundane tasks allocated to me. I'm there in body, in mind I'm allover the show without much control. I got my pizza stone yesterday. well actually a terracotta dish I bought for £3 from a garden centre! Now I just need to find a perfect dough recipe. This may all sound banal but I find it has a zen component and I need all the zen I can get right now. I've bought a lot of books as well. A hundred years of solitude, readers on Socrates, Plateforme in the original french by Houellebecq, the complete prose of Woody Allen. I got an anthology of the Journalism of Robert Fisk. I think maybe I buy too many books. It makes moving house a pain. I know internally I am about to undergo a vision quest with the individual who usually acompagnies me to such realms. I acquired a copy of Ruskoffs Cyberia, I'm assimilating that in my own time along with Alans Watts "The Way of Zen" and Frazers "Golden Bough". I've got a beginners guide to Anthropology. I'm trying to thoroughly learn a piece of Koine Greek as well. Earlier on I spent sometime in a French library and read history magazines. I find history written in French interesting, it takes quite a different emphasis to similar material written/produced in England. Its always interesting to see how people who aren't the English see the English, especially outside the anglophone sphere. Rant #567: I hate the UK. What I loved about the net at its inception was the assumption that everyone was American or that at least everyone would be operating in an Americanised cultural sphere. America has junk culture but it had elements of the libertarian left and indie/punk culture that were far far far superior to anything in my immediate milieu at the time. Broadly I still think thats true. What I really hate is software that can tell where I am. No, MYSPACE, I do not, will not EVER have a UK account, so when I tell you "NO" it means "NO" for now and all time. OK? Likewise, when I get blocked from videos on youtube because "they're for the american market only", I have to think firstly "who the fuck told you, this shits free, its none of your fucking buisness anyway", secondly, if I'm blocked from doing something I consider legitimate. I will do it anyway. With a bloody vengeance. I hate targeted adverts. I hate the corporate crap in this country which either I don't want or I can't afford. When I see an advert I semiotically dissect and actively attempt to either pervert or ignore its vile semiotic payload. American adverts make me laugh, tell me something about the most powerful culture in the world and always give me a feeling which is midway between exoticism and vulgarity, but it always either educational or hilarious. I need to find a way to mask my Englishness. I live in a deeply malignant culture. Maybe the grass is always greener but it really shouldn't be upto technology to enforce outside my will a cultural identity.

26/6/2008: Dennis:Last year I met a guy called Dennis. Dennis was in his late 40s. We automatically clicked. He had a swarthy complexion and salt and pepper hair. He was brilliant with the deliquent kids I was working with. He managed to swing between eloquent, well educated angry bookish loner one moment and juvenile deliquent the next. He was a little weird. But so am I. And the kids all loved him. Dennis used to often offer me lifts home from the unit I worked at. We used to drive accross Salford and park up at my halls of residence. Neither of us would have much in our respective lifes. His marriage had collapsed. He loved his kids. He had a chain of women he didn't really love. He loved his weed. He loved his whiskey. He read his philosophy and social theory. He empathised with the kids. He was lonely and intense. I saw glimpses of myself there. I had the best conversations I had in all of 2007 with Dennis. We talked NLP and Human Givings. We talked Frankfurt school marxism and Anarchism. We talked about systems theory and symbolic interaction. I talked psycho-analysis and behavourism. I talked about Christianity, Taoism and Zen. I talked about Heller and Hesse, Miller, Mailer and Plath. We talked about alcohol and drugs and about the emptiness of society. We talked much about the concept of the Steppenwolf and Enlightenment. We got onto the subject of Wittgenstein and his early and later works. We talked about classic british socialist sociology. He talked about Rock and Fucking roll. And about how bad the taste in music of deliquent scally kids and the masses are.............. I admired his rage and empathy. He told me that I was one of the cleverest people he'd ever met and that I should be at Oxford and Cambridge. I hear that a lot but not often from a man of his qualifacations and intelligence. This means a lot to me (all this is linked to a lot of my self doubt connected with my late teen breakdown/my ex). After I finished placement I stayed in contact with Dennis by text. Its was always a pleasure to receive texts from him at 2:00am or 3:00am on a Saturday morning or late on boring Sunday afternoons. Over Christmas he developped Pleurisy. By March he informed me he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. I guess years of bongs must have caught up with him. He told me that the tumour was unusual but he was trying to stay optimistic. I got texts about his tumour, about the morphine, about his love for the devil weed and the nurses on the ward. About two months back his texts stopped. I've texted him several times but I've had no response. I hope he's OK. People generally don't come back from lung cancer. And it kills fast. Nasty bastard cancer. How can you mourn without a body? "Medical team are still very puzzled about origin of tumour+aspects of its pathology + has it spread (?) so I will need more investigations, lung CTScan asap, + further treatment at Christies hospital + possibly another op. Things shoould be moving a bit more rapid from now on. Fucking NHS. They take there time. Tell me more when my fucking headache goes. Take care, hope you're enjoying the weather - the snow + hail if any. I'm OK with lotsa support. Now wheres my methadone drip? Denn :)" "I'm ALIVE Simon........Op went well.........haven't grown angel wings just yet! Got a very sexy nympho nurse feelin my other lump! Tee Hee! Ok i need a good shag! but my chest + rib fuckin hurts! They can't numb area as my lungs wouild collapse! So im enjoyin morphine drip! They're keepin me over night in first instance as they've removed a big un! Clearly not my dick! Hope ur OK + ta lots 4 ealier texts. I will keep you updated as things progress wiv biopsy analysis etc.......Cheers matey! :)" "I remember my first student party circa 1066! :).........now thats fucking old man or shud I say now thats I fuckin old man!......just pass me the spliff..........." "What u doin over xmas hols? Goin 2 parents? Assuming a new persona? Search for Bin Laden? Holy Grail? Niravana? Meaning Of Life? Any fucking pub you can have a decent pint in?"

22/6/2008 1995 Uber Alles: I passed my assessment with flying colours. Car journey on the way home I discussed with trained counsellor and acid casualty the importance of being Si. If your intelligent and sensitive you're inevitably going to be weird in amazing and terrible ways. It was pointed out to me that it was always going to be difficult to find people whose souls sing in time with my own. Not for the first time, it was pointed out that I'd have been better off as a musician. No shit Sherlock. We also talked about leaving the country. Stress related burn out. The end of socialism in a post-modern world and zealots who can neither let go or modify their initial agena and all this was linked to paradigm theory. I've come off the rails recently. I don't regret it. I'm going to pass my MA, the danger moment has passed. Its all anti-climatic. It means nothing. My BA meant so much to me. I'd been thrown out of uni, suffered at work, partied hard and I still got a 2:1 at LSE in the end. Its a feat unparalled by anyone I know. Its probably the only thing in the last ten years other than my Friends and Miranda I actually feel proud of. I have a plan. The plan requires a pHD, learning to drive, speaking French, German, Spanish and Madarin fluently. It should take me up to my late 30s. I can't work in the real world. I know that. I'm not normal. This means I have to take advantage of the strengths that provides me and roll with the punches of the negative ones. I have to work logically with mes atouts which means much of what I do seems illogical to others. This situation means I need to have some system of reality check that works. It really is life or death. My twentys where absolutely ruined by one evening of madness(sanity?). Losing time years of prime life means living with memories of certain kind of death. I always think of the words of the Joker............. All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That’s how far the world is from where I am: just one bad day. You had a bad day once, am I right? I know I am. I can tell. You had a bad day and everything changed—why else would you dress up like a flying rat? You had a bad day, and it drove you as crazy as everybody else…only you won’t admit it! You have to keep pretending that life makes sense; that there’s some point to all this struggling! God, you make me want to puke…It’s all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for…it’s all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can’t you see the funny side? Why aren’t you laughing? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Gone midnight the party animal phones me and invites me to a party. Significant others are doing sound engineering in shitty satellite towns. At home all that awaits me is masturbation and miserycore. All the buses have finished for the night. I see beer monsters and sex workers in the distance like snipers dark and scuttling in the urban environment. I hear girls in tears and ugly male voices harrassing them. Wails become misheard as dead advertising jingles in my weary head. At the transport interchange I board a bus that takes me half sleepy to another arena of battle. I jump off at Rusholme. The enemy roam in packs. I text my friends. My phone dies. Alone and fatigued. I await the dust-off. The party is full of trendys. Mainly hipster lesbians and pillheads.  I hear the line shouted " because they are bisexual because they are greedy". (I have stories about my own life, my own evening. I won't tell them. No-one likes a party pooper. No-one likes the truth). Everyones on drugs. I'm not and other than a bit of weed I have no intention of indulging. I drink cheap cider in the corner. I write obscene arty graffiti on the grafitti board. Everyone thinks eveythhings so great but every one is so fucking miserable or empty underneath a cotton veneer. The emperor isn't quite naked but you can definitely make out his cock. It all feels like a Brett Easton Ellis novel. I remember reading "Less than zero". I am the same age Brett Easton Ellis when I first read "Less Than Zero". Brett Easton Ellis's boyfriend died during his 30th birthday as a direct result of a drug binge. If Ecstacy was so fucking great it would have changed the world. The world is more fucked than ever. FAIL. Acid changed the world. MDMA people made people stupid with fools gold love and seratonin loss. But then again I'm not one of the beautiful people......... Dyspraxics can't successfully pull poses. Hack bits off and dress and drug me up. I still won't fit in. Like I said, work with your strengths and insulate yourself from the inevitable, glaring weaknesses. I'm 30. Pre-1900 most humans who ever lived were dead at my age. The music is terrible. FUCKING TERRIBLE. Bad fascimiles of 90s post rave dance music and Britpop. All the shite I always hated re-branded with a remix. I mean fuck, they even resurrected ultrabeat. The indie is like britpop with the last lipstick traces of a truly alternative outlook dabbed away with a damp corporate cloth. Fuck me, Take That my well be actually be more alternative than the fucking Feelings. 1993 forever. 1995 Uber Alles. Yet again I chose not to voice too much of a dissident voice. Why the hell would I? I can't win? Naturally beautiful people with a certain social climbing attitude are unaware of the VIOLENCE in their aura and in their wake. The world can burn down in flames as long as they get theres and as long as there is no DIRECT assault its all legitimate. FUCK COOL. FUCK COOL. FUCK IT. FUCK IT. WE'RE FUCKED. Saturday I watched punk and got drunk. Sunday I'll do the same. I desperately want someone to prove me wrong. I need taking out of my system and away from most of my toys in order to grow In other news. I've acquired "What does anything mean basically" by the chameleons. I don't usually name people by name but I will do here. In spring 2000 I lent the NME journalist D** M***** all my beloved Chameleons albums because I loved that band and I wanted to spread the word. Dan has appalling taste. the kind of man who would rate "2 unlimited" over Morrissey. He decided he disliked them instantly and then lost my fucking CDs. Something which has rankled ever since as I don't really have money to go replacing what I've already owned. Due to the marvels of modern technology, however, I have a copy again. Stick with fucking Kylie (who has ALWAYS been banal and shite D**!!!!!!!!) I'm a gonnnnnnna listen to some real tunes. Also, I've managed to acquire all the My Bloody Valentine EPs..........which I reckon rilly is recquired listening especially as I'm going to see them..............

22/6/2016:  New Flood: Last year I spent a lot of time alone living in a giant Lower Broughton tower block surrounded by people I just didn't connect too. As always when totally alienated I took solace in books, music, alcohol and um......other stuff (grins). For the first time in my life I had broadband. I had discovered the wonders of youtube some months earlier while living at my parents for a few weeks following the end of the painful and alcoholic gutterpunk living arrangement. This allowed me to fill in many of the gaps of my musical prelidiction that had previously been compromised by time, space, money, availability and storage space. One night while sipping JDs and surfing aimlessly moderately stoned I discovered this Song by a band called "Little Nemo" on youtube. Little Nemo was a comic strip that freaked loads of people in the early 1900s at the point when the victorian era bled into proto moderen technology and thinking, and the world hadn't yet lost its cling film hymen of innocence irreparably torn in the industrialised killing fields of World War I or the much much worse which was to follow in the following decades. The comic strip remains weird and haunting to this day. Its from this comic strip that "Little Nemo" took there name (I always find anything called Nemo as I once read aged 10 or 11 in one of my sisters horrible "teen" magazine that NEMO stood for "non ejaculatory male orgasm". I think that every time I see that horrible orange fish in that Disney movie. I reality a clownfish dropped in a shitter would be dead from Freshwater and the chill factor long before it got into the sewers but I'm a pedantic killjoy, and I digress..........). The band were leading lights in a French Movement "touching pop" which came out of the "Cold wave scene (these two scenes having roughly the same relationship as "goth" and "shoegaze" in the UK indie/post-punk scene). I love this band for being able to do a poppier "disintergration" era Cure pastiche, which few bands have ever really pulled off. I also like the fact that they remind me of House Of Love/Sound/Chameleons/early My Bloody Valentine and that whole melodic, intelligent branch of post-goth. Also, the lyrics to this song make me shiver, they remind me of something in particular, a certain sense of desire, longing, loss and frustration, a mild weltschmerz shot through with sex which there should really be a word for, but there isn't. I always find it shocking when European bands do amazing things with the English language. English indie bands have got lazy with language. Can you think of any, relatively new British alternative act whose use of language isn't facile, banal and a fascimile of a fascimile of an exhausted cliché? Nor can I............... Screen religion shows love and action For gods of violence, you match in silence You all have dreams, the problem it seems, Like everyone dreams the same one Forget the time when you were told It could get better later A New Flood's breaking in your soul I feel it's getting stronger You all have dreams, the problem it seerns, Like everyone dreams the same one Kill the monster and give the power Back to the feelings, the words the meanings

19/6/2008:  Manic? Prologue?: I've made a decision. I'm paying for an advanced TEFL course with job placement. I'm going to China. I'm fucking off early in 2009. I've snapped. I've had the most beautiful, horrific, depressing and grotesque month in a long time. I've looked at my options and seen them dwindle to a type of zero. I need to extend to the domain of the fight. I can't win here. I've got an MA, thats got currency........ I've learned a lot from Social Work but I don't wanna be a social worker. Ever. I'd be lying to myself if I pretended that I did. My plans are advanced now. Theres 4 or 5 conversations I need to have and I've found the £400 I need. I'm not sanguine but this is as near as I get. I need to take a step back. But what else is there? What I want just doesn't get. I can make sure my next 8 months are fun packed and meaningful because time is running out. tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock I've reached the end of the line here. I can't be happy in a suit or being a bum anymore. I gotta run. I think this was the meaning of the drug induced visions I had on my birthday. The tectonic plates of my mind have shifted. I have a new task. Tying off all the loose ends. At least my life will have some impetus again. I don't think I can finish my healing here. My heart was broken into a thousand pieces 7 years back. Its semi-functional again. But what I here is muffled humming when it should be singing. This was always the plan B but its plan A. I'm almost manic about it. The thought of escape - but without screwing anyone over. Its beautiful. BEAUTIFUL. If I don't do this I'll get less than scraps or a suit. Theres no love anytime soon and I can't afford to play Wii Mario Kart. This is the right thing. I'm finished here and I have been for a long time. Certain objects act as fuses at certain moments..........I'll offer gushing proclamations of thanks at a later date. A jealous God has to choose whether to be jealous or to be a god as one can't be two contradictory things...........I've spent too long jealous of too many things. Henry Miller left the US for Paris aged 32. I moment came. He had to run. Life won't be perfect. Life is never perfect. I'm going to choose a new set of imperfections. I'm gonna see joy in things. I'm gonna learn Chinese. The meaning of the last two years? Even when I win I can't win here any more.

18/6/2008: Serviette: The evening carries an unexpected heat though outside the sky is grey and the floor is damp, with it smells of decay, car fumes and piss are reactivated. Rain falls sporadically. I feel a little fatigued but I won't sleep. I'm trying to avoid junkfood. I know I've got to avoid spending silly money in the next week or two as I'm heading towards bankruptcy. It flows out but it won't flow back in. What do I have back at my house? Crap in cans. I want to find a cheap terracotta slab and convert it into a pizza stone. What to do tonight. I could go to my friends and drink. I don't fancy that. I have too much at stake in the next two days. I could do academic stuff but my heart isn't in it and the brute amphetimine force of necessity, do or die is absence. I could read but I feel my introversion is bad enough at the moment. Maybe I'll tidy. I'm trying to put off the rest of life so maybe thats all I'm good for right now? I want to be wrong. I want to get a sudden phone call like the one I got in February 2000 telling me I was wrong about everything and the universe can read my mind and make my dreams come true. To quote "Withnail and I", even a stopped watch tells the right time twice a day. Sometimes its all too easy to infer the wrong rule from that. I lack a behavourial module or two and as a result there is a direct and indirect lack within the wider system. I'm considering the TEFL escape again. I've considered the pHD, I've considered Law but I reckon this might be the easiest way to make a liveable wage and sharpen my language skills. I'm 30. The looks I never utilised and the hair that was never deployed in the endless gender war could go any day. I regret not doing those things when I was younger. But me being me how could it be any different? Given the way I am. Have I been spectacularily lucky or unlucky in that department? I dunno? I'm watching the news in French. It helps break elements the info/image hegemony of our media system. The experience of having the anglo/american world view being de-centered is definitely valuable to a philosophical soul. I can see myself fleeing England one day. For a while anyway. Wage slavery and no love and no sex and all my friends either drinking and drugging themselves to death or elsewise becoming burnt out nerds or family men. Running away is fine, but where to? Where to go? Are people the same everywhere? If I'm pathological can I change what is holding me back? If I can work out what the fuck it actually is in the first bloody place? The world isn't going to re-mould itself back into the place I want. Its not going to become some womb throwback with added differentiation and cocktails. All desire is suffering. All survival is suffering. Nothing is real. All clichés at my particualar social level (even the cliché mechanism is cliché). Everyday I keep getting told I'm "too honest" at work. My fellow students, I strongly suspect, think I'm a neurotic asshole. Why? Because I tried to tell the truth as I see it. Because try as I might, I can't withdraw every last scrap of my ego into a professional-presentational straightjacket. I'm 30. I'm scared for my future. I'm scared for me......... I'm wearing jeans that don't fit and I have to hold them up. I'm wearing my fathers trainers. Where will I be in six months? Poorer? Qualified? I need answers. I need ways forward. Need. Need. Need. Mr Maslow was onto something. Perpetually thwarted and I don't know why. I keep getting new pieces and I sometimes wonder if I'm forcing them into the wrong puzzle

17/6/2008: Dysphoria: I argue points intensely to idiots who don't listen and I half win but it means the sick farce that is the latest phase of my academic career is stretched out a few more weeks. A pyrrhic victory. Even the parents are asking questions now. I don't want to work for a living. The idea of working is sending me under. Oh well. Never mind. A rant for another day. After a brief afternoon buisness/socialisation session I take the bus to Stockport Crematorium. Only I get distracted and go looking for books in my old Levenshulme stomping ground. I see stuff by Poppy Z Brite, Jack London and Robert Heinlein but manage to resist. I find a copy of "Aerial" packed with copius intellectual notes seemingly written legibly by an intelligent, angsty girl in eight different dayglo colours for 30p. How could I resist? Especially from a born again Christian charity shop.............. I turn up in Stockport with a bladder full of caffeine piss and Sylvia Plath in tow. At the funeral I see the most obscene double entendres in prayers and hymns. I hate priests talking to me and have no time for religion. Its all just lies to make people feel better and I'm in no mood to put up with it. I imagine the priest doing unspeakable things. Thoughts of other priests, choirboys, monk outfits and latex devil outfits with vibrating buttplugs built into the end of the tail like the backend of a crimson sidewinder spring into my filth fuelled mind. Like one of my regularily friends says, I suffer from "unquantifiable brain wrongness". I couldn't sing the hymn even if I wanted to as I don't know the tune. I'm the only one here who isn't crying. Part of me died when she called me a "dog murderer" the day it had to be put down. 13 years. I don't suppose I ever fully forgave. I'm trying to write an account of my relationship with her but I fear it might be one of those projects I never finish. Later on theres a wake. True to form I over eat, over drink, hide or rant and eventually escape to fall fast asleep. I never truly wake again today. I feel no loss. I feel guilty for my lack of loss. My hearts been empty for a long time. My father ties to counsel me over his cack-handed charcoal outlines of problems I've been having. I'd wish he'd shut the fuck up. If he knew the first thing about my life he'd have a break down. Well meant words from an idiot can't help me. Besides I'd ultimately hold him responsible for 70% of it historically. The problem can't be part of the soultion and fuck me is it winding me up. I have a brain and a soul. Therefore I'm doomed. Now everyones in bed by 10pm. Theres nothing to do other than watch shit TV, read Sylvia Plath and get drunker. I can't even stay here anymore as my parents have gone to bed and I'll get shouted at. I'm 30. I re-watched Fight Club. What scares me sometimes is that my closest friends get maybe 75%+ of my sense of humour and start to get a glimpse of just how deep this thing goes.......... And it isn't always pretty..........sometimes seven seconds of my machine gun laughs conveys more than a rain storm of 3000 eloquent words. It can be a little "Kenny" from South Park at times. Take a guess. You're probably right........... i am jacks complete lack of surprise i am jacks raging bile duct i am jacks wasted life i am jacks inflamed sense of rejection i am jacks cold sweat i am jacks broken heart i am jacks smirking revenge

16/6/2008: 4am: My head is still fizzing and I go back to check for two of my friends. I can't find them. I go back downstairs and my other friends are gone. I feel loneliness and rage. Its no-ones fault but I have to deal with feelings and feelings are like a fuse on an explosive pack of feelings. I look around town. Its a warzone. I have visions of Beiruit. You see beer monsters. The enemy. You must avoid. If they corner you. Be willing to hurt them and flee. Yeah, the world seems like Beirut now, theres an ice chill in the air and the black sky is turning blue. I've gotta get out of here. I decided to swing up Newton Street rather than Fairfield street. I'm too sensitive right now. Thinking about sex workers might send me crazy. Uh oh Landmines?????Oh well............. Walking towards East Manchester. 4:25 am. I'm trying to maintain a state of zen mindfulness to stop myself flying apart. I won't label my emotions. I keep telling myself "its this way because this is the way that it is". I realise that I'm fascinated by neurosis in myself and others and I experience relief and pressure as a type of intellectual S/M (or maybe this is brain chemistry talking). Its daytime nightime now. Ultra violet interact with my eyes to turn the sky nitrogen blue. Steam the size of cities looks like cotton clouds. I can see hills in the distance but I'm stuck in the city. Theres no people walking through the wasteland and no cars. Its like someone dropped the neutron bomb. I'm still trying to feel something for my Grandma. I can't. I realise I can't. I know what I'm feeling. Its better not speak of it. I get in and phone my friends. My speech comes accross as an admonishment and it really didn't mean to. I put on the Smiths to purify myself. Sleep isn't coming for quite a while. The birds are singing. They're pissing me off. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mum:It doesn't seem like 5 minutes ago since I was here with her at the warehouse Son:We're all dead already ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- I speak with the counsellor for a while in the same room I had my dyslexia assessment. I can't be cured. They can't be cured. No God. No social progress. No now. No future. I got asked if I was ambitious. I got told I had no intellect as a baby. We discussed passive aggression. We discussed small talk about sex in the city as being the human equivalent of dogs sniffing each others shitty asses before humping each other. One day the aliens will beam me up. Today, back to work. Tomorrow I have two meetings and a funeral. Whats in the will will pay for another trip to Paris and Amsterdam. You can never go back.

14/6/2008: γλυκύς chemical cherry aftertaste: Woke up hungover on the couch that doubles for my second bed with stale beer and stomach acids in my mouth. I worry its a weekday but realise half awake its the weekend. I surfed the net for a while and read up the ancient Angkor civilisation. I had reason to look at the Etymology of money. Money comes from the word "monata" which was one of the names of the Greek goddess Juno and the word "to mint" is also comes directly out of that name due to the fact that money was minted around her shrines. To speak of money or to spend is to invoke dead gods. I walked around Manchester for a bit. Struggled to find a TV license. Bought "Rester Vivant et autre textes" by Michel Houellebecq and "Listen Little Man" by Wilhelm Reich. Its all too warm for me outside. I went into a cool basement Starbucks for a while. I'm bored and don't want to go home to soon as I know I'll just go to sleep. I went to a posh yuppie tiling place and have been sizing up tiles. I want to buy a big terracota slab to use as a pizza stone...........mmmmm........I wanna make fresh pizza! Its gonna be a long walk back to mcr. I'm glad I have cherry 7up in my bag. All hail artificial chemical cherry flavorant! γλυκύς! Its my favourite artifical taste ever!

13/6/2008:Dennis Cooper: I love Dennis Coopers writing. I wish I'd caught him in Manchester the other week. His blogs great as it brings punk rock obscura in with high art cultural fragments, poetry and weird porn type stuff. I guess that was always going to be intriguing to one such as myself. Today he has his readership discuss their favourite quotes from his books............I've posted a random selection of some of the ones that I've found myself liking. http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2008/06/number-of-people-have-asked-me-to.html I see a punk being a punk, a performance of youth, a performance of being outside youth, a moment of erasure, a transformation, a nothing that points to something. It makes me smile. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2:11: What are you seeing? 2:11: My lips said, Me. 2:12: Thinking. 2:12: My lips said, I'm hearing voices now. God. 2:12: Thinking. 2:13: My lips said, I have so many problems. I hate it. 2:13: Where are you? 2:13: My lips said, My room. 2:15: I'm rolling around in that room looking scared. 2:16: My lips said, I'm just going to believe this is real or I'll go insane. 2:16: Can you see me? 2:16: My lips said, I see myself. Fuck. 2:17: It's dark here. 2:18: My lips said, What are you? 2:18: Same person as you. 2:19: My lips said, My name's George. 2:19: Don't understand now. 2:19: I look scared. 2:20: Scared. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- In my few clearer moments, between hallucinations, I believed I'd gone totally insane, or what people characterize as insane, and suspected I'd never return to the world [...]. Despite my explosive behavior, I felt an unusual clarity. I knew more than I'd know, and yet, as part of my mental upgrading, I understood how this "genius" would isolate me. All that otherworldly information, so suddenly focused, available, et cetera, had no accompanying langage. But in describing my state, I'm unable to note more that its skimpiest outline. That's my point. How can I bring what I learned in that world into my everyday consciousness, then translate those thoughts into palatable terms, even assuming the knowledge is still in my brain somewhere? It's one of my big goals in life ". --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "It's strange what goes on in your head when you're attracted to someone--I mean, so turned on that your thoughts are just a twisted narration to his day-to-day life, and then by some fluke or fated twisted or whatever you get the chance to fuck him whenever you want, and you start to realize that his sublimity's just your own imaginative garbage, period, and that all you're going to get out of him is a new set of needs, body odors, opinions, emotions, et cetera, all of which you completely recognize from your other relationships, and you start thinking, So why am I prioritizing him again?" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 9:42: Dead. 9:44: It’s like nothing. 9:45: Scared to move at all. 9:47: My leg hurts. 9:48: Gonna shake it a little. 9:48: Okay. 9:53: Nothing to say. 9:59: Gonna stand up. 9:59: Can’t see what I’m writing. 9:59: Excuse this. 10:01: Gonna walk some. 10:03: Fell. 10:06: Lying there. 10:10: Wood floor. 10:10: A building, I guess. 10:12: Don’t understand. 10:14: It just is? 10:15: Nothing to say. 10:18: Bored. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If he could remember this later, tell Ziggy, perhaps, just perhaps, in a distorted way, he’d be as close to conveying his love as is possible under the terms of his …emotional damage? Too bad. He won’t recall a detail. It’s terrible that friends can’t intuit these things from one another, though guessing games keep them together as much as their blab ============================================================================================= “Like, kids want to befriend their favorite cartoon characters. I did. Well, my dad took me to Disneyland so I could meet them. He aimed me at these huge walking toys and, well, I tried but…they couldn’t even alter their facial expressions.” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tick, tick, tick... Calhoun clears his throat. "I should crash." He reaches out, kills off the cigarette, disappears. "Oh, okay," Ziggy nods frenetically. "You can stay, though. Turn on a light, if you want. It won't bother me." Calhoun, or rather, his bed, makes a few being laid-down-on noises. "Thanks." Ziggy slugs his knee. "Or if you want to crash, we can share the bed. Just don't --" "I know. Don't try anything, ha ha ha." Slug, slug, slug. Calhoun chuckles. "Sorry." "That's okay, but... Really, I don't even want to. It's not about sex at all. I --" "I know." Calhoun clears his throat. "I'm an asshole." "No, no, you're great. That's not what I mean. I... uh..." Shit. Ziggy's stumped. "Never mind." Still, he lets his lips silently finish the sentence, although there's so much he wants to clarify, and every possible word he could use seems so clunky, etc., that it's more like he's mouthing some prewritten, incomprehensible prayer which has nothing to do with how weird he feels while he's pronouncing it. "Well, good night then." Calhoun... rolls over? "Yeah," Ziggy whispers. "Sleep... tight." Calhoun yawns. ZIggy's getting so, like, emotional he can't think. Tick, tick, tick... Fuck everything else.

13/6/2008:Rage: I’m working on a bigger project so if this is sketchy and perfunctory you will have to forgive me. I have an anger problem. Its easy to blame the most recent (still a long time ago) manifestations of bullying that make me glower with rage but the trouble is the root is so nebulous that my conscious mind can’t see the whole thing let alone define a root or a first cause. Certain things make me glower with rage but until there is a social context in which to tell a story in a meaningful way they stay dormant and afterwards they seem mad. How many more unexploded bombs lurk in my psyche? How do I know if they’re their or will ever go off? I’m trying to work on being less obsessively pissed on feeling vengeful towards people who fucked me over when I was 23/22/18/16/15/14 or whenever. I don’t get so angry about stuff anymore but I realise that I need to “concentrate” to let go and that my rage isn’t an especially attractive personality trait. I still find it easier to talk about rage than love. Funny, that. I want to be more Zen. Maybe I’m grief stricken at the moment but I’m full of unusual emotions at the moment anyway and though I think I’m generally OK with regards to my behaviour, I’m always scared that I’m going to make a total tit of myself. One of my friends last year told me I “had to forgive more”. At first I was rilly pissed with him and then I realised he was totally right and its something I’ve tried to take on board. I am trying to be a better person. But you have to work out where you are, how you define that and how you get there and none of these things can be done overnight. At least I can’t do that. Robert Anton Wilson always talks of the “Cosmic Schmuck Principle”, that being the more you wonder if you’re being an asshole, the less of an asshole you are likely to be. I think thats generally true. But just because you’re wondering if you’re an asshole doesn’t mean your not one., however. Sometimes people deserve second chances. But as a sovereign being who in his social time considers himelf equal to other social beings of his milieu theres most def a limit on the shit you can take off others. I don’t give people shit because I don’t like feeling like an asshole. In fact sometimes I’m so passive with rage I collapse into myself. A back hole. A dead neutron star. Lets live in the now and not in the past. Lifes too short for hating or victimdom. I’m evolving but its always slow. Evolutuion is always a staggered dialectic. And offers no guarantees. Other than change. And the second law of thermodynamics still applies. Theres about 10-15 of you I really love in different ways. It sounds like bad hippy bullshit but its true. I’m nearer to tears writing this than I was days ago when I found my Grandma was dead. I can’t write the next line. Do as thou wilt. And do as thou wilt equals do as thou must. Love is the law and love under will

7/7/2008:Limping Slowly To The Finish Line: The essay is going to be late. I mean even later. I'll get away with this by the skin of my teeth. Limping slowly to the finish line. I'm nearly finished. Who and what will I be next? I try not to think about it. My counsellor says I sound scared. My main emotion, I tell her is disgust, disgust for the vast majority of what constitutes the adult world. "I have a very narrow vision", I'm told. "Prove me wrong", says I. I dream of reading up on theology and Koine Greek though I remain avowedly agnostic with an intuitive leaning towards de facto atheism. Then again I intend on teaching myself Sanskrit too. I blame the marajuana. The again I think one should know a fair amount about religion in order to be able to argue back against its more militant, missionary and insidious manifestations. I'm looking forward to reading sociology and social theory properly again. I'm looking forward to reading novels. Dosteoevski and Pynchon. I have a copy of Will Self's "Great Apes" ready for the reading. Its nice to have real sheets again. When I have the money I'll buy a proper bed. The futon is just not cutting it any more. I suppose I should be glad that I'm not sleeping on a holey mat on a threadbare floor breathing up spilled masoor dhal lentils as I did during a couple of my halcyon bum days. Its too warm. I'm dripping with cold sweat fretting about the essay I don't want to write. Enforced academic assessment is bogus. Especially when my writing is supposed to pertain to an outside reality that I haven't experienced and strongly suspect doesn't even exist. Jump through hoops and we'll through you a banana. I where a suit and the hoop is no longer a hoop. Modern man, not even a step from a monkey. Over and over again the basic principle remains. Your society is a chimps tea party and its fucking ridiculous. And given your response system and that of your tribe and species, how could it ever be any different. Eat. Fuck. Jump through hoops. Beat your chest. Wriggle your ass. Love and hate according to pre-encoded codes. Die. Theres no story to tell. No unifying narratives. I'm one man at a turning point.......and in many ways I'm a pretty mediocre man. Today, Thomas Disch killed himself (writer of "Camp Concentration and, um......"Brave Little Toaster"). Jesse Helms is dead, This means nothing 99% of the population of the UK. The European Parliament is debating passing a "three strikes and you lose your internet connection" rules in Strasbourg. No-one cares. Gordon Brown prattles on about the need to save food while the World Bank tells us its bio-fuels that are inducing the food crisis. The media just paps on about London stabbings and tennis. Yawn. God is it 11 years since I started listening to Fugazi. The distance in time between the first EP coming out and now is the same time difference between then and the end of the Beatles going in the opposite temporal direction. Fucking scarey. What I see as Modern isn't modern no-more. And I'm not (that) young any more. I'm on the cusp of early middle age and I'm still a de facto teenager. I can't imagine stable relationships (or even unstable ones), careers, children or household pets. Its only the last one that bothers me. I can't imagine it getting better. Actually I expect it to get a little worse. Loose another few pieces of my liberty. They'll let me roam as long as I can pay my taxes. The other day I bought a jigsaw. It was a painting a metre wide of the Chinese Goddess Of Spring printed on foil. I'm gonna do it in my spare time on my computer desk and and stick it on my wall. yes, my lifes that exciting right now. It is a beautiful image, though. Cold reality leaves me cold. I have no real desire. I have nothing to shoot for. This is the end of an eight year narrative. I failed uni and my girlfriend left me. I wanted to prove everyone wrong but I had no real desire in the change. I sorta got away with most of what I planned. Apart from the girl part. Here I am standing at the end and start of something. I wanted to find an image from the Sandman (the first volume where Death berates Morpheus for his introverted negativity), but I could find it so I guess I'll post something else instead. I want to go the theatre and watch something fucked up.

1/8/2008: Maya: Mi deziras ke ĝi estis mi. Worried. About others. About me "now". About me down the line. Making decisions with a pure heart is never enough. Action has karma until we reach a realisation that allows us to live unmaliciously detatched from it. I haven't reached that point yet. I swim in lakes of pleasure and pain. माया mind observes माया object processed in माया brain creates माया thought. माया "I" is inseperable from माया thought as are all steps of the माया process-non process. Philosophising is an escape from life and responsibilities so much of the time. What is life? What is responsibility? see. I'll go on following my heart. Though I fuck up from time to time. But its just not enough. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- One more week I'll know whether the last three years of my life have been worth it. I can get my portfolio in, I limp to the finishing line. I survive. I fail. I fail. The crisis I've been pushing away from me for the last decade is at my borders. Who to be? Who to become? I don't want to be a nobody. I don't want to be stressed, bullied and bored. I don't want to fuck people/the world over but I want status too...... I want the moon and can not have it. I have two incompatible sides (I have endless incompatable sides). I want to be loved and I want to be happy because thats monkey hardwiring no matter what language or metaphor you use to express it, kaj mi estas simio (strange, I just realised the esperanto for "monkey" looks/sounds very much like my name). --------------------------------------------------------------------------- I hope the party house gets resurrected. Soon. Impotent wrathful machismo needs smashing (or is it just the same inverted-am I just a hypocrite? Or the exponent of empty rhetoric?) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm a little upset right now. I'm a little worried. About several things. Je suis un peu perdu. The right to fuck up is the one right I think people need to grow. But fuck me I don't feel like exercising it too often.

5/8/2015:Something in The Way: I’m sat at my desk, loading albums from my flash drive to my laptop. I’ve been reading Lautremont and Baudelaire in French. I’ve read stuff on Theology and Philosophy this morning, some journalism by Robert Fisk and a bit of Kafka and some of Henry Millers essays.................. I’ve done everything but my essay. I can’t write my fucking essay. A common theme with me. Its stupidly late. And I feel sick. Why do I do this? Why? So near the end. Jeoparidise everything. I guess its because I see no future no matter what I do. Nothing palatable anyway. And ultimately I don’t give much of a rats ass. I’m finding it hard taking anything seriously at the moment. For the last 8 years I’ve been moving towards something and I’ve taken massive blows to my self image and esteem and now I’m on the verge of becoming..........something. I just don’t feel like it. I suppose I’ll have to give my professional qualification a whirl for financial reasons and because of the inevitable annoyed howls of all and sundry. But ultimately. Theres no desire. Theres no overriding mission. The point was to get there, not working out what I was going to do when I did. I wonder if in part in my psyche sabotaged the final few months at Manchester for similar reasons? Its easier to analyse your socially presented discourse about an event as if it was the event it is supposed to pertain to rather than trying to analyse the event(s) it(them)self, well as far as you can (I guess thats just a long winded way of saying sometimes you can get caught up in your own goddamn hype to such an extent that at times its hard to get break to and rilly look at the events that inspired the hype in the first place. Theres always the danger of the hype displacing the historical truth in your mind even if (or especially if) both phenomenon are closely related. While also acknowledging the genesis and perpetuation of the hype as events in themselves.......... Man all that sounds confusing but I assure you (me) that it all makes perfect sense when you break it down (it all makes perfect sense when it breaks down?????). Elliot Smith and Baudellaire. 8 years. All thats changed is the technology and the language I read that stuff in. Oh and the fact I only get hugged once in a blue moon. And maybe I’ll get a pass where once I got a fail but its a bitness of a muchness or whatever the damn saying is.............. The voidness remains exactly the same. 30s a little old to be doing what I do in the way that I do it but what else is there? Telesales? Care Work? Mc Donalds? Ritual Disembowlment? Escort Work? Work minus survival or status value is violent in a sense and thoroughly mind numbing. At least people believe in what they’re doing right now. Theres so many people in this world I don’t ever want to meet and I’ll have to be nice as fucking pie as I’m bullied or ridiculed or trying to complete a task I know is thoroughly retarded and will serve to nothing while desperately not allowing my face to give the game away that I think its all a sick retarded farce. I still feel really lost. All my sisters now have mortgages. I alternate sips of whiskey and tea. I had a bad anxiety attack today and spent two hours in bed. I can’t handle receiving anonymous phonecalls on my mobile right now. Its tapping into my paranoia and making me act crazy. I WILL get this finished. I’ll finish everything. And then????? I dunno. I’d like to go to Paris in Winter for my birthday and then go to Belgium and finish in Amsterdam so I can walk around stoned in the rain and look at sad sights and drink coffee and listen to Scott Walker and Can on my pseudo-I pod. I feel the need to learn dead languages and read obscure scripts. I successfully cooked with globe artichokes today. I wish somebody had said to me five years ago “the leaves are inedible”. It would have saved a lot of farting about, several artichokes, a lot of money and baaaad indigestion. I’m slowly getting there with my pizza. Things I learned today. The amount of dough in a 12” pizza = the amount of dough in two 9” pizzas, due to that easy division, thats why both types are easily available in kebab houses...................

5/8/2008:Ashton: I’ve recently got back into Ashton as a place. I went through a phase of spending a lot of time their circa 2001/2 while living in Hawk Green as it was easier for me to get to than Stockport. Back in those dark days JH who was like a father to me in some ways showed the Hindu food warehouse near the bus station. It was very much like the ones that line the zone of the A6 in the longsite district, but it didn’t have any horrible stinky meat, it served alcohol, had loads of cool figurines of Ganesha and Krishna and lots of incense. It was more overtly Indian than Pakistani than Bangladeshi, which chimes better with my own personal aesthetic and intellectual/emotional concepts. Before long I’d discovered the delights on the local Lidl which served me with 50p a can cider and beer and Feta for various veggie dishes at rock bottom prices. Recently I’ve started going back to Ashton. Living where I’m living its near and easy to get to. For all Manchesters atouts I’m there 5 days a week at least. I find food in the city centre is quite pricey. But much more than that, and its only in the last 5 years or so, I find that a lot of the second hand outlets charge a premium price for old text books and clothes. This pisses me off. Its sheer greed. But I guess it might be an inevitable consequence of the end of that whole horrible, evil “cooler than thou” thing which thankfully died a cocaine induced death circa 2001. Somehow it still feels like the Manchester of Smiths songs without being totally irremediably scummy (to be fair its a lot less scummy now than it was about ten years back). There are some incredible old buildings, Victorian pubs that shimmer blue and green. The old food market burned down, but you know what? It was shit anyway (I do once remember finding a rare copy of the Manic Street Preachers “Suicide is Painless” cover in another now shut down in door Market there 12/13 years back. Fuck me. Is it that long already?) Theres a lot of charity shops. They have cool books and clothes in. I’ve found Levis in size 38” recently for £3 and loads of books. Theres one place which is amazing in its horridness. It has some lobotomised true believer playing jesus worship songs all day and theres a hidden chapel behind some 1970s dayglo hessian scholl assembly curtain. I feed the jesus crap in my head through the perverted William Burroughs filter and imagine bad things while scurrying through barely unpacked boxes looking for music and books that the concept of Christ these guys believe in (as opposed to Jesus himself who seemed pretty cool and appears to have done very little to deserver the calibre of his um......more devout “followers”) certainly wouldn’t have liked............ Ashton has pound shops too............and a B&M bargains. Cheap food. Cheap booze. High quality food that the masses didn’t bother with and some dreck too. The art in poundshops is avoiding the dreck and grabbing the cream. Its an art I’ve mastered to the same extent as my yellow sticker food hoarding (incidentally I found a box of rat poison in with the food in the remaindered pile at W^& *&^t. Quite worrying rilly..............). About halfway though my trip I bought a deluxe ice cream and a milkshake. Price? 60p F’all!!!! Cool! Ashton is big enough for me to aimlessly wander around. I went around the outdoor market. I found a stall selling Vegetarian Black Pudding with free samples. I abused the privilege. There are plenty of Coffee bars and not a Starbucks to be seen anywhere. There are internet cafés but they’re too expensive. The library is cool. They keep selling off loads of really cool cheap stock dirt cheap. Why? Because people are stupid and want their Dan Brown and Mills and Boon. Such is life. But I can profit from it by buying books by Freud and and giant textbooks on Psychology for less than a pound. God bless the idiot tax payer and the intellectually challenged British Public. Bless. Bless. Curse. I’ve also found a barber who will do my hair into adorable punk spikes for £3.50. Hey ho – lets go!!!!!!!! The main event however is the Ikea. Everyone has reduced Ashton in their heads down to Ikea. Which is sad but inevitable, it appearing like a beached blue Levaithan from many miles out. I don’t have the hatred of Ikea of some of my peers. Yeah they’re selling a lifestyle. Yeah its ecologically unsound. But I do find it more palatable than its rivals and I like flicking through all the Swedish books in the store. That puzzles me. Some of the furniture is actually nice. But why would I care? I have no house pride partner to impress and I can’t see that</a> changing any time soon. The only items in the store itself I really care about are one of the chrome swivel lamps which I’ve just gotta have on my geek reading and writing desk and I big £30 metal casserole pot which look and act just like the “Le Creuset ones but are about 4 times cheaper. But you don’t wanna hear about a furniture store and thats not what I’m gonna talk about. You can read the brochure if you want that. What I’m gonna talk about is FOOD! The Café outside the check outs serves veggie hot dogs for 75p, it does fries for 50p and coffee WITH INFINITE REFILL (note, this never happens EVER in in England). I’ve been drinking black coffe till i got high! I signed up for a members card. This means I can get FREE coffee everyday in the main restaurant area – sans purchase! Do you know what this means? Every day I’m gonna get free Coffee and read Hesse, Burroughs and Kerouac surrounded by arguing couples and their screaming babies. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Your lower middle class comfort purchases are going to subsidise my free caffeine and for 50p I can get two more cups. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Yes I am a skank hound and I don’t care cos it sure beats working for a living! Theres also the Swedish shop. It has Swedish cheese fairly cheap, along with rilly cheap filter coffee and beer, which isn’t cheap but is sorta delicious. As a final note I should say that not everything about Ashton is great. The first thing I saw on the first day of my 30s was that the nerdy guy I used chat to and bartered down in price my Cable from the X-men of the future from the nerdy guys comic store was actually an at large child rapist and murderer (not at large anymore). But man, yeah, that was fucking freaky.....................

5/8/2008:Insecure Me: I was awake till the early hours. I think about things I lost and never had. What I was, what I am and what I’m on the point of becoming (bifurcation point at a higher fractal level. Maybe multiple bifurcations). I try to empty my head, count down in multi-coloured threes and control my breathing. I try to get beyond “I” and “language”. To stay calm I need to get beyond cease to exist. Even if I win I lose. First thing I learned after the amniotic haven ruptured. “Its dangerous to understand new things too quickly.”-its recently become my favourite cliché. A new stupid platitude. Supra-received wisdom I can expound without even reflecting on it (everyone has a stock of this stuff). Does it have a meaning? Actually I was thinking it was true. Couting off days. 3 days left till my portfolio is in and my future is settled one way or the other. 20 days and its seven years since I was in a relationship. Sheesh, 23 seems a long time ago. Times, cycles, the ones you neurose over and the ones your not even aware of. The ones that comprise you and the social symphony. Yeah, everything from poop falling out of your ass to delusions of true love - you just ain’t aware. Yeah, I reckon I neurose over the wrong ones. But thats the truth of my cycle. The one that configures and manifests but can never be modelled, at least as well as I want it to. lets speak of the tao. I feel flashes of jealousy and flashes of anxiety and paranoia. If I fuck up uni I’m going to be a MESS for 18 months or so. And then I’ll be old and fucked. I pass? The adult world I fear and hate and is indifferent to me on my own terms looms. So it should. I’m 30. But I don’t have to like it. Whatever I do it amounts to the same. Absolutely nothing. Kurt Cobain and Richey Manic:Dead at 27 Bill Hicks dead at 31 Depression is powerless anger turned inwards (read:losing the ability to laugh at the sickest jokes or your version of the same). Malignant sadness. Innocent?Guilty?Blameless?Complicit? These things don’t mean what they say and never did. I get to Friday and complete my essential tasks, which I will, I’ll feel like Tony Soprano at the end of the Sopranos. Its not a victory. Its a reprieve. “What would make you happy and what would it take”. Its a loaded question. She makes eye contact in the right room. I know the prognosis of the negative answer. How the fuck can you answer a question like that. Like feelings, language isn’t adequate to convey the pictures/sounds/tastes in my head. “Stability” I say, “a little love” and “some money”. In a daydream fire rained on cities, marshmellow odours of the apocalypse filled the air and the structure fell out of the world.” She smiles and says “that good”.

29/8/2008:Why Call It Anything?: I'm feeling bored. I wipe pizza grease over the keyboard inadvertantly. Is it too early for beer? I think so. Maybe I should make a cup of tea but it seems almost like too much effort. I'm surrounded by books, prose and poetry. I can't be arsed reading. Maybe I should try to improve my Esperanto? maybe I shoould watch the news in French or re-watch the Robert Anton Wilson. I dunno. I can't be rilly be arsed. Nothing on youtube appeals............ Tomorrow I should go to a zine festival. The day after theres a refugee festival. I'll probably stay in SK6 and get plastered with the Roden. I'm in SK6 cat sitting. I've not seen much of the cat. Uni tell me I need a doctors note or I'll have to pay hundreds re-taking a module. Poo. Its my own fault. I have a rebellious streak, passive aggression and a fear of the future. I don't believe in what I'm doing and I'm massively affected by other people. Oh well. At least I'll pass. Passing placement was a great relief. It was touch and go for a while. But that survived its just finishing the job. I won't print here what my dissertation title is. But its very, very silly. Even sillier than "was Plato a feminist" (He wasn't, hey I said in three words what Manchester uni wanted me to say in 10,000. he was Greek...............). Yesterday, I went into the red for the first time since 2005. Shit. I need a job rapido. I fucking hate work. I'll have to meet new people and most of them will be annoying fuckwits. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I need a trip to Amserdam I think...............even if its on my own in the November rain..........burning leaves and hot coffee. Civilised people. Tempeh and seawood pasties in the train station. yeah, I could rilly for a bit of that. France too........... I have a lot on my mind. Do you think "it" will be OK? Where do you locate "it" in space time? Who's asking and who's perceiving. Stop being so zen. Your so zen your not zen at all. I've had a good time in the last fed days. yesterday was a scream. I ate loads, hung out with cool people and watched a cool band........ Its going to be (another) tough month. I say it every month but by this time next month a new phase of my life will be starting.

1/9/2008:Aristotelian Logic:  Last night I went to my ex flatmates house and watched "Driller Killer". He has a new 17 year old girlfriend. Its always scary when you realise "I was alternative before you were born". I got told 30 isn't old. She didn't believe it. Neither did I. But it’s the thought that accounts. Saturday night I got lost in woodland. I came close to falling 50 feet into a river and becoming cold dead maturbatory hump fodder amongst algae covered rocks for the farmers collies. I feel less scared in woodland than I do the suburbs though. Over and over again it strikes me that man can't seccede from society. Society has a high percentage of scrotes than milk does fat. It can't be avoided. Its just I've become expert at avoiding it as far as I can. However, my imminent change in status is going to make me less effective. Jesus I'm going to have to go to the "scrotes r us" job agency and work with scrotes, interact with scrotes and take verbal abuse from scrotes. There'll be nice people. There'll be indifferent people but I'm just shuddering thinking about the great British public................ I wish people would stop papping on about the credit crunch. We have the chancellor telling us this is the worst economic crisis in 60 years. Bullshit. The first oil crisis in the 1970s was. The chancellor just wants to give the Prime Minister something to remember him by before inevitably becomes a sacrifical lamb (interestingly a true sacrifice, Tribal leader ends life of other key member of the tribe to appease forces that neither of them control but both of them get attiributed blame to by members of their own and other tribes). The term "credit crunch" is a little misleading. Sort of a branding exercise to sell fear and cheap crappy merchandise as if it was in someway "bargain". Basically, banks lent money they hadn't got to people who obviously weren't going to pay it back for things which weren't worth what they were borrowing the money for in the first place. Thats not a "crunch". Thats plain fucking stupidity. You don't even need to be a first year A-level economics student to know that. I have no intention of ever working in manufacturing. Hence I don't really care. Other than the fact that this is probably the worst moment ever to get a job............. Other (stoned) realisations: The extent that my OCD obsession with ego integrity holds me back. I'm reading Aristotle at the moment. I can't believe I stumbled through three years of a Philosophy BSc without knowing what "axiom", "predicate" and "syllogism" meant. Its no wonder that I got even more depressed and frustrated than I was at the beginning. Its OK. I've learned to use a dictionary know. A useful skill. And not one you're likely to learn off your own back from a UK state school, even if you were in top stream for nearly eveything. Properly learning all this Philosophical shit now will hopefully help me silence the bleating of some very loud lambs...........

7/9/2008:Because I never Wanted One: During drinking session to say goodbye to one of my friends who is departing to another city to go to university, somehow I managed to shave ALL my hair off. My own fault rilly. I'm sure theres underlying psychological reasons (isn't there always). Had a blazing row with my father about it. Which is ironic because I usually have blazing rows with him abot not cutting my hair. I always find large gatherings of old friends a little sad. People move on. People drift apart. One day. These people. Stood around a casket dressed in black. One or two less. Maybe one or two more. Internal realities drifitng apart. The adult world encoachs. David Blunkett says we should work until we drop...........I just wish he would (drop, that is, politicians don't work.................) I have a dissertation to write. This is the bit I really bottled 8 years ago. I fully intend to get it blody nailed this time. The money is in the red. I'm going to have to go into social lockdown shortly. My liver will thank me. I have no job. "Job" is something that appalls me. A violence against my idle essence. The obligation to mix with thick self righteous co-workers and bossess who are thicker, younger and nasty little fuckers to booy giving me retarded orders in an ego traumatising manner. Not all jobs are horrific. Not all relationships will break your heart. But most............. The idea of democratic politics these days seems to be based on a metaphysics even more flimsy than that of religion. Religion cannot be falsified (therefore is logically meaningless), peoples believes about politics and the political system which are bandied about as thruths CAN be........... to paraphrase the Cure song lyrics "whatever you do it amounts to the same. absolutely nothing". How far is communication between two people possible? I have my doubts. I've started thinking more about my psychology recently. The almost complusive untidyness of my bedroom. My essay writing phobia (its "true", its just been diagnosed as that), my detatchment, my dark sense of humour, my inner rage, touches of obsession, cruelties. I suppose theres the "why" and the "getting over and on with it". I don't know the answer. I'm at a very "where do we go from here moment". To be honest I don't really have an answer. I find the idea of having a job a la "Clerks" hilarious precisely because I've never had to do it? I think I'm so work negative because it was always forced on me by the patriarch..............all always thought he knew best. I really wish I'd been left to my own devices in my late childhood and teens. Interference has made me crazy and the resulting neurosis has tainted everything since. I'll be OK. Eventually. I just think that I'm heading for some kind of reckoning and its short term effects may be quite emmetic.

15/9/2008:I Killed The Clouds: my thoat burns bad throat taste. sneeze droplets on hands sleight of hand deny existence wipe on pants when he looks away and time has elapsed and people are idiots and the news is just a TV with a claim on the truth i feel a bitterness and an anger that arises from a status anxiety and a difficulty differentiating myself from an defective whole and i hear Mugabe criticising the English in English and his eyes are bluer than mine and I guess it must be hard thinking that the devil is something inside of you permeating the code that throws forth your concentration and I sneeze again and does the virus leave fragments forever (imagines dicks and lips bleeding oozing sores) the advert is stelling me to do something with the pru which means dick to me because I have no money and no property and a brain and everything is sold because you are not good enough and it can be rectified if only from scowl to laughter in thirty seconds sold cheap outside of prime time a scowl and the music is rousing and you can do anything with light rearrange the corposes camera light the collapse had a large impact and the dow jones rainy pavements (bodys shattering under gravity and there own weight and whats you final thought? session lows? Five Billion pounds? Dreadful day? She mentioned the pru and says they're fucked. I crave chillis. I've started work on my journal article. I dunno. The alarm switch switched on while my flatmates mother showed me photos of Canada and I prepared globe artichokes I'd found two days prior in Walmarts yellow stickered veg disposal pile. I'm writing about groupwork with gay, lesbian and bisexual patients/prisoners in secure enviornments. All the literature serves to remind me how developmentally retarded I am for a 30 year old man and how out of touch I am with all the dominant discourses/counter discourses of society. I never knew how I came to be. I don't know how I am going to get out of the mess I'm in. Gonna get this MA tho. Damn sure of that. Recovering Morrissey freak/overgrown teenager aren't validated value positions apparently. But its OK. A lie is a truth if backed up with enough references. Taking out a big fucking loan so I can be bohemian like me until at least Christmas. Parents talk about signing on but fuck them, fuck that and fuck the state. What to do, what to be? Life is imperfect in relation and regard to our expectations of it. There lies the root of an awful lot of our misery. Our we willing to do shift our expectations, as out of sync with reality as they are? Are we fuck.................. I bought three Elliot Smith albums for a £1 each the other day, partially replacing the ones my ex ran off with. Got "Me Two" by Rufus Wainright as well. I bought the complete works of Nick Drake as well but some asshole had run off with CDs. CDs seem such a quaint idea. Like a throwback to another time. Music is just information/a sample in format know. Still a reason for living though. I'd rather have a few more great albums than a family or a career right now...............is that a sign of psychopathology? I can't have what I can't have so lets embrace that which I can?????????? I've just finished reading "Big Sur". Kerouacs in his 40s and all his fellow beats are sort of mature and he's just a divinely possessed alkie, even Neal Cassady is virtually a family man and he's going mad, and he can't relate to his peers, girls, the city or nature anymore. I relate, I really do. I've just started re-reading "On The Road". I've not read it for ten years. Weirdly, I'd never heard of Kerouac until 1998 when my friend Greg insisted I read it. (When I was) an eye liner soaked freak acutely rather than chronically broken hearted with the world and my own dysfucntion everything seemed purer and rawer. Ten pints a night in the SU bar just talking about god knows what but I wished I'd taped it. I remember making Burroughs-esque cut up collages on Gregs floor listening to the stones and the doors and the manics and the smiths. We wanted to be stars and burn a little more brightly. We hated the working class machismo and student conformity and psuedo student rebellion that surrounded us and of course inevitable partially impregnated us but never quite enough to disqualify us from our game or qualify us for everyone elses. The Rocky Horror Show. The Verve in Wigan. Morrissey Evenings. Manics Nights. Homorerotic Photo Shoots in grave yeards. Forgotten indie bands with that horrible late nineties production values. Cheap hardcore shows with an idiot straight edge elite. What can I grab from that time? Theres no girl or boy in my arms. I have no job and no real ambition. Do what? You die in the end. People talk of "the time given to you" but thats a ridiculous, twee quasi-metaphysical statement. I woke up this morning and I was me, I still am at dinner time and I'm haunted by memories. I'm twisted by the disjunct between memories, expectations and reality, by a sex urge relentless as the urge to take a shit. In the evening I have a few beers to take the edge off and I really shouldn't. Theres no reason for consciousness to manifest like this. I feel like smashing up the TV every time I see a politican, a certain kind of advert of just some or any cunt who thinks they know better than me and I don't why I'm so annoyed when I know I know nothing and anyway mamillian power games are inevitable and no amount of education flushes out of the harsher eges of maleness and anyway I think I've drunk too much coffee and tea. If we were satisified life as it was told for us would end. I didn' answer my own question. Aged 19 I was directionless and this is the first time since that time that I've not had an overriding, compelling force. Minus love or glory theres just cookery and books.................. An investment bank crashes. Why would I care? Camera's and databases all over Albion. The presidents going to get elected. Obama vS McCain is pitched pretty much at the same level as the WWF. Corporations exist. The environments fucked. They're talking about "Jades " poxy metastasing vagina on politics shows.................. The laptop warms my lap. This is the closest I've had to anyone sitting on it in three and a half years. I have to deal with banks and I have no choice. I'm probably the happiest person I know, weirdly.................... I know I've said it all before but maybe if I arrange the pieces something new will emerge. I'm still working on the definition of the unspeakable, perceivable non communicable though its idiotic and I just sound like some stoned pretentious hippy which is funny beacuse.............

19/9/2008:  Harsh Dry Cough: I'm tired. I got up early to see my learning mentor. Spent Money I havent got to see my learning mentor and got to uni and he wasn't there. He has a hernia. Yesterday I bought Platos "laws", "Towards the African Revolution" by Franz Fanon and an anthology of materials/leaflets by various radical 1960s factions from both Europe and the US. My cold is on my lungs and have to spit or swallow jaundiced pulmonary jissom every twenty minutes or so. Lovely. I wish the news would stop papping on about the banks. I have no house, savings or pension and if you have those things they're nearly always used as a stick to beat me for my decadent lifestyle (if you don't save you'll be like the grasshopper in the ant and the grasshopper etc). Sorry. No sympathy. Don't care. I lose nothing. I can still afford £1.18 cheap and nasty cider of death. Not my problem............... This is a pressure moment to be sure. I here voices around people unquestioning the week before freshers week why am I here I don't know anymore and I can't seem to go back or forward and its lunch and i'm not sure whether to surf for a while or walk back to manchester and if I go home do I make a meal I ate a kilo of veg last yeah big brown turds of doom now inevitable ripping soft ass tissue people talk such shit maye I should look for records or books? I wonder if I am mad or sane and it doesn't really matter what answer I, anyone else or society comes up with cos its all constructed at the end of the day and for some reason I think about writing and laughing gas highs. I have an outline for a story its about care homes, abusive fucks, African Migrants, philosophy, rock n roll and gutterpunks and Nazis getting their heads caved in with paving slabs. Its not exactly I work of fiction but if I don't tell the story, distill the legend maybe it will drift and dissapear and I dunno I guess my presence on a subcultural/systemic level has to have some kind of functionality maybe? I'm not well dressed or good looking enough to be a mere background prop........I worry about my journal article, the main problem, comme toujours is that at base I just don't give a shit. What is my motivation?  Neurotic and Intorverted? Eysicnk would have scaled my motivating factors as fear of punishment and I think there may well be something to that but most shrinks are full of shit and most theorists are perverts which is maybe why I relate to them..................

4/10/2016:  Enron Redux:

I found  this interesting. Somebody else in the media has made the point that I've  been making to all and sundry that the credit crunch resembles a bigger and  badder version of all that Enron crap 7 years back.    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/04/enron.creditcrunch  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  My course is a worthless joke and I'll pass it just but it all seems a little  ridiculous and I'd rather learn German and read Houellebecq in the orignal  french in bed and I'm drinking Assam tea which leaves a slightly bitter  aftertaste and I guess prefer Earl Grey with its laser violet streaks in its  nylon bags beautiful colour that no-one stops to see as its dropped in  boiling water adjacent to disposal.    I look at my face in the mirror. Theres a mallon streak in my all too bushy  eyebrows. My esteem must be screwed or something. I can barely look at myself  in the mirror. I always prefer to imagine myself in another dimension. As  some kind of beautiful and heoric object. Not the flesh, blood, piss and shit  confused monkey that I take myself to be.    I don't want my career. I need a job. Humans need "strokes" or they  go crazy. I'm crazy. I'm fucking crazy. I don't quite know what the problem  is. I guess the wavelength I vibrate at, my natural dance is somehow  discordant and just out of rhythm with the lock step work and fuck oif the  rest of the world.    I look in the mirror. Have I killed myself and unaware of the act and the  consequence? Am I caught in process?    However I re-arrange to pieces. The picture remains the same. The authors  signature is in the arrangement. All over the crime scene. The jury always  shouts guilty (super ego shouts guilty), the id shouts "more" and  and and the ego is weak but nowhere near as compromised as those around it  though it still can't look at itself in the mirror.    Sometimes. In the shell. The mollusce dies.    To post or not to post. I dunno. I write a lot of self indulgent shite. Write  now I'm on autopilot. I'm shy. I forgot to be heroic. They don't want hero's.  Well not too many of them. To be, to become - what? I good citizen - to whom?  And how? And why? Don't assume for a second that philisophy will help.    I'm an anomic product of my age and my age is shifting (chronologically,  developmentally, socially epochally - if thats a word and it probably isn't  but when grammar stifles thought fuck grammar).    The lawman, the artist, the man with power is always the thief who can some  how make his act look like virtue, the source of law itself. The original sin  confers sin on everything else somehow.    People run on TV. It just strikes me as a little pointless and hopeless. Its  grey and cold outside. Summer has suffered an infarctus and rigor mortis is  setting in. Birds flee in packs distant in slate stratopheres. Monkey life is  ridiculous. Vote for the monkey whose poison closest matches your own. Monkey  markets fall. Monkeys don't change.    In philosophising. I find. Goes back to the monkey. Monkey fucking. Monkey  tools. Monkey love. Monkey politics. Monkey fights. Add language, guns and  clothes. What more is there? The catigricol imperitive? Objective  morals????????????????    OOOOOH OHHHH OOOOH OOOOOOOH. BARE MY ASS. SCRATCH MY BALLS. POOP FALLLING OUT  OF MY ASS TO MARK MY TERRORTRY AND WHO CARES IF THAT POOP IS JUST WORDS.  BANANA JUST LOOKS LIKE DICK. CIVILISATION AND HUMANITY ARE NOTHING IF NOT  OXYMORONIC. WE ARE ALL BROTHERS IN OUR MONKEYDOM PRIOR HUMANITY.  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  10 feet in distance 10 lightyears in mind.    its no-ones fault.    so it goes.

 8/10/2008:Smells Like Sick: I'm sat in the computer lounge at the nursing building at uni wondering why everything smells of vomit. I really hope its not me. Just got out of meeting with tutor. The end of this thing is draaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaging. I just want this fucking course to end. Not that I want to work. Learned to make new chickpea and potato curry. Its the simplest recipe in the world. Unlike the butternut squash, baby spinach and Walnut tortilla I made yesterday. I'm not sure if I'm a student or unemployed, or whether I'm crazy or not. If I had the money I'd be in Dublin/Amsterdam or New York. I've nearly been writing this for seven years. I've not been properly hugged by anyone I gave a shit about in that time. An atypical blog comment. An atypical blog meta comment. An atypical blog meta meta comment. And thus the cliché continues................ Another thought about the credit crunch. None of this would have happened if the Soviet Union hadn't collapsed because some of the sillier excesses of the Chicago School economic approach et al would have been rained in. Could it be that in an inadvertant way Communism in death managed to acheive what it never managed in life? (The vision is of Scratchy/Tom drinking themselves to death in exetential alcoholic hell stupor after their existence has been denuded by the utter destruction of their Jerry/Itchy nemesis...........). Fuck yeah I'm weird. The person next to me has left and the vomit smell is gone. I feel harsh cutting people out of my life even when it is necessary and justified. I guess humans aren't designed for clean, clear emotional amputation. I wonder how close I got? Some dreams aren't meant to be I guess. Or come true at the point where you've stopped caring (though I haven't stopped caring). At least I never get THAT high or low. I'm in a permanent state of mild irritation.............. I sometimes wish I was more of a man in the sociological meaning of the term. If I induce a state in someone it certainly wasn't intentional. Accidental all the way down.

 9/10/2008: Slight Flashback: Albums which make me think of a time and a place...............Long night coach rides to Oxford and London. Primitves - Lovely Ride - Nowhere Depeche Mode - Black Celebration/Music For The Masses/some Great Reward Hole - Live Thru This L7 - Bricks are Heavy Didjits - Hornet Pintata Throwing Muses - Throwing Muses Church - Blank Crusade Suicidal Tendencies - Suicidal Tendencies Killing Joke - Nighttime/Brighter Than A Thousand Suns Skinny Puppy - 12" singles Nirvana - Incesticide The sound:From the Lions Mouth/Heads And Hearts + Shock Of Daylight The Get Up Kids - Four Minute Mile My Bloody Valentine -Isn't Anything I remember the first crack a few days before the 2000 American election. When it all ended in August 2001 I had the first Fear Factory album and Converges "Jane Doe" on me. Maybe that was a sign. It all seems a long time ago now - but it seemed like a painful eternal now for a long time. I'd like to go back to Oxford one day. Its the place I developped a taste for hummous and spent a fortune on black coffee there. I regret not buying a copy of Leonard Cohens "Beautiful Losers" second when I had the chance........ Things aren't better or worse merely different. I suspect however that I'm blast welded to the same life course developmental stage…..

17/11/2008:Blue Comet: My birthday was a sequence of diasasters interspersed with some nice moments. 31 is a crap age. I'm putting on weight. I've just discovered I have a week reprieve. I'm a little fed up with my course and my life and my trajectory. The reason why I'm not a grumpy angel is that I'm no angel. This wasn't the plan, but this is where I plan from. I ate meat for the first time in eight years on Friday. My body rebelled and puked it back up. I didn't want to. I'd ordered an expensive veggie platter and I was bought an even more expensive meat platter. The waiter refused to admit he'd got my order wrong (later, he neglected to bring me a third of my main course) and wouldn't return it. My friends was paying for it and started to pull his face. I got chided and like the punished child I permantly feel like I caved in (admittedly I planned to eat meat the once on my 30th birthday, to show my will over my usual behaviour patterns). I ate 2/3s of the platter and felt like a whore. Later a blew serious undigested meaty chunks over a large surface area of my least favourite South Manchester suburb. I ended up telling my dad to go fuck himslef because he accused me of stinking while I was sorting out a computer virus problem for him. When I told him how I smell (staight after getting out of bed) was fuck all to do with him he started getting arsey. This all ended with him accusing me of being on hard drugs. I got a grovelling apology later but I'm just fed up of being treated like a fucking child (whoa, this feeling is surfacing a lot). My landline for the second time this year appears to be cut. Which is strange because I'm not behind of MY payments. I'm in a bitchy mood. People around me collapse when they go without sex for 3.5 weeks. Try 3.5 years and endless horizons of nothing. Try sinking yr libido into exitential texts, Mario Kart and veggie cooking all in an attempt to divert my gaze from the endless horizen. Meldramatique, moi? D'accord............... I'm Simon and I'm only 31 Chronologically. If I had any faith in people or myself whatsoever I'd be radical. I fear I maybe last of the late, great Generation X-ers. Fear the planet of couples. Better find a gym. My belly gets resurrected so many times it makes Jesus look like a crap amateur. I hate Manchester Uni SU (where I am right now). It reminds me of failure and loathing. A degree here, a white hair there, it reminds me that not much changes (actually, I find campus culture a lot less puke inducing since the end of the Cocaine and Carharrt pants culture that was so fucking insidiuosly dominant during my initial sojourn at Club 18-21).

1/12/2008:View From the 3rd Floor: I can't write any more on my essay. I still have my dissertation to write. And five exams to do. I should start work this week. On a psychiatric unit. My first paid work in 25 months. I've got debt. I need a trip to Amsterdam. I need to be around people who actually talk to. I need to be around positivity rather than negativity. I have the mindset of a little boy. I find it harder to be open. I'm a jealous and lonely god. I keep thinking of ludicrously detailed things to write and sometimes I write fragments but I just don't write here. I can't stay a teenager for ever. But I hate the adult world. I hate "mature" grown up people who view me with disdain. This is all coming to an end. 6 months? 12 months? 18? I consider working in America. I consider wandering the Earth. Exactly how much delusion is there on this trip, its hard to say because I'm deluding myself you see. Pigeons. People. Cranes. Flats looking like insectoid rockets. Orange sky. disdain from all angles. inertia. Meditation going down in threes in mutliple colours. Observation of my non self by a non self. Disruption of posture, breathing and body language. Concentration on the 22 major arcana along with their correspanding hebrew symbols and representation. Blanks my mind for a while. Doesn't heal a void torn by a broken heart and lack of communication. Somedays I feel like I fell off the earth in some obscure manner and I'm permantly three seconds behind or in front of everyone else depending on who is processing the data. I hate the feeling of drifting apart with no blame implied. words words words so adolescent but was is a grown up? A highest arc of human potentiality or mereley one who has stopped growing? It depends how you look at it I guess. 31 31 31 31 31 31 31 31 31 dead as a sexual and emotional being hate stress and pointlessness hate the image of the father hate the poiticians merely annoyed at myself I want I want I want.................. in my unmade bed that broken futon with its mouldy mat do I breathe spores I wonder will they kill me quicker than other peoples tobacco than other people than myself?????????? I hate jocks. University is full of them. Is it wrong to intensely dislike men who sail through life without apologies on physical force and the zen silence of tensed muscle????????????I don't care. I do anyway. I vent these adolescent feelings. Something happened when I was 19. Kept me trapped here. One day all my comrades died and lived on the next ten years or more as bad parodies of themselves. Growth all gone. Simulcra remains. An post apocalyptic wax work museum of dead souls.

2/12/2008:The Hiatus Is Important Here: Going to parents for the first time since the fiasco of my birthday. My sister is coming home from Scotland. I dunno. I find it hard dealing with my family, especially my father. How can I sum up the problem? When I was younger my dad used to insist I do something "useful" and exhorted me to "not become an academic dickhead". But I am what I am. The jock gene is abscent from me. It was an adolescence of books and Morrissey, not screwing girls because they and I held requisite positions in the local social structure and chasing balls over fields. Then further stuff happened which short-circuited my masculinity further and made me crazy for a long, long time. And I had undiagnosed dyspraxia. Probably. I'll turn up tonight clutching "The Rebel" by Camus. Converying my feelings along with telling the truth is taboo. And there'll be beer in the chiller though my dad doesn't drink anymore. And I have hidden whiskey and cider if there isn't. I'm spending the afternoon doing ECDL training. The evidently christian girl running the training has been a little icier since she obviously got the idea that I was gay (one interesting professional placement and a red ribbon in a strategic place!). Not rude, just icy and maybe its paranoia on my part. I really don't like the way the British polity is going at the moment. The idea that David Cameron is somehow capable of representing the diverse interests of the UK population is as ridiculous as me representing hardcore body builders. New labour is scarcely better. The stuff going through parliament right now is nasty. Lie detector tests for people on benefits. "Wellness" notes to show employers what you can do rather than notes that declare you sick. Forcing of single mothers with kids under 7 to back to work interviews. This stuff is demeaning and this stuff is fucked. Then theres to dayglo bibs with "community payback" written on them for people doing community service. We're not even one step away from the chain gang. The reclassifacation of Cannabis is as illogical as the making it illegal in the first place. That'll stop every stoner I know won't it? (all of which work - unemployed people can't afford it!). Christ, the America of GW Bush is discredited. Why does the supposed left wing in the UK seek to emulate it? Its heartless and its puerile. I just finished reading "Stupid White Men". Michael Moore is a terrible writer with a plethora of exceedingly saliant facts. He had one idea that appealed. The idea of running Green party candidated against right leaning democrats and getting people to back left leaning ones. There should be a progressive, non sectarian leftish movement in this party that deliberately targets right wing, blairite/brownite MPs, but leaves leftish ones alone. They should be utterly media savvy and should have none of the arsey idiocy of the SWP/Respect coalition et al. Why would I want to vote for a party which strikes me as being to the right of the Conservatives under Major? I wouldn't and of course I don't. I'd rant on longer. But the most poisnous piece of legislation proposed in the current round is: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/01/uk-to-punish-publish.html http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/11/413023.html?c=on "Terrorism" is such an abused phrase its become meaningless. The police, like politicians (and anyone with power without equivalent counterveiling checks and balances) should be watched and critiqued harshly. Yes, they are necessary evil. But a necessary evil is something else other than purely necessary and that should never be forgotton. finally, I'll end todays rant with a Neil Gaiman quote a sort of liked: “...You ask, What makes it worth defending? and the only answer I can give is this: Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you're going to have to stand up for stuff you don't believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don't, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person's obscenity is another person's art. Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost. “ Neil Gaiman

9/2/2008: מֵאִיר שִׁמְע : I walked to Salford to do work. Got side tracked. My last journal entry appears not have posted. Poo. My mind is full of school horror and the ghosts of failed romance and the reality of disconnection. This is a dysfunctional way of thinking, I know and I can change it anytime I want. And I do. But the motor all too often slips back into neutral. I often half awake/half asleep believe I've killed or that I'm in prison or maybe I did something horrific sometime. I need to be fully concious before that feeling goes away. "Many years ago I was talking to the Dick-king. I suggested his libido and womanising where somehow linked to his Dad leaving at an early age. That somehow he wanted to prove himself more of a man than his mythical, absent father. This struck a cord and we went at that. I think this maybe was the zenith of my career in pop psychology. I've talked an awful lot of shit since. Probably talked an awful lot of shit then. Probably talk an awful lot of shit now. I'd like to think that there is the odd truth in there also. Or failing that something beautiful." ------------------------------------------------------------------------- What I need to do: 1)Get my dissertation finished - its a no brainer, rilly 2)Get my ECDL finished. I'm a fucking idiot. I should have done this ages ago. Thats 5 exams. nothing else rilly matters until I've done this because thats what I need to do to graduate. 3)Learn to drive. I hate cars. But I need to work and cars help facilitate that. 4)Apply for jobs. My inheritance will run out soon. I find it hard to get the enthusiasm to do this. The reality of work is exploitation and bullying and the tolerating of stupid fucking people. 5)Bed. My room is a tip. But making out on a futon with a mouldy matteress is just, um, not cool. IKEA pine definitely seems the way to go. 6)Alcohol reduction. Because theres cheaper ways of killing myself. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- I know all this. why isn't it done yet????????? This is the most insecure I've felt about a Christmas since the millenium.

21/1/2009: 2009: The honeymoon has worn off. I keep getting sent out to shifts that get cancelled. This costs, sleep, time and money. This morning I read stuff in French eating a giant footlong veggie breakfast sub with a large latte. only £3.70. I'm beeing harassed by a very odd man. Its beginning to seriously piss me off. I have a swollen gland in my arm. It hurts. Nurses on power trips piss me off. There is nothing worse than stupid, opinionated people in a position of power ESPECIALLY when some of that power is over me. I handle criticsim badly d'accord............... I can hardly listen to music as my stereo is still AWOL. My dissertation needs to be finished. I'm going to learn to drive this year. I wouldn't be shocked if the recession turned into a depression. We could all end up eating fingernail dirt and people would still praise Thatcher and vote Tory. Sheesh I'm feeling misanthropic today. I'm gonna buy a big fuck-off 28" wok with lid and make veggie vindaloo.

23/2/2009:  Boheme: Spirals. I pick out fragments. Mind samples. Clichés. I try to re-rrange them into some kind of picture. Never for its own sake or my own sake but for the sake of the audience and who is the audience ( :) ). Somehow this period of time reminds me of the last few months of '99 and the first few of 2000. That epoch generated two outcomes. One of which I'd dearly like to acheive and one I'd dearly like to avoid. Its gonna be close run thing, because I'm masochist or crazy maybe. (I look at the photos and I wonder and yes I can see it and how do I square my crazyness and someones elses in a society that is itself crazy mounted in a history that is is itself crazy). They've found virii living in virii. If my feeling is right? Its been a long time. I mean the twin towers were still standing and I'd didn't have my BA. I'm not sure how far I've moved but who doesn't want to feel that way? I mean who doesn't wanna relate? Feel like a God? Communicate? The special need the special for the most part they just walk alone. By special I simply mean statistically rarified and stratified. I need an alien because sometimes I don't feel it was an earthling that lodged the patterns in my nascent foetal souk. I used to like the comic shop in the corn exchange. In the heads of others there is? I dunno. I mean I've spent years trying to figure it out and I have theory but talk is cheap and life is so very expensive. Theres a lot to be said for home-made minestrone. Please let me be right. You see the luck I've had...............etc etc etc and now I'm old and bored I still compose myself out of old lyrics and band photo's and kids programs. The adult world is still a million miles away as I pluck out grey hairs from my eyelashes and wonder just how fucked me liver actually is. I see people far worse off than me. time4beddy byes....................

8/3/2009: cold. cold. cold. cold. cold. cold. cold. cold. cold. cold.  cold.: For the first time in years I feel the pressure to write to impress. I guess its maybe just the first gulps of endorphin backed spring air. Spring doesn't arrive for another week. Thats how long I've got to get my dissertation in. In the meantime I'm living in a cold nuclear winter of the soul. I'm glad to have the net again. Its cold in this room. I don't mind work. It pays me bills and my colleagues are all good people and it makes it sound like I'm stetched on my CV but really I'm just chugging away. For now thats OK. Theres no master plan. Get the fucker in and LIVE. I want cups of Chai. I wanna read Spanish. I wanna do psilocybin truffles in Amsterdam. I have a zit on my chin. I need a hug. But doesn't everyone? In this sensation famine I sometimes feel the duality of the robot day routine and the manifold re-occurence of the avatar marker. 2008 was a fucking mess and I made one big mistake. But you know what? Fuck it! My heart was in the right place and I think I'm a better person than I was in 2006. I'm a dark person. I've had a lot of stuff to deal with but one doesn't have to stay that way forever. If Holden Caulfield was a girl would I fall in love with her? Methinks yes. Its easier to fall in love with thoughts and dreams than real objects in the real world. I'm not sure you can patch through to real objects in the real world.

20/3/2009:YYYYAAAAWWWWNNNN:

Spring  wipes its cock on winters corpse. I'm stuck indoors. My dissertation is two  weeks late. I have instructions to buy bog roll and soap powder. Maybe later  I'll make dahl. I watch French cartoons and listen to "Death in  Vegas" and Techno-punk.    yaaaawwwwwwwns.    the rent is due today. i don't have the money to pay it because my pay is  arriving a week late. I think later I'll walk around the jewish cemetary for  a while.    These are dangerous days.    Does my brain slip because of the hormones or do the hormones cause my brain  to slip. Before sleeping and before rising I meditate on this and I don't  really have any answers.    Yawwwwwwn...............

 22/3/2009:  Blue candle.  Purple Candle: Incense    Cups of tea    So many pastries    I can't find the enthousiasm    This is my last hurdle. I get over this. I've "won".    It all feels like 2000 replayed. I thought maybe I'd be better of by now but  obviously not.    I have no desire or aptitude for this stupid project.    I rather be asleep, hugged or drunk.    I have no peers here.    The task takes on orange hadean hues................    its the crunch moment.    it hurts.    i'm scared    theres something wrong with me somewhere    even if I survive this    and i intend to    fundamentally    i haven't changed    and i still have no-where to go    but this needs clearing    I see one path    not sure where it leads    but I intend to walk it    as far as I'm allowed    I see omens hang in there air    and thats evidence of magical thinking    and thats a sign of madness    I don't look bad for my age    i have enough cola in the fridge    to give a rhino diabetes.

 29/3/2009: reading e-mail, high on caffeine with my balls on the fucking line makes me feel ill and sad.: I feel worried and I feel sad. I can't work for shit right now and everything is either a billion times faster or slower than me. I feel the need to dance a panic dance flailing arhythmically around my hovel throwing punches and clapping my hands to a metronome that detonates in my head alone. I read old e-mails. Sometimes you lose something precious. Someone precious. Whatever whatever and you try to rationalise it and the only thing to rationalise is that its gone but theres denial and you've invested too much in a collapsed stock so you return to pick the scab and theres a scar there and you want to pretend that there isn't. Most days are OK now but the faultlines remain and on a day like today history bites you in the ass just by the sheer relativity of the stress experience. So many things come to mind and they drown out happy times which seem to shrink and drift so far away. This is the only way I can write this fucking uni bullcrap and it makes me ill. Tomorrow I'll feel dead inside. Tomorrow. Tomorrow always comes but it feels a billion miles away. I have my mourning and my insecurities and all this will pass but something, somewhere along the way must change. I'm lucky. lucky. lucky. lucky. lucky. I need a new phase in my life. and I can't live with the stress. There are certain things I wish I could reconcile myself with better. I'm not so bad or good in the ways I've been constructed as "bad" or "good" by others. But I'm worse and better, infinitely in other occulted ways. The caffeine is wearing off. Thank fuck. But I can't take sleep either tonight. I'm not 19/20/21/22/23/24 anymore. where am I going?

26/4/2009:Pressure Drop: i have no money and no job and shortly no home. i'm in the process of buggering up my MA. At least the sun is shining. i can't skip the feeling of doom at the moment. i'm faced with the prospect of moving back to my parents shortly. It may well be a long, hard painful summer. the last 13 years have lead to what exactly? Being a middle ranking officer in a social care organisation or being the shit cleaner at the bottom. Which I was bullied into doing. fuck that. need to get on an evil keel. need a total paradigm break. Something somewhere is wrong and though it might not be my fault I'm the only one who can put it right. I'm not sure where to start or whether its worth the effort. What I'm doing is not an option long term. what I'm doing isn't even an option short term at the moment. Another 10 years cleaning up faeces and taking abuse and drinking myself stupid because i hate my job and my life and someones going to end up scraping me into a bag way before my time. Need some imagination and some luck and maybe academia forever isn't the answer. i was never any good at it. sometimes I wonder if I have ADHD or something similar. but if you go looking for mental health or development problems, some twat with a shit diploma from a crap college will find them for you. where shall i drift next? 31. 31. 31. 31. 31. 31. 31. 31. 31. 31. 31. What do they see what I fail to see? What do I see that they fail to see? What that is seen is not there at all? Pathological rainbow states of the mind.

21/5/2009:Some Words: the man drew a gun on his opponent and it went bang bang bang. Cordalite smoke hung in the air like micro cumulous. Time slowed down and crow type calls echoed like avian conch calls of doom. Haemoglobin water arose the earth. No one saw a soul escape. Maybe there was no soul to lose. Methane escaped from the vent of the victor. Adrenline survival joy displaced by thoughts of vengeance, god, crise de Coeur, tumours and strokes In the distance I saw a dust storm a blowin.

14/6/2009: Reality Displaced……: Still have terrible writers block. Life is still in flux. Going to the seaside next week. Going to a festival in Scotland in a month. Money is still scarce. I will be unemployed again soon. I couldn't care less that live journal is ten. here is something I read earlier and wanted to translate accurately. so I shall.......... "Puis vient, tout de suite, à chaud, la communication politique : un projet de loi, le durcissement d'un décret, une règle à appliquer sans faiblir, une nouvelle norme pour que ce crime, cet accident, cette catastrophe, ne se reproduise plus jamais. Surtout plus jamais ça. Nous vivons ainsi entre émotion à répétition et principe de précaution. Parfois cependant, la télé se réveille. L'autre nuit, après le crash du Rio-Paris, Paul Virilio décodait justement ce qui est à l'œuvre (dans l'émission " Ce soir ou jamais " sur France 3). Il parlait de "synchronisation de l'affect", d'une société où l'on passe des communautés d'intérêts à la communauté d'émotion, où le présent est oublié au profit de l'instant et où notre rapport au réel est chamboulé (to overturn/disturb/throw into chao) par " l'accélération de la diffusion instantanée de l'émotion ". Il faut lire Virilio. Lorsqu'il glisse en passant que, enfant de la guerre, il a vu "comment le fascisme a manié les émotions", il faut l'écouter. Non qu'il y ait quelque part un tyran omnipotent décidant des axes de la propagande de masse. Nous n'en avons même plus besoin, tant nous sommes habitués à ressentir sur (télé)commande les émotions qu'on nous montre, en flux continu. Dans nos têtes, si l'on n'y prend garde, l'histoire en train de se faire s'efface peu à peu, ou encore, pour citer Virilio, l'événement se dissout au profit de la succession des accidents. Comme il y a désormais des "accidentés de la vie", nous voilà devenus des victimes de l'émotion." Then comes, all of a sudden, white hot political communication. A new law, the hardening of a decree, a rule to be applied without weakness, a new norm in order that this crime, this accident, this catastrophe, never happens again. Sometimes however, the telly wakes (from its dream). The other night after the Air France/Brazil air crash, the social theorist Paul Virillio decoded the mechanisms at work here (on the TV show "this evening or never" on the TV station France 3). He spoke of the "synchronisation of emotion" where the present is forgotten at the expense of "the instant" and where our relation to the "real" is thrown into chaos by "the acceleration of the instantaneous diffusion of emotion". Virillio is a writer who needs to be read. When, on the TV screen, a child passes into view in a wartime environment, Vrillio sees "how facism manipulates the emotions", it is necessary to listen to him. Not that this is the question of some all powerful dictator deciding of the "mix" of mass propaganda. We have no more need of one, as we are used to feeling on (remote) control the emotions that we are shown, in continuous flow (note the pun here is an english equivalent of an untranslatable pun about the french word for remote control and control. the english version here works in the same way with the same semiotic ramifications). In our heads, if we are not careful, the historical narrative is in danger of being erased, bit by bit, or even, to cite Virillio "the event dissapears and is displaced by a sequence of accidents". In as much as we see "victims of accidents" (in the media reality creating/perverting discourse), we have today become victims of emotion.