The air is cold here. But I walk enough to be warm. One foot in front of the other - what does this distance, on a good road, count for against the migrations that people have carried out?

Brush off the cobwebs, sweep dust off a wooden table - this is to re-enter an old house. A year and a half on I should feel more horror than ever at what has been written here and what I thought then. But I am doing no better than I thought then - at least I thought, then.

So no judgements. Nonetheless I should clear this place up, which I will soon.

It has been a very pleasant day today, and today precedes a day which will probably not be very pleasant. As a matter of fact, tomorrow is going to be ABOMINABLE. Literature! And Economics! Economics and Literature! First Literature, then Economics - no, to have Economics, then Literature.

Oh heavy day, oh insupportable hour.

Went to HMV today, and somehow came upon the CD I have been looking for ever since that miserable Taiwan trip last year when the only CD I wanted was the one that was all over the ads and inexplicably (or, knowing the Taiwanese, therefore) nowhere on the shelves. Tokyo Jihen! Shiina Ringo! I mean, who doesn't like Shiina Ringo right? She even has a name that means apple, something only matched by the glorious Coconuts Girls and maybe some band from Osaka named Pink Blood Fly Chicken Hill Water Spray Gore Murder Blue. (I'm sure I've seen these words in some combination or other on the shelves.) Well, apparently HMV doesn't like Shiina Ringo, because they don't have a single CD of hers on the shelves!

Speaking of people who are inexplicably not on the hollowed shelves of HMV (no typo there), WHERE ON EARTH IS NOBUO UEMATSU!? Or, well, given he's in Japan where he has cranked out music that has made grown ups cry when their favourite long-haired demigod girl gets skewered by some creepy guy with long white hair, and is probably going to crank out more music that would make us cry over, oh I don't know, some random encounter with a chocobo or other (even game plots aren't what they used to be, man), WHERE IN HMV IS NOBUO UEMATSU!? If anyone who works in HMV reads this, please explain to me why I can't find him. He's Japanese right? I've searched L3. He makes game music, right? I've searched L1. You can't cheat people like what! You *paste*, or, well, you *nail* the damn sign on the wall, you follow it up! Now I regret not buying the FF X Piano collections when I could, and I could also yell about Junya Nakano, but I am nice and magnanimous and I won't. (Where in HMV is Junya Nakano? Wither goest his piano pieces? I neede to knowe!)

Lesson of the Day, as Written on the Walls of Heeren: When In Doubt, Buy. Corollary: Do not wait until the addiction hits, the websites are closed by the internet police, and the cds already stop coming out because the producers have crawled out from under the piles of revenue and yelled "NO MORE!" in a particularly Monty Python and the Holy Grail way, before you go and look for the miserable CD.

And well back to Tokyo Jihen and the absence of Shiina Ringo. So much for the lesson, I still didn't buy the CD (what's the point if I only got hooked on one song? Even though it *is* unavailable online... and unavailable by friends... and... sigh. ABOMINABLE. HEEEEEDEOUS.) This entry is to work myself up so that tomorrow, I shall raid HMV again, and Recover Junya Nakano, Nobuo Uematsu, and Shiina Ringo. It's all right. I can afford it. I have my Nefmq money. I do. I do.

...This is just impossible.

Nevertheless, at least the people on top were worth the money, despite their complete absence in any form. What really irks me is the fact that Ai Otsuka, our good old friends Morning Musume, and our newly-acquainted friends Coconuts Musume (Musume means young girl. It's supposed to have a connotation of being attractive I think. Do not fall for it in this context under any circumstances.) are all grinning, being sprayed with blobs of jam, or posing with ridiculously short skirts all over those same hollowed shelves. Why? WHY!? I mean, come on. This is not just a matter of taste anymore, this is a matter of economics. Think about it - music is one of the things most prone to externalities. Good music heightens the mood of a whole room if just one person buys it, and a city with enough bad music will all get turned over to acts worthy of the Sodom Room in Hell before long. Then what you do is, you do a thought experiment where fourteen whiny, utterly constipated voices scream a generic tune that was created by cutting up a piano score by Nobuo Uematsu (NOO!) and then asking a parrot trained in card fortune-telling in India to piece it together (NOOO!). Okay actually it's probably worse than that, because you still won't get generic music that way. Maybe the fortune teller who owns the parrot write the music then.

THAT is how bad it is. Then now you think of the externalities. Think of the people who will walk past CD shops that are blasting these songs. Imagine these people going back to their apartments, taking a toothpick, and poking out their eardrums to save their souls. Or think of this sort of music playing as background music in your nearby fast food restaurant (No, it *has* happened, I do know.) Now think of the people who would solemnly regurgitate their food, wipe their mouth, drink the last of their ice tea, and go off to some other fast food store. Think of the suffering! Think of the gastric pain! The wasted digestive effort! The cost of another exorbitantly exploitative burger! How can anyone possibly argue against having to internalise such externalities?

And, given these people all hail from Japan, there is only One Way to internalise these externalities: the Forty-Seven Ronin Way. Attack their millionaire homes where Mephistopheles (the mastermind, of course; who *else*?) is teaching the parrot-owner how to play the synthesiser with his elbows for the next album, and then skewer all of them - yes, even the parrot - on long swords. Very long ones. Then you can commit hara-kiri or carry out an Honourable Escape by swimming across the Tsushima Strait to Korea to seek asylum, I don't care. But you see, someone has to do something about this. So what I need now are forty-seven volunteers. Sign up on the tag-board, and we shall rid the world of bad music like Tokyo Jihen aimed to do (The name means 'Coup in Tokyo', and it is seriously impossible to think of it in any political context anyway) but never managed to. Good music will never win the battle against bad music, only long, ponty, metallic things.

(Please note: I need forty-SEVEN. Not Forty-SIX. Don't ask. Just sign on.)

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You are the only person I love so well I would blog for whenever you say something; I do not do that even for she whom I love. For all that, I suppose I disappoint you. But then perhaps it was mutual too.

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A lapse of memory takes me, and I realise I no longer remember the number. It must have been somebody else's number, but I cannot remember who, for those were the days when her number was not known very well to me. If I remember correctly, it would be the wrong number.

I can't be sure, and I'm not making sense. When would the wheelchairs come to take me? I don't think I'd need a straitjacket, but you need to let me take along my pens, the lovely blue ones who write in sprints and dry pants, the incontinent blacks rolling their balls in incessant circles when you put them to their slow executions. It is liquid dismemberment, writing; but now we have humanitarian (penitarian?) means, the blog and the Document, they don't kill pens but only minds. It's like the pigeon thing in Australia which some novel talked about, it's probably not a very good novel or it was one of those "AH HA I SWITCH MIND OFF DIE KNOWLEDGE DIE" novels, which makes it very embarrassing to mention. I think it was by Michael Crichton. (Now shut up.) Anyway there was this thing about pigeons and the SPCA on it, which was in a huge footnote which left me with nightmares.

I don't know why, but footnotes which are huge and long always give me nightmares. That is why I stop reading AJP Taylor once evening comes, because his footnotes are dreadful - long ones, ones with French and German and Latin mixed in when Bismarck (the bullying chancellor), or Clarendon (cowardly guy), or whoever is talking. Once I get too much of all those in my brain it translate into dream footnotes which never end, cannot be understood, and without which I cannot understand what the hell the book itself is saying, but I can't stop reading the book and putting it down because I happen to have cuffs around my feet sitting in an electric chair and the book actually weighs 12 kilogrames and once I lay it down, once I give up, it touches the conductors. FRRZAP. Someone fries beside me from fatigue and I hold the book up a little until the barbed wire around my shoulder (to prevent me from raising the book above my head where it's easier to hold on; I have very meticulous dream-tormentors) starts biting into it - not really biting, mind you, it's more like a beaver than a crocodile though a crocodile doesn't really bite either, it just spins you into bits after you're finished rotting, which I surely am not, but anyway the barbed wire bites me. I lower the book and nearly drop that thing onto the conductors.

I need to go on reading but I can't.

I want Freud. I want love. I want chocolates, and I want her to know. I want her to *listen*, and this may be my fatal flaw; but I want it anyway. Okay come think of it? Maybe I don't want Freud. Disregard that one, Providence.

Oh hell. Disregard the rest, too. I don't even have money to buy chocolates, or a hooker. Okay, chocolates. I don't even have that. And my liquidity is like the stem of a pen with a wedge of stuff at the ballpoint tip, it's all liquid, you can hear the damn thing sloshing if you listened, but it won't, come, out. Ah haha! Sloshing, sloshing, like drowning with an unreadable 12 kilogram book tied to your wrists except this time there's no getting out of it. Todo! Todo! I'm going mad, Dr. Sigmund, I really am.

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The blogging window, I realise, is extremely unconducive. It is as though the blog is a sensitive-skinned person lying naked on a couch and now I'm goign to have to tattoo all my angst on the son of a bitch; he'd delay, and he'd present all the rather unworkable parts to me, and he'd keep the bare skin pressed to the couch or curled up somewhere. (with him, that is.)

So there. Three minuts of loading time and an ugly square of a box for me to pour my shit into just doesn't cut it. Harrrrrumph. No entry.

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He breaks the news to you in bed - he, that is, in bed, and you... you forget, as you tend to forget revelatory moments because there's no time for the colour of the walls and the quality of the previous intimacy at Crucial Times. He is beautiful enough for you never to have questioned him when he called you beautiful; he is the exception you told yourself to allow for in your Life Plan - one in 18, you tell yourself, who never swam into the sea of pimples to find you on your little fair island; one in 20, but 20 was Gun Time, Jump Time, Crawl Time, Pump (calisthentics)Time; one in 22, but 22 was the Year of Three Texts and Two Essays in One Week where you were; one in 24. The fraction gets smaller, and then it gets real.

But yes, he breaks the news to you - so you tell her, with he in bed, you not in bed: you've let him in through all the doors you can conceive, six or seven or eight times, not waiting for an answer, and now he gives one. ?????. 'I'm sorry for not telling you who I am all this while,' he says, and he puts out his ridiculous arguments for the non-disclosure, arguments you wrenched out of him in your cafe (not strictly *your* cafe, given it owns your life and you own only the nice black apron), and other cafes a la 'I'm sorry, but they've got better latte', and eventually the part of your miserable little flat that serves as a cafe, kudos to him. 'Of course,' he goes on, 'now I think... I can trust you enough.'

Why, thanks. 'So who are you?'

'I am tbe Crown Prince of Idorna. I've been out here for a year, and then we met. And I'm staying for a few more months, before going back. My father is ill. I... I think he wants me back once I complete my course.'

What do you say when someone tells you he's a prince? White legless horse writhing down the smog-wreathed streets of this city-inferno, check; dashing attitude and aristocratic impeccability (or maybe that's just because everyone knows what you didn't, stupid little girl?), check; apparently ridiculous wealth, check. Double check and underline ridiculous wealth; you didn't even know your country printed money in the one thousands. But then a rich man's son, prince to some commercial empire, could do that too; a Prince, on the other hand, is just inbred.

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Times

My watch is off by three minutes, which is highly symptomatic of most of my life; as someone used to tell me, I was always mistimed. And so I was - three minutes off on my guide to how endless days were segmented; thirty minutes off on my instincts to seek food, three hours, one day, or maybe all eternity off on an attempt to arrange a coincidence. I should not have tempted coincidence at all.

Perhaps I would be well-advised to take on some motto like 'What remedy but patience?', but that would be so extremely self-pitying you'd need to be a martyr to say it, just like the guy who actually said it. Are there lots of Latimers and Ridleys, perhaps, willing to be burnt at the stake for their God? Or are these two really the ones I saw immortalised in a great stone pillar at Balliol, Oxford? If fate and attempts at amusing wit would have it I might yet get a chance to go check and see, but then there's always the Internet these days, and the Internet chargeth not tre hoondred thousande dollares...

In any case such are mistimings, so maudlin beautiful. I push open the door and re-enter the room to find you at the bar with two drops left in your shot-glass; as far as attainability is concerned you are to them as I am to you. I open my mouth to speak, but then you've spent enough on today and slip past, more and more blithely as is the fashion this season where partings are concerned. Never mind the fact that even if we had lingered we would have done no more; say goodbye, goodbye, and goodbye again, but only goodbye, and all of goodbye for all of the time we have for goodbye. Perhaps it's best you didn't care anymore.

On a lighter note, my mp3 player's wires are hopelessly entangled and will not part from each other. They've been like that ever since I came back from that little study excursion and took the step of actually listening to them; I thought I'd had them properly wrapped around the player such that nothing would go amiss, but then independence rather than obedience is what the hardware of my life seems to be geared towards. No matter; now that I've put it this way I feel much better, almost proud in fact, of the fact that my computer's connection has been dying on me repeatedly with 'dadum', 'dadum' like some perverse musical on privation and futility, and that the same mp3 player's plastic jacket is falling apart (I'm glad for that, it gets in the way of, I don't know, everything) and that it rewards me with sudden silence in the middle of almost all Miles Davis jazz pieces. If I take this overseas, it might just make my love my homeland even more.

Or it might just make me buy more cds, but then cds are awfully expensive anywhere, even here. No love lost, then.

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