2005-09-30 - 11:37 a.m.

Last night: to the cinema to see The Aristocrats. For those who don�t know, it�s a kind of potty-mouth Olympics where comedians tell variations on one joke, the idea being to make it as offensive as possible. It�s an interesting experiment in that by half way through, things that seemed bad taste at the beginning are suddenly really tame, something you never thought you�d think about eating faeces or matricidal rape.

In my opinion, the worst taste (and therefore funniest in this context) versions were told by South Park (�And now for our impression of the victims of 9/11�) and Gilbert Gottfried (�You�re wondering, where�d all the blood come from?�). Honourable mention also has to go to Sarah Silverman (�Joe Franklin raped me��).

Obviously, it�s crying out for an attempt at. I came home with four pints inside me and a creative challenge, For reasons of wanting to retain at least a couple of readers, I won�t post it. Suffice to say it�s disturbing what you can come up with when you push yourself.

Sadly, no-one is going to pay me for prodding the darkest recesses of the human mind, not unless I retrain as a daytime TV presenter, anyway. So the rest of my time at the moment is, as usual, focussed on finding gainful employment.

I really laugh at those ads you see in the newspaper with headings like �Why not be a freelance writer?�, as if it�s some gilt-edged passageway to eternal riches and fleets of diamond-encrusted speedboats filled with more nubile admirers than you could possibly fit into the on-board jacuzzi.

I feel like writing back saying, �Thanks for your question. I can think of plenty of reasons why not. You�ll spend half your life scrabbling around in the gutter for jobs you really don�t even want, or end up selling your soul to FascistMediaCorpsNewsIncorporated but hey, there�s at least a thirty percent chance you might receive a pay cheque without spending six months on the phone to accounts payable, so there are SOME highlights.� But I�m too busy trying to sell my soul, so I never get round to it.

And I shouldn�t complain because I haven�t, say, for instance, had my life blown away by a death-mongering hurricane.

I guess I haven�t felt the right to be publicly upset about New Orleans�it�s not MY city, after all, and I hate to be all bandwagon-y but then you spend a certain amount of time in one of the few places that you really feel at home in (it�s the city I�ve visited the most times out of any outside this country) and people you care about have lost their home town and well, what can you say? It feels so cruelly absurd that a place where you�ve had some of the best times of your life just isn�t going to be there for, well, who knows?

The only airport I�ve been to where passengers are drinking strong cocktails at baggage reclaim. Leaving has always just reminded me of the relative banality that awaits back home, where going through customs doesn�t even have a two drink minimum.

To Todd, Ben, Melinda, Nathan, and in fact everyone who has made my many times there as memorable as they have been hard to forget: I�m thinking of you. And I just wanted to say one thing, a thought that might be of some solace in these dark times:

Have you ever thought about being a freelance writer?