A Fairly Triumphant Return.

As the Wildhearts once opined in the sleeve notes to Fishing For Luckies - I think, although if I'm wrong I'm sure someone will correct me - 'Self expression is like sex. The less you do it the more you find that you don't want to'. And how right they were. Visit a foreign country, I thought. Expand your horizons. Gain valuable life experiences. Work on your (pretty fucking limited) writing skills. Start a new, cheerier blog and maybe prove that you're not a completely miserable cunt.

And it has been very sweet indeed. I've had fun. I met people, and seen things, and been places I never thought I would. I've even fallen in love. But the problem with people and things and places and love is that they take up a lot of time, time that in previous stages of my life would have been spent trawling the internet for inspiration and banging my head against a keyboard until the blood pooled into a joke about cocks that I could then post. I've been too busy for that kind of carry on, and the lack of a net connection hasn't helped at all. Seriously, how did people gather information before the internet? It's beyond me. Just a lot of library time, I suppose, when they weren't chasing mammoths over cliffs or unlocking the secret of fire.

More pertinently, I have an evil, evil job. Not just because it's a bank job, although that would qualify it for at least a special merit badge from the Great Beast, but because it's stolen my words. I spend all day leaving notes on a computer system and these notes require me to use - at most - thirty different words in various combinations. If there's anything that'll murder your ability to write more effectively than spending 40 hours a week writing the same thirty words over and over and over again then I don't want to know about it. Taking a header off a high dive into an empty swimming pool would do it, and at least afterwards you'd get a special helper to come round and wipe your arse for you.

I've got nothing. I'm dry. Bereft. There is a whole world of interest just outside my window, with fascinating characters and ideas and locales, and beauty and misery and ease and hardship, and all I can do is stare at a blank computer screen and obsess about how badly I suck. I'm having a great time right now, but it's killing me.

So I've come back here, where I started. I'm wrapping myself in the oily black cloak of I Hate It Here, a name I stole, to maybe rediscover the little bit of me that knew how to put the words in the right order to make the few people who listened smile for a minute. For the record, I don't Hate It Here. I'm actually, believe it or not, happy. Is it possible to spew toxic rants at the shitty state of the shitty world whilst still feeling an overall contentment, the like of which I haven't felt in literally years? I don't know. But we might as well find out. Fuck knows, it's not like we're up to much else, eh?

One final warning: you people are going to have to sit through some tedious, self-obsessed wank before I hit anything resembling a good patch. Like, for example, the article you've just graciously sat through. Waste of fucking time that was.