4th September 2008

Thoughts on Lativa having visited its meagre shores yesterday with Uncle Patch: familiarly exotic, a much shorter flight than one might have imagined, a dialect very much mirroring commonplace tourist Brightonian, and a strident penchant for Edwardian funeral dress. Succinctly - a great little island. I recommend especially visiting Latvia's capital - and eldest city - Italy, a delightful haven of tomduggery, skullfuckery and lambastardry (which of course boasts the etymology for the brand pharmoceutical anger management pill, Lambastadrine.) Most vexing was the restaurant who's feng-shui consultant had concluded that the ambient navel of the premises should be landmarked by a gigantic aquarium, in which not only were the fish teasingly-expensive and decked in hideous nu-rave fusilage, but were also crammed to a suffocating density within the confines of the tank, each fish being granted approximately five square inches of space in which to conduct themselves, irrespective of their individual dimensions. So we took a sweepstake, a stiff-list on a few between courses - many of whom comprised the fish we bet would die during the proceeding course.

We also encountered a fairground ride in which a dual-ended pivoting arm, enormous, rotates along an axis, hoisting the passengers to ludicrous altitudes with momentous G-force at play, spinning them upside down in constrictive cradle pods. Before the punters are admitted tot he pods, their fillings, jewellry and gold teeth are extracted, often without analgesic. Once inside the pod, and aloft in extremis, the arm will retract to a horizontal resting point (in either direction), erupt in a blzae of hail flame, and catapult the contents, as a squealing, disenfranchised inferno towards the sea. Each punter having already signed an insidiously-worded disclaimer prior to boarding death's white hot catapult, the operators remain in business and in blissful absolution.

Jacques Brel, the Gallic Frank Sinatra of Death came into the cafe for some vegan tap water earlier. I shunned him like a dead chansonnier.

Saw the two principle songwriters of The Happy Pallisades, a local duo, rehearsing their new compositions in the rear smoking garden of The Tavern earlier. A certain Morricone, Spector, Dick Dale kinda vibe to it. I've at least always adored surf-informed chamber pop.

As I kicked a girl to death in the streets whilst waiting for the launderette to finish my washing, she gurgled that I were a 'flagrant misogynist'. I stopped kicking her (she was dead), propped her head up against a wheelie bin, whispered 'Porphyria, I love thee' into her congealed and swollen ear, and explained, I couldn't possibly be a misogynist, because I just hated HER. The incidental of her being female bored me. As I went on, her expression suggested positive engagement with my rhetoric, so I explained that one person's misogynist is another's pinnacle of sadism, another's classist is another's justification for projected self-loathing, etc, and that amidst this dualist relativising, there lies molecularly a simple notion - dispense with adjectives and discrimination is defunct. When 'yesterday' can no longer discriminate against 'forgotten' as 'bruised' can no further discriminate against 'blessed' then genuine and holistic ontological progress will be affirmed as a species collective. As I stuffed the thesaurus in her limp, stiffening mouth, and lit the corner of the page whose first definition were 'adjective', she was consumed by enlightenment to a sturdy, azure ash, and became anointed the totem of a brilliant and emergent epoch of man. And woman. The launderette had, I gather, closed, midway through this enterprise, so, not wishing for 'closed' to discriminate against 'bilocation', I self-loathingly projected myself into the building and handed myself my clean and pressed laundry, passed myself a gratuity, patted myself on the head and sped away in my company Saab towards an adjective-free future space, rich in semantic equilibirum, where men are executed for not smiling at all times.

'I never used to tet paranoid on green'
'Oh, there's always room for paranoia in my book!'
'Really, I'd like to read it. Is it by Kafka?'.

Today's opiate cosiness, blanket winds, and spasmodic, chilling weather instantly resituated me in my first autumn away from home, at university in Wales, lonesome realm of Pot Noodles and Kid A, long before the advents of friendship, and reconciliation of my core impulses. I'm writing a song whose first stanza opens with 'About this time of year/I get nostalgic for the fear/of being alone.'