2003-05-23 - 2:58 p.m.

From the cheeseboard of Pablo Kickasso:

Apologies for frequent radio silence at the moment. It�s a strange time here at Kickasso Towers, what with this new-fangled working for a living more than three days a week, trying to salvage the last fading embers of a creative mind before they succumb to fuzziness and incontinence, questioning the fundamental nature of your very being, that kind of thing.

Did you ever see Crimes & Misdemeanours? The bit where Woody Allen is commissioned to do a film about the odious Alan Alda character: �Idea for a farce,� Lester says into the microphone. �A poor loser agrees to do the story of a great man�s life, and in the process learns deep values.� Well, it�s nothing like that. I just like that scene.

I think, for someone riddled with more self-doubt than you would think about shaking a stick at if you weren�t so hung up on your own stick-shaking abilities, assertions that you are a worse specimen than you even imagined are a tricky arena. Yes, hard though it may be to believe, I�m far from the towering colossus of cocky bravado that you�ve all come to know and skim read occasionally.

On the one hand, you feel like pure, undiluted shit. Which is weird when you�re pretty used to just feeling like the diluted kind. But, and as Ben Affleck will be saying on his wedding night, it�s a big but, it forces you to discard the everyday fairly decorative feelings of remedial self-loathing and defend yourself. Then the only thing you�ve got is the belief that you aren�t a reprehensible lowlife, that you�ve never really acted in a way that is unforgivable, that honesty and loyalty in people is still something that makes them worth knowing. And fuck me, if that feeling isn�t a thousand times stronger than you�d have thought when you 're really forced to examine it.

��and people will still love me even though I'm an idiot�. Amen.