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fuck. last night I dreamt up a whole science fiction epos.

the earth was hit by a strange spore that travelled in the air like pollen.

victims changed physically, growing larger, with drawn, exagerated faces that looked a lot like the long-nosed masks you'd see at a venetian carnival, only deep red and drawn in anger. and they started preying on their fellow humans. all biological life on the planet shifted and changed under the influence of the alien spore.

then there were hours of individual storylines and narratives against this backdrop. one was like a rehash of Mann's Death in Venice, another one was (surprise surprise) like Poe's the Mask of the Red Death [I bet those of you who know the story can guess how that one went...]. yet others I have no idea where came from...

there were viral policemen chasing long green boats. old men shuffling along beaches in the throes of painful transformations... elegant parties wrecked by the plots of the younger ones. old women transforming in their boudouirs into monstrous red hags with hard faces...

weird.

I can't go into detail about all this, it's fading as I write anyway.

the dream finished off with a fast-forward and a sequence of the mutated earth, long after the infection reached stability and a new ecological order had emerged. red trees with eyes and lashing tentacles trapped and ate roaming semi-mutants with horns, red faces, thorny living grass flowed across the undergrowth and enormous, bloated, 20-story rodents grazed on pine trees...

in this strange landscape a feral post-human teamed up with a legless flying vampire to invade an old bunker, emblazoned with reich eagles. inside the Fuhrer was having his immortality treatment in a jacuzzi, courtesy of his mutated assistant. they killed him, and in killing him destroyed something of the old order that persisted.

weird. my subconscious writes moralising postapocalyptic stories.

disgruntled.dismayed&disarrayed. distant, distanced, disgusted. dismembered? dissolute. distended. dismal. distorted. dismayed. disoriented. discombombulated. disengaged. dislexic [hang on...].

disco disco disco: discordant? 

discordian.

my mind is adrift with flotsam. I'm off to topple a Holy Chao while it sleeps.

ack. I can never focus my eyes in the mornings.

this makes life difficult and leads me into an immaculate catch 22 situation: if I had a cup of coffee, I might be able to focus my eyes properly. if I could focus my eyes properly, I might be able to make a proper cup of coffee...

clear as daylight. one of the many touching little impossibilities of everyday life, the sum total of which is easily summarised as a meta-situation: biological life sucks. but if I wasn't biological, I would not  be aware of the fact that my life didn't suck.

cheerful innit. now, if I could manage not to pour boiling water on my fingers...

in Oslo again, feeling oddly dislocated.

two days ago I walked into a newspaper kiosk and stood staring at the candy section... you know when youre in a foreign country and you go to buy chocolate, and when you reach the chocolate section an enormous expanse of unfamiliar wrappings with strange lettering looms before you, and you're suddenly put beside yourself, and you draw into yourself in that "it's ok, it's just temporary, I'm going home soon, I don't have to get used to this" frame of mind?

like when you're driving through Germany along the Autobahn and your parents stop off for fuel and you scamper into the store and scamper straight back out again because all the CD covers have scary men with moustaches and the ice-creams have bizarre unfamiliar mascot logos, and everything is lit by glaring late-night gas station irridescence, and its all like a foreign country [which, admittedly, it is...]?

well, that' how it felt.

for about 15 minutes, the chocolate section in a kiosk in my native country felt to me like a German gas station.

had my "aura photograph" taken today, just for fun. wanted to take one for a long time, and the "enigma millennium festival" was touring whiteley's next door...

"so sit down, put your hand on the sensors, smile at the camera" and one of our wild-eyed crew will interpret it for you.

which I did, and she did. oooo-ing and aaaaa-ing when the picture came out, she insisted on showing it to everyone, and all the people that manned the stall got together to look at my photograph.

"wow! I've never seen one like that! it's really pretty! what's that colour? wow!"

[I swear, I'm not making this up].

one guy with a beard and wilder eyes than the rest was convinced I had telepathic powers. "you've got it there babe!" [eehh...].

the picture was, admittedly, quite cool. the whole frame was filled with bright orange and red, with an oddly-shaped purple and white trail coming in from the right side. in the middle of the picture my throat and face were illuminated in blazing white light and areas of purple, and there were scattered trails of light blue and magenta throughout.

it looked nothing like the sample pictures they had scattered around the stall, and I admit to being not-so-secretly gratified by this. my suspicions of grandeur are confirmed.