I don’t mind my own company. I get on well with myself, and I’ve got myriad ways of staying occupied within my own mind. It’s a good job that I can entertain myself because I’m rather a hermit.

Sometimes it’s good to close your eyes and make visions appear. I like to paint landscapes to explore in my mind – strange forests or cities, caverns or mines; whole planets even. Or it can be good to follow some free-forming imagery – a crow evolving into a rainbow, into a tunnel, into a cat made out of metal fibres covered in tiny hooks, into a rippling pool, etc, etc… sometimes things so random or unexpected that they surprise me, like a gin bottle with angel wings “eating” a giant edifice of cheese as big as a house, then sprouting a huge human foot with hairy toes to hop around on because it has become to heavy to fly.

I’m fascinated by the textures of things – wood, water, plastic, dry/brittle leaves, or fur on a dog’s head. I enjoy recreating things like that when I close my eyes and lie in bed sometimes.

There’s a lot of beauty in simple and seemingly inane things – even dust floating around in a shaft of light, especially if you set up a prism or an equivalent to break that yellowy sunlight into different colours. I like to feel the sun on my face, too.

I also like surreal dialogue, whether I’m writing it in a story or just making up a conversation where I play two characters. Sometimes you can create really interesting stories just by finding out what character B will reply to some bizarre suggestion made by character A.

The characters always seem to be oddballs and outcasts, because that’s all I can really relate to (I’m not the kind of person to say I hate people or find them boring; I don’t – people mostly just scare me and I have great trouble trusting anyone at all – I can put people off a lot because they think I’m being aloof, when in fact I often just go shy and quiet around people because I’m afraid). Although these made-up characters are like me in some ways, often they are total opposites from each other and from me.

A good thing is to imagine two characters get trapped together in an inescapable prison of some sort – be it a dimensional void or just a desert island in the middle of the Pacific with no chance of rescue. Their only reality is their immediate environment, whatever few props there are to hand, and each other. There are no rules except that they cannot escape their situation.

You can find a lot out about the characters in a situation like that, and ultimately about yourself since the characters are all really yourself.

One thing I “found out” in a long while ago is that all the things we’re conditioned to chase after by advertising are, in fact, the most irrelevant and undesirable things in the universe when you get deep down to the core of it all.

Ultimately, all that matters (beyond the practicalities of survival) is the inner experience of yourself and those around you. By extension you could say that relationships and making those around you feel better or more alive is incredibly important, although I do find even “relating” with people at all pretty difficult, as mentioned.

If I’m not being all quiet around somebody, I’ll tend to the other extreme of just being completely stupid and saying random things. That can be entertaining to some people, piss others off, but most will probably be thinking, “This person is impossible to have an adult conversation with.”

I’ve tried to reach out and tried to be serious with a few people along the years, but it never works out. I ALWAYS find ways to sabotage myself. I think there must be something inside me that simply wants to keep everyone away, and will stop at nothing to achieve that.

Anyway, our inner worlds and the possible connections between them are all that really matter in the end. To make each other feel secure enough to find whatever it is we’re looking for.

But, umm...

“Show me the money!” a potential hijacker shouts down the satellite phone into Bin Laden’s ear. (I hate that catchphrase so much.)

The other day I was ranting about Islamist radicals and people like them. While they want to blow up any woman who shows a bare leg, my motto is more along the lines of Free Love.

I think we should respect the human body rather than feel ashamed of it – that goes for our sexuality too. Public nudity is illegal, by and large, because the human body is considered “offensive” and “indecent”. I think that is insane in the extreme. How we ever got like this is beyond me.

Our society is governed by ignorant cretins; puritanical prudes. And those suicidal bombers trying to destroy it all are no better, but even worse. They are far more ignorant and somehow even far more puritanical in their desire to suppress humanity itself.

However, if Bin Laden comes on the TV one day and says that we’re a culture warped and obsessed with competitive material acquisition, it will be the only true or meaningful thing he is likely to ever say in a million years.

There IS something deeply deranged about our culture.

It seems that our society is all about working ourselves into an early grave just to by endless bits of crap that we don’t need, just so we can get one up on the person living next door. Advertising uses sex to sell anything and everything to us, yet the same culture says that sex is filthy and the human body is not “decent” – you can spend a night in a cell if you try to prove them wrong.

Our society is built on a strict hierarchy, with the corporations sitting at the very top of the dung-mountain. They don’t want to hear about people sharing things. “Free Love,” is just about the last sixties-type slogan they want people talking about. And, if people started to realize that the competitive acquisition of material junk was so much pointless bullshit, they would begin to get scared.

The state of human society is just shameful in some ways. According to the statistics, 40% of humans on this planet do not even have access to hygienic toilet facilities, let alone healthcare. Meanwhile, some of you are getting all stressed out because you can’t afford that new Lexus or a house with a pool in the back.

The imbalance is obscene, but you’ll never hear George Bush or Tony Blair saying that. There is golf to play and more countries to invade to get their oil.

While half the world is starving, half the kids in western countries are becoming obese from eating too many Big Macs. You’ll never hear Ronald MacDonald saying:

“Don’t stuff your face, kid. Spare a thought for those without any food. You’re already risking cardiac problems. Save that cash and give it to charity.”

Ah… but I’m going off on a wild tangent here.

Basically, this is my way of saying that I tend to opt out from much of our grasping culture. Not from some holier-than-thou-bunch-of-idiots crap (I’m a hypocrite with my PC and my clean drinking water anyway, and no better than anyone), but just because I can’t relate to most of it.

A lot of things just plain annoy me about it. Rap music, for instance, is supposed to be all subversive and controversial in its lyrical content, or so we’re told, but most of the popular rap music out there is more conformist than anything else. Far from being subversive, the overwhelming bulk of it simply reinforces everything that is already wrong with society and helps to keep the status quo in place.

Subversive would be telling kids to opt out from all the bullshit, chase the wealth of knowledge instead of hard currency, refuse to be mentally raped, opt out from violence and dismantle the system through civil disobedience on a massive scale.

Instead, they tell kids to get rich or die trying, to buy into the system more than anyone, and fuck everyone over to do it.

Here’s the essence of it: “Buy all the status items you can get your hands on - the car, the mansion - and then spend the rest of your “stack” on enough drugs to addle your brain into forgetting how pathetic and pointless your existence is. Oh - and if you can’t afford that kind of lifestyle, destroy your neighbourhood with crime in order to boost your wallet until you have more zeros than dying brain cells in your skull.”

And any music with any real subversive content is used as a backing track to corporate TV advertisements. Sheesh, they’re probably laughing over the irony of it. Music about liberation used to prop up a system of mental enslavement, or maybe to sell fatty products to overweight kids. It’s almost beautifully evil in a way. You have to hand it to those bastards.

Sometimes I feel like an alien or just a lunatic for even thinking these things - but wtf.

Whether I’m right or whether I’ve just lost the plot, the world stresses me out and I mostly feel powerless about it all.

Look at the world from space and it all seems insignificant anyway, I’d imagine – as if we were a lot of tiny warring ant armies, running around killing each other over scraps from the dustbin.

So… if people don’t see me around, maybe I just didn’t get up today.

I stayed around here and kept myself occupied in one way or another…