Number 94

The complete and utter righteous indignation I had earlier this week kinda got shat on with the news that 27 people were killed by a loony tunes gunman in Connecticut. You can be as pissed off with UEFA as much as you like, but their wilful ignorance of racism pales into insignificance to the massacre of a shedload of school kids...

I've got this mate, we'll call him Bill. Bill's says to me and Roger on Thursday night that he's going to pull a sickie on Friday. Friday comes around and Bill texts us to say that he's unwell. If you need an example of irony...

The week has been influenced by the letter E. From the 88 second capitulation by Spurs on Sunday to the current letter of the alphabet I'm at in the great CD play. It reminds me that once upon a time, in a different life, I thought E was the most superb thing ever created (that's E for ecstasy and incidentally one of my few spelling blind spots) and anyone who knows me well will know that I have always been completely and utterly anti chemicals. But E was different and in many ways it changed my life immensely.

It's 20 years since I first took it. It's 15 since I last took it. I really miss it, but it's just never going to happen again, but not for moral reasons or stuff like that. The reason why is something we'll end up at. The first time I took it, two hours after dropping my first pill I was looking at my mate Andy and shaking my head. This was bollocks, I didn't even feel different; we'd been sold a pup. And I was like this for about another hour until BAM something hit me that totally floored me. What followed was about 9 hours of gradual crescendos of a heady mixture of euphoria, love and wonder; hitting a peak before slowly de-intensifying. Coupled with this is a sensation of being in touch with the primordial part of oneself; it's as if the hippocampus has been supercharged and while it wasn't natural it was quite unique.

I stopped taking it because my body didn't like it. My brain could have married it, had children and wiped it's metaphoric bottom for the rest of my life, but my physiological self just went apeshit. It gave me horrendous cramps, dropped my body temperature sending me into shivers and shakes and it was marginally worse than the good effects, so it really wasn't worth the hassle. This mysterious change happened within two years and although I struggled through a few more attempts at reliving those moments of blissful perfection for longer than I enjoyed it initially and then it was gone.

A fleeting flirtation with something illicit and then it was over, like a life, snuffed out.

I'm not making any comparisons.

E has thrown up some interesting music - Engineers, Eyeless in Gaza, Elbow, Electric Soft Machine, the Eagles, Elecktrum, Eels and a almost forgotten Echo & The Bunnymen album called Reverberation - very psychedelic. Some more stuff went and I realised that I'd bought a lot of stuff beginning with E over the last few years.

I saw something pretty fucking awesome the other day, the teaser trailer for Pacific Rim, the new Guillermo Del Toro film about monsters and giant robots, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w6Vv2z-QiAI and it made me realise that it was probably going to be a load of shit, but the trailer got me all fanboy and ting. The new Star Trek trailer had exactly the same effect.

Dexter's building to a finale that looks almost like they're boxing themselves into an even less manoeuvrable position than they did at the end of season 6. Homeland is barking and I can't see how they could possibly stretch to a third series (but how are they stretching The Hobbit into three films?) and Fringe just isn't the same any longer - it's a different TV show, one that has an invisible shark and some water skis hanging in the background.

The cold spell is over; I said to the wife tonight that I would find it almost ironic if we ended up having one of those typical British winters; mild and very wet between now and the end of February; two weeks of winter at the start of March and then repeat until everyone dies of vitamin D deficiency.