2001-11-15 - 10:04 p.m.

�I'm crawling, I don't know where to or from, The centre of things from where everything stems is not where�I belong. I got this city sickness, growing inside me�so this is where I ran for freedom, where a man cannot be free�

So things are definitely looking up in the career stakes, having spent the afternoon moving furniture for a soupcon over minimum wage. Yeah, it feels good to put those years of academic study and subsequent work experience to good use, working out how to get wide tables through narrow doors. I was hoping the agency would break me in gently, maybe with handing out flyers for nightclubs or washing windscreens at traffic lights, but it was straight in with the hard stuff. Actually, I have a shallow but palpable feeling of manliness, the kind you must get after an honest day�s labour � all aching muscles and chronic, debilitating back pain.

And to think it was a mere 24 hours since I was rubbing shoulders with the cream of London�s fashion world at a magazine launch. Such is the social mobility roller coaster that is my life. Cleaning out the gutter then gazing at the stars. Actually, I can�t be sure that the cream of the fashion world were actually there since I wouldn�t recognise them if they came up, measured my inside leg and fitted up me for a quick bespoke number. But I�m assuming they were the ones in the ill-matched combos of ponchos, woolly hats and non-ironic 80s power suits. What a delightful and curious bunch of people they are. Thankfully I had a wonderful partner in crime who distracted me sufficiently so I didn�t have to randomly hack them all to death with one of their own angular accessories. There is nothing on a par with the bafflingly misplaced snobbery displayed by people who design fucking unwearable, unaffordable clothes for a living. Who the fuck do they really think they are? Plus I think it says something that the place emptied as soon as the free bar ran out. Get a real job, you emaciated humourless charlatans.

Like, um, moving furniture.

I have these hands beating with love for you, and you're not here to touch, sent you away, what else can I do? When I need something that much?

My housemates have all gone away. Separately (at least, that�s what they told me). And in a way it�s kind of nice. I can, if I so choose, stroll around in nothing but my onion costume, make long-distance phone calls for several hours at a time and watch Jason Lee movies on repeat. Of course, what I�d really like to do is perform random lewd acts in every room in the flat with at least one other consenting adult, or a mini-bus of minor soap nymphettes, but the booty-call hotline is currently unavailable. I just seem to have been on hold for a hell of a long time now. Maybe there�s a fault on the line.

Um, you know I was joking yesterday, right? In that last paragraph? I got paranoid because 3 people took me off their fave list and I got a couple of concerned e-mails asking if I was OK. You should know by now that nothing written here is ever said in anything approaching seriousness, right? Right!

�I'm okay afterwards, afterwards lasts for minutes only. I'm okay during�you kind of fill up my mind. It's just that before, may last forever. It's just that before, you just fuck my mind.�

Today�s melancholy dreamboats