Sound and colour and texture. Remembering how good it feels to go to a show and stand so close to the speakers that the vibrations make my sternum hum. Taking photos of almost everything but the band, colours so rich they burn behind my eyelids. Halloween night and everything’s loud and close. I’m warm and I’m drinking iced rum and I can feel every decibel shiver through my body and rattle in my kneecaps and I don’t need to think, I can’t think, I’m so glad I don’t have to fucking think. 

Things I did today: 

Dug up a dead fox; cycled to the most depressing supermarket in the world, bought a baffling colouring book; fed Bear Cub the stray; finally got around to cleaning behind the cacti; got stabbed in the eye by an aloe vera; found three very dead moths, one butterfly and a megaspider. I don’t know what the Latin name for this species is, as in my experience its entire geographical range is localised solely within this house, but I can tell you that it’s unusually large for this country/climate/side-of-the-thin-veil-separating-this-reality-from-a-nightmarish-Lovecraftian-netherworld-of-monsters.  

I found a tiny bird skull and tried to draw it a couple of times. Then I drew it to scale. Then I drew another different kind of bird skull next to it. Then I realised that did precisely nothing to actually convey a sense of the size of the thing so I drew my weird lumpy hand.

Then I drew a little fly that was hanging around being creepy, repeatedly landing on my fingertips and in my paintbox and then inexplicably falling over and pretending to drown in my watercolours. Had to fish it out with my paintbrush three times. If it turns out it’s actually a person who’s fallen victim to some scientific experiment gone awry, like in Honey I Shrunk The Kids, I’m sorry but they should really try and get someone else’s attention because I don’t even answer the phone. 

Pencil & watercolour on paper. (2013)

I’m too shy, too reticent. Gotta start putting myself out there. Posting selfies. Bracing myself for a meteoric rise to prominence. 

Self-portrait, Sep 23 2013. (Scan/photomanip.) First and last.