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the rot-month. that's what they call this time of the year in sweden. the time of rotting.

I opened three consecutive cartons of milk today. straight from the fridge. every single one was thick and solid and curdled. because of the heat, they said. yeah right. the heat that seeps through the walls of a fridge and curdles milk at 4 C.

witches. the sea lies still and dead and murky in the heat. a sargasso of thick green algae that roll slowly along the bottom of the sea and stick to your feet like a veil (or a shroud) when you swim.

the heat. 24 degrees at the bottom of the sea, 20 yards from land... at night people flee their sweltering houses in crowds for the chilled refuge of terraces and the beach.

a diffuse stillness hangs over everything. not quite choking, but...

and yeah. i can't help but think of cool air and fans and ice and the ventilator our friend had to borrow to keep the flies away from the body of her dead husband for the two days he lay on the couch after he died, waiting for his sons to come back from the other side of the country and pay their respects.

man, this has been one hell of a month.

man. you ask for something real to happen, then it all happens at once. girlfriend breakup, old friend dies, and relationships dissolving all around. crazy stuff.

the world renews itself in mighty shrugs. dangerous if you're on the surface of it...

these days I can't be bothered to regurgitate my (nonexistent) personal life on the site; politics makes me sick; the sci-fi weirdness of the world outside my window far transcends my ability to phrase that weirdness; I sit, quietly rotting, abusing myself, drinking too much coffee, eating nothing, going slowly and deliberately toxic for no apparent reason except an indecipherable desire to do so.

I watch too much daytime tv and I have learned to blitz a game of spider solitaire in 93 moves. I know the names of the crew on "Love boat: the next wave". I am lazy and bleary-eyed.

groups of people dazzle me, like the bright sun when you emerge from a dark room. it makes me scuttle back behind my cupboard.

everything seems trite.

I'm in a gray limbo, waiting for something real to begin.

basically, I'm wearing my trousers rolled. prematurely.

and it's entirely self-inflicted. I could get myself out of this, if I wanted. but not really wanting, I stay in it.

weird. I hate it when I do this to myself.