Bleaker Street

The sun will never shine again. I don't mind. I really don't. I've been lucky to have had as much sun as I have during my life. Some people have never had any sun. People who live in vaults (such as safety-deposit boxers) have never felt the warmth of spacefire on their face.

I've had plenty of sun. So, whilst it's a shame that I'll never experience it again, I'm not bitter about it.

It's the epitome of bleak out there. I've never seen anything bleaker. I've drunk bleach from a black beaker; I've licked a blind bloke's leaking grey teat; I've eked out a weak funereal living; I've bled and shrieked.

But nothing is bleaker than this day. Because it's wet and cold. That's why it's bleak. That's why I'm writing this way.

Soon it will be April, and the sun will still refuse to shine. My eight hundred parasols are a joke: each more useless than the last.

The summer will be full of people reminiscing and pissing wattage up the walls.

Then it will be winter again. And at least the seasonal cold will be familiar. We'll wrap it round us like a shawl, nodding on our rocking chairs as our ricket-stricken children squint at fluorescent tubes.

This is what the world is like now. We've had a good run. It would be greedy to ask for more.

***

I thought I'd get the upbeat section of the blog out of the way. Next: onto how I really fail.

Hahaha!

I just made a mistake!

I meant to type "how I really feel", but accidentally wrote "fail". I'm sure a psychiatrist would have no interest in analysing that mistake LOL!

But seriously, folks - I'm really lucky to be where I am. Even though my feet are freezing, I have all manner of cheering luxuries. Lucy just made us a pot of loose-leaf earl grey tea. A lot of people think earl grey is the bleakest of teas, and those people may be on the right track. But at least tea is warm and delicious, which is more than can be said for the sky.

Also, I bought a jambalaya ready meal earlier. I know what you're thinking. "A ready meal? I didn't realise you were DISGUSTINGLY WORKING CLASS." Frankly, I find that offensive. Please email me an apology.

The jambalaya in question actually came from Waitrose. That's right: Waitrose. That's your favourite shop, that is. Who's disgustingly working now, eh?

I also have DVDs of the television programmes Enlightened and Girls to watch. I've only watched a couple of episodes of each, but they seem to be very interesting and American. I'll let you know when they cease to be either.

That's the good thing about living in the civilised world. Nature may crush our spirits, but we can always buy commodities that will make us feel better. That's why there's no need to fuss about poverty and war. Buying things kills off our urge to make the world a better place. I'd rather improve my DVD collection than the state of the planet.

I'm listening to my iTunes songs on shuffle, and they seem to be as bleak as the weather. I think that's some kind of reverse-pathetic fallacy. Maybe I should skip until I find something more upbeat.

Ugh. No, not that.

I don't seem to own much upbeat music.

Oh, that's pretty good!

There!

Then again, the lyrics aren't that happy.

Speaking before you figure it out
Not always right, but never in doubt
Stepping inside for now
Your mind is red
Fall down dead

Into the dark, out of the room
Out of the way, never too soon
Some of the ground you gave
Lost instead
Fall down dead

Don’t listen to me, listen to yourself
Listen to yourself
Don’t listen to me, or anybody else
Listen to yourself

Some of the things you said
Stop my head
Fall down dead
Fall down dead 

I wouldn't like to fall down dead. I'd rather fall down alive, and then die afterwards. I don't want to miss the falling. It would be an experience.

I need to buy some slippers. They would warm up my feet, and no mistake.

Purchasing will save us all!

Capitalism is all about distraction. With enough objects and colours and sounds, things seem good and well.

I've just looked outside, and it's not that bleak after all, actually!

I'm going to go and cut myself.

Some bread! Cut myself some bread!

HAppy EASTERR Everyboddy!!"

Head Games

I just nearly signed off an email with an exclamation mark after my name.

Thanks,
Paul!

That would have been embarrassing.

I also nearly added a stick-man drawing of myself triumphantly shouting my own name.

Luckily, I check all emails seventy times before hitting the "sned" button. I've very thorough.

It's Red Nose Day today. In honour of this, I wrote the preceding sentence, and will put some change in a collection box, provided I pass one on the way home.

Oh great. Now that I've made the content of this post current (or "up-to-and-including-the-minute"), I have to finish this today. I can't just leave it for a few days and then just finish it when I have nothing else to do. If there's a power cut, for example.

I just read what I had so far. Fun fact: typing "sned" was an intentional error; writing "I've very thorough" was not. Sometimes I inhabit my comedy so much that I'm not sure where I end, and the big fake plastic nose, glasses and moustache begin.

Funfact: the fifth German act.

Ha! I might have tweeted that before. Or maybe I intended to, but thought that it needed more work. And an umlaut.

I have very high standards.

I dreamt a funny thing the other night. I thought it would be hilarious if I was a boxer, and my nickname was "The Most Sane Man in the World".

The humour comes from the fact that anyone with that nickname would seem insane. Anyone so insane as to have that nickname would be feared as a fighter.

It was a bit snappier in my dream, though. In my dream, I invented an adjective. It was something like "The World's Sanest Man".

Oh. Hang on.

Hang on just a minute.

"Sanest" is a real word?! Spell check says that it is!

That's really put the cat amongst the pigeons. It means that my unconscious mind has a better vocabulary than I do.

What about "saney"? No. That one's not real. "Sanest" it is.

I really can't believe it. Sanest.

Anyway, I think people would find it an intimidating name. Paul "The World's Sanest Man" Fung.

It would mean I was either insane (according to my initial inverted interpretation), or I actually am more sane than my opponent.

It raises interesting questions about the nature of sanity. The nickname suggests that there are degrees of sanity. All people lie somewhere on a sanity spectrum, ranging from Jack Nicholson's Shining character (John, I think his name was) at one end, to me at the other.

I'd be saner than people who considered themselves quite sane. I'd be on the top of the sanity tree. It's not a tree, it's a spectrum. It's just an analogy.

Would people's sanity fluctuate between more and less sanity, or would it be genetically predetermined? I'm not a doctor.

The alternative is that sane and insane are absolute values. One is either sane or insane. Linguistically, this seems to be the case. Insane is the opposite of sane. Just as invisible is the opposite of visible. Or intellectual is the opposite of tellectual.

It could be black and white. But not in a racist way. It could be the whites who are insane, Mr Presumption. Who's racist now? Or the Chinese. Let's not have any preconceptions.

Or maybe it's a combination of the spectrum and the absolute. After all, there are degrees of visibility. If one is invisible, she cannot be seen. But she might also be more or less visible, depending on whether or not her bathroom has frosted glass for example.

(I initially congratulated myself on using a female pronoun there, but those suggestions of voyeurism have made political correctness come back and bite me on my penis, which - and I can't stress this enough - is flaccid, confirming the nobility of my intentions.)

So some people might be more sane than others. But the insane people may be lacking in sanity altogether.

In any event, I'd be a great boxer.

I'd need to train and buy gloves, but success is 90% nickname.

***

I was asleep just now. It's later in the day. I just thought I'd relay a bit of dialogue I dreamed. My sleep-self's creativity isn't all nicknames.

Here it is. I think the first person is on holiday somewhere.

"This country is weird. Did you know that towels are at both number one and number two in the charts? Towels."

"What charts?"

*pause*
"I don't know. But they really seem to like towels here."

THAT COULD BE IN A PLAY.

Jump Forward

It was a great day when humans finally erected a building tall enough to guarantee a successful suicide.

For a long time after we first began construction work, the depressed potential jumpers didn't have that option. We started with shacks and huts. Jumping from the roof of one of these would not guarantee death. It would probably just be fun.

But gradually, as technology and design improved, our buildings began to inch upwards. Nowadays, with our Shards and our Burj Khalifas, it's difficult to remember a time when we struggled to dwarf a sunflower with our architectural prowess.

We slowly moved from single-story sheds to two-story deluxe sheds. People standing on the roofs of these new giants would look down at the ground. It would have looked very far away. But not far enough away to guarantee death if you jumped. It might cause an injury, but that wasn't good enough. When it comes to suicide, there are no half-measures. Unless you're a conjoined twin.

People forget how difficult it was for the suicidal in those days. No tall buildings, no guns, no gas ovens, no exhaust pipes, no sleeping pills. It's really difficult to kill yourself with a spear. Being suicidal back then must have been very depressing.

Eventually, news would have spread that we'd cracked it. A new form of structural engineering perhaps, a stronger mortar, or a sturdier girder, would finally have enabled us to reach the desired height. From this new building, a jumper would guarantee a swift departure. They could shuffle of the roof and mortal coil simultaneously, though obviously they wouldn't yet be aware of this expression.

News would spread. People would gather to watch as construction neared completion. The suicidal from miles around would gather, waiting for the building to achieve its optimum height; waiting for the doors to open.

Of course, the architects would have known this was a possibility. I'm sure that building height was restricted to sub-suicide height by the powers of the day. But human ingenuity is not easily restricted. And one brave visionary must have decided to ignore this edict.

We can't limit the scope of human achievement, just because it will cost a few lives. It's not an easy decision to make, but we have to keep pushing forward. If we were always bound by safety and fear, we would stagnate as a species. Evolution requires risk. If you want to make an omelette, you can't be worried about how certain eggs might react to the proposal.

Some people would be too impatient, of course. Days before the building's full height had been realised, some would have snuck up to the roof, carrying a step ladder. Their eagerness would have given them a head start.

As soon as the building was high enough, the suicides would begin. The queues would have been long, snaking up the stairs and onto the highest point (where the thoughtful construction team would have erected a special diving plinth). Dozens would plummet every minute.

As the pile of bodies built up, the distance for the prospective fallers would decrease, so a good samaritan would have had to keep throwing the corpses to one side, where they'd be carried off by primitive hospital carts. The organs, bones and clothes would be used to further the cause of medical research.

Whilst queueing to jump, some of the suicidal people might have struck up conversations. Realising that they had similar interests (self-destruction, jumping from things), some of them would have formed profound relationships. Some would even forego the suicide entirely. Faced with companionship and understanding for the first time, they would leave the queue and get married, or go into business with each other.

After the first couple of days, the crowds would die down (no pun intended). Soon other buildings of a jumpable height would appear all over the country. Suicides would continue at a steady rate, but would not happen with the same feverishness and excitement.

The idea that you could kill yourself by jumping off a building was taken for granted. The suicidal had, in a way, been emancipated. Society as a whole became more accommodating of those who no longer wished to live. (The first tall building emerged at roughly the same time as the noose.)

Today, people have an incredible range of suicide options, from train fighting to toaster/bath electrocution. In fact, it might be the case that there is too much choice, as counter-intuitive as it sounds. Some suicidal people have so many possible avenues for achieving their goal that they become paralysed with indecision, and will sometimes give up on killing themselves altogether. It is not easy to opt out of modern life

We must remember, however, that romanticising of the past is something to be resisted. It's true that today's suicide doesn't have the intensity or the novelty of that initial movement. The enthusiasm of those first, excited roof jumpers isn't something we can replicate.

But modern suicide isn't worse than it used to be. It's just different. New technology (the internet, smartphones etc) allows for a greater level of communication between the suicidal. People are able to devise their own methods of self-slaughter, and share them instantly with like-minded people all over the world.

It's always a mistake to think there was a golden age. Suicide has existed in different forms for thousands of years. Who's to say what form it will take in the next twenty, thirty, one hundred years?

Buildings are now so tall that a cat could jump from the roof and lose all nine of its lives before it reached the mezzanine. But let's not forget those poor people in the distant past, looking longingly up at the sky, yearning for a platform.

Look how far we've come. Look how far we've fallen.

The Sculptor

Michelangelo famously claimed to be able to see his statues fully-formed in blocks of marble, waiting for him to reveal them. Similarly, I also sometimes claim things.

I'm not claiming to be Michelangelo's equal. He was, by all accounts, a very skilled artist. I am not. But our penchant for making claims is something we both share. We are not equals, but I could, in some sense, be seen as part of the same lineage: an unbroken line of claimers dating back to authoritative cavemen.

"Buffalo strong; need many spear," they might have claimed.

I don't have an interest in buffalo, and spears are now obsolete technology. But the essence of their statement is something I can recognise.

History can seem like a bewildering sea of activity. There have been so many people, living in such a wide variety of circumstances, that trying to situate yourself within them is almost impossible. What bearing does one atom have on the whole? What importance can be ascribed to a single monastery brick?

The further we zoom out, the more insignificant we become. But if we zoom further in - enough to make out the inoculation scars on our upper arms - we become not just an important thing, but the only thing.

It is only through our connection to others that we can hope to find a sense of perspective. The perspective will still be warped and subjective, but it will at least give us something to hold onto.

As I get older, I'm starting to compare myself to others more often. I don't know why this should be.

I suppose I just want to see where I stand in the League Table of Humans.

When I was younger, it was still early days. The rankings didn't mean so much because there was so much time in which to accumulate points.

But I have fewer years now. My range of possible finishing positions is getting smaller and smaller. Things are starting to settle down - people are finding their level.

I'm probably not going to beat Michelangelo, even though I (hopefully) have several years in hand. I'll really have to pull off something spectacular to climb above him.

We may both be equal in our propensity to claim things, but that's not really going to sway anyone. It's even less significant than goal difference.

I don't know what the measures of success are in the League Table of Humans. I like to think that money isn't too important a factor, but it's probably in there somewhere, maybe just above juggling on the the scale of human worth.

The factor that has the most weight is some kind of abstract spiritual well-being. I don't mean spiritual as in something beyond the natural world (because there isn't anything), but in the sense of something more profound than the number of cars you own, or the number of countries you've visited.

I think maybe a person's well-being isn't cumulative, but is only added up after you die. That's why people recant on their deathbeds.

At this point, I should probably say that I don't really know what I'm writing about here. At no point during this post have I had an objective, an argument, or an idea to convey. I've skirted round the edges of some interesting things, but haven't been able to put together a coherent message. I have, at least, written in a fairly serious tone, which may have bamboozled people into thinking that what I've said is somehow insightful.

That's the closest I can get. It might be that I have some kind of opposite charge to that of truth, and so we repel each other. I've tried to work my way around this natural law. I've attempted to approach truth with brute force. I've lashed myself to smaller truths, hoping they will carry me towards revelation.

But I can't change my charge. Truth will always be out of reach. I aspire towards it, but am doomed to fail. This awareness may seem like a kind of truth, but it isn't really. It's just an acceptance of falsity. All of the optimism and linguistic trickery and imagination in the world can't overcome the twin powers of magnetism and pragmatism.

All I can do is continue to write in the same style, still - despite dipping into meta-analysis - talking about nothing of any substance. And yet here I am, about to click the 'publish post' button.

What I call content may not be what you call content. For you, this might be an exercise in futility. For me, it is Monday. We may be packing different luggage, but our suitcases are equally heavy.

Where Michelangelo saw a block of pure white marble, I see a pure white text box. Where he frees the statue within, I chisel away blindly until you can all see is the black.

Dip

And I thought to myself : why waste my afternoon pressing various sharp things into my eye socket when I could be writing a blog?

This is something everyone can enjoy! Why should I have all the fun?

It's been a crazy couple of days, I can tell you! I don't know where to begin, I can tell you! I can't tell you everything I've done, I can tell you (in code)! 1234562890*

One thing that I will say is that I'm considering adopting a speech impediment.

We went down to the shelter the other day, and had a look at the poor unfortunate speech impediments that people had discarded. People think that having a speech impediment will be fun, but they don't take the long term view. A stutter will grow. Do you have the capacity to care for a full-sized stutter?

Remember: a lisp is not just for Chrithmath.

They do a good job at the shelter, taking care of them all. But they don't have an unlimited capacity. Some of the unwanted impediments will have to be put down.

The stutters and lisps are popular, of course. And Jonathan Ross has made the soft 'r' a hot property. But I was interested in one of the less popular ones.

I think we're going to provide a home for one that's not so highly demanded. I want to be unable to pronounce my sevens.

It will be good exercise for one thing.

***

AAAAAAAAAHAHAHA.

I took that sentence to its logical conclusion, all right! That's why I should be a comedy. But I abandoned it before it could be resolved. That's why I will never be a comedy.

***

It's more Saturdayish than it was when I wrote the above. If I'd started the "adopting a speech impediment" routine today, it would have been fully fleshed out. It would have had a punchline.

No point in dwelling, eh?

To dwell is to stagnate. Fresh fruit flies free.

What shall I have for lunch? Fresh fruit? Fruit flies? I can't decide. There's football on, so I'm struggling to concentrate.

I'm going to do my best, though. No one wants to paddle in the stream of consciousness. They want to take a proper stiff English dip in a canal.

Here is a well-argued essay on a single topic:

Lawns

The British have always valued their lawns. Every household should have a small rectangle of tamed nature to all their own. Preferably two.

The lawn was introduced to Britain by the Romans. Roman lawns were very different of course - not as green, covered in spears and chariot axles - but the basic principle of giving houses a grass bib was a staple of the Empire.

The native Britons were initially reluctant to adopt this kind of landscaping. Since ancient times, a person's property consisted of a building and several pits. Nature was threatening to the primitive Briton. It was something to be avoided. Grass was associated with disease and witchcraft. Pits were a way of transforming the outside into the inside. After all, what is a pit, if not a worm-laden house?

But people soon began to see the benefits of lawns. Grass was softer to walk on than the usual rocks and bones, and so led to great savings in shoe costs.

Lawns also became a good way to store gnomes. Before the Romans, a household's gnomes would be stored inside, cluttering cupboards and enlumpening beds. Now they could be placed on the grass, clearly visible. Gnome type became a good indicator of wealth.

In the days before lawnmowers, lawns were trimmed by sharp Frisbees, thrown at the desired height.

During the Reformation, the opulent green of the lawn, together with the iconography of the holier gnomes, was associated with Catholicism. Many lawns were burned, and many bird baths were smashed. Protestant England was not a place for clean feathers.

The lawn went in and out of fashion until Queen Victoria popularised the lawn in her hit single "Grass Out Front, Arse Out Back".

Since then, the lawn has been seen as a bastion of Britishness. Is there a more British scene than seeing an old man, asleep on a deckchair, his arm lolling at his side, the tips of his fingers tickling the blades of grass, his wife baking a pie in the kitchen, his son compiling an anthology of cricket statistics, his dog snuffling around the flower beds, looking for the culprit of some hideous crime?

No.

There really isn't.

One day I hope to have a lawn of my own. I will sprinkle it with fertiliser and will plant and water a flag. It will be a Union Flag. But I will call it a Union Jack, because I'm not a stupid pedant.

***

See? I can do anything I put my mind to.

I'm going to stop doing this now.

Have a lovely life.


***

*Code solution:

1: G
2: R
3: A
4: P
5: E
6: F
8: U
9: I
0: T
*: an asterisk, indicating a footnote 

[/Turing]

Input

It's time for one of my patented reviews of popular culture in a feature I've decided to like to call:

Fung Is Entertainted

I've seen a few films and television programmes recently. Here's what I thought of them. I have a short attention span, so I will have to summarise my findings in only two, abbreviated, words.

Django Unchained

Prett Und'rwhelm.

Argo

Goo. Fu.

The Red Shoes

Spectac Vizh

Manhunter

Int'res BS

The Walking Dead

F'ing B'ring

Chinatown

Snip'd Noz

Before Sunset

Eth'n Hawk

That's the end of this edition of whatever it was I decided to call this. Join me next week to see what life is like.

***

I'm thirsty. Hang on a minute.

...

That's better.

I just glugged down some orange juice (straight from the carton). Then I realised that the washing machine had finished, so I hung up the clothes.

That may not seem very interesting, but it will explain why this post smells of detergent. This isn't just a visual thing for you. I want you to experience my writing with all of your senses.

Lick the screen.

Go on. Nobody will notice. It doesn't have to be a big, slobbery lick (though I'd be delighted if it was). It can be a small, tentative lick. Like a cat trying to assess a letter bomb. Go on.

What does this taste like? Like orange juice? No. It won't taste like that. But it will taste of something appropriate.

Shh.

SHH!

Don't say anything. I just want you to listen. There. Can you hear it? It's almost inaudible, but it's there. Computer screens make a slight noise, and that noise fluctuates depending on what is displayed. Not a lot of people are aware of it, but the actual composition of the pixels modifies that sound. Simply by having different images on the screen, I am playing a "tune" that can be picked up by sensitive ears.

LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL.

There. Did you hear that?

What about this?

There. See? A whole different sound.

I'm playing this like an instrument. My blog doesn't just smell, taste and look interesting. It also sounds great.

It's also probably effective with whatever the other sense is. I can't remember what the fifth one is, and I'm too busy to look it up. I think it has something to do with gravity.

This is a sensory smorgasbord for you.

I'm a little bit concerned, because my spell check has identified an entire paragraph as a spelling error:

You see? It's all underlined in red. That can't all be incorrect, can it? It's not even a warning about grammar - it's definitely a spelling issue.

I right-clicked (or "wrote-click") on the error, and it has No Spelling Suggestions.

I've never been one to kowtow to spelling conventions, so I'm going to plough on. It's still a worry, though. I don't want my spell check to start judging me harshly. It's only through its indulging me that I've had the confidence to keep writing, even when I have nothing to say.

***

Panic over! I wrote "what it displayed" rather than "what is displayed". Once I corrected it, the red lines went away. It must have just been giving me a buffer zone. I might have missed a two-letter error line. Better safe than sorry.

I'm going to end this blog post now. I've got a lot to do today; particularly when it comes to the field of body scratching. I realise that this entry has been short on "substance" and "content", but I've never claimed to be a content provider. Or a substance provider.

The only thing I provide is happiness.

For others.

On Liquids

I went to sixth-form college in Eastleigh.

Yesterday's by-election has made me think about the time I spent there, and the people I encountered.

Ha! Not really!

I did go to college in Eastleigh, but know nothing about the place, and only went outside to buy McDonald's coffee and terrible albums on the day of release.

Also, I haven't really been following the by-election news, even though I might well have caught a glimpse of my old stamping grounds on the television. (I didn't have stamping grounds. I barely had feet at the time.)

My only significant memory of being in Eastleigh was a constant feeling of hatred towards immigrants. But that subsided whenever the bus carried me back into the tolerant arms of caring, reasonable, socialist Southampton. My friends and I would show our disdain for the bourgeoisie by going to Sega World and dropping £18 on a session of Time Crisis.

***

Imagine a mirror world, where males are female, words are backwards, and sheep are threatened by menstruation.

Go on. Imagine it.

Now, have you imagined the punchline? All of the ingredients are there.

It's not really a punchline, so much as a thing that I thought of which made no sense without that build-up.

Are you there yet?

That's right.

The Girl Who Cried Flow

"Flow" is "wolf" backwards. And the word "flow" probably has something to do with periods or whatever. I can't google it, because I'm worried about what I'll find.

There might be a cleverer or more succinct way to do that "joke". Feel free to write your own version. I'll gather together all of the entries, and will compile them into a big ball of screwed up paper.

I'll have to print them out first.

***

The good thing about writing a blog post in segments is I can use clever sequencing to make up for a deficit in quality. Always start with your strongest segment, then continue with something of real substance. Make sure you end on a high note. You can bury all kinds of shit in the middle.

I haven't sequenced this blog post yet. This section is in third place as I write it, but I might decide to put it first. It seems pretty strong.

Of course, my putting this first might be confusing, given that I'm about to mention the wolf joke and McDonald's coffee. Perhaps I should just leave things as they are.

It would be a shame, though, as the following segment is going to be AMAZING, and would make for a good opening.

***

Hello. This is the beginning of the blog post.

***

I came up with an obscene rap in the shower the other day. I won't transcribe it, because it doesn't really work unless it's accompanied by some heavy beats and/or the sound of running water.

I think the time I spend in the shower is the most creative of my day. I don't know what it is about rubbing things into my body and hair that makes me so susceptible to inspiration. It's like a meditative state, I suppose. You don't need to concentrate on lathering yourself, so your brain isn't encumbered by the usual roaring mind traffic.

Thinking and clothes are the biggest impediments to the creation of art.

Our new shower is terrible, though. The brilliant ideas I have - and to give you a sense of scope, my rap rhymed "retention" with "pension" - can't come as thick and fast as I would like (shampoo viscosity). We're hopefully getting our bathroom done at some point. When we have a fully-functional shower, I'll be churning out ideas faster than you can say "Paul - you've been in the shower for nine years. Do you still want this tea?"

***

They sell sanguinello juice at Waitrose. It's expensive, but it's there. I don't know anywhere else that sells it. But I can't stock up, can I? Even if the juice lasts for a long time. I can't. What would people say if I had a trolley full of sanguinello juice (in bottles)? They'd laugh for sure. They might make a cutting remark.

It would be expensive, not just financially, but in terms of self-esteem. What would people say?

Maybe I could anticipate the remarks by muttering "blood orange, blood orange, blood orange" over and over again. And each time I said "blood", it would be accompanied by my electric LED baseball cap displaying the word "BLOOD".

That might make it better. I would not be mocked. I would be respected.

I really like sanguinello juice. It's much better than water.

***

I'm dusting my hands to signal that it's all over. I've gone back and carefully sequenced this whole thing. If I could use one word to describe my writing, it would be "honed".

I'm really disgusted with myself.

This whole thing is a disgrace.

I'm angry.

I'm sleepy.

I expected better.