426:

I need to stretch my brain and other bits before I can continue doing anything; this week has seen birthday and wedding parties and just general drinking here and there, and as much fun as that is, it isn't conducive to clear thoughts in the morning. When I wake up stressed out with self-doubt and stress and stuff it's more than a bacon sandwich can handle. Pray for a silent immobile day staring at the TV with one eye and the twitter feed with the other, before waking up at about 7pm and deciding I'm bored and had better do some writing or something. Maybe I'll get around to writing more novel, blogging about Ricky Gervais' stubborn addiction to an ugly word and Richard Herrings twitter stand against disablist language, a blog about a grand ol' Belfast pub and the mystery of its missing apostrophe, and a bunch of other stuff as yet to be pulled from my notebook and the dank oubliette of my memory; and maybe I'll get caught up with whatever other paperwork and form-filling that needs to be done (of which there is surely plenty, and I'm putting off writing that to-do list out of genuine dread and horror at what I might see before me). Rather than doing any of those things I'd much prefer to go back to bed and read the Captain Beefheart biography that has been reminding me about great music, and convincing me to listen to the most difficult stuff again. What with the recent hoohah about the Booker prize deciding that readability is the most important factor for judging literature (it isn't and shouldn't even factor in at all; literature should be a challenge to make you stronger as a reader, not a television programme in words), its great to be reminded that conventional 'listenability' is not a factor in genuinely valuable music. Great music as with great literature should make you work and think and wrestle with new ideas and difficult forms. Good comedy should too; but that doesn't mean you can just claim to have changed the meaning of an offensive disablist word, then repeat it over and over in a style that suggests you haven't changed it at all, eh Ricky Gervais? But less of that for now; it's a difficult issue and one that I am totally unqualified to discuss, but that doesn't mean I won't, I'm self destructive like that sometimes. Having said that I don't want to write about it at all, yet still have to, but don't need to but do want to, but can't or won't but probably will, ya get me? One long paragraph that will never be read by anyone is much more satisfying for me than writing a to-do list, and almost half as useless and ten-times as pointless.