SOUNDTRACK: Requiem for a Dream: LOTR Remix by Clint Mansell on repeat.

No - you've got no idea how frightening I find the idea that Clint-Alan-Moore-Knows-The-Score-Mansell is probably the most innovative, stirring, populist soundtrack artist in the world today. Something's broken, somewhere, and no-one has any clue where to start applying the sticking plasters.

Good. Covering up wounds is a stupid waste of time. Give 'em a little air. Let the fuckers breathe.

So let's breathe.

(Interlude: MSN conversation -
XXXX says:
i feel in a strange state of loneliness
Kieron says:
I don't know what I feel at almost three in the morning listening to this on repeat. So I write some stuff.
XXXX says:
yes, that's the key for us i think
XXXX says:
there is no final vocabulary
XXXX says:
and so we are in turmoil
XXXX says:
forever)

Don't want to talk about what's the most exciting cause of turmoil currently, but even before that I'm been swallowed up and obsssessed over the weekend. All media are chasing me around, and just making it impossible to sleep because there's too many thoughts and conversations that are running around my head. Films (Long Good Friday's heart being not in the Gangsters vs IRA most link to, but rather the subversion of the detective genre by making it be gangsters investigating their own. That and its score and brutality. Requiem for a dream again) and Comics (Skreemer. Milligan cross-cutting a near-future noir with Finnegans Wake to do something that's not an easy read... but it could have been a ludicrously complicated one. Take it apart, and it's a behemoth of mad craft. Obvious mad craft, perhaps, but still beautiful).

Other thoughts: In terms of comics, I have four sorts of ideas. The first sort of idea are ridiculously baroque, intelligent works that if they came off would secure me a ludricous critical repuation. They're sellable to the right publisher. They require more technique to write than I currently have, so I'm leaving them well alone. The second sort are the ridiculously pulp trash made of bits of my head I've collected over the year. I can write these now on energy, they're perfectly sellable, and I'll start fishing around in the new year. I want to sell some of these, desperately. I don't care wear. In fact, I do. The trashier and nastier the better: I was re-reading Morrison's work on Zoids today, which I realised used almost all the British invasion style Vertigo-stuff techniques to tell stories about big plastic toys. And it took it completely seriously. Most of all, the second sort of ideas are that - as pulp trash only works when it's written from the balls and the gut and you mean it. Otherwise, you're a wanker, and deserve to die. The third sort are small-scale short arty comics, used to play with themes and experiment. These are things like the HITS and hopefully HOMO DEPRESSUS, and their natural position is on the web, drawn by artists who want to experiment with these smaller scale pieces and shown to the world. Some of them are sellable, but I really don't want to. Their natural home is the web. They want to be free, and I don't want to stop them.

And the fourth sort of idea is CODENAME: POPBITCH. It hasn't a proper title yet, and it so clearly needs on (PLANET OF SOUND or LOST IN MUSIC are the other two candidates, and both of those stink in all the wrong sorts of way. Anyway - it's like nothing else. It needs to be long form - 22 pages, single stories. Possibly 12 or 16. Either way, longer than I feel comfortable for a purely web work. Equally, while I know there's an audience there for them, I know there's no publisher in comics who'd even dream of taking it on. Because their audience aren't reading comics. I have enough craft to have a crack at doing them now, I think. In fact, I can't imagine not doing it: it's something that has to be written and shown to people.

So: It needs to be a small press thing and done as soon as possible. For - I think - Bristol 2003. Since it touches more than a little on fanzine cultures, it needs to stink of cheap photocopying with staples that are put in the wrong way that slice people's hands.

I'm not drunk, by the way. I'm tired beyond belief, wracked by a terrible sense of melodrama and writing flow of conciousness.

Do excuse me - but I think the world's ending... The sky's dark. Nightime? You mean this happens every day?

It's at times like this you can see the primal fears kick in. Think back to the time before a nutjob had spent an hour rubbing twigs together and discovered Man's Red fire. If there's no moon, it' s Total Darkness. There, anything could come and get you. You're living in a forest whose edge you've never seen. There could be anything out there. There probably is. And it's big and dark with your mate hanging of its teeth and one day, when you're not expecting it, it'll eat you.

Back then, the world ended at sunset every single day. And sunrise was a new Genesis.

It's 3.20 in the morning. I have no idea what time it really is, but the light's growing thin.

Find friends to huddle to. Collect your flint daggers. Sleep back to back, lightly, waiting for something to jump you, as you know that it eventually will. If it's coming, you'll be ready. The world is over, and you're waiting to fight Leviathan for a chance to see the dawn.

Night-night.