MATERIALIST DOT NET

strange new walls block passageways and odd structures sprout in the quad like cheap mechanical mushrooms, promising bright lights and rivers of ear-bleeding music to entrance a townful of bland cherubs. to get out of my house, I either sneak out through a tiny secret forest behind the back, or crawl beneath the giant wheels of the articulated monster lorry parked in front. in short, the college is transforming in preparation for the june event. read the blurb and tell me it doesn't make you weep, from sheer pity and heart's longing for the apocalypse.

many years ago, a flatmate of mine fried the goldfish of another flatmate alive 'as an experiment'. it was ethically sound, he said, the goldfish had no sense of self that could register the neural impulses that constituted pain. quite the cartesian. the fish in question was one of a pair, acquired at a funfair in a plastic bag; its school-mate was watching the operation from a glass jar poised next to the cooker, and was subsequently fished out and bitten in half. this morning it occurred to me that I should thank this guy; put him in my acknowledgements even. in hindsight, from the standpoint of my chapter on the slaughterhouse, the incident marks a point in the path of my exposure to forms of violence that disguise themselves, or try to appear as something else. in the same breath, there are more recent others I should thank. but I'm not going to. go to hell you twisted bastards!

[I even commemorated the goldfish incident with my first and shockingly rudimentary flash animation.]

not dead; spelunking the hazy depths of my thesis structure. trying to write a first draft of my concluding chapter. hell on earth. as flats and local friends will attest: not quite a person right now, nor quite one for the company of such. verbalization will resume in due course.

despite the fact that my last paycheck comes this month. my room is a heathen chaos, I swear the corners of the room are physically decaying, but I like it. it fits. the weather is good and writing is inflected by old X-files episodes, coffee walks and rather pleasant dalliances that leave long aryan hairs all over my room [hi kirsten!]. I look forward to the rest of my life, and I'm even enjoying this bit. I wake up moving things and bits of argument around in my head: a good sign, subliminal engagement, even if it also tends to characterise periods of a certain oddness, on my part. I'm not entirely present. this afternoon, the idea occurred to me that I might be able to twist gell and his theory of the 'art nexus' into summarizing the various strands of my still profoundly unsatisfying argument about ethnopolitics and industrial meat fetishism. it just requires the temporary suspension of disbelief involved in treating industrial meat as a work of art.

come back to bland-as-porridge wolfson, find my mailbox crowded with unpleasantness. apparently, I am at risk for legal proceedings from a company called GE Money. back in march, a dumb tubby little high-schooler till-bimbo swayed me into applying for a 'topshop store card' in exchange for a £2.50 discount on a pair of trousers. in so doing, she failed to disclose that I was signing up for a lifelong flat £4 monthly fee. 'you can just throw away the card...' yeah right. after two months of ignoring topshop missives as spam, the credit company is now threatening to 'close my account' and issue legal proceedings to recuperate the £8 I owe them. beh and ech. to hell with my credit check rating, come and get it you corpocrat bastards.