Even mainstream American newspapers are starting to find it slightly fishy that everytime some shit is going down, we are told our subways may blow up, or they do blow up, or similar.

I talk to a lot of people, and they are all in a weird alignment. Dentists, pollsters, new age hippies, raving republican twentysomethings and hotel doormen tell me that shit is not as it seems and the next few weeks are going to be nuts. That, and we are about to witness the demolition of Watergate as the worst scandal ever to affect an American President.

Woo hoo, eh? Well, perhaps not. Clinton wasn’t shy of bombing people when his collar was getting breathed on, and the swine in charge right now don’t need excuses to kick off attempted armageddon. Because they’re CRAZY! And crazy people in corners are mad dangerous, especially if they have loads of nukes and armed dolphins and tremor machines and the fucking SPANISH FLU and shit.

“Chavez… has told foreign oil companies they owe more than $3 billion in unpaid taxes going back several years. [His] government has said oil companies won’t be able to continue operating in the country if they refuse to pay those claims.”

Man, I love Hugo Chavez so hard! He’s not taking any of those oil scum’s crap! Or IBM’s! Nor Microsoft! They’re cheating their taxes and he ain’t having it!

Expect Bushcorp to start bombing any day.

Question: How do you fuck an area that’s been destroyed by Hurricanes even harder?

You give all the money meant to get that place back together to people from, um, other places. CLEVER!

Hey! White Mike Jackson to sign to Def Jam? Jay-Z and Ghostface collab! Safe!

Oh, and here’s Biggie dissing RA. Mean! And he ain’t got love for Cube, who, to these ears, was his biggest influence! Respect the architect! Sheez! He’s got love for Pac though. And Rage. Big up Rage!

WOAH!

STOP THEM PRESSES!

I was done then, but I just read this.

Last time I was in London I was getting all freaked out by these giant bus ads saying if you were under 16 you would have to get an Oystercard if you wanted to get a bus, or tube, meaning, basically, all kids would have an ID card. All would be completely traceable. Etc. Now, I read, they’re trying to FORCE everyone else to get an evil trackey Oystercard by ramming up the fare for a single journey to £3 (!!!!!) from the already high £1.70, UNLESS YOU GET AN OYSTERCARD, which will lower your fare to – get this – £1.50! Scum! Swine! Redken calls this “free choice!” I call Redken SWINE! SWINE, Redken! DECEIVER! None of your trickery! Get ye hence!

I shall have to get a bycicle again and hope no cash strapped lickle yout who can’t get a bus cos he can’t get an Oystercard cos he’s not needing to be tracked cos his poverty has forced him into teefing and wotnot doesn’t nick it.

— Saturday, October 8th, 2005

“Blogs. I don’t even read them. I mean, it’s so outrageous… you shouldn’t even read it. It’s garbage. Nobody cares about it. Everybody knows the simpletons who are doing it are cowards and they don’t have any influence.”
Bill O’ Reiley

Wow, so my spelling the other day was pretty abysmal, right? Pritty… pritty bad. Yessir.

So, I am in LA again. Is that EST or PST? I have forgotten. Anyway. It is very sunny, and there are hummingbirds and mad bugsies all over the place. Last night Jeff took us to see Sigur Ros at the Hollwood bowl, so I got to drink nice red wine and eat crackers in a box in this beautiful outdoor arena and watch a few stars try gamely to penetrate the LA pollution dome, as we were serenaded in Super-Sound by these Icelandic types. I cried out of my right eye. It was beautiful. I had no idea what they were on about, but they had a wee orchestra, and I kept thinking about all the meanerds and all the genocide, and then here are these wee dudes from Iceland making this awesomely gorgeous noise with bits of wood an metal. Fucking crazy humanity.

Speaking of which, Ron Jeremy was there. Who’d have thunk it, eh? Everybody was very surprised. Which goes to show what presumptuous think-we-know-it-alls we all are.

So, you know, we’re expecting them – them being the “fucking crazies”, as Colin Powell had it, to blow up some trains in New York, and trigger a Earthquake in San Fransisco, and drop a baby nuke in Chicago, use that as an excuse to nuke Iran, and actively fail to do anything at all about bird flu then use that as pretext for blanket martial law. Then Luke emails me this story in The Guardian about how they’ve gone and recreated that spectacular Other Flu, the Spanish Flu that did that amazing job of felling the population back at the start of the twentieth century. Serious! They’ve recreated it! And stuck it on the internet so’s any crazy goofball scientist with a bunch of testubes can unleash MASS MURDER! Whoo!

How is it scientists can so often be so smart, and so Skygoshdarned DUMB at the same time? How is it they can afford to do that kind of shit, but they can’t put non-archaic books in Primary Schools? Why do we stand for this lunacy? IS the last sane man alive actually a RETARD?

The Family Guy movie is very funny in places, but ultimately disappointing. Just so’s you know.

Hey, good news! The EU is making itself useful and challenging the US’s dictatorial ownership of the internet! Sweet! So we’ll have dudes like Charles Clarke running it AND dudes like Paul Wolfowitz! Woo hoo!

Hahaha.

— Friday, October 7th, 2005

So, the last dream I remember having, I got back to London, and was living in this weird flat, with really high ceilings and sort of piss yellow walls. It was in a fucking terrible state, I can tell you, and I was greeted by this horrid stench, and blood and shit all over the walls and the floors. Then I remember I’ve got a dog (I haven’t actually got a dog), and that the dog’s been locked in here the whole time I’ve been gone. Then I hear this awful growl, and this blunt nosed, sinewy ball of muscle and gristle and teeth and spit leaps at my throat.

Last night, I don’t remember my dreams, cos I my head was full of the song Emile and I did. It is a very happy sort of an affair even though it sort of isn’t.

I am off to LA again now. Peace!

— Wednesday, October 5th, 2005

I found a good thing! I found a good thing! Lookitme! I gots balance! Someone chuck me a unicycle!

Now the world is getting older
There’s a few things to be said
Do you believe the things they told you
Do you believe the things you’ve read

From the west side to the east side
Through the windows I’m looking out
You’ll never get bad information
If you believe in the word of mouth

Saying that, I have heard some crap off students in pubs. But so what! Mike And The Mechanics! Paul Young RIP! You KNOW him and Dirty are jamming!

— Tuesday, October 4th, 2005

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning… Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”
Frederick Douglass

This fucking stupid hotel desk is too fucking high and the chair’s too fucking short, or perhaps I am, so I have fucking chronic neck and shoulder-ache from being hunched up clattering at it all stupid day. I would apologise for the language were I not in such tremendous discomfort.

Anyway. Mary said I need balance and write nothing but depressing BLAH nowadays, but I can’t think of anything cheery to report, so maybe I ought to keep my fat mouth shut. But I went out to get coffee and food earlier, got the coffee, them went to the ATM to get foodey money, and lo, it was EMPTY, woo-hoo. I do have a bagfull of quarters, so if I can get over the embarrassment of paying for a sandwich with a bagfull of quarters I shall. I shall have to see how I feel later I suppose. Maybe if I go to bed now I can just delay the whole eating process until tomorrow, when I am sure aid will come, and I can stop my pitiful blatheirng. I did write two songs today. And having done that, I decided to cover Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, which cheered me rather until the neck thing started to really get at me. At least I am very handsome today, as the mirror at my desk reports with some gross regularity.

Apparently Narstie was on telly earlier voicing concern about how his lyrics affect the young ones. When I first met Narstie he rolled into The Dairy to sell me weed, and freestyled at me, “this is a message for the young ones/why do you like guns? Why do you wanna be the hype? Why do you wanna be in the limelight?”

Later, when we came to making a song, he spat, “I’ve got 40 guns and 40 clips, wow, I’m from Brixton,” rounding off with some stuff about how famous he wishes he was.

I love Narstie, bless him, he is at war with himself constantly. As are we all, I suppose, unless we are swine, and think ourselves to be perfect. Narstie said he has two phones so as not to look poor for the fans. I understand how he feels – not wishing to affront the darling New Yorkers with a bag of quarters and all – but I have never had much of a problem with appearing poor, since I always HAVE been poor, apart from a few brief spurts between last month and Summer 2000, which have tended to find me wasting my New Money on rounds and rent and records. I went through a period of buying a lot of Wu Wear and fake gold, actually. I shall pay for that I am sure.

One time, when I was young and in trouble with the law, my probation officer helped me achieve a grant from Prince Charles and his Trust. It was purportedly to buy musical equipment. As it went, I think it went into drug debts, or something similarly unpleasant. Men with pool ques will win over creative ambition, in most instances. Always I am ahead of my means. But it all worked out in the end I suppose. Those years will fuel my stupid songs for many to come, I am quite sure, since I don’t actually have a life these days, dwelling as I do between violently furnished hotel rooms and well-insulated studios. And if I do go out I get so wasted it renders the next few days unbearable and the “memories” dead as doornails (and what is so dead about them?). It is no wonder people’s second albums are always so poor. It is a good job I did all my drugs in my so-called Youth, as I would be all but doomed by now.

Anyway, that Narstie TV show was about the power of the cursed “N” word, which I have had all manner of arguments with upper middle class/lower-upper class DJs about. I would advise you to read this, it is very good, and sums it all up rather well. Hate tends to breed hate. When we were at school we used to call each other “cunt”, and look at how we turned out.

Wade and Daffid mailed me. They have invented a new kind of music, which they call STUNNK (also a way of life, they say. I shall have them fill you in tomorrow), and are both In Love and have Mottos.

“Trim and healthy is the new getting drunk every night
and
love is the new sleeping around.”

Does love fix necks and nightmares? Probly not. I have no idea.

Hey, get this – I just worked out how to raise my seat. I have been squatting like an invalid quite needlessly all weekend. I am unsure whether to laugh or cry, which pretty much describes my whole disposition right now. Die dulci fruere.

— Tuesday, October 4th, 2005

I write tonight from the midst of a deeply unpleasant hangover, as we were celebrating the union of James and Dana yesterday, and I drank too much whiskey, and did that thing I used to do a lot, where a part of my brain swuitches off, and I turn into a raging lunatic, and an asshole. Happily, this occured (in the main) once the wedding celebrations were done, so nothing got spoiled. Just me. I can’t remember much of it, but I did scrap with bouncers, and I think one of them might have put a foot up my ass or something, as my right butt-bone is in bad shape.

I watched I Robot just, and really enjoyed it. Fist time I saw it I thought it was rubbish. I don’t know why that might be. But I really enjoyed it tonight, found it moving, even.

Anyway.

Back to the nightmares.

— Monday, October 3rd, 2005