[Once again, Sarah has uttered a priceless line. She's one of the most well spoken Americans I know. And that's saying something. I wonder if she took Jive lessons? I know she did Spanish and Japanese...

You are forgetting the Cardinal Rule. Bitches is crazy

It’s under my bed, it’s never been read.
It’s in with my school stuff and my mom never cleans in there.
From my first little fib, when I still wore a bib
To my latest attempt at pretending I’m someone
Who’s not seventeen, doesn’t know what you mean
When talk turns to single malts, or stilton, or

While not seventeen, there is a shoe-box under my bed. It used to contain a pair of dark blue Vans; now it’s filled with notes and letters, an armband from the National Trust, a box of crayons, postcards, receipts, some old photographs, too. The sort of thing one keeps in a shoe-box under the bed.

There is so much in that shoe-box that I would love to keep. But there’s also a lot of pain attached to it. Things best forgotten, things I’d rather not remember. It’s like being force-fed tales of a Geo-centric universe, wooden spoon down the throat, as if my liver were being fattened up for some cannibalistic Foie Gras treat.

All that ever was good about the shoe-box I still have elsewhere.

Today, the shoe-box burns.

I could murder a cup right now. That and some toast. Hmm.

The office was finished today. The chaps came and lugged half-inch deep pile up to the top of the house and into the loft, and spent a good part of the morning cutting it all to shape and fit. Now that it’s reasonably habitable, I’ve been slowly filling the shelves and such with notebooks, letters, journals; even my old copies of Creative Review have found a space there, as has my Minolta XG1, and the lenses.

My desk has grow a large coffee mug, filled with about 30 different shades of Sharpie and assorted markers. The top right drawer, once my smoking drawer, now is filled with scraps of paper and notes and pencils and Mont Blanc Ink. Two PowerBooks sit in front of me, neither one doing very much of anything. Behind me on the shelves are books I’ve amassed over a few years, and always meant to read. But never quite gotten around to doing it.

I used to churn out reams of stuff. Most of it was, by my own admission, utter tosh. But some of it was decent. I could sit for hours, sometimes days at a time, just writing, or drawing, anything and everything. Even if I were not churning out gold any more, I’d still like to be able to create trash. As it stands, I’m having trouble doing even that of late. Just this one entry has taken an hour already.

It’s not right. Time was where I could have hammered this out and done a few revisions in under ten minutes.

I think perhaps I need to take a pen and paper with me to a Royal Park sometime soon, sit, watch the world go by, and find some of that missing ‚Äúoomph‚Äù - even if all I get in return is some hackneyed old tosh about heliocentricity (a favourite of mine while sozzled) then it’s a start. It’s got to be better than this sordid existence of supporting morons for clients.