2005-06-10 - 5:26 p.m.

I didn�t know juicing could be bad for you, but last night a friend told me that he got so addicted to juicing that the roof of his mouth got inflamed because of all the acid. I imagine he meant citric acid rather than he was blending car batteries, although if you�re a filthy juicing addicted, maybe car parts are the only thing that will do it for you any more. Mango and pear just doesn�t cut the juicing mustard.

I�ve always aspired to a juicer, though, and maybe one day I�ll get one. I need some kind of spur, though, like winning lots of money or finding out I have terminal disease that requires me to ingest industrial amounts of fruit and vegetables to even stand a chance of surviving. I�ll be on my death bed, having got my parents to buy me an extension cord so that the juicer reaches my bedside table, and my frail arm will reach out to the fruit bowl��Just�one�last�peach�smoothie��.

Those would be fairly pitiful last words, in the big scheme of things. Even in the small scheme of things they�re pretty chronic.

Is there anything you can�t juice? What about tuna fish or Doritos? I�d like to try something radical like a tuna fish, Doritos and human milk smoothie. It sounds horrible, but maybe the flavours would work. As my old grandma used to say, you don�t know until you try. Of course, going senile was something she tried and still didn�t know about, so I guess you can�t apply that maxim to every eventuality. But it�s a start. You do what you can.

Tomorrow I fly to Arkansas. Like many people with learning difficulties, I used to mispronounce it. I was holding forth on the state at a party and pronouncing it �Ar-KANZ-sas�. Everyone laughed and someone whispered that it was actually not pronounced that way, and that it is ACTUALLY pronounced �AR-kanz-sas�. And then someone who had overheard the whisper said that was a crock of shit and a fight broke out. One of the attendant police officers was fairly certain it was pronounced �AR-kan-saw�, and I�m a great believer in the brightness of policemen, so I�m going with that. I hope to visit the state �KAN-saw� at some point in the future, too.

Anywazza, I�m there to see the great outdoors. The outdoors IS great, apparently. I wouldn�t really know, though I�ve seen it on TV a few times and it looks quite pleasant. Not many juicers around, but lots of trees, so that�s something. Then it�s the great indoors in New Orleans, which is like a big mug of boiling soup at the moment, so I�m shimmying up to the air conditioning. Then a couple of days in Chicago, with a bit of both, I expect.

There�s a train of thought that says I was so drunk last night that I told the guy who answers the phone at the Chinese Takeaway that I loved him. I�m sure it was only in a food-providing sense, but it seems like a good time to be out of the country for a while.