Falling.

When the evidence of a fall becomes apparent, it is already too late to stop the dramatic plunge earthwards towards a new, lower resting place.

Once the foot slips on the ice, there is nothing more to be done except to intercept the ground and pick the bruises off yourself like ripe fruit. Once the avalanche takes hold, the only course of action is to wait to be burned to death in its whiteness, the tongue of the mountain reaching beneath the flesh to drink your blood.

When the depressive sees the first warning sign of a relapse, the horse bolted long ago. That first sign is loss of interest in that which maintains the make-believe structure of a significant and fulfilling life. I noticed it on Monday: wan footballers creating pretty patterns to no greater purpose, egged on by aggressive, tribalistic followers.

The futility of everything is drawn into sharp relief: the most important thing in the world is to get up before lunchtime and pull together the scraps of the day that remain, and yet the result, when accomplished, is met with disgust and disappointment. What is wanted is wanted until it is achieved, and then it is regarded with suspicion and drained of merit.

I don't know how far away the bottom is, or when I shall land there, frightened and broken. Every time, I promise that there will be no return to this pit, this distance, only to relapse eventually to my origins.

Could it be that the shock which pushes the depressive body off the edge of the cliff - again - is the residue of previous shocks which pushed the depressive body off the edge of the cliff? Like an idiotic, incomprehensible video sequence repeated forever, an invisible force causes a man to fall far enough to kill him, only for him to come back to life every single time, shaking off the muck and stasis of the grave.

Recurrence.

Three days after Christmas, and more than 18000 had turned up for the game - the stadium wasn't full, but the patches of empty red seats were smaller and fewer than normal.

The gate had been swelled by a good four or five thousand from the north-east, and to cut a long story short, I witnessed a stirring fightback from a home side whose resources and status were inferior to their opponents, who arrived with the cachet and squad of a very recent top-division side.

It was the kind of afternoon, with the winter and dark closing over Oakwell's maw, that I live for: eleven red upstarts re-affirming that where I come from might not be the most affluent or storied town on the planet, but its football team will turn you over with a low-budget mix of perceptive ball-play and fighting like cornered animals.

I should have been elated beyond normal parameters on my exit from the ground, but I was gripped by melancholia: the result didn't matter to me, because I was fixated on my own internal fluctuations. I don't know what happened - I'd undergone my usual struggle to get out of bed in the morning, rushing for the train after a very quick wash and cursory clean of my teeth.

I'd set the alarm for quarter past nine but didn't properly surface until just before eleven, a dark filament of sleep bridging the interim. All through the northward journey, I tried and failed to immerse myself in a book, never managing to break through its difficult shell to extract the clarity and drama flowing beneath.

The rapid, geometric events of the first half passed me by, except that I mused on the futility of my obsession with the game when the visitors scored: thousands of ecstatic supporters bouncing like jack-in-the boxes in the away end, telling us our support is fucking shit, and that their team is the greatest the world has ever seen.

When Barnsley inverted matters in the second half, there was no rush of excitement when either of the two (well-worked) goals went in. I stood politely and clapped, feeling the great void of the universe echo through my bones. No over-the-top exuberance at the end, no feeling of relief - the normal schemata of football-match attendance had been drained of almost everything: all that existed was turn up, go home again, and exclude the middle.

Ebenber.

Ebenber 25 in the year 2309 is what would have been Christmas Day, until the Ebenistas came along and overthrew the old religion, killing their calendar as a humiliating afterthought.

Clad in half-blue and half-red, thousands of Eben's adherents took to the streets of Rome in the latter days of the 23rd century, intent on tipping the Pope out of his gilded cart and turning his face into the dirt with the soles of their boots.

But Rome did not fall easily - the cardinals had to be shaken out of their aesthetic splendour like salt from a cellar, and the debilitating, drawn-out process took a decade or more. The wall of hired, sinewy muscle drafted in on the minimum wage to fight Catholicism's battles was capable of administering a nasty blow from a meaty fist or a short-range weapon. Even God Himself needs the assistance of a thug with thick forearms from time to time.

Every day the same staging of the same conflict under the same conditions - two great, lumbering beasts locked together in an orgasmic, static rage. It was not sheer military might or weight of numbers that turned the war away from the established church, but the zeal of the new order which had yet to become embedded; which was not yet such a part of the common vernacular that its propagation was guaranteed to be handed down with conception.

Nightmares.

Nightmares.

The seeds of nightmares invariably lie dormant, only to bloom into upsetting episodes weeks or months later, just when they have been forgotten about.

I've had a run of them since the weekend, most of which involve falling from a high structure and hurtling through the atmosphere at terminal velocity.

I am interested in what it is that causes nightmares to be frightening - when I was four years old I had one whose engine was obvious, and yet still continues to puzzle me. A girl, sitting beneath a tree, smiling, and as innocent-looking as you would expect the dream-contents of a child to be - and yet I woke up, more-or-less screaming the house down.

As I try to articulate it now (I remember the nightmare vividly) the best I can manage is that there was 'something evil' about the girl beneath the tree. Despite the exterior appearance of harmlessness, the 'dreamscape' pulsated with imminent terror and destruction - at which point my sleep came to an abrupt halt.

In the case of my falling off the tops of high buildings and bridges etc. (did I jump? was I pushed?) it is the sense of acceleration towards the ground, experienced as a sinking feeling in the stomach, which jolts me awake.

For now, the only common ground I can find between every nightmare I can recall (I'm told that the ones which leave no imprint on the waking mind are the worst) is the loss of control - the mind with which I act is temporarily hijacked, and I am forced to endure images which I have no wish to be exposed to. It is the process of the nightmare at all, as opposed to specific details, which causes feelings of distress.

I ask, in addition, why the 'seeds' of the nightmare choose to discharge their unpleasantness now and not at some other point in time? Is it to do with the departure of Bluefish, and this is a delayed reaction? Is it hinting at some internal crisis, the nature of which I can only guess? Or is it 'just' the periodic fluctuations of an over-worked imagination?

Perhaps admitting their existence in the public domain is merely fuel to the fire, and I shall now be dogged with nightmares for months on end as revenge for tipping out the dustbin of the unconscious. But I hold the view that these processes are fair game for discussion, and take the decision to publish and be damned.

Anniversary.

In the past year I have:

• discovered the exchange rate between the currencies of Great Britain and Australia - one Frazzle dropped into your mouth is sufficient remuneration for one kiss (at least when on Swiss soil);
• heard you sing that you come from a land Down Under, alternated with the idea that Australians are all ostriches;
• fallen out of a train in Vienna - frightening Germanic words and high, bare, rumbling Germanic engineering;
• been so sickened at your imminent departure that I found myself incapable of eating;
• slalomed through the streets of Budapest, without a word of Hungarian, in pursuit of a flight which I genuinely thought was going to leave without us;
• made you the birth spark of every single word of this blog - the revealing, the derivative, the obvious and the thought-provoking alike;
• giggled to myself at the unprovoked invocation of the word 'antipodean,' my guarantee of mock rage from you;
• realised that strawberry milk is our elixir, and promised that the tap will remain shut off until we are together again;
• read with joy about the non-existence of Ern Malley.

"In the past year I have...." requires the twisting of the English language if it is to be re-written in a form which is closer to the truth:

"In the past year, we, with the aiming of tending the non-physical but nevertheless tangible third party that constitutes our relationship, have...."

For, of course, this is all about we, and how we go about bridging distances, doing our best to maintain the structure and discipline of a short-range relationship when we are anything but, and the third party of our relationship is even more fragile than normal.

One year on from the seismic moment which turned everything on its head, when you were the first flash of lightning and I the rod, I spend the dying moments of our first anniversary thinking of you, the random, chaotic way in which we met, two gas atoms bouncing about urgently until we finally connected; the paranoia and nerves as I went to meet you at the airport for the first time; the broken halves we leave behind when we are separated.

It has been hard at times but the most demanding climb leads to the most breathtaking views during the journey. After a year of pushing on, I would like to continue the ascent, for my eyes and mind and being are at peace whenever I stop for a moment to contemplate the fruits of our labour.

Happy anniversary, Bluefish!

Birthday (I).

A list of birthday wishes, precluding all barriers and improbabilities:

-For humanity to continue the relentless chase for knowledge. My instincts say there are some categories of learning so esoteric and abstract that they can probably never be grasped without the application of principles which are yet alien to us. As a non-scientist, I suspect that scientists are attacking questions at the edge of current understanding with tools which are stone-age in comparison to those required. Yet one day, thumping at the surface of a dilemma with an outdated instrument will lead to the insight necessary to produce a new means with which to attack. It is the consignment of certain people, then, to be disappointed; to bash away relentlessly without the consolation of triumph. This is the weight which pins you to the floor, that you speak of with a devastated love, yet without it you would float away.

-I want to appeal to dreamers to keep dreaming, even as you struggle to communicate those dreams. Such wishes, drawn from the very shaft of the soul, do not commit themselves easily to words. Speak of them only loosely, then, but never let the dream itself stray too far from your side.

-Don't fear to admit that the patterns formed in the brain are many times quicker than the oscillations of the tongue. And when the tongue beats the synapses to the gun and you stand, temporarily confused and embarrassed, don't be scared to admit that either.

-Realise the paradox that we face as a species: we pursue an infinite amount of knowledge in a finite amount of time. That is - one day, I expect our race to be obliterated. The odds of it not happening (again, my inner fountain of all knowledge tells me) are astronomical. And if we slalom around danger upon danger for the next five billion years, then we'll need to recolonise on a different planet before the sun's last gasps erase us.

-I wish for the abolition of all religion and all religious sentiment, but I realise that in the subsequent vacuum of irreligiosity, a more virulent strain of deity would spring up.

-Know that my inner fountain of knowledge is inherently flawed. Go to the bookmaker at once and place a bet on the human race lasting at least another five billion years.

-I want to believe that love lasts forever. I want to believe that it is a contract between two conscious entities which isn't revoked upon argument, or even death. If this is the case then we have no need for eternal life.

-I want to believe that I'll be here in another 12 months, writing more of the same, and that Bluefish will be upstairs complaining that I'm a bloody drongo who keeps very awkward sleeping hours, and that I should retire to bed now. So the warning goes, it is only another three hours (at the most) until her confused internal clock begins to wake me up again from the nap I had barely started.

Suicide.

In what is likely to be the least surprising news of 2009, it was confirmed on Monday that my mother's friend, who died last week, had actually committed suicide.

Anyone who'd ever met her knew that the image of her own death followed her very closely - indeed, she'd tried to end her life on a couple of occasions, only to be pulled back from the brink of obliteration at the last possible moment.

The third time, though, there was no dramatic rescue act. Like the cat who had nine times to die (of course those words are not mine) finally the numbers stacked up. Nobody knows how many co-codamol she took, each one another bullet to a fragile body which had long ago taken enough punishment - but the important thing, from her perspective, is that there were enough to do the job.

It took her a fortnight to die, leaking blood, and organs failing successively like a set of dominoes. To be prepared to sacrifice oneself because there is no longer anything to live for is the ultimate resetting of consciousness - I have done all there is for me to do, and I hereby express the wish to become again my constituent atoms before nature otherwise would decree it.

Speculating wildly for a moment, though, what if that isn't it? What if she is condemned to be spat out, disappointed and shocked, once again into the world? I was reminded of this possibility - be it eternal repetition or eternal re-incarnation - as a colleague and I stayed back late at work last night.

The South African, my ex-girlfriend, was a staunch believer in re-incarnation, even devising a system by which she could estimate the age of a person's soul: nah, she's a new soul. Look at her, floating like a bubble. He on the other hand, has been here and back many times before - an endless journey.

What if it's true? It's unverifiable, but what if it's true? Every eighty years or so, springing up like a jack-in-the-box or a flower? It makes suicide - which I've always regarded as the last cry of defiance, the final blinding burst of light - even more futile than purchasing a lottery ticket.

The 14 million-to-one probability of winning the jackpot suddenly looks like a hell of a bet compared to taking one's own life - the first has almost zero chance of ever coming up, but with the second you've already been beaten before your body is even cold.

Oh, how easily the certainties by which we move from one day to the next are overturned! How simple it is to take a cherished truism and invert it! Suicide is no longer the falling of the hero, but the tossing of a loaded coin. It is the gun in which every chamber - and none of them - contains live ammunition.

Airport.

The fifth of December, and Heathrow had already put on her Christmas outfit.

Soft blue lighting arranged in the manner of a snowfall hung from the ceiling of Terminal Four; and the food outlets were serving turkey-and-cranberry sandwiches.

It didn't feel much like Christmas, though, as I sat opposite Bluefish in one of the aforementioned outlets with one of the aformentioned sandwiches -it had gone 4pm, and we were both aware that our time together was now short.

Our three weeks together had elapsed, and she was leaving England at just after eight o'clock. I estimated that, with her needing to check in and jump through the hoops required to board, we'd got a couple of hours left and no more.

I got the idea in my head that my lips were a timing device - every utterance slicing off another chunk of whatever remained, knives instead of the hands of a clock - so I was sparing with my words.

Words, anyway, are difficult when one's fate is already decided. The only meaningful sequence in such circumstances is a statement asserting that you embrace the inevitable. Everything else is nonsense.

We were fairly quiet, then, when the elderly lady asked if she could sit at our table. Of course, we consented, you're more than welcome. I expected her to just sit quietly while I trained my gaze upon Bluefish, trying to take 'photographs with my eyes,' so that I might recall them as I'm falling to sleep, as I wake up again.

The lady, though, was anything but quiet. A non-exhaustive list of her topics of conversation in the space of some 30 minutes or so: the Meredith Kercher murder trial; her own forthcoming trip to India; the reasons why I wasn't accompanying Bluefish to Australia; whether or not cartons of orange juice can be taken on aeroplanes; previous visits to the far east; her knowledge of Australian geography.

Bluefish did the bulk of the talking; I sat there dumb as a post. I felt simultaneously sad and relieved: sad because the pure agony of the inevitable was denied to us, two hearts thumping in unison like synchronished stop-watches. Relieved because I didn't have to experience the unique and difficult pain of separation.

Awakening.

The dark shell of the house looms over my arched neck, as I sit wondering why I ever bother to write anything at all.

What despairing prod compels the unwilling finger to discharge the mind's incoherent kaleidoscope, still churning out its chaotic dream-states even as they are poured from digit to page?

The self is no longer autonomous, aligned definitely with its conscious goals. It instead is parasitized, deflected, and floating in the recesses of itself.

To create is to endlessly re-arrange the same small stock of symbols and force new combinations from old material, and the urge to create is the imperative, cried from within the self, to replenish barren resources.

Now my prone body lies limp in the chair, a dessicated starfish, and I say: no more! no more shuffling of the same deck of cards! Yet the implacable voice demands that I produce something, that the eye must cajole the mind into smashing together a river and a sonnet in the hope of experiencing an almost-smile.

To truly create is to annihilate every thought, and begin again, child-like and vulnerable. Adult cynicism means I can never destroy everything, but I can sometimes pick away at the clouds which obscure the vision, and apprehend the universe with clarity - but only ever for a moment.

Vienna.

I now realise the paradox which is at the heart of many human transactions - yet I lack the words to describe it fully.

Bluefish has been and gone: the house is strewn with her possessions, and I am working my way through the book about Ern Malley which she bought for me.

It is, in other words, almost as though she is still here: memories still breathing, more real than anything I've ever dreamed. There is a connection between events and my recollection of them which will certainly decay over the course of the next few months:-

I was scared of the Bratislava-Vienna train. The door was heavy, alien, and there was no obvious way of getting it open once it had slammed shut. I didn't like the sheer drop between the edge of the carriage and the platform - a good foot or eighteen inches further off the floor than on English trains.

So when we arrived at the station, my instinct was to put distance between myself and the strange vehicle which had carried me there. As soon as the door opened - I struggled to make it do so, not seeing the push-button over my left shoulder - I leapt out of it, complete with one piece of luggage, maybe two.

I landed awkwardly, scattering people on the platform as they tried not to bump into the gibberish-speaking, angry-looking foreigner who had just fallen out of the door.

Bluefish couldn't stop laughing, and, once I'd got over the initial realisation of what an idiot I
must have looked, enjoyed mocking myself as well.

Without too much strain on my behalf, I am able to recall quite specific details about the moment when I made a fool of myself. It is this proximity to the very recent past which sets the trap of the paradox - when memories are alive and breathing, the events to which they refer are not closed.

It is as if the consequences and conclusions which are the natural endpoints to past events are yet to be fully realised - as though they are provisional. It would seem that it takes time for a memory to fully 'set' - the past in some way re-arranging the present and even the future with its ghostly appendages.

The time between an event occurring and its memory 'setting' brings (for me) a closeness to the objects and people which composed the event. So I feel as though I orbit Bluefish particularly closely in these days - a house pockmarked with things belonging to her, and a recent history which has still to fully reveal itself.

Politics.

In Bratislava's historic centre, several large boxes decorated with images of communism, and more still through the peep-holes cut into their surfaces.

Each one commemorating the fall of an ideology, city by city: this one Budapest, this one Warsaw, this one Berlin.

The most striking image was that of Bucharest - thousands of Romanians pouring into the street to celebrate the removal of the hated foot from their windpipe.

During such a great outpouring of joy, it is easy to forgive citizens for not asking themselves what they had left behind, and what surprises were in store for them in the future, for the ecstasy of triumph is all-consuming, at least for a short while.

I am trying to imagine what it must be like to go to sleep, and wake up with everything one is accustomed to suddenly inverted. Was there ever a group of psychiatrists to help stunned Romanians come to terms with their new world? Was there ever a doctor to dispense a metaphorical slap around the face and say: this is not a dream?

How would a person make the necessary transformation from living under one system to its total opposite? One where the new thinking simultaneously says that flawlessness is within one's grasp, and as far away as the stars?

The Bratislava rectangles gave me no clue as to how I might answer these questions. Faces frozen with joy from 20 years ago, trapped in their moment forever. Singular images standing as representations of whole countries, as general principles.

All of it is, of course, history now. The sick and the dead and the damned in their Slovakian obelisks - each one signifying everything and signifying nothing.

I need not write, for I have only a sketchy grasp of that which I am writing about. I know no more about Communism than I do ballistics, for I lived not in their moment. I look at the dead eyes of Romanians through the dead aperture of another person's camera, and I think of history in my own naive and ignorant way.

Letter (I).

Saturday 21 November 2009, 23:23.

Dear Bluefish,

This is what happens, darling, when a man inflates himself to the extent that he becomes arrogant.

Like Icarus nearing the sun, he floats too close to his dream, and the dream is too real for him.

Even in my arrogance, I tend only two modest dreams in your name, the synthesis of which is (for me) love:

• to know not the fluctuations of every current in your heart, but to be able to assert with confidence in which direction the whole is moving
• to be able to ease (not cure) your medical condition

I expend so much energy trying to accomplish the above that I have forgotten everything else: the light reflecting from your eyes into my soul; the smile which simultaneously bolsters and effaces the self.

Yes, I have forgotten everything else, and in doing so I have damaged us, probably irreperably. Where I was once looked upon almost reverentially, I now see only disgust.

As is my crude way of behaving, I tried to derive love according to a specific, precise formula - current plus cure.

In my arrogance, I assumed that this would be the solution to everything. I cannot believe just how terribly badly it has backfired.

When I cried on Thursday, it was partly because I could (can) feel Bluefish slipping away from me, forever, and it was partly because I am required to come up with a response I simply don't possess. I must ditch the formulae at once, open the cage door, and exist alongside and for her, without any fear all.

To fear is to lose, and to plan is to minimise fear. What was a surfeit of hubris then is a crisis of inactivity now. The only structure which is permitted to remain is the one which points the way to the lack of a structure, and the eventual liberation of a summer which seemed endless.

Truth.

"It's just one good idea after another with you!" exclaimed one f my managers after I overheard a colleague's phone conversation, and made a suggestion based upon it.

"I wish!" was my laughing response. "It's more like the odd half-decent idea, followed by a monumental fuck-up!"

Sure enough, within the space of about three hours, I made the error which I had earlier prophesised.

(The technical details of my suggestion, and my fuck-up, are neither here nor there. They serve only to illustrate a point, one which persists even as I approach my 31st birthday.)

A glimpse of something worthwhile, followed by crushing mediocrity, endlessly repeating itself throughout the years. This is not the sorrowful rambling of a former or relapsed depressive. It is demonstrated in every action I carry out. I photosynthesise, absorbing the longed-for light of my Bluefish, and I emit sour, rancid air.

Each time, a paralysis of either mind or body prevents me from intervening to prevent the unfolding of dramas both major and minor. I know the point at which I must act in order to divert an event from reaching an undesirable conclusion, and yet I continue to watch. Then I feel the moment pass, and there is only the inevitable contrition and kicking of oneself to contend with.

On the way to work earlier - before my fuck-up - I cried, the tears aggregating with the rain. I cried because Bluefish requires a response which I am unable to give; both the knowledge of what I must do, and the execution of the action are beyond me.

I am a spectator in my own life, with a trail of destruction swishing behind me like a prehensile tail. It obliterates everything in its path, even the mental and physical connection between two people which, until recently, seemed immutable.

Untitled.

I sometimes wonder what it is that's killing us, and then I remember that you have been, and remain, unwell.

I told you earlier that the recollection of your condition sometimes causes me surprise - to look at you, nobody would ever know that you ailed a thing.

In my clumsiness, I fail to make enough allowances for your other self, the one which squeezes you until you wince. The one which shunts you intermittently over the threshold of darkness.

When I got back into the house tonight, you were silent, and nothing I could do would stir you. Yet you flew forever to get here, back to my ordinariness.

I try to give myself enough margin for error, but my most conservative guesses are hopelessly optimistic. Strained words regarding whether or not every man would find you attractive. I can speak only for myself, love. The evening poisoned.

What is it that's killing us? Your other self is akin to a lover - it seeps into the gaps between your love and mine, and corrodes both. The bluefish and the redfish and the something-else fish. The darkfish.

What a weight you carry, the weight of being sick. What a hopeless excuse of a partner that cannot lift it even a millimetre, watching hopelessly as you are ravaged again - making love to a butcher, with the face of a million different types of pain.

The sickness makes you no less beautiful. I always see your face floating cloud-like on my idle working-day dreams. No less beautiful, but altered - and what alters you changes me alike. Darling, we need a new paradigm - one where I am more aware of events unfolding around us, and one where every day is a short step towards your eventual well-being (it will come) and not this difficult terrain which threatens the very existence of our synthesis.

Punctured.

I seek to understand why a simple, unambiguous statement of fact, expressed to me verbally with either a smile or a laugh, should cause me to hurt in such a profound manner.

In three days, Bluefish returns to the England whose clouds were at her feet back in July, whose limp little summer was but a cold shadow of the ones to which she is accustomed.

It isn't her return which brings about my suffering: no, it is something far less significant - yet, clearly, no less worthy of discussion.

(When I was a child, and later an awkward teenager, I found that it was always the throwaway remarks which delivered the seed around which my misery grew - being told by my father that I had no friends, for example. The remark was not spoken with malice or intent to wound, but that's nevertheless how I processed it.)

The limitations of English, or of the limitations under which I use it, are causing me a problem. Hurt, when it is the description of something done by one person to another, almost always carries with it the idea of guilt and intent:

• stop twisting my arm behind my back! You're hurting me!
• some internet scammers cleaned out your bank account? Ouch, that's gotta hurt!
• [as above in parentheses] the way in which you just addressed me has hurt me
  

The word I seek doesn't exist, or at least I don't know it. I want to define something innocuous and natural that nevertheless punctures. In addition, I wish it to be understood that being punctured does not diminish the sentiment held for the person who made the puncture.

On the contrary, I assert that such a wound is one of the definining characteristics of love. Hence there is no sense of biding one's time before administering forgiveness, for there is nothing to atone for. We are, instead, grateful.

What fact might it have been that Bluefish stated which caused and continues to cause me such anguish?

It was this: I have only ever seen snow once in my lifetime.

All my sentiment came rushing to the surface, akin to a bottle which has been shaken up and then opened, or a tributary rushing towards the roar of the sea.

I am yet to work out quite what caused the puncture wound; I only know that something did - perhaps it is the stark confirmation of our distance, and I marvel all the more about how we can be so close.

Childhood.

To what extent is it possible to leave behind the residue of childhood and emerge from its risk-free cocoon into an adult of some description?

In order to truly escape, it is important to realise that a fundamental biological trait is working against us, and doing its best to strangulate the self with its own past.

(I risk looking foolish here, for I lack the technical descriptions and knowledge of biological principles to express the following argument with the fullness I'd like. I'd rather look foolish, however, than condemn myself to saying nothing at all.)

Everyday experience - I'm no scientist - has shown me that my personal biases are very quickly formed, depending on the outcome of the first occurrence:

I choked on some fish bones when I was a child. Since then, I have never been able to allow that type of fish to pass my lips without wanting to be sick.
A negative conclusion to the brief relationship with my first girlfriend led me to tearfully declare that I'd never go near another woman.*

Like any other creature, then, I demonstrated the capacity to learn things. It is the capacity to un-learn what has already been processed that I am interested in here.

Without the ability to (truly) erase our personal histories, we become fastened to a groove which is more and more deterministic with every passing day, frozen with fear into a routine which takes increasingly more energy and determination to escape from.

'Truly' erasing the past would mean more than the oft-repeated delusion that today is the beginning of the rest of my life, or that this is the point where the stupid mistakes stop, to be replaced by a machine-like precision in everything I put my name to.

It would, in fact, be more likely to be a surgical procedure: something which would go about 'resetting' the brain's infrastructure, and enabling it to start again. Such an operation would increase the probability that I'll bring my life to an end with an act of sheer lunacy, but the trade-off is the freedom to exist without parameters.

In whose interests is it that I continue to survive, a library of past mistakes and their painful consequences?

I am, according to Richard Dawkins, nothing more than a random aggregation of genetic material, and the will to proceed is nothing more than the desire of this cloud of genes not to be obliterated yet.

The sub-microscopic afflicts (is) the judgement and reason of the macroscopic. Without the genetic imperatice to learn, I should have given my being back to the soil and the rocks years ago.

Loosely, then, I conclude that I cannot escape my childhood, for my genetic roots condemn me to self-loathing without limit. I hope that more sleepless nights will convince me otherwise - some spark of insight - but the condition pessimist within makes a compelling case otherwise.

Capitalism.

It's two-thirty in the morning, and the lights in the living room have been extinguished for now.

Outside it is dead: no high heels clumping against the pavement, no shouted drunken invective, no distinctive sound of tyre struggling to turn through a slick of rainwater.

The background noise of our waking hours has been temporarily suspended: there's only my intermittent hammering against the keyboard to break the silence.

Most of my life, I long for these little islands of solitude. The more the tender, discerning ear is enraged by the dissonance of layer upon layer of sound, the more appealing is its opposite.

I spend so much time dreaming of the vacuum which repudiates noise that it becomes an objective in itself. I want to shut out sound in the same way that a curtain curtails the light.

These early hours, then, should be a triumph, a source of ecstasy, for even the birds' conversation has halted. The conditions which I long for are more-or-less visited upon me.

Yet I feel a growing sense of unease. I find myself listening hard for the sound of my own breathing. Suddenly, I want to talk to someone, anyone, about anything.

At the very moment when the wished-for state is attained, it is suddenly no longer desirable. In the case of silence v sound, any sound at all is preferable to the prolonged hush which hangs heavier and heavier. Without knowing it, then, I have completed the most manic calculation of the capitalist thinker: there is nothing more alluring than the exact opposite of what one currently has.

This the methodology which sells skin-whitening cream to dark-skinned people, and skin-darkening cream to light-skinned ones. The bet had been backed, and then the capitalists laid it, winning no matter what.

I, who possess a store of bitterness as deep as the self for the capitalists, I have been caught in their mechanism, and when I am writing I long to do anything but write.

Stasis.

Why, I ask myself, do words sometimes flow freely, and other times they remain dammed up, stubborn in their refusal to be released?

Stubborn refusal - this is an adequate summation of my most common experience. I have something to say, and a vague idea of how I wish to express it, but no way of setting anything in motion.

The past 16 or so months have taught me that there are ways of teasing sentences out of a reluctant head and setting them down with lethargic fingers. Certain pieces of music have been known to do the trick, pulling me close to the event horizon of my personal abyss, where the threat of extinction is near.

In having to bow down low before the self before I can write, the whole thing takes on the mantle of convention, of process, and I might as well apply for a repetitive, predictable job in a factory or an office. Convention and process spell the death of creativity. I'm aware of this even as the words 'the creative process' echo in my mind. When the first thing to do before a word is committed to paper or screen is to, without fail, annihilate one's emotional resources, then this is a convention, an a priori.

There is a never-ending battle between myself and the shadow of myself. I recall the quote from Savo Milosevic, the Bosnian-born Serbia international footballer. When preparing for a game against Bosnia (for Serbia), Milosevic said that he was playing for his country against his country. Similarly, I fight against myself with myself, and feel the victory of the body over the repudiated soul.

When writing the two previous entries on here, I performed some sort of sleight of mind which permitted me to express the unsaid. These are the ghost-sentiments, the unseen objects that hijack dreams and promote the 'sinking feeling' which occurs during waking hours.

I wonder whether I've hit on some trick of the light which will tip the battle of self against self in the direction 'I' most desire? By writing in (effectively) patois, or by maintaining the pretence of being an outsider, might this permit the articulation of thoughts which are otherwise too personal, too real?

To chip away at the prison which contains every possible thought - this is the thing. Should only the smoke or the mirror-image of these infinities ever present itself for diagnosis, it is preferable to the frustrating self-imposed restrictions under which I currently work.

Idioms.

Mi dad's gone ooerm nar.

Ee kem ter stop wi me fer four neets cuz e ad a cooers (e's baht wuk for nar) abart aif a mile from eer.

When e wor eer it turnd parent-child relationship on its eeud. Am barn ter speyk like im nar cuz tha can't forget thi roots, can tha?

Am barn ter speyk like im and behave like im cuz to all intents and purposes I am im. Favva-leet. A thutty-year owd prototype, guin darn same deterministic path.

That meeans am barn ter loyse Bluefish one day. I'll cop off wi some gert I meet in t'boozer or wheerivver, an piss ivverythin away. Ivverythin a've wukt for. All them bloody years, wuth nowt. Just like me mam an me dad.

It appened ter me. Well, ter them, an a got cort int crossfire - as tha duz. A kem ooerm wun neet an me mam wor sittin int dark. It wor only abart six a'clock. This is years agu nar burra still think abart it.

Wot's guin on, a sed ter mi mam? Shi cun't gie ower rooarin, and teld mi ter av a look at a bit o paper shi wa owdin. It worra letter frum mi favva: sorry, a've bin playin away. I dun't want ter leeave thi wi nowt.

Fuckinell, e'd gone. A kept tellin er that e'd be ooerm in a minnit. Be reight - thee watch. If 'e cums ooerm, I'll gie im one-eighty in is back wi mi kitchin nives. Am tellin thi, sun. You know what? No bluddy judge in England ud convict me if a did im in terneet. I adden't gorra bloody clue - a nivver sore it cummin. Bolt art ert blue.

E din't cum tho. Turnz art e teld mi mam e wor gooin ter wuk an then ee'd gon bak tut ouse ter pick iz stuff up. E'd waited for er ter set off to visit er mam an then ee'd gon back an tuk ivverythin e could lay is ands on.

This wo Friday. A din't see mi favva til Setdy. Ee kem tut ouse (wi some chips) and they teld me ter gu up ter mi room after wi'd etten em. Later on, wi gorrin iz car an e tuk me in tut tarn. Ad nivver seen im cry afooer, burri did.

Nubdi ivver sore mi rooar. A did it int bath, cuz salt ed assimilate wit watter, and tha'd not be anyt wiser. It wor an excuse fort red face ant puffy eyes an all - a've just gor art ot bath.

A wor 19 an a cun't andle it. Mi mam sed a'd find er angin at back ot dooer wen a got bak frum collidge wun er these days. Shi bowt enuf paracetemol ter num a killer wail - neighbour ad ter keep tekkin um offer. Bowt as much as she cud from both supermarkits. As much as she cud from both kemmists. Mooer than enuf theer ter finish thi off.

A'v not bin reight wi mi dad since. Like a seh, it wa bloody years agu. A've only ivver bin able ter talk wi im abart it wunce. An a din't know what ter seh. A can't even write abart it in proper Inglish - a ev ter code it like this.

A can't forgerrit. A reckon it's same as if tha'd bin in a reight bad accident wi all thi limbs mangled and clingin onter life wi a flap o skin. It's ter much fo thi eead ter process, an all tha can do is develop copin strategies. It meks it so that sum days er allreight, but aif ot time, thi dreeams are fukt up, an tha weks up feelin as tho tha's bin dropped darn a well o misery baht end.

Fallin thru t'blackness, and then fallin sum mooer. A've bin spinning like a cathrin weel in mi own shaft er darkness for 11 years. Am longin ter it bottom. A'll either dee or it'll jolt me back into normality - worrever tharris.

It's ner wunder a feel so sad allt time. Am carryin this rahnd wi me, an it teks effort. A can't gie ower feightin wi it, an a dun't know ow ter lerrit gu. Avin ter balance fooerces wi summat a lot bigger than thi's fuckin debilitatin. Like a kitten trynna pull an artic.

hacked

just goes to show how easy it is to recover someones password thus compromising the security of their blog

isnt that right paul

once you get ahold of one password the rest fall like a stack of dominoes or at least they do if the persons as predictable as you are

theres only a finite number of spanish verbs in the preterite to be used and it isnt like youd gone far beyond vine fueron and hiciste

yeah once you get one the rest of em come easy and its like having the key to your unconscious mind open estuve

so your scared of dying and scared of failure and frightened that you cant communicate

this is the message from your inner sanctum those encrypted files on your desktop by the way its too late to delete them now theres no going back because i was bright enough to remember to take copies of everything

so your scared of dying for the same stupid reason your scared of everything else

theres no certainty and no predictability so for a man who craves routine and regularity how autistic of you every day is like death anyway

your terrified that your life will be snapped off somewhere in the middle like all the men in your family dying young and having achieved nothing

just another headstone describing another wasted life on and off the stage unremarkably and without incident

the thought leaves you frozen in horror and the shock of never having done anything about it leaves you frozen in horror

Photograph.

Sometimes I open the photograph of Bluefish and I, one taken in an English seaside town at the height of summer, and I wonder if we ever existed at all.

The photograph is by now a fossil, trapped in the frozen river of linear time. A black hole is the photograph, sucking in any information about what existed before it and came after it.

Nobody would know that, in the hours before it was taken, Bluefish and I had cursed our way through sun-struck streets, wheeling a rectangle of luggage which regularly ran into trouble on the uneven surfaces. The two of us had been very close to losing our tempers as we searched out a distant hotel, and the mood darkened further when the satellite navigation system on my mobile phone kept sending us around in circles.

And it would be hard to discern from Bluefish's relaxed smile that the pair of us were being destroyed - not with the devastating light and impact of a bomb, inverting everything in its vicinity, but more akin to a shipwreck.

The inevitability of her return to a distant land meant that we slowly fell apart, committing with each passing hour another part of ourselves to an imminent future which had already been taken care of. Each thought of that yet-to-be endured Friday night at Heathrow sweetened the pair of us in the depths of misery.

So the photograph is arrogant, or spoiled. It demands that the eye focus on it, and nothing else. Context and depth mean nothing to it - a bore in brightly-coloured clothing.

Yet to those with a sliver of 'inside' knowledge, the photograph is at once transformed from mediocrity. The image of Bluefish and I, packed tightly together and filling the eye, can never be mediocre - it is, instead, painful.

It is painful because it refers to a past which is irretrievable, and which no kiss of life can ever re-animate. Couples always isolate particular aspects of the world, and declare them the stage upon which their relationship is to be played out: our song, our television programme. In general, they draw upon the cultural output of others, and greedily appropriate it.

These are just borrowed, though. The only things which truly belong to them are the fruits of their own labour. More poignant than any photograph is the rush of sadness which fizzes through the self when I contemplate our history, or when it is visited on me in the form of a photograph.

Do you remember how I was sitting on that bench, swearing? Do you remember how you snapped at me because I suggeded getting a cab - my solution to everything? A couple of hours later, it didn’t matter because you were smiling like an angel, and what I now look at is the shadow of an angel, stuck fast somewhere in the middle of a long-gone summer.

Civilisation.

In England yesterday, the story broke that the IRA man convicted of bombing Brighton's Grand Hotel has been invited to the event commemorating its 25th anniversary.

By now, you won't be surprised to learn that I heard about this on the booming, incessant works radio.

The announcement was met with widespread derision, both from the MP interviewed on the news, and from my work colleagues - none of them could believe that Patrick Magee, the perpetrator of an infamously murderous and well-planned act of terrorism should be offered an olive branch by the British authorities.

The collective pronouncement on the subject was approximately this: we're fucking caving in to a man who's drowning in the blood of others - again. If Magee was a child-killer, the public would turn on him en masse, and rip their morsel apart like a pack of wild dogs. Few seconds, it'd take. Few fucking seconds.

I wasn't popular, then, when I suggested that the decision by the British government to invite Magee to the 'reconcilliation' at the House of Commons showed an impressively mature attitude from an administration which is otherwise eating itself alive.

I wasn't popular, but I stand by it. If the poacher has finally turned gamekeeper, then it is safe to invite what was formerly the worst of the foxes into the hen-hut.

History acts as a polarising force - the very best and very worst acts of our species are dissected, examined and scrutinised to approaching infinite magnitude, with the vast majority of decisions and occurrences left to wither, unremembered and unremarked upon.

Magee's act is unquestionably one of the most notorious to have ever taken place on this island. Its high-profile targets - including the unsuccessful obliteration of the then Prime Minister, and mutilation of a member of the cabinet - and audacious negation of the (apparently limited) security at the Tory Party conference ensure it will live long in the memory.

Similarly, the invitation to Magee should be considered as one of the most magnanimous ever extended by a state to an indivual. It does not insinuate that terrorism is acceptable, or that Magee is forgiven, or that history is forgotten. It is, instead, the assertion that Britons and Irish, channelled through the figure of Patrick Magee, can truly live adjacent to each other (and together), and it expresses the hope that the past is not condemned to be repeated in a future of frequent memorial services and tearful loved ones.

Experience (II).

In an arbitrarily pure world, then, or, more properly, a world which corresponds entirely to the set of values encoded in my own mind, there would be a clear demarcation between the domains of fact and not-fact.

To attain this, it is not enough for a newspaper, say, to clearly delineate the parts given over to news from those given over to comment or features. If an entirely new language is not required, then a new paradigm with a shorter leash is the minimum to be hoped for.

Is it the role of the journalist to insinuate (within a news story) that Barack Obama might face diplomatic pressure to relinquish his Nobel Prize; to assert that Silvio Berlusconi is just another sickening chip off the old block of Italian politics; to print specific allegations relating to the sexual conduct of Roman Polanski?

It's pernickety and naive to claim there should be laws against this sort of thing. The downtrodden journalist already has the boot of litigation close to his teeth and always ready to swing back, especially in England, the libel capital of the world.

Furthermore, the dream (I had) of rooting in the hard earth with my fingers to reveal uncomfortable truths is quickly obliterated by the pressure of deadlines. I dare say I'm more free, sitting here tapping away in a chair, than almost any journalist alive.

Is the death of entertaining copy in the Press a price worth paying for a greater dose of the truth? Or is the realm of facts - uncontestable ones - of such limited application that we'd end up with newspaper headlines like:

• THREE SQUARED NINE, CLAIMS PALIN
• GOALLESS GAME ENDS GOALLESS: BOTH TEAMS DRAW
• MICHAEL JACKSON - ARTIST

In my well-sifted, filtered world, the license of creativity is awarded only to those who have turned their backs on the brutal, unforgiving desire to arrive at an unambiguous truth, expressed in the absence of convoluted literary language. Thus, Milan Kundera can write about a fictitious house in a real city in what used to be the real Czechoslovakia, occupied by the fictitious Tomas and Teresa, who are themselves layers of inviolable truth, subjective elements based on the truth, and partially a literary device, created in Kundera's imagination.

Experience (I).

Most of the things I write start with at least a sliver of uncontestable fact, even if it is as banal as today I had an altercation in the street, or if we get relegated tomorrow, I intend to drink a whole bottle of gin.

The statement of a fact, relying on a single occurence with which to justify it, is not the work of science. It is, perhaps, commensurate with the work carried out by the taxman (1) or journalists (2):

(1): Dear Nogomet, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) are writing to advise you not to spend money on a bottle of gin in the event of relegation. Instead, please deposit the £13 at your nearest tax office by the end of the calendar month. It is imperative that you do so at your earliest convenience, as your contribution goes towards the smooth running and upkeep of British society. Yours faithfully, S. Chester, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs.

(2): A FOOTBALL fan was left flabbergasted when he received a tax demand ordering him to cough up the price of his weekend tipple!

Gobsmacked Paul Nogomet, 30, had bought a £13 bottle of gin to help him drown his sorrows in the event of Barnsley going down tomorrow afternoon.

And he was astonished to receive a snooty letter from HM Revenue and Customs, advising him "not to spend money on gin in the event of relegation."

It went on: "Instead, please deposit the £13 at your nearest tax office by the end of the calendar month. Your contribution goes towards the upkeep of British society."

Outraged Nogomet said: "What business is it of the government's whether I want to buy a bottle of gin?

"I pay enough tax. I don't see why I should pay extra for nipping down to the off-licence. I'll need to have something to drink if the worst comes to the worst on Sunday."

A HMRC spokesperson said the letter was a "standard communication."

Championship side Barnsley need a draw at Plymouth tomorrow to avoid the drop.

In the two cases above, a single fact has accumulated a loose aggregation of detail around it, and something (however limited) has been generated. Through the transformation of a fact or facts, then, we derive letters and journalism (in the short form.) At some unspecified point in the future, I would like to think about what happens when facts dwindle away completely.

Madness.

A living wheel of fire, burning itself up in agony, turning through the middle distance and into the foreground.

An invisible barrier, an impediment, against which the wheel grated for a number of seconds before disintegrating. One wheel embodying every wheel that had ever existed or would exist, accounted for in this last violent act.

Skulls orbiting skulls, viewed as though through a mirror. Laughing, mocking skulls with their great central star. Skulls viewed through skulls, the eye's ossuary.

These among the simple dream-symbols through which my mind cycled as I tried not to fall asleep at something after three in the morning during the first of what is likely to be many turgid night-shifts.

I saw spiders pushed through a tube inclined at twenty-past the hour, from which emerged dolls and cities and plumes of smoke.

They let me out of work early, and I walked home cursing the night. The night a broad oblong of penumbra high above my head, signifying nothing. Being so tired that you can't separate dreams from reality must be what it's like to go mad. Perhaps it is the first stage of madness, when the internal and external worlds fuse and cool, so there is no going back.

Desolation.

The repetition of a well-known song on the radio on Friday afternoon was sufficient to drop me down the deep shaft of misery from which (it feels as though) I have no hope of emerging.

It's not an uncommon song on the generic, ten-a-penny radio station to which I am forced to listen for the duration of my working life - I'd estimate that I hear it at least twice a week; normally causing my body to stiffen, for I have been conditioned thus.

On Friday, though, I knew it was going to be a bad one as soon as I registered the first couple of notes. I swallowed the imminent devastating lyrics whole and assimilated them into my bloodstream.

This song the same blunt instrument which the mental hospital played over and over for nine hours solid, eventually breaking the resistance of my ex-girlfriend and forcing her to cry.

What is it about the repetition of events which causes us, at some unspecified point, to break? Why after eight hours and 59 minutes (say) was she able to withstand its force, but the next cycle caused her to give up? Why, yesterday, did I internalise the song instead of watching it carefully and then directing it away?

The police (in dramatised television at least) know this, picking away at the same weak point until the whole convoluted structure that is the guilty person's facade is demolished.

There is some inherent flaw in all of us - a hairline fracture in the glass which, when exploited, reveals the uncomfortable truth of our mortality and fallibility. In the case of your author, music is one and alcohol is another. I am catapulted down the well by particular songs - music to me is a little death, the shadow of which crosses my frozen face.

Nor can I tolerate alcohol, at least not when I'm in the house on my own. The distraction of other people prevents me drowning in the stuff, but I spiral away into a viscous, terrible misery when alone. Both music and alcohol have in common that they remove the control and regulation of mood from their master, and put it in the hands of some outside stimulus which delights in causing sadness so far off the dial that it is incalculable.

I've been playing the song over and over for the past three hours, doggedly pressing the replay button as its heavy, sorrowful skein comes to an end. I wanted it to empty me, that I might sleep a dreamless, chloroform sleep, but I'm not there yet. The music broke me long ago, yet the blinking, living eye has refused to submit, and watches cynically and without emotion, somewhere beyond the self.

Salvation.

The world as we know it is at a tipping point which will determine the future of our species one way or the other.

So say the climate scientists, so say the mobilisers such as George Monbiot, and Billy Meier (whom I've only very recently heard of) has been ploughing the same furrow for any number of years.

The Mayans have darkly suggested that the end of 2012 is where our species falls off a cliff - they are the latest in a long tail of prophets and visionaries whose apocalyptic predictions have proved to be unduly pessimistic.

Short of a total wipeout when God visits revenge upon our decadent and atomised selves - I feel that a trillion gallons of Birds Custard weeping from the skies and drowning every last one of us is at least as likely - then pressure for resources is likely to cause what Monbiot frighteningly refers to as an 'adjustment' in our population.

Something must give, inevitably, at some point in the future. I remember reading that if the human population continued to expand at the same rate as in the 1990s, then in another 500 years we would have expanded to the distance recesses of the Solar System. Without a degree in scientific methodology (for reasons touched upon, sarcastically, in my last blog) it seems we have already bitten off more than we can chew.

What an opportunity for the gifted handful of people in the world who can comprehend the science, extrapolate its consequences into the future, and express it to the masses in plain, unambiguous language.

What an opportunity, too, for the legions of doom-mongers who would predict our (and point out, more specifically, my and your) demise, and promise to postpone it if some pledge or sacrifice (normally monetary) is made.

This, then, is the problem. If the planet is resonating desperately on its axis because the capitalist model is proving so rapacious and unsustainable, still the capitalists (in their disguise as concerned environmentalists, also known as 'greenwash') leak through the gaps and perpetuate the problem further still.

All of the above assumes, of course, that the premise of the earth ringing its alarm bells is based on fact and not a) horrendously bad science or b) the seed of an excuse to kick off another spurious war (in the future, when the present existing stock of cartoon bad guys has been exhausted) with an 'enemy' of whose identity we can currently only guess at.

Not to labour the point too much, because it's been made million times by more eloquent scribes than I - but even if we are in imminent danger of obliteration, it's in someone, somewhere's interest to state and then overstate that case for reasons other than concern about saving our environment.

A mass consciousness can only begin to grow, and to thrive, when access to money or embellishments is cut off. Only then can a movement begin which is for salvation, and not for itself.

Circles.

As talents go, it was more the hot little light of a match, or perhaps a candle, but it was still there nevertheless.

Now, like the overweight and panting Rabbit Angstrom, I slave desperately to recover that which once came so easily - the dual shock of time and inertia dwindling it to a nub.

It's taken 15 years of travelling in a circle and, like the religious zealot, conveniently amending or overlooking the evidence of my own eyes, before I got back to the same place I departed from without a second thought.

In a secondary school of 1200 pupils, I think I am justified in saying I was the single best one when it came to learning foreign languages. I was gripped by a paradox: the fact that it required no effort caused me to work even harder at it, and I permitted everything else - science, mathematics, woodwork, geography, history - to wither beyond being irretrievable.

My lack of mathematical aptitude is testimony to this mental atrophy. I stare blankly at descriptions of imaginary numbers, am incapable of understanding what a squared second might be, and cannot explain the difference between a vector which has dimensions and one which does not.

So whatever speck of talent I possess is restricted to one thing only. I suspect I shall probably be a happier and more stable person for having made this all-too-obvious breakthrough. A decade-and-a-half too late, then, I am re-learning Spanish - and the disgustingly easy superiority I used to enjoy is, I am pained to say, no more.

I push the preterite tense up a steep hill: is it discubrí or discubrío? Is it hizo or hico? Such things used to be spat out, perfectly, without having to reflect on them, but now I tread uncertainly. I long for the smooth, flowing correctness to re-assert itself.

Truth.

I once promised myself that I'd write down every thought I had for a brief but unspecified period - a day seemed more realistic than a week or a fortnight.

I wanted to write in a clear and unambiguous way, unaffected by perception or mood, and overcome the desire to omit anything on the grounds of inappropriateness or tedium.

The aim was nothing less than a clear but miniscule window into the soul, that I might turn the contents of otherwise idle musings into something composite and capable of uprooting the small psychological barriers which otherwise become mountainous.

That I haven't chronicled every mental cul-de-sac by now is evidence that the job was too intricate and demanding for even a decicated scribe. Notwithstanding the fact that I must be left alone for a full 24 hours to record absolutely everything without distraction, the circularity of the task is inevitably defeating.

It is never long before the thoughts being recorded are of the form: writing down thoughts in word form is pointless. It is then when censorship creeps in, and the self declares that it's safe to ignore thoughts of that self-referential nature. The playful, undirected mind sabotages the job in hand by thinking: I shall not write down the next sequence of thoughts, which is then itself written down.

The mind is a device trained upon the outside world. Like the camera, it is accustomed to surveying everything but itself.

Stars.

The black box fell through the air and punched the concrete surface, emitting bright stars against the darkness.

This wasn't the death of an aeroplane, but the end of a mobile telephone, shattering into the ground at the culmination of an out-of-character act of violence.

I'd raised it an arm's length over my head when its connection went kaput again, this time in the middle of sending a message to Bluefish. The severing of its signal - bisected by forces unknown - prompted my momentary spasm of rage.

Rage against what? Against a fusion of metals, whose functioning is, like that of my own body, a mystery taken for granted? Against the arbitrary harbingers of fate, who dispense bitter and sweet entirely at their discretion?

Rage at the violation of the capitalist transaction which permits no deviation? The society with money as it roots forgets about love and leniency and lends itself only to a transaction: I must pay, or get chased through the courts; and the phone company must deliver perfection, else I shall snap its product like a twig.

Rage because the idea of such a transaction has ever formed in my mind, thus putting me beyond the reach of nature and pity and beauty, with each and every thought poisoned with the unbending philosophy of the human-made, human-tuned market?

Rage at my own ignorance, that the device might as well be a holy turd for all the understanding I have of its working? That, even if I knew it intimately, its 'moods' are still beyond my control?

It is all the above, and it of course concerns the separation from Bluefish that the fluctuation of a mobile phone invariably brings about. Anger, rising up through the self like a wish, and then the dark thud against the pavement bringing relief and closure.

Blank.

I was suprised and disappointed at the extent I was let down by own memory following a small incident in town on Wednesday night.

Making a rare journey into the centre after dark, I was surprised when a woman came barreling out of a sidestreet as I was passing, almost knocking me off my feet.

Minus a shoe, and crying, she asked if she could borrow my mobile phone because she wanted to call her boyfriend. I explained that she could have it, but I wouldn't bet on it working: the reception has been a joke for weeks.

I was swearing at the phone, and trying to force it into some sort of activity, when the person I assume was her boyfriend emerged from the same alley, demanding to know what was going on.

She told the man to go away, pushing him and walking away into the night, leaving he and I to argue in the street.

"Did she want to ring the plees? Tell me the troof!"

"She never said anything about the police. She told me she wanted to ring her boyfriend."

"She wanted to ring the plees, dintshe?"

"I told you - she only mentioned her boyfriend. Nothing about the police."

This dialogue went on for some minutes, and I eventually left him, swearing at my retreating back after bidding him goodnight.

I can remember the conversations, but I can't remember what either of them looked like, or were wearing. Under pressure, under stress, my powers of recollection broke down - either that, or the situation was so difficult that the memories were never formed in the first place.

If my life depended on it, I couldn't tell you what colour the woman's hair was, how tall she was, what the man was wearing. I remember shaking as I emerged from the dialogue, through fear? Through the desire to flee?

I shall have more to say about the fallibility of my mental architecture in the future. For now, I am content to express sadness at it breaking at the point when I would have very much liked it to have been on my side.

Creativity.

With work winding down at close to 10pm on Monday night, a conversation began between a colleague and I, the last two refuseniks in the office.

He told me of a television programme about The Beatles that he had watched, and express his awe and wonder at the depth of their musical ability.

Talent such as theirs comes along once in a universe, he volunteered, and, besides, they happened to come along at the right time - soon enough after the introduction of the television for the device to still be a novelty, and soon enough after the Second World War for a ravaged nation to be seeking something to belong to.

Furthermore, my colleague ventured, musical notes have a finite quality: eventually, humans will have used every harmonious combination possible, and so nothing new or original will ever be produced again after an arbitrary point in time.

For one of the only times in my life, I came down on the side of the argument which declares the limitless potential and beauty of our species. As with science, fallow periods in music, in politics, in art, in any discipline, are inevitably ended by the onslaught of one or more iconoclasts who seek to redefine the field.

It is akin to the statement: at some unspecified time in the future, every sensible combination of letters will have been exhausted, and writing will therefore cease, save for the repetition of ideas already previously established.

To be iconoclastic, though, all that is required is to arrange a nonsensical combination of letters, and have it stand for the repudiation of all previously established ideas. Mqri.

Mqri is the demonstration that resourcefulness and creativity will never be expended. When dissonance is the only option that remains, people with talent will nevertheless mould it into something original and, in its own way, beautiful.

Gradient.

There are varying degrees of writer's block; the inability to translate thoughts and ideas into (coherent or otherwise) words.

One school of thought, that taken by medieval sculptors, suggests that creation and fluidity is frozen within the self. Only by working away at the block of marble, or at the reticent, unwilling meat puppet, can the as yet invisible beauty be released.

A modern perspective, based on an endless cycle of renewal and replenishment, would argue that when there is nothing left to articulate, then the end of the road has been reached. As the scientist who challenges orthodoxy once too many times is eventually shunted into obscurity, so the writer with nothing to write similarly violates his terms of service. Until the glorious, frightening spark returns, the dispossessed should take up paper-folding or gambling.

There are varying degrees of writer's block, extending from the insufficient internal consistency of an idea, to having nothing whatsoever to say. I suppose there is a further breakdown of communication possible in the event that I forget the rules of English syntax and grammar, or lose the ability to write altogether.

From that point of view, then, I am merely halfway down a slope at the bottom of which is an enforced and eternal silence, a living death. Even automatic writing, the last throw of the dice of a desperate man, and yet its most natural expression, is a distant consellation requiring extraordinary levels of talent.

Oh, to be able to automatic write, and to unwrap the many layers until whatever miserable secret that drives it is revealed! Is it really so simple, and yet so outlandish - wrenching the key from the soul which would do anything to repudiate this one event, and then standing back in disgust and astonishment when the whole game is up?

I long to write disjointed, in order that meaning is clouded and opaque, describing order and chaos, sublime yet outrageous, uncomfortable and difficult, natural yet the heart which drives it is manmade.

Visitor.

Most of the things I write about have some sort of creativity as their engine: memories of how things were, or ideas about how they might be, with words wrapped around them for effect.

I don't, then, generally bother with things which I am directly experiencing at the time of writing - the Spanish estoy pensando, present continuous.

It is different at the moment, though. There is a spider, large by English standards, roaming the downstairs part of the house, and it is this which occupies my thoughts, my typing.

I first saw him (they're always male, in colloquial spoken English) on Thursday night, half-emerged from a small hole at the bottom of the door frame. There have been a few of them guarding that little entrance since I moved here in April, recoiling back into their abode when the pressure of my foot stirs the ground next to them.

Not this dinner-plate, though. I can walk past with deliberately heavy footsteps, and the spider remains rudely stationary. This is an inversion of the natural order of things, and I feel affronted. David is giving Goliath, in relative terms, the middle finger.

Some 30 minutes ago, I detected movement from the corner of my left eye. Inevitably, my intruder had broken cover and taken residence under one of the wooden bars connecting two of the table legs in the living room. I orbited it, fitfully, for what seemed like an eternity, trying to ascertain the best angle to launch a rescue mission with a giant soup mug - the largest drinking vessel I own.

I tentatively dabbed - this is the best word, for it implies no conviction - the mug within the vicinity of the spider on two occasions, both time withdrawing my hand as though next to a hotplate. I stood back to admire its circumference, even pausing to take a photograph with my mobile phone (from a distance of a few feet, coward that I am.)

Then, gone, and I don't know where. I shifted my gaze for a matter of seconds, and my opponent had made its next move. I now scan the room anxiously - the walls, the floor, around the corners of objects.

I shan't kill it, even if spiders do possess all the characteristics to spark a cognitive emergency. Their very shape - that of a cracked windscreen - spells danger; their movement a confusing blur. This goes for the limp English ones as much as those which carry a genuine threat.

Yet I implore myself not to harm them. Should we not show our house guests hospitality, even if conversation is difficult and we'd much rather they go back to their own place? I shan't kill it, even though visions of it have disturbed my sleep for the last few nights; nightmares of swallowing it whole.

No horror writer could devise a more sinister enemy than the monster which generates spiders willy-nilly, impaled in victims like death stars. The corner of my kitchen seems to generate them regularly.

Disconnection.

The incremental awakening, as though from a long sleep, that all is not as it should be; an awareness that some aspect of my being had been imperceptibly shifted.

Rolling within me, and stretching its deadened fingers, the shock of movement coursing through the bones, conscious heaviness, the apertures of the eyes swimming with confusion. Disconnection of time and space and places.

The shock to kickstart consciousness - a set of traffic lights at half past eight in the evening. The sky a starry dish; laughing and shouting superimposed onto the sound of vehicles rumbling up to the junction.

Lights burning red, forever, isolating one side of the road from the rest of the planet. Comeonthefuck, impotent disquiet at this machine-imposed exile.

The unsleeping. Something yawned and intoned: you have lost yourself, through its slack, dreaming mouth. Its tiredness a striptease, to be removed one garment at a time. The unsightly, inelastic flesh below that of a figment of the imagination, the monsters conjured by four-year-olds.

Lights glowing red, angrily. Every human who has ever lived knows that this means danger. It is a tic of the brain, a flaw. On the pavement, stasis.

A machine with lights controlling a machine with wheels, controlling a bad-tempered, disbelieving man whose ghosts beat softly, like the wings of a symmetrical butterfly, within him.

You have lost yourself.

Secrets.

My existence remains a secret to many of the people closest to Bluefish.

Some of them may have guessed me - a hazy, shadowy creature crouching in the darkened corner of her soul - but others will have no idea at all.

To solve a puzzle, first you must have some idea of its parameters*. My congratulations go to those who realised there is a puzzle at all (hinted at by a change of some description in Bluefish. A far-away look in her eye? A sense of her being simultaneously present and absent from conversation?) - and made the intellectual leap upwards and forwards.

It doesn't concern me that I am Bluefish's known unknown. She sought confirmation of this over the past few days, and promised to rectify it should it hurt or distress me. There is no great need to fix anything, though. I am the current which pushes the blood around her veins, and she brings about my negation - transforming that which is destroyed, humourless and empty.

I have always been the jealous type. This means that it is not enough to merely share love with another person. Our names must be picked out in hot, bright stars, visible from any point on the surface of the earth. News channels must roll, endlessly, with the thunderclap of the revelation.

Yet I find that I can more than tolerate being her secret. It's something which is preferable. Does this volte-face come from being secure in her love - the final admonishment to thirty years of self-depreciation - or is it something different; an awakening, a realisation?

Its two mindsets describe the difference between romantic love and unsustainable, dangerous love. Now, it is enough that the thought of me can cause her to smile to herself. It no longer must be a matter of public record, for the act itself is all.

Unsustainable love declares that everything must be acknowledged, judged and valued externally, and it quickly burns itself out.

*There are millions of ways to waste time trying to solve the Tower of Hanoi, and only a few correct methods. Its parameters are every way, successful or otherwise, in which its constituent discs can be manipulated.

Jacques (I).

An extract from "Poids de rien" publication date April 2010, leaked by a publishing industry mole to inmemoryofabsentfriends in mid-August.

"It was the first day of September in Alsace, but to Jacques it might as well have been the first day of any month.

His days weren't defined so much by the passage of time, but by the piles of stinking clothing he had to work through - other people's dirt his peculiar badge of sorrow.

Disgusting, filthy animals, up to their necks in shit. Like cattle - and the women were worse than the men, he had found.

Jacques - bespectacled and unsympathetic in this, his 52nd year - mused on the strange discrepancy he had uncovered during the course of his job in Ninot's oppressive dry-cleaner's. Why is it that women should happily sink in their own ablutions when the mythical creature which lives in his mind is its exact opposite? As clean and pure and ungraspable as steam: this is a woman.

Oh, the oppression! If Jacques' life had been a pack of cards, every one he drew would have led him down this path of muck and heat and misogyny. 52 cards in the stack, each the bearer of some unlucky symbol or distant misfortune. Now they were all exhausted.

The first day of September, like the first of July, the first of February, promised nothing. The weight of nothing multiplied by nothing, months gathering months, a gaping, living zero, was an immense burden to Jacques. Zeroes pushing against each other, heads in a crowd.

Stinking clothes discarded by abnormal citizens. The only cipher he could push down between the days to differentiate one from the other."

Gods (II).

The Christian church remonstrates bitterly with those who steal from God - persecuting them up until death, and then blackening their names happily ever after.

God made the universe and all that's in it, say the scriptures, and any refutation of this ancient assertion is tantamount to stealing food from the holy table; inserting a finger into the holy anus.

The Catholic church hounded Galileo to his grave. Even now, in the supposedly civilised 21st century, the theory of evolution is sometimes accepted only tentatively. It might appear that natural selection is blind, but this randomness is perfectly logical when the enormous mind of God appraises it; or it is a celestial trick to trap unbelievers - true followers can see that all creatures are immutable, and only those tainted by the devil infer variation.

What is it that upsets the church so much, specifically? Supporting the view that the earth revolves around the sun, declaring that humans are descended from apes, upholding the random nature of the motion of the quantum, all shunt our species from the centre of the universe to somewhere on its outskirts.

We are just apes, on an unprivileged planet, who are made of imperceptible chunks of matter whose trajectory we couldn't predict even if our eyes could resolve them. Freud hammered another nail into our sensibilites when he argued that even our thought processes have been hijacked - the id is capable of leaking through cracks in the consciousness and swamping us with its primitive desires. Where we come from, where we live, our destiny and our self-control - all ransacked.

But there is one crime worse than any of these solid scientific discoveries. The day human beings invented god sowed the seeds of our doom. If people are made in the image of god then, it stands to reason, we can aspire to be gods.

People with sublime talent, those who achieve highly, so the idea goes - these are the ones who are gods-on-earth. Smaller than god, and without his long reach and pulverising fist, maybe, but his ferocious stamp seared into their flesh is evidence enough.

These people are the ones we have all heard of, whom we talk about in revered tones as we queue up for lunch in the works canteen, whom we read about to pass the time on train journeys. Even those of us who don't own a television, we still can't escape, for aeroplanes write their names on the sky, and tangled lovers draw their likenesses in the sand.

Yet what of these great people? They are not god, and their longing is to be flung back down onto the earth with the rest of us. So they get pissed, show their vulnerability by sleeping with anything that moves, turn their first names into a dimunitive, speak about how much they like going down to the football ground, or how EastEnders is what helps them get away from themselves.

Yes, the worst thing the church ever did was create the church. They have made bastard gods out of people with a grain of talent, and for this there will be no forgiveness.

Gods.

I've spent my whole life being chased by other people's gods, and running away into the shadows until they get sick of trying to recruit me to their cause.

There was the Catholic god when I was young: austere and vengeful in the tales told by my mother as she recalled her upbringing under his auspices - sanctioning twisting of hair, striking with a cane and refusing to bury those who have ever been divorced. Like the airbrushed London gangsters of the 1960s, he only punishes those who are asking for it.

I tried to talk to this god, but I saw him for what he is. He cast a shadow over the very sick beginning of my life when I could have fallen at any minute from my slender tightrope. Death being at least as likely a possibility as survival, I was christened at the age of three hours. That my father had sidestepped the Catholic church was (literally) a sin to my grandmother, and I always assumed I'd never really been forgiven.

I spent time melting away to the sanctuary of an upstairs room, or trying not to let my breathing be heard, when Jehovah's Witnesses arrived at the door brandishing their dogma, repeated for posterity in innumerable copies of Watchtower.

There has been the need to raise my voice in the street - the last bastion of those with no further argument - to the proselytisers who care about the destinty of my mortal soul.

Then there are the African gods, whose roots are not suspended in the sky, but preserved in every cat, person, stone and house that has ever existed. The fatal lack of of empirical observation condemns those, too, though: while those with the power to see such things can tell a sick tree from a healthy one because of the strength of its life force, I can only see a tree.

I've spent forever either fleeing such gods, or frozen in terror at the thought of them. Now, the ironic thing is that I've lifted a fragile, reluctant woman onto the pedestal from which gods stare down icily, and just as she was warming to her role as my arbitor, she had to leave.

So I am, once again, without religion - and without religion, it was observed, man is nothing. This time, though, it has been wrenched from my grip instead of relinquished voluntarily. The scorch marks are striped and sore on my fingers: stigmata.

Poetess.

I come back to you every time, and it is no longer a shock.

To get anywhere, you have to start your journey - but my journeys are always circular, and they all terminate with you.

For ten years or more, a third of a lifetime, you have been my reference point. You gave birth to the twin ideas, both of them corrosive, that it is possible to become sufficiently depleted that the only option remaining is to take your own life; and that no great experiences are required to produce writing of huge significance.

Worse still, the logical conclusion of the two concepts above is that a writer is elevated to immortality upon an untimely or inexplicable death.

I was supposed to be dead eight months ago, according to the timetable I made when you first broke my skin and took residence there: the great weight which I drag with me everywhere. Had I been more brave, the thin gruel of my own words would have sold maybe a hundred copies by now. The shifting, celebrity-obsessed western society would have made sure that I had my five minutes, and then cast me aside in open-mouthed anticipation of its next victim.

At thirty I intended to die; to fill the oven with my oversized head and replicate your end. I wished to rise so that we might compare notes - you, whose tree overhangs with serious, difficult fruit - and the butcher could have made off with my sarcophagus.

Now you are not a harbinger of death but instead postpone it. In times of crisis I listen to you read your slow, devastating poetry, and I swear it is a form of medicine. I am not replenished by you; no - you complete the process of hollowing-out, that I might begin again.

The bare bones are yours, oh butcher, but the virgin residue which will re-commence filling them out any minute now is my future. That my new, fragile skin is made from your own laboratory-synthesised genetic material is a secret neither of us have to share.

Origins.

I wonder about the origins of our biases and convictions in the light of an observation made by Bluefish in the last few hours.

Since her condition has deteriorated, it is a fact that I have found communication with Bluefish more difficult. Why is this?

I contend that the reason is because, from somewhere, I have convinced myself that it is a source of irritation to the unwell to be weighed down with trivialities. In other words: conduct your business quickly, decisively, and then leave her body to mend. This mindset has become a source of conflict between Bluefish and I because, she laments, she needs my presence now more than ever.

So where did it come from, then, the notion that it is improper to laugh with or eat up the day of those who are sick? (I should clarify that Bluefish is not on the 'endangered' list.) As I write, I realise precisely why she might appreciate now more than at other times an opportunity to be leavened from pain; to be distracted by anything at all. Yet still, my stubborn viewpoint persists.

I remember a book called 'Carrie's War,' which I recall had the stink of misery and sickness and overwhelmed, seething patients seemingly drifting from every page - the doomed Mrs. Gotobed.

I remember my grandfather announcing: they gave me some good news today! I've got two weeks to live!

I know how I behave when I have anything from a headache to something which requires a hospital visit - unbearably, illogically angry with anything which dares to intersect my path. Just as the drunk feels free to punch you in the face because he is no longer in control, I find myself biting back rage and frustration. It is the only time that such thick, dark emotions come to dominate me.

There is, I realise, an element of fear (on my part) here too. I am scared that I am no longer the one doing the steering, and that Bluefish is not permitted to steer herself either. Instead, we are at the mercy of something abstract, something which has overloaded her and stolen the thunder of both of us.

This is the frightening thing about (even non life-threatening) illnesses. They arrive unannounced and cleave that which was unbreakable straight through the middle. It's no longer just you and I, love.

A confession, too. I am scared of dying, and any illness demands that we, for a moment, look our own mortality squarely in the eyes. The thing about existence, so the joke goes, is that nobody ever got out alive, and I contemplate this with a shiver.

Illness.

Is it possible for a person to be so ill or miserable that their condition has an effect on someone else located an arbitrary distance away?

Some sets of twins supposedly have this characteristic: when you're cut, we both bleed. This telepathy is cultivated by shared nature, and shared nurture.

What about outside such an immediate family environment? What does it mean when Bluefish, in Canberra, has been cut and I in England metaphorically bleed for her?

The romantic in me rushes to the surface and cries: this is the ultimate expression of love! To be joined in an intimate, lockstep dance with the sick girl from whom I am separated by thousands of miles of ocean!

In ecstasy, we point out where the malfunctoning of one is replicated and amplified in the other. This love needs no external validation, for it exists haughtily above the abyss of men in their dirt and cowardice!

Yet although we are correct, we are mistaken. It is true that when Bluefish suffers, I concurrently suffer, waking up from bad dreams with an anguished yell. We are one: you with your neck; and I with my nightmares. In the near future when the surgeons pull out your agony by its roots, and kill it stone dead, I too shall shed blood.

There, though, the correlation ends. When the toxins which are presently polluting your system are a fading memory, I'll still spend my sleeping time bellowing out the past, existing uncomfortably in this unnatural furrow, returned indefinitely to the stale, sweating pit in which I've spent all but five weeks.

Psychiatry.

I remember the first - thus far only - time that 'they' ever admitted me for psychiatric evaluation.

I'd been struggling to get out of bed for a few mornings; then a few mornings became several weeks, and the sleepless pressure was becoming enough to blow my head apart.

So I went and begged the doctor for pills: please, give me anything to stop my very life leaking through my synapses. Some months ago, I reported the recollection that these 20mg pellets - the anti-depressive equivalent of shandy - turned everything flat and white and featureless. I existed in cloud, in mist, in snow.

Easily, a gift, I passed from one side of the wall to the other, ghosting through solid objects and people like steam. Abracadabra! Like some cosmological mind-trick, a feat which seemed to take a matter of seconds had erased four hours from my life, and I would wake up shaking. Like one of Pac-Man's ghosts, the pills let me travel wherever I wanted for a while, uninhibited.

The pills didn't fix me. Being a modern, impatient child of my time, I expected that I should be fixed. This is how I wound up in the waiting room of a South Yorkshire psychiatrist, hostile eyes following the cleaner as she swept around my feet.

When I was invited into my consultation, I pushed angrily into the room and demanded to know why the psychiatrist had a spy in the waiting room, watching my every move. What had she reported back, and what was the thinking behind it? Is it because you know my answers in here are rehearsed, while the ones outwith your confines are natural and unhesitant?

It was without pills, and without profession infringement, that I re-established some sort of normality. The difficulty in waking up subsided, for no apparent reason, and I ultimately threw the pills in the bin. I wished that the bin was the deepest mine-shaft on the face of the earth, or the Mariana Trench. I wanted them to be irretrievable.

Now the same stirrings which precipitated the deepening of the misery I had are happening again. Lethargic, and falling fast from the high of three weeks ago. The financial markets have taught us the difficult lesson that for every boom there is a bust. Regretfully, I anticipate that the cycle will soon have completed another one of its inevitable circles, and it so happens that I must soon start from the bottom again.

Cathexis.

With each significant memory, either positive or negative, is associated an attendant charge of emotion or energy - this is nothing new, and Freud was putting the meat on the bones of similar theories over a century ago.

I am aware now that the magnitude of such charges is never permanently reducible to nothing, even when cues to a specific memory are presented repeatedly.

I haven't drawn the graph of the decline, but the charge of energy does fall away with the number of repetitions, dwindling to somewhere just above zero at the nth presentation of the cue.

The withdrawal of the stimulus allows the energy charge to replenish slightly. Without any scientific rigour, I tentatively state that the charge replenishes more slowly than it drains: after n repetitions, and n equivalent rest-units, the cathexis would be more drained than before the presentation of the first stimulus.

This idea gives us the opposite of learning - where increased exposure to something results in enhanced recollection; and its withdrawal weakens powers of recall.

Strong emotions, then, would seem to be a hindrance to recollection. It is best to engage in learning with a cool head, and avoiding the strong, familiar scent of memories (I don't best know how this can be done) which encourages the perfidious bubble of cathexis to inflate massively, and obscure everything.

Inversion.

There are in-built biases in language which, if we are not careful, condemn us every single time we open our mouths.

"Hi. How are you today?"
"I've been better - I feel a little bit down."

I envisage shades of mood arranged, according to the convention embodied in the second quote-marked sentence, on a simple (vertical) number line analogous to a Likert scale.

.
.
.
+5 This level of joy is seldom experienced by anyone, even once.
+4 I'm so happy that I can barely concentrate on anything else.
+3 Life is good. I smile at strangers.
+2 For no discernible reason, I feel pretty good.
+1 I've certainly had worse days.
0 I don't feel anything at all. I'm either neutral, or numb.
-1 I'm a little bit down.
-2 There's a moderate sadness that I can't shift.
-3 It is obvious to a casual observer that I am suffering.
-4 I am broken to the extent that I struggle to get out of bed.
-5 This could well be the end of my life.
.
.
.

Expressed simply, then, 'positive' moods align themselves with positive numbers, and depressed moods co-incide with negative numbers - this we see from terminology such as 'feeling upbeat', and 'on cloud nine' as opposed to 'hitting rock-bottom', and 'my mood plummeted.'

I contend that most people are more able to deal with positive numbers than negative ones. That is, positive numbers are more natural. In the most intuitive manner of speaking, negative numbers refer to (a lack of) objects which are not graspable by the senses. Consider the classic (and stereotypical) case of a caveman with the corpses of two mammoths on which to sustain himself.

He counts backwards thus: I have I and I mammoths = II. When I have eaten a complete mammoth, I have II - I mammoths = I.

When the latter mammoth is also consumed, I am back to where I started, and must go hunting again. Our caveman only being a hypothetical creature, we cannot ask him what happens when he initially has two mammoths, and three are taken away - but some 21st-century humans struggle with the idea of debt, and of being less than nothing, so it doesn't take too great a leap of the imagination to conclude that our caveman might recoil at I and I mammoths - I and I and I mammoths = -1.

(To be continued....)