Friday night at the Garricks. Packed full, like a womb but only more intimate. Feel a little like frogspawn - wrapped up safe in maternal goo, shoudler to shoulder with people to talk to. I flit, less like a social butterly, more like a social battery hen.

Any conversation in a friday night at the Garricks could make a suitable blog entry. It's an enclosed environment packed full of genuinely creative and totally political creatures. Movements are forged and disbanded in the space of a pint, and forgotten in time for morning. As much as it's a vile sterile little pub, I can't dismiss it just because of the people. The peopel, while not good people, are interesting people, and that's all that I've ever demanded.

Ultimately, you can do anything you want to me, but bore me.

Here's one. David McCarthy, Ste Curran and Mark Wahlbank - the Edge Entity, basically - and I were chatting about floating personality and alterations, with a specific comic twist. Specifically, they were dwelling about the specific personality modes of Drunk Dave and Tired Ste. Clearly, these are not the same as basal level Ste or Dave. These people have very different skills and motivations. What they desire is not what basal Ste and Dave would wish. Hence, a literal war with their altered self. These two minds in one body throw machinations in each others way, temporal traps to trip, like Memento's tattoos.

Tired Ste is sleepy. Tired Ste will turn off the alarm and return to sleep, and leave no trace of these actions in his memory. To thwart Tired Ste, basal Ste will place glasses of water in the way of his alarm clock. Tired Ste, however, is determined. When Basal Ste wakes up hours late, he discovers that Tired Ste has moved all the glasses out the way without leaving memories.

Drunk Dave is a bad man. Drunk Dave will do all manner of things, which can't be predicted, hence must be set in a cage. When Drunk Dave is coming, basal Dave will delete every single girls number from his mobile phone, knowing what Drunk Dave may do. But Drunk Dave is cunning, and fully capable of retrieving the numbers from the deleted folder.

Drunk Dave. Tired Ste. Next engagements in their war with their other-selves will be fought, if I'm any judge, tonight and tommorrow morning respectively.

I have a something like a Drunk Dave, but I haven't been in his company for a while. Out-his-fucking-head Kieron has entered my life on all too few occasions in the last year, so I can recall exactly the frenzied Dionysian passions he explores. Last time Out-his-fucking-head Kieron was around he ended up crouched in the living room of his girlfriend's flat displaying his belly to all concerned and demanding they tell him if it's expanding like a balloon, as from his perspective it clearly is. And then Out-his-fucking-head Kieron decided to get naked. It's the only insane thing to do.

But I'm not thinking about Out-his-fucking-head Kieron today. I carried home an armful of CDs from work, rescuing some marching tunes of an alternate self that hasn't shown its face in a couple of years: Evil Kieron.

Evil Kieron was begat by woman and misfiring organs, and was something of a cunt. Evil Kieron laughs at rail crashes and snarls as often as he smiled. Evil Kieron was not a nice person to be around, unless you were on the dancefloor. Evil Kieron would never give a kind word when a cruel one would do. Evil Kieron was, admitedly, a good writer - the best work in my games journalism career has come from the period when Evil Kieron was fully in control of the KieronForm (Deus Ex, Everything is Wrong - you know, the award winning shit).

I'm thinking of that alternate self as I'm listening to Six-by-Seven's "The Closer You Get", which was one of the handful of defining albums of the period (ATR's "60 Second Wipeout", Shellac's "1000 Hertz", At the Drive In's "Relationship of Command" for the anger. Nina Simone best ofs and The Sophtware Slump for the sadness that just won't go away). My personal rage seemed to match the political mood of the time: General, rootless disastisfaction, realisation that things were not quite right at a quite fundamental level, Corporate Oligarchy draping a yoke around our necks and all the usual PRML SCRM XTRMTR bollocks.

"The Closer You Get" nailed the hard and the soft of the time. EAT JUNK BECOME JUNK is a song that has to be written in capitals, and is the sound of type-writer hammers descending on a city, crushing buildings into inky ruins. And on the downs and downer side, "One Easy Ship Away" is... well...

It's Saturday afternoon, and the beaten drums of war protestors merge with the chitter of the crowd marching up and down the consumer catwalk of Bath high-street.

And I find myself singing along with the modern age.

"I feel good now putting a gun to my head
I feel hope now, pushing a knife through my chest
It just looks bad, dragging a knife though my neck
I feel hope now, with my head down on this track"