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I am going to die.

the human race will probably die too. most likely under the weight of its own stupidity and greed and ignorance.

but it doesn't matter that we're destroying ourselves.

because we were all doomed anyway.

the sun itself, yummy warm infernal nuclear power station in the sky that it is, is finite in duration. incomprehensible amounts of precious irreplaceable lifegiving energy are constantly flung meaninglessly into the dull unintelligible void.

one day, hundreds of millions of years from now, the great solar furnace will run out of combustible chemicals and extinguish itself.

perhaps not before overreacting and exploding in a vast ball of superheated plasma that swallows the globe, melting it into its component materials.

if it survives, on the other hand, our poor little planet will plummet into its final winter, turning into a huge dark frozen ball hurtling through the stellar voids, forever and ever. a cosmic popsicle.

----

----

not just that: the universe itself is most likely finite too.

when all the stars have fizzled out, and tepid pointless useless entropic radiation fills the black gulfs between the dark, dead, drifting celestial bodies... when nothing moves, nothing stirs, and there is not a glimmer of living intelligence or energy or life left in the entire cosmos...

well hey. we won't be there to feel cold and bored, at least. can tell you that.

----

the point is, to cut a very very long story short, all things human are doomed to perish. all our efforts will ultimately, in the great scheme of things, be erased by forces beyond our control. completely.

vaporised. nulled. rubbed out with the great senseless universal black tipex that encompasses all things in the end and makes them equal...

----

luckily, there are other things whose finitude bring less consternation.

----

such as the workday.

the fact is that it is friday, and I can go home now. and sleep. and read. and rest my weary straggling struggling eyes. and have my hair cut.

----

cosmic schmoschmic.

screw the cosmos. screw universal perdition and the inhrent futility of all things human.

I'm going home to play tekken.

"A lot of people have been calling asking if they can sell T-shirts and buttons. We have no control over what they sell. We're just asking that it be in very good taste."

- JUDITH ANDERSON, mayor of Terre Haute, Ind., on preparations for Timothy McVeigh's execution.

what can you say...

I'm thinking of moving.

I've heard mars is nice, dry and comparatively lacking in americans.

yeah.

just realised that through some freak accident of HTML circumstance my diary makes a point every time you access the front page. if you have the right equipment, that is. the RIGHT stuff.

mucho excelente, as another illustrious diarist here might say...

but hey, let he (or she) who has ears hear...

besides that I am well, and in good form. I realised I can leave the flat at 9.15 and get to the office only 5 minutes late, if I skip my moneyburning foray into Coffee Republic on the way...

so much for earlybirds and mouth full of repulsive invertebrate earthslime creatures.

not for this little bunny, no.

give me some lazy 9am lettuce, partaken of on a sundrenched sofa. cosmic conditions coincide to blast a high-powered window of pure beaming sunlight down on our couch around 9am these days. on a good day.

ha. ha. ha.

you won't believe it, but it happened this morning. my hypothesis as of 10.15 this morning is that the whole of Dalston was shifted into a parallel dimension where the Isles actually receive, and received, enough sunlight to keep the englishmen in... meanwhile the Indian empire is flourishing, africa was never colonised, and the nazi flag waves over continental europe... etc.etc.

so what was I saying.

ah yeah. lettuce. and carrots.

now.

I am the polyglot office rodent. me and biblical slut two desks across from me, who is the office buddhist beatnik vegetarian. also a rodent, in some sense.

so *eyes dart furtively around* lettuce? lettuce? *crouches down, hops gently over to next desk, sniffs at the sub-editor*...

LETTUCE GODDAMIT!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!

hmmmm.

*gets up, brushes off, coughs discretely, ambles back to desk*...

*sits down* or maybe a cup of coffee would do...

bloody hell. I should have expected this. in an age of ADD and MTV, the next logical step has happened. the pathetic fallacy. the natural world, prone as it ever is to anthropomorphisation, has begun to take on the less desirable characteristics of being human...

take spring this year for example. spring, heh?

like f*** is it spring. winter winter almost summer spring, autumn spring spring midwinter spring winter winter interplanetary void-cold winter spring winter winter winter...

and that was just yesterday. [haw haw haw].

suppose ADD natural cycles are not a new thing in this g-dforsaken land, is it... take the weather. last year I looked out the window at one point. sunny on one side of the street, <i>hailing</i> on the other. in the distance I saw skyscrapers shrouded in looming purple clouds, banks of fog, other scattered hailstorms, and rain; shafts of sunlight everywhere.

not a moment of steady, uniform, focused, head-sorted-out-properly-and-screwed-on-right weather, anywhere in sight. no wonder these people took to the seas. the native land was driving them out, and out of their heads. poor stunted malnourished Victorian buggers living in ugly rotting houses, I say.

no one pities the imperialists, do they. they just had traumatic childhoods..

no mention of this meteorological flux chaos thing in the Revelation of John, I checked, but there certainly should have been...

the weather gods have suffered mental damage from the pollution. irradiated through holes in their ozone roof they have finally gone mad and stopped cleaning the house. not just that, they've regressed to the stage of scatterbrained sadist 8-year olds.

'haha, lets torment those little creepycrawly skyscraperbuilding termites down there. where's my magnifying glass? Zeus, get the lightning gun and mom's bag of hailchunks, I'll get the waterhose...'

what we need, I think, and what science has yet to grasp the need for, is Ritalin weatherballoons. actually, make that rockets packed with drugs. maybe Ritalin incense sticks. pump some sheep up with Ritalin before we burn them and send them up as sacrifices to the great unruly classroom in the sky... we may as well make some use of their deaths, right?

*shakes fist to heaven* : <font size=3>shut up and be quiet, d'ye hear ??? we'll get you back for this!!!</font size=3>

*clouds darken quickly, rain starts falling over desk*...

what the...

<font size=7>---ZZZZZZAAAAAPPPPPPP---</font size=7>

*drizzle drizzle fsss*

*ash settles gently on the office floor*

holiness of holies. the Lord hath risen.

and so now have I.

about to set typing fingers to keyboard on an academic paper I was meant to cowrite with my father in mid-march, but which got delayed by deadlines (for him) and lack of perceptible brain activity (in me)... thought I'd limber up with a quick little entry here.

mood assuaged by some lovely melodic and insanely, truly insanely cheesy happy self-styled hardcore, 1995-issue. unbeatable. also cup of coffee, biscuits, comfy jumper. fully armed.

so: paper is on the idea of 'creative destruction' in nietzsche, and how it was appropriated by schumpeter. I'm writing the nietzsche bit, father the economist writes the schumpeter and historical contextualisation on that side of the academic divide...

basically a quick schematic analysis of zarathustra to establish a tripartite model of creation destruction and stagnation, a quick flim through other major works to establish supportive evidence, then a profile of the creator-type to see if there are links to schumpeter's model of the entrepeneur... presumably upon return to london a few forays into the British Library to secure some corroborating secondary literature.

['move---your---ASS' my media player's going right now. 'RAVERS---UNITE!!! ---- maximum respect to the european posse!!! maaaaake some noise!!!'. cue cheesy fast tinny melodica beats... see if any of you can identify it... *grins*. ok I've got crap music taste...]

erm, what was i saying...

['its nice to be important, but its more important to be nice'... classic.]

oh, yeah. back to the paper. will be interesting, but there's a certain pervading resistance to getting your brain working again after prolonged periods of mental lassitude... I basically want to watch cartoon network and not think. and this applies to most things I ought to confront and resolve. not academic thinking in particular. relationships, washing-up, life plans and changing jobs, that kinda thing... " if you leave it long enough it will go away"-school of thought... same policy the allies used against hitler before WWII. see how much good it did them.

hindu three-element theory. raja is the fire that burns away the earth of tamas, leaving sattva, the bright light, behind. I am a glimmer of raja, a glimmer of sattva and vast, terrible, uncharted quantities, territories of damp, dead earth where the sun never rises and scurrilous chitinous creatures crawl and burrow and whimper and screech...

yet at the same time I am goaded on by my superego. raja? which is not super at all, in this case it's simply the part of me that aspires to evolve, take responsibility and understand... as conscious as any part of me, as easily understood. probably <i>not</i> an internalised projection (an injection?) of my father, then.

----

*brrrr*... hate this feeling of opacity. when your mind is obscured and youre trying to think constructively about something, and your thoughts follow the random twisted paths of your physical brain structure, rather than extending to their full natural capacity and reach...

by the way. the irony of starting a paper on the great mustachioed one, 'der Anti-Christ', on the day of the Lord's Resurrection is not entirely lost on me... *grins*. my own tiny little iconoclastic pomoism...

happy easter everyone. may the memory of the shadow of the dead G-d live again forever and ever... [kickin it kickin it kickin it YEAH! MOVE --- YOUR --- ASSSS!!!! Yeah. rave nationn! stay tuned...]

naw, naw, do not worry, He is not dead.

I survived my frontal charge into the monitor last time, with mild scarring and a DIY lobotomy, no more 'mister ratdude' either... probably. g-d. gotta stop letting my demonic inner Beasts run loose in my OD. diary turning into a playground for imaginary animal creatures... what has it come to, I ask...

I haven't updated for a bit because I didn't have anything nice or edifying or funny or even vaguely meaningful to say, I was dead tired, and I was busy at work.

also, on Good Friday I climbed into the belly of the Giant Steel Bird and flew, flew, fleeeeew across the sea to the land of my ancestors, where I'm now resting and drawing strength from the land, and nourishment from the vast quantities of chocolate chip cookies that my mother fills the house with when I go home...

so don't worry. I am quite happy, and will return when circumstances warrant it. or when I run out of week-end.

so in the meantime I hope you're all happy celebrating your bastardised celtic spring fertility rites with your ostara/easter/whatchamacallit.

happy easter. keep your crosses up. fight the good fight. le roi est mort. or something.

blueberry muffin and double espresso for 'lunch'.

I am entitled to take an hour off for midday provisions, but somehow in the end I never do this... must be my deep-seated corporate loyalty. happy to sacrifice the meagre hours of my existence to further the growth of the Whole.

yeah right.

hence, I'm now loyally reclining in my blue-and-black-plastic chair in the near-empty office, idling <i>fiercely</i>, bare feet firmly planted on my cleanswept table, muffin in one hand and typing with the other. little crumbs of f'ing cakie all over the table.

empathically not a kodak moment.

the day today stands, as is evident, in the sign of minimal activity, on most levels... a day for mighty, earthshaking doodling.

even my imagination is running in first gear these days, my dreamlife or lack of such being evidence enough of this... take last night:

I was in the office, but my flatmate crank had for some reason taken over my computer. as an employee of the company [which he isn't]... and I had been given a tiiiiiny, tiny little fucker of a computer instead, with an even more shrivelled little microscopic monitor... it looked like the pastel plastic ones you get on keyrings, for chrissake... and he'd taken my desk. I was working from home. and people kept calling me up on my mobile, mistaking my number for the number of someone "im-por-tant". which I obviously wasn't.

pathetic isn't it... not exactly mindblowing stuff really...

yup. need to sort the little bugger in my head out.

ought to beat the shit out of him, probably, and leave him bleeding in a Mexican graveyard with no passport. that'd do it.

Tyler Durden territory. 'punish me and you punish yourself'. *sigh*. wish my suconscious intelligence was, in fact, a savvy hugely charismatic streetwise culturejamming fighter-philosopher with plans to overthrow Western civilisation... at least it'd be interesting.

nah. rather I get some cringing neurotic office rat with paternalistic worries about whether people like him or not, whether he's being succesful, what he ought to be doing. a tiny little stupid Kafka protagonist lurking in my head.

good thing he's a powerless wimp, or my life'd be worthless...

*rolls eyes back in head, tries to talk to himself*: listen. LISTEN! one of these days... ONE of these days I'm TAKING MY WHOLE LUNCHBREAK! HAHAHAAAA!!!... that'll teach ye to feed me pointless shallow dreams, you rotting lump of carcass!!

d'ye hear that there, little Kafkan in my head? I'll get you! I'll get you and you can't do anything about it!!! hahaha...

*unexpected angry twitch in mousearm. frowns, looks down, momentary puzzled look*.

What the 'eck ?...

*head bolts up, speaks in funny squeaky rat-voice* Oh yeah? you think you're so cool? Hah? Think you can put your feet on the table? Think I'm a ratty wimp? Take THIS then you motherf...

*forces left hand then head into desk drawer, slams it shut several times*

*squeaky voice again*: Still there you piece of superior 'I'm-so-conscious-I-can-laze-around-the-office' SHIT???? take THIS then you fucked-up waste of sp...

*tries to strangle himself with mousecord*

*pathetic normal consciousness voice*: GGGGHHNNG... no, no, I didn't mean it! *choke choke* you're cool! I'm the one to blame! I'm sorr...

*fanatic screaming squeaky rat-voice* AAAAARRGH!! I'm so tired of your complaining and your lazy ways!!!!! Die die DIEEEEE you worthless piece of waster cr...

*drives head full force into monitor*

CRAAAAAAASSHHHH !!!

*sizzle sizzle spark fzzzzzzzzzzzz...*

in the venerable tradition I'm establishing of quoting my friends witticisms, I thought I'd refer an incident that happened last night. it amused <i>me</i>, anyway.

chatting after dinner I mentioned the remarkable expediency with which the english had processed my requests for information yesterday. 'oh yeah' said rustpot, 'the <i>english</i>! we're <i>good</i> at that'. [we have a habit of squabbling about the worth of english culture. yanno: ugly food, ugly houses, ugly people, ugly culture... I always end up quoting the joke about why the english went out and took over the world: to get some good food, decent-looking women and warm weather].

anyway, I retorted something about this being the same grey, <font size=3>anally retentive</font size=3>, pedantic efficiency that crunched up the Indian empire, enslaved large parts of the world and I might have added, created the concept of 'concentration camps' during the Boer conflict at the turn of the century. I didn't add it because I didn't think of it at the time. but I put it in now, to make myself look more clever. ah, the joys of <font size=3>(be)hindsight</font size=3>...

at this point Biblical Slut, who's doing an MA in ethnomusicology and has been getting heavily into his pompous pomo wordplays interjected 'yeah, that sure puts the "<font size=3>colon</font size=3>" into "<font size=3>colon</font size=3>-isation", doesn't it...'.

[...]

a few seconds of stunned silence; then we all groaned...

no dogs this afternoon. stayed in the near-empty office to help out on a collective company deadline, for a <i>really</i> major-league player who's booked us to provide them with content.

felt too lazy, and myriad minor excuses not to go kept popping up in my mind. cruel. pointless. noisy. full of all the wrong people. poor little mechanical rabbit. poor dogs. they shoot them if they break a leg, and keep them in cages and whatnot. don't want to encourage cruel and objectifying treatment of animals for primitive human amusement.

besides, I felt the need to raise my profile in the company and look diligent after months of abject slacking.

so I've barely surfed the web today. rather, I've been busily contacting representatives of various londinian event organisers to confirm the dates of their events. a blessed release from my day-to-day struggles with the inherent inertia of mediterranean tourist offices, who systematically refuse to extend their sights beyond the next two weeks in time... immensely frustrating when you're trying to produce content three months in advance.

londinians, on the other hand, like the overeffusive americans, are neatly and precisely clockworked. very nice. we like the english. as long as they're on the phone and in a professional capacity, that is.

also, I cleaned up my desk. which may not sound like much, but it was. it really was. I had six months of accumulated tourist office brochures [stacks up to 2 feet in height, I'd say], random paperbacks on taoism and "the electronic eros", half-empty coffe mugs & brownie crumbs, old cokecans with crucified bluetac figures, a bronze statuette of shiva nataraja dancing the dance of destruction; floppy disks with random material on alien abductions; letters from home, scattered paintings and prints, business cards, rizla papers & empty tobacco pouches, pens, mummified plants, stacks of photographs, mousepads [several]; two scissors with unnerving rustcoloured stains on them;...

it really had to be done.

I think the catalyst was the rather large insect that crawled across my keyboard this morning when I got in. it was a kind I normally associate to damp cellars and the underside of mossy rocks. don't remember what it's called in english, in norwegian it's called "monk's lice"...

also, my deskmate Nasty Clever Biscuit kept muttering about my imperialist enroaching tendencies. my chaos kept threatening to spill over on her side of the desk, and she resented having to beat it back with a stick all the time...

let's face it. disgusting.

given that my desk was the first desk on the left-hand side when you entered the office, it was always the first landmark to meet investors coming in. imagine the sight: me sitting half-hidden by stacks of useless material, coffe mugs and withered plantstalks, long-haired, scruffy-looking, heavy clocking headphones pumping barely concealed german trance; overhead lights zapping on and off like something out of poltergeist. puddles of water on the floor, moss on the walls, rats scuttling back and forth, dogs trotting through the black-and-white office with human hands in their maws... [ok, forget the last bit. that was kurosawa I think. you get the picture though...]

no wonder the company got into trouble with the suits.

my only legitimation was that I was part of the funky-grungy alternative new economy. a blatant lie, and only a temporary stopgap.

so now I'm cleaning up my act. maybe.

a new epoch in history is dawning. I shall become sickeningly neat. a veritable manifestation of the anti-entropic principle.

yeah.

well, maybe. for a bit.

literally that is.

going to see the dog races in walthamstow on a company field-bonding excursion. weird. I'd say a pact of fellowship written in the blood of innocent prey, but they use artificial rabbits these days. which doesn't bode too well for the intelligence of the Beasts does it.

----

need to decide whether I find the practice ethically objectionable or not. and it would be foolish of me to do so without exposing myself to it in the flesh, wouldn't it.

----

hopefully, I shall be able to regale you with a field report at some later point. unless I have been torn limb from limb by savage hounds, that is.

I always did think of my inner animal as a bit of a rodent... do wish me luck. please.

'intelligence emerges from the maelstrom of pointlessness'

(crank. at the kitchen table. 15:48 today. while I was washing up.)

I've just done all the washing up in the flat. for once.

hush hush kids. I know.

three hours it took me, three hours with a background of steady high-powered chitchat; listening to one of those metaphysical conversations taking place across the kitchen table... history ('history is really an algorithm, isn't it...'); the human spirit, evolution, the nature of capitalism, utopian social models, evolutionary algorithms, the failure of communism... nature, morality, law, justice, the quantum leaps that separate humanity from the animal state; the problem of consciousness; crime, criminal responsibility, the moral status of the paedophile...

whew.

crank got up this 'morning', miraculously. a bit out of phase with reality, and quite a sight. padding into the living room, fag in corner of mouth, waves of high-tide serotonin lapping gently against the coastline of his mind. first thing he did was grab a bottle of white wine and cane it. happy, and still high as a kite.

as I was saying, it took me almost three hours of groovin' and movin' with that old brush and the funky wash-gagdet we have here: a washing-up stick-washing-thing with a hollow shaft you can fill with washing-up liquid. excellent gadget indeed.

mission accomplished, I settled back in the sofa with a fag and a nice second-hand copy of Michael Jackson's 'Moonwalk' [yeah yeah. I got it yesterday for 59p, and I thought it sounded interesting. the man is after all a cultural icon of the late 20th century. I managed about 20 pages of gutchurning facile 'beautiful' claptrap, loving words and 'imagine that...'s every three sentences before flinging the beast aside and having a shower to cleanse myself...].

see if I can now take a more active role in the preservation of the organic dynamic system of the flat.

yeah. definitely.

I'm also having an excellent morning. woke up about 10 in a giant square patch of blazing sunshine that beamed down through the window down on my bed. stayed in it for about 2 hours, dozing like a drunk cat.

got up, did the washing up, heroically, rewarded myself with several cups of nice freshly brewed cafetiere coffee.

full of energy now, grinning randomly and without cause, aaaand with nothing to do all day but chill out and read. I'm planning to delve into the final part of the Omen trilogy [also 59p. probably also a stonker. unbeatable classic I predict]. admittedly, it's now 18:30 and I've <i>already</i> done nothing all day... but hey, that's what sundays are for isn't it. and it's still light outside. life is worth living after all.

the Truman show has to be one of my favourite films. we watched it last night, and it had me in paroxysms. 'Cue... the sun'. best line of all time. fantastic stuff. a feat of the imagination. all elements of symbolism perfectly synergised, meshing like well-oiled little bits of celluloid machinery. the guy who wrote the script must have been cracking himself when he wrote it.

hmmm. might just watch another film now.

hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

yeah.

emerging from the maelstrom of pointlessness, I think I just might.

yeah. bring it on...

ok. I'm really sick of this goldfish theme now. no more.

here's an update instead. a RL entry. no blathering.

3.30 am. feeling empty, tired and toxic. definitely on an unhealthy streak now. and for the last couple of years really.

second night in a row I'm staying up til 4am to keep people company on their way to stansted on early morning flights. last night it was old friend, erm, lets call him Helmsman (because his life ambition is to build his own houseboat and sail the seven seas, and he studies "marine architecture" in an unnamed English coastal city), and his fiancee Kung Fu Starlet (well, her name has something to do with celestial objects, and guess what she does in her spare time). (ok it's late and I'm very tired. forgive the names ).

Tonight it is ?gf and her sister, who're on their way to Florence. ?gf presently asleep on my bed, very sweet, dark curly hair floating out all over pillow. curled up in the foetal position, wearing one of my warm scandinavian jumpers. reminds me of a small furry animal. a kitten maybe.

sister is a different story. on the same night as the goldfish died her boyfriend of two years, Biblical Slut broke up with her, and roamed off into the world incommunicado. we pieced the story together over the next couple of days, and there is much sadness and a bit of bitterness, and a sense of radical change in the air. things shift, and this couple were quite nicely welded. I lived with them for a whole year, last year.

brooding unnamed flatmate off his skull on Es. keeps running around in circles conversationally, going back to the same 'ol subjects. again. and again. and again. being very sweet and concerned, but in that slightly contrived overenquiring chemical way. a touch of the neurochemical bulldozer about him. manic eyes.

[this is not a critique of Es or people who take them BTW. just a tired observation.]

I'm useless at doing the washing up. apparently. "pathetic". can't be arsed to bother with it, though there is a growing consensus in the air that I ought to do more. ah well. suppose I'll make an effort.

"really strong pills" is the key word for the last couple of hours. and dimly remembered possible homoerotic experiences. the joys of eavesdropping...

me clatter clattering in the background by candlelight. translating what two people in the sofa into words on a screen. weird. not a webcam. but similar. stealthy and somehow illicit.

<i>"life is that which constantly seeks to overcome itself"</i>

- Nietzsche, 'Also Sprach Zarathustra'.

two days ago my flatmate brash bought a pair of goldfish, brought them home in a plastic bag and put them in a jar on his windowledge; with all comforts and amenities, overlooking his desk, with a nice little picture of Jesus and the Virgin Mary wrapped around the back of the jar, looking in.

for spiritual edification and amusement, one supposes, though the role this particular picture played in the ensuing tragedy is perhaps not to be underestimated.

we can only attempt to reconstruct exactly what happened.

there was just one goldfish in the jar when Brash went to bed at 2am last night. the one goldfish whirred nervously around in circles in the jar, outlined against the streetlight outside the window, skittering off the moment it detected movement in the vast deformed world outside the jar.

there was a wet blotch on the topmost sheet of his printer paper stack, a stack that stuck up and leaned like a walkway towards the little jar on the windowsill. the drying blotch zigzagged vaguely down the sheet, ending in some tiny splashes on the upper casing of the printer.

a twitching trail of splashes lead on from the base of the printer across the desk towards the edge, and over it...

I was brushing my teeth when I heard the cry from brash's room. flutter and I rushed in to find brash staring in shock at something on the floor, wedged in between his printer desk and his bed...

I looked down. at first I thought there was a bit of chocolate on the floor, wrapped in orange foil. then the huge staring eyes, the little fins, the little puddle of water that had pooled by its mouth...

and if this was a Stephen King novel I'd have screamed.

what in fact we did was observe a few moments of shocked silence.

the dead thing did look remarkably sinister. pathetically out of place and tiny. tragic, if it weren't so pitiable.

dead little orange arrow, pointing at us in accusation, aimed for the door, presumably for freedom and the vast open spaces of the sea...

a tiny little aquatic spaceman who forgot his spacesuit.

it was lying on its side, and its one gigantic cyclopean eye gazed up at us, unseeing. the water around its mouth looked thick, almost like regurgitate, or transparent vomit. translucent alien blood.

I hid behind flutter.

it had chosen its final resting place well. looking into its eyes from the level of the floor [as I did, obviously, crouching down] you couldn't help but notice the gigantic inescapable sign above and behind it. it had landed in front of an old case of baileys.

and arrayed in titanic letters, large as a billboard in the things thumbsized microcosm, above the poor dead thing... was the ironic epitaph:

Baileys. The Original.

and so we marvelled at its tremendous feat. g-d knows how, but it had somehow wrenched itself out of the water, from a jar that was only about four inches across, seven inches tall with four inches of water, heaving itself up and up to the brink of the jar three inches above the water and over it, hitting the printer paper stack and rolling down it, hitting the desk, twitching and heaving itself across the desk to the edge, and fallen off it, a fall of at least four feet... for a two-inch creature that is a way long fall.

I hope it died quickly. the water had pooled around its mouth in a coherent puddle, with no signs of struggle or spasms. no water around it.

I hope it died from a broken neck. or something.

and so we marvelled at the sinister, heroic stupidity and self-destructive drive of this fleshy lump of floating turnip; wondering quietly to ourselves how something with a clinically proven two-second attention-span could possibly display such rage and strength as to perform this feat...

then brash said he wanted to pickle it.

and I got my camera out.

and now the little thing rests, floating immortal in a jar of vinegar in brash's room, and lying forever prostrate, intact and staring out at you, in a picture folder on my laptop harddisk entitled 'goldfish fatality'.

respect, o nameless little goldfish.

you taught us something about wildness and passion and life.

we will never forget you.

here's a missive I sent about five minutes ago, to the head of anthropology at one of the universities I was applying for to start a PhD in september [if anyone's interested, I <i>could</i> post my proposal here: quite interesting, <i>I</i> think :-) certainly not run-of-the-mill stuff].

the story is, I missed an interview in early march because of tube problems [browse back in my records to the time around March 6 and you'll probably find it: something about buses and cigarettes and letting coincidences govern major life decisions], and the interview was rescheduled. problem was...

-------

<blockquote>FW: interview today, apparently?

Sorry to have missed the interview today. Sadly, I wasn't informed it was happening until half an hour into it, which posed a bit of a logistical problem for me. Particularly as I am busy working on an important project, and couldn't take the time off with five minutes notice. :-)

[...]

On the topic, I've been reconsidering my plans for next year in the light of various recent developments, and I think I shall be pushing back my plans to return to academia for another year or two. I'm sorry for the effort you've all put into this, but given the problems we're encountering it seems perhaps it is the will of a higher power? :-)

All the best,

[sangreal, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah]

</blockquote>

----------

obviously, this entry is a complete waste of space, and I apologise deeply and profusely for it. feel free to mailbomb me.

but leaving that aside, the main point of it is,

I'M NOT DOING A PhD NEXT YEAR!!!!

[...]

what should I do instead ??!?

"If you could have a song written about you, what kind of song would it be? Who would you choose to perform the song, and what would it be called?"

----

"song about me".

primarily dolphins singing. at 2/3 of normal speed [slowed down]. in the background, erratic ECG beeps morphing into occasional blasts of obnoxiously loud, heavy techno; winne-the-pooh melody. floating bits of lyric-samples = Jennifer Lopez and Slobodan Milosevic reading out GWBUSH's inauguration speech. backwards. revealing secret message [obviously].

video of Lopez tearing her hair out, naked with one kidney in a bathtub full of ice. lots of translucent little Aphex Twin midget presidents with big boobs dance around her, waving McDonalds paper bags. Bigbird crucified on a metal cross in the background, big furry tongue lolling. next to the cross but behind it, Tony Blair rigid, leaning against a wall. pale and frozen, rictus grin [as ever]. occasional close-ups of his face. staring eyes. seems to morph into William Hague and back again.

interspersed with black-and-white shots of vietnam-helicopters firebombing civilians; and koalas, eating eucalyptus leaves. furiously, at 6 times normal speed. deforestation as song progresses, these shots are replaced with plastic-clad children in a wide range of pretty pastel colours, playing in fields of burning cattle, kicking dead bodies and hiding in burst rotting ribcages. all of them male and female with my face now. [thanx to Aphex Twin].

whole things build chorally to a climax, the shot where the volume is tweaked to levels that are damaging to the human ear and a gigantic chorus of 200 million hydrocephalic mutant singers with pale skin, huge black blind eyes and deep bass voices swarm Rome and climb the Colosseum to sing out an anthem of praise to ME, [in ancient aramaic maybe], shaking the world to pieces with the sheer power of my Name...

finally trails off with shots of debris floating in space, and dolphin song fading out.

- light, breezy, tropical tang to the air! [spring a possibility after all, even in this bleak and dismal City].

- warm, cozy shafts of light, filled with dustmotes and midget tiny faeries [microscopic flying mutant mice, maybe...MICE: the Next Generation...] filtering through our warehouse windows.

- Sunday breakfast with heated chocolate croissants, yoghurt, and FRY-UP; still do not understand British propensity for extreme breakfasting.

- flat's first big argument: about the aesthetic merit of a second sofa in the living room. aesthetes flutter and ?gf vs utilitarian boyz. majority [us] probably wins, though court adjourned.

- padding about in pyjamas, dressing-gown til 8pm. very Zauberberg. down to the chesty rattling cough. pigmentation moves towards an interesting shade of pale, and crimson in my cheeks. yet, the crisis is over.

- Brian Aldiss, taken on the sofa in homeopathic doses.

- lots of cool people taking lots of fiendish drugs. not me. just paracetamol. and a few tabs of acid. [no, no. joking...]

- mild crisis of self-worth. inspired by Aldiss, spent some time dreaming up new words to precisely describe dreamy inner states and particular fears and melancholias.

- great relief at my not getting married after all. amazed at the very real relief produced by the annulment of an imaginary situation.

- some sex.

- death of the Kyoto agreement. [or rather, the realization of this fact and some of the ramifications trickled through to my dimmed consciousness]...

bottom line:

sunspots and intense solar flares.

[ explains all of the above, really. except maybe the breakfast thing... ]