I'm so hot I feel like I'm going to get into a temper, and my neck is stiff and hurting and I've been in this room for hours - beside me someone is going tap - tap - tap - on the keyboard with one finger. I'm going to eat something now - all the blinds are shut for some reason - if they were open from here you can see - a puddle of water really, nothing more, that's all a harbour is, but there is still the height, the height that suggests silence and cold, even though it is so hot in here we could be at ground level

19 June 2001 I moved into my new office. On the walls are signs which politely say 'staff only' and 'waiting room.' The doors are dark and made of carved wood; it isn't fake. It's luxurious. On the landing in a stairwell is a glass lightwell filled with dusty, overgrown tropical plants, like in a movie. The ceilings are high. Perhaps there is even some asbestos. There are two people in the building; myself on the top floor, with my desk in a corner and the rest of the rooms heavily empty, and the prospective internet entrepreneur in a back room on the ground floor. He listens to the classical station and has greasy grey hair swept over the top of his head. I crawled around on the carpet picking up shards of something unidentifiable. It might have been a broken light fitting.

I spent so long in the office it came to seem like home. When I had gone out to try to buy a heater in the afternoon I rushed back up the stairs without looking where I was going.

Unfortunately I immediately smiled at the bartender and asked for a pint of beer. He said without looking at me 'we don't serve pints here.' I didn't mind that he pretended to detest me but I felt guilty because Pat insisted that he would buy us all an $80 dollar bottle of vodka (ie costing about 3/4 our average weekly income) but the bartender told him that 'we don't have vodka here.' Probably because I ruined everything by making us seem like 'students.' We left.

We attended the Terminals: I use 'attended' advisedly; by the time I'd been through the rounds of everybody else's (post-opiate) enthusiasm, my own had dwindled. I had decided to postpone drinking (the glittering prize) until the following evening, when I would be in a house with people I liked. The Terminals were 'good.' It was very dark in the upstairs bar at Arc; the Terminals are like a constant wash, there's no need to worry that you'll be disturbed by a sudden surprise. So I didn't have to do anything but wait until the end. I slept well, I wasn't drunk.

Last night, I was in the lounge with Ricko. He said 'I think the whole thing with smoking is, it's connected to this new amputee craze . . .'
I interrupted and said 'Wait! I just read a review of a Missy Elliot gig that said it was marred by 'irrelevant wandering in the audience and bizarre talent contests' and now you're telling me there's an amputee craze?'
He said 'Things are a lot different now to how they were in your day.'
I was listening to early Tyrannosaurus Rex; that makes me feel like, 'of course your dreams will come true! It's inevitable!' Disappointing world! When I got to Gilbert's my hoped for drinking pals said things like 'I woke up covered in vomit so I'm not drinking.'

Pat played and gave out popsicles. He played so early that there was hardly anybody there. Just a few straight people, and me and Tom and Lynton and Ricko and Gilbert (these two groups were segregated to different ends of the basement, naturally). We were in Gilbert's basement; in front of the couches everyone was sitting on there was a double bed covered with a cream and brown patchwork quilt. Tom was sitting next to me and he seemed very amused, and compared Pat's music to Primus. I thought that it was great of course.

Ricko played a set with a guy with a white shirt without buttons down the front and a goatee beard saying things in a made up language out of a book. Three girls played violins. The Murdering Monsters played looking disenchanted. For most of the night most of the band members had looked bored, admittedly. I ate spaghetti on toast. At first I thought it would be awkward and embarressing to eat it in front of other people but it tasted good and was easy to eat.

An index to old kitty entries, my links page, and my ontological struggles. XX