The Keith Richards Diet

Once again I find myself just traipsing around the internet making a nuisance of myself, as I do most nights when I am bored and lacking inspiration.

It's starting to get to me. I'm teetering on the verge of writing something but can't access it. The experience always feels like of of those dreams where you find yourself running desperately and purposefully - but then your legs turn to jelly and you can't 'effing move. My mind is cloaking itself, secreting everything valuable or insightful; hiding it away beneath the long-forgotten junk that clutters my brain - all covered in "dust and broken vases" like the ruins of Pompeii.

I am seldom quite so tormented by blinking cursor or empty page.

I think some part of my daft subconscious feels pressured because of Thursday. Another year gone and still I have yet to achieve anything of profound greatness. I have yet to capture the next must-have design, or write that defining piece from my two-decades-and-two. Youthful exhuberance combines with learned weariness, to create a stagnation that breeds nothing but discontent.

I have been reading James Joyce poetry this evening. Atracted by 'The Dubliners' tales of paralysis and the parallel to the situation of my own mind, and the amusement that only a writer who is very great or very bad, could name a collection of poetry after pissing into a chamber pot. The work in question 'Chamber Music,' was published in the early 1900's - don't ask exactly when as I have no idea. I have not once claimed that anything in these rambling diaies would be either true or well researched.

I was reminded that it has been some time since I perused the works of Mr Joyce whilst watching repeats of 90's Whose Line Is It Anyway. Perennial luvvie Johnny Sessions was parodying Joyce and it encouraged the shameful reaction I always have when someone mentions this particular Irishman, as I am forced to admit to myself that I have still not read Ulysses. I know I should, and often mean to, but life has a way of tempting me into less taxing pursuits.

As my thoughts are less than forthcoming tonight, here is one of my favourite examples of poetry from the man who wrote that blasted book which I have not read, and possibly never shall.

Flood

Goldbrown upon the sated flood
The rockvine clusters lift and sway;
Vast wings above the lambent waters brood
Of sullen day.

A waste of waters ruthlessly
Sways and uplifts its weedy mane
Where brooding day stares down upon the sea
In dull disdain.

Uplift and sway, O golden vine,
Your clustered fruits to love's full flood,
Lambent and vast and ruthless as is thine
Incertitude!

-James Joyce

On a lighter note, I also read with interest recently that Grayson Perry has made this years list of alternative fashion icons in Harpers Bazaar. Perhaps I'm more a more conservative dresser than I thought I was, because I really do not see the iconc-image potential of the man. It baffles me why a transvestite potter would be of interest to anyone except writers of Hogwarts-based slash-fiction. As a ceramic artist, and the first cross-dressing winnder of the Turner Prize (2003) he is noteworthy. As one of fashion's potential leading-lights however, he represents all the style charm of Beth Ditto in spandex leggings.

Speaking of undesirables - Pete Docherty was finally arrested today. I know that it will probably do him little good, and is unlikely to bring him an epiphany, but he is a public figure and it will at least show that drug taking comes with serious repercussions. Though if the obvious wasted talent, and prospect of looking like Keith Richards before you're 40, doesn't put people off heroin then hearing Docherty bleat about his difficult time away from the paparazzi is unlikely to have much effect. I have a theory about Keith Richards. I think he would have died of an overdose decades ago, but for the remarkable coincidence that all the drugs he took combined to comprise the ingredients of formaldehyde. I reckon he's that tanned looking because they've just been varnishing him since 1986.

Jo Brand announced on television today that she is writing a book about Morrissey and his Fans. Paul O'Grady said Morrissey was "a bit miserable." That is quite possibly the biggest understatement I have heard this year, and also rather rich coming from the plague-on-cheerfulness that was once Lily Savage.

I'm bored with writing this now - so you must be bored with reading it. I should start putting any interesting bits in the first paragraph so you need never concern yourselves with the latter flim-flam and blather!

I'm tired of knowing I shall not sleep.