Typing this and not sure where it's going. I would transfer to some more obviously productive mode were it not for the fact that I keep launching on ideas which fizzle out for lack-of-point and yet there must exist within these hopeless meanderings a thing of itself. One supposes, yet does not know, yet is familiar with this amalgam of mood and realisation. I think the prosaic term would be 'bored' but this is accurate only insofar as the similarity of feeling and result... a torpor. And I'd keep this little paragraph on the screen for later nuzzling and pruning except the computer makes such an incessant whine across such an unpleasant range of frequencies, highlighting how lacking in sensibility this machinery is, now it has inveigled my innermost stirrings towards communication. The routes I've been starting on are old ones, which used to give me pleasure. Music, say, and here on the cover of a magazine is a synth/sequencer/recording piece of software that can do all my teenage dreams for free, and it's great, except I've lost the desire. Same with architecture and visuals: everything I can see I can make into an aesthetic exercise/building parti/surrealist cartoon. Why bother applying effort? Work smarter, not harder... for what? Who are we trying to impress? And has experience in the working world not taught me that these 'work mantras' are in the service of sophisticated repetition, a kind of high-class switch-off to the possibilities of being alive on planet earth? This leads me to a conclusion. One that is familiar to humanity, if not yet to me, which is the concept of a threshold: an elastic, bouncy almost glass ceiling of a threshold, that needs either to be fatigued into infinite flexibility or burst through altogether. I want a higher level. In ward thirty, approaching 23 hundred hours. Reading in bed. Above the irregular snoring of my room-mate are voices in the corridor outside: the ones in white clothes I admire for their sane acceptance of duties, as they open card boxes and crackle pills from bubble-packs, clattering into plastic dishes in multiples to construct requisite milligrams of drug. Wash it down with 10cl of water, not from a cup or glass or mug, but a specially calibrated vessel so the whole thing seems more responsibly scientific. Heavy footsteps... the guy next door is pacing around as the 'sweet trolley' is wheeled roughly south-west in this self-closed diamond of a floor-plan: a cloister and, in the sun, a tranquil place where the soul is free, concentration possible and complexities unravelled. I'm closing the book and inserting home-made earplugs as an alarm sounds: another nutter to the fire-escape and if he or she... it was a she and went straight to high security jail in an ambulance-the rules-, the poor woman... battered and abused and hopeless and... not mad! Good gawd how smug people can get but it's their job. Room ten. Morning. The armchair is buff leather; the window reaches to eight inches from the floor, skirting-space occupied by a central heating radiator of the trendy, minimal kind. Window sash thrown open to 100ft of frosty driveway at the end of which is Loch Feochan, in the house where Campbell, Thane of Cawdor, was murdered in 1592. A wee blue dingy of a boat bobs on the surface, a seagull, just a common, ordinary seagull wheels around stage left to stage right and under the riplets a mass of water. Cars pass. I venture down to a capacious living room and for lack of better things read about theatrical productions and poems in the Times newspaper and charge a spicy bloody mary to room ten. Fireplace. The loch is still there. just the rush of afternoon air; a jetstream's wake on shores of my skies jokes on velveteen flies on a dusty pane so much air in my hands I was hoping to remember you sweetly but I wasn't prepared for this I find it magnificent to be upset and for life to take one by surprise... I don't mind the pain but I accept this is a bit out on a limb to those who crave comfort and familiarity. What we know explains what we have but, if we're alive what might just be possible? If one were to forget a moment about knowledge... Big mountains. These lumps of rock are very, very big. Gordon... off-topic as usual:) _______________________________________________________________________ Never pay another Internet phone bill! 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