monday 28th february, 2005


aaagh, here it is, the last day of the month... i have no idea what next month's design is going to be. i can't take the pressure. my brain is fried from watching constant repeats of vic reeve's big night out... i thought i would thrive on the endless onslaught of giddy surrealism but i'm floundering. and i like it. i've been reduced to mental candyfloss yet again! thank you sirs.

monday 21st february, 2005



RIP brother
maybe he had just had enough. again i say, fucking hell.

sunday 20th february, 2005


i can honestly say i was not expecting to see anything like the bizarre paintings of shirobokov when i was online today. these things make you question everything you think you know. go all the way through the gallery then ask yourself what the hell you just saw.


The one who is transporting an ear
if 'queen bitch' is in the life aquatic's soundtrack that would be pretty durn cool.

saturday 19th february, 2005

wednesday 16th february, 2005


US men sue over inflated hopes

Gary Younge in New York
from The Guardian

so let's review... mr. coluzzi a) has a small penis and now the whole world knows; b) is stupid enough to reply to spam and now the whole world knows, and; c) is upset because he got duped by spam and he thinks he deserves compensation and now the whole world knows. sheesh. i'm truly at a loss, people.

i know season three of ANTM is over in the states but we're only on episode 5 over here... so i know eva wins and i always thought it would come down to her, amanda, and yaya in the end. i was hoping for toccara cos she's cool and was really sad to read how her wonderful, bubbly spirit got broken by the competition. there is a giant "L" on my forehead, isn't there? damn.

monday 14th february, 2005



i was gonna do a huge babble about all this political stuff that really pissed me off on saturday, but i just finished doing the final tweaks to the even worse site and i'm spent.

to celebrate valentine's day in style, me and the little mister ordered some gourmet pizza and downed some green nyquil. that would partially explain why the email i just sent to all the people on the EW mailing list is so friggin' bizarre.

i gotta go. my vision is starting to blur and i like it.

america's next top model rules. go toccara, eva & yaya!

friday 11th february, 2005



this afternoon, in my ever-expanding attempts at creatively skiiving off, i was hiding in a stall in the ladies room in G floor, centre block of the county council (it sounds more and more like a gulag every day, doesn't it?). The goal was to go off radar for at least 10 minutes, when a sound from beyond the battle-ship bleak walls literally made me cock my head like the victrola dog and freeze, waiting in silence. someone was whistling in the corridor stairwell, a melancholic, haunting melody - like it was coming through a thick fog in the 1940s, totally film noir, cloaked in dark mystery. it echoed so perfectly, the dire architecture of granite and linoleum building creating the perfect acoustics for such a wafting, solitary sound. i just wanted it to go on forever, the tune wrapped itself around my head like smoke. and then, just as my soul filled with most unexpected feelings of promise and wonder, it was gone.

in those all-too-brief seconds i had an epiphany. it's moments like that, random and arbitrary, that i want to remember forever. i must keep always these vivid memories of sights, aromas, sounds, sensations... that's what i will take with me into senility and beyond. the times where i feel completely alive, and in the moment, feeling everything happening inside me and around me all at once, spiralling out into the universe. god damn i have so many.

i don't think i was fully alive until i started living in moments like that, and it wasn't until i left new york for berkeley in early 1998 that i really could. i was always too self-conscious, too self-aware to just things happen to me. the turning point: an outside table at cafe roma on college avenue with donna, sipping my first ever latte the morning after i arrived in california for the first time. el nino had been ongoing, weeks and weeks of non-stop rain preceded my arrival; but for a couple hours that day the clouds broke, and i had never seen a sky so blue in my life. NOW i knew what she had been talking about! i looked up at the whispy ring of fog that circled the peaks of glorious mount tilden, towering over the houses just across the road. it suddenly dawned on me what i had done, what i had been thorough to get where i was at that very instant. i felt like i could finally breathe, and relax, and let go a little bit. i started learning how to enjoy myself without worrying about the consequences. now i know to alot of people, that's a total no-brainer and something they've been able to do since they were children. when we are children that's what we all do. but at some point some of us forget how to just enjoy, how to just be. if we are lucky enough we get it back. i am very, very lucky that i got it back. if i remember nothing else when i'm dribbling in a greasy flowered armchair in a rest home in surrey somewhere, i want to be able to recall instants like that where i could just sense warm summer air, smell night-blooming jasmine, or hear mysterious whistling in an echoing stairwell. all the rest, well that's just filler really.

firesuite by doves is just ripping my brain apart in these huge radio shack headphones right now. do you read me? do you, really?

tuesday 8th february, 2005



ohhhh... i feel awful... it's like a couple of sumo wrestlers are battling it out in my stomach... i haven't eaten anything weird so it's probably my system fighting a bug... we have an OFFICE MARTYR at the county council who insists on coming to work, coughing and sneezing into her hands and rubbing them all over your desk and paperwork while tediously over-explaining stuff you already know how to do whilst a booger gracefully protrudes from her dainty germ-infested nostril... i skiived off at 2pm, watched some robins in a park (one was singing to me, i swear!) and then went home. apparently not quickly enough however.


Christopher Walken with a carrot in his mouth
irreverent. that's me! name the film and you win something strange and useless.

the new even worse site is complete and ready to upload; i just can't be bothered right now. ass, meet couch.

thursday 3rd february, 2005



the county council offered me a job after temping there for only 3 weeks. the little voice in my head (also known as "mom") started saying things like 'take the money' and 'a bird in the hand is worth blah blah blah' etc etc. my heart, however, was deflating by the second. i tried fighting the sinking feeling. who doesn't want security, financial stability? i looked at the grey, grey people all around me in the education and libraries department. i thought about that commute from brighton to lewes every day, and that dire walk up the high street, and what that would be like for the rest of my life. because they are all lifers there. and that's just not for me.

the one thing i've figured out about me is this: i need freedom. without it, i'm as good as dead. i need to feel like there's always something new just around the corner. the mystery of the unknown. endless possibilities. looming potential. so if that makes me a flake, a slacker, a dilletante, then so be it. i'd rather temp in brighton centre (and not have to face a commute) for less money than they were offering me cos at least i'd still feel ALIVE. so there it is. i didn't move to a new country to start my life over again to do the same shit i was doing before! i've had so many crap jobs and crap commutes and just taken it all cos it was a steady paycheck.

it needs to be said here that derry is incredible, by supporting my decision to look for work that would at least keep me happy. it's about fucking time. people in my past have often been less than supportive in my decision-making, by either not taking the time to try to understand what makes me the way i am, or by dismissing my ideas and wants immediately cos i didn't fit the mold. but that's another story.

so today i turned down the council's offer. i was putting my trainers on at 4:58, and the 3 other PAs in the office were running around like total freaks trying to get some junk together for some presentation tomorrow. it was obvious they would be there for about another hour. on salary. they don't even get overtime. fuck that shit. as i walked out into the cool air of the sussex downs, i literally started singing this song:

I'm free - I'm free
And freedom tastes of reality
I'm free - I'm free
And I'm waiting for you to follow me.

If I told you what it takes to reach the highest high,
You'd laugh and say 'nothing's that simple'
But you've been told many times before
Messiah's pointed to the door
And no one had the guts to leave the temple!

OK, i admit it's not the who's best song, but it is what i was singing. yes, i am lame. but i'm not trapped either.

tuesday 1st february, 2005



i am doing this update on the 31st cos i actually found a colour scheme i can live with (who cares what anyone trying to actually read this may think, just highlight the text einstein) and wanted to upload the whole bugger before i run out of steam.

simon, you are right that i had an 'uncomfortable sushi incident' in reality that inspired the sushi incident in my book, but the one that occured in reality was actually way worse cos instead of being in a loud, obnoxious yuppie place (every agoraphobic's nightmare) he took me to a quiet little place in noe valley where you could hear a pin drop... the horror, the horror... ever have one of those dates? you know the ones, the moment you sit down and realize you have absolutely NOTHING to talk about, so you start drinking, quickly? it was one of those. and even though i was pounding sake in an attempt to look like a hopeless alcoholic he still found me charming. damn the luck.

oh well, i've found the last man i ever need to charm (intentionally or otherwise) so all the creepy painful dates of yore are merely amusing memories. life sho am funny sometimes.