So what mental morsels do I have in store for you today? Yes as usual it’s past 5am in the morning and I’m feeling adequately delirious enough to attempt to engage the public once more.

The truth is I don’t get out much… well to tell the brutal truth almost never, not unless I have a good reason, and they are far and few between. I suspect I’ve burnt out my social gene many years ago, I used to love the throng of a crowd, shared intoxication and syncopated jiggling around with friends and strangers to a relentless stream of monotonous tones and rhythms. It didn’t take much back then to engage my attention throughout the night, the wee hours into the morning and most likely on through to at least the next day if not another evening just to make sure I’d flushed the disappointments of the previous week from my drug addled psyche. But those days, years, decades are far behind me now. Even a glass of wine is guaranteed to turn my stomach and leave me incapacitated in a darkened room with a migraine for a good twelve hours or so.

Perhaps I’ve reached my limit, I’m almost certainly getting old, but beyond that, it could just be that I have far too much inside this cerebellum to waste my time imploding my emotions for the sake of a trip to the stars and back. The comedowns came thick and fast after a while, immunity is a terrible state of being, the desensitization of existence can pull one down into so many potholes and pitfalls of the soul that the "high" is barely noticeable. I find that lack of sleep alters my state as well as any narcotic can, bar a bout of chain smoking and caffeine as the sun begins to rear its ugly head through our winter sky down here, there’s not much to engage me on that level these days.

Besides, I’m hunkered down more so than usual, my latest piece "Bill and Ben" is dragging on, my partner Christina has made numerous attempts to qualm my fears, fear is too strong a word, let’s just say my disappointments, whatever I’m experiencing it’s based on a frustration with my own and indeed the world’s physicality. The truth is it hits me in my logic circuit, my heart remains untouched, I don’t weep for my lack, I whip it, I whip it real good. I’m a cruel taskmaster, and my id is grateful for the attention.

Saying that, the sombre weight of my own garbled philosophies have little effect on me these days, it’s the purported media-enhanced visions from the TV and the Web that have the most effect. If there’s a new incursion, rumblings of new war, a bombing, an attack, an injustice of any kind, or even a paparazzi furore – I add it, with relish mind you, to the knapsack of my twisted subconscious and let it gestate there through a series of processes. akin to that of a cow’s digestive system. Six stomachs later and the chlorophyll is lactic, the grass is milk, and thus there’s something creatively edible enough to sustain myself with, until the next bad news day feeds my rather depressing habitual ritual for a vision of the world.

I used to "believe". I used to think one day we wouldn’t need money, we could all just get along, religion would be downgraded to personal belief, government would some day be nothing more than an administrative slave to the people, and energy would be provided in abundance due to a miraculous quantum scientific leap. Still those delusions kept me going for a good few years, they also fuelled various deeply engaging, though in the cold light of day and hindsight most likely nonsensical, conversations from my past.

These days I have a more grounded attitude regarding life, art, love, society, purpose, being, and so on and so on. It isn’t a matter of opinion for me, it isn’t "belief" any more, this isn’t a game and I’m not here to have fun, for I’ve waited a long time to begin living, in fact far, far too long. My brain has already literally exploded a couple of times, probably with the sheer aggregation of experience and knowledge gone to waste on a few glib conversations with the odd hippy (in more ways than one) for the sake of social decorum, under the school of wastage mind you, and when I really think about it, I very much doubt any of them ever remembered a single thing anyone ever said to them, no matter how pertinent. The scale of brevity over levity. The truth hurts, but what hurts more is that no man is an island, no ego is sacrosanct, no belief untouchable, it all decays with enough comparison. Everything, including mine and yours and the stoned pariahs at the shop around the corner have nothing to lose, or rather very little, and I mean that relatively ladies and gentlemen. Our weakness is our strength, an epitaph of two fingers sticking bold and proud up towards the elite, standing on the horizon of advertising agency dreams and politically skewed histories to come.

We have less baggage, less weight, less commitment to the world than those who tell us to turn its wheels of industry, commerce, politics, religion… or those blessed with fame and fortune who inspire us to paint them another colour in order to keep us distracted, but only long enough to pull the proverbial rug from beneath our collective identity. The wool was and most likely is and perhaps even will be pulled over my eyes on some level or another till the day I die, but I can still catch glimpses through the weave, it’s only wool after all.

I’m not a sheep, I haven’t been domesticated, I don’t know if being human or an individual holds much water in our present age, but there is no über conspiracy to take solace in. It’s our own fault, and saving grace. Yes perception is illusion, but nothing and no one, however far removed, ethereal, or alien would bother to waste resources on maintaining these infinite and infinitely wasted complexities of logic and ordered chaos. If the sky turned green tomorrow we’d all notice that, if time slipped backwards there’d be at least a few raised eyebrows, if gravity was disproved the sceptics would still have their feet firmly planted on the ground – and by the way, if there are little grey men running around experimenting on cattle and hicks, they are stoned. With all that power, science and technology, you’d think a master race had better ways of spending their supreme existence.

The only little grey men I worry about wear suits and run governments and corporations. I also worry that somehow, somewhere, some of them will convince me to do their bidding in order to spread my message of social exhaustion and entropic doom. Money does talk doesn’t it? It mainly tells me to screw myself but that’s besides the point. One question – how can a hermit start a revolution without the unholy tryst of compromise brought about by social and financial commitment and endeavour? He can’t, but he can paint, and he can blog, and wait, and see.

This post is tagged aliens, art, cerebellum, chain smoking, conspiracy, death, desensitization, friends and strangers, government, grays, greys, intoxication, money, revolution, society, soul, trip to the stars, visual arts, winter sky