Vinnie's here

Hello, I'm on the couch and Vinnie is sitting where he likes to sit, on top of the backrest part. He thinks it's his couch, but no matter how many hours he puts in sitting here on the couch, he will never catch up to Basil. It's Basil's couch, end of conversation.

I made a droopy stick out of the red wax casing that "baby cheeses" come in and I've been sort of poking Vinnie in the face with it and this is making him extremely happy. I don't mind. I already used the red wax to take an impression of my front teeth so I could consider further whether Pip the lovely dentist was onto something when she said I have an overbite like a Simpsons character and the only way out is immediate, no expense spared installation of "Invisalign" braces as seen on a great many women of about my age and degree of crippling sudden onset uncertainty about place of self in world, and having decided my toothprints look OK I have no further use for the wax and do not mind making it all gross with cat hair by using it to poke Vinnie in the face. As I said. At least this way I don't have to touch him.

Pretty soon Vinnie will go to sleep and perhaps then I will put down the wax and just think quietly about the things I've been thinking I should think about. The mental picture I have of what these things are like is of the foot of a cliff or mountain, with the pile of things rising into heights obscured by clouds. There is a patch of bright sunlight striking the cliff/mountain surface somewhere above ground level but below cloud level, and in this light a few gulls are tooling around. Maybe there is even a cheesy little rainbow somewhere way up high, with an illegible motivational quote written over the top in a font that isn't comic sans but something much more difficult to precisely articulate the dismalness of.

Or maybe the cliff is like this



1. Down at the base of this cliff, where I seem to be, is the thing I have been thinking about today whilst actively wanting not to think about it. This is Seven Pillars of Wisdom

2. Next on the pile might be, Why is it that my response to almost every book or movie or record I read or listen to or see lately, is irritation and fault-finding? I'm very ready to accept that it's me, not the book/movie/tv show/record/whatever, because it's happening with almost everything. Stuff that other people say they think is great, people whose judgement and opinions I really respect and value, probably you are one of these persons in fact. Because I'm shifty but also cunning I've managed to come up with possibly rational-sounding & maybe persuasive arguments to justify my irritation and I did think about abusing blog privileges to lay some of them out & see how they fared. But that would be avoiding the real question, right. Why right now does almost everything seem to me not as good as it could have been if the author had just done a slightly better job of it? You know, I think this might be connected to something I've written about before, ie, my doctor's frustrating habit of listening to anything I tell her about how I reacted to some text or artwork as if the actual content of the thing doesn't matter. It's like trying to discuss art with Spock. I just think that when a person develops some sort of fixation on a piece of music or a loathing of a book or whatever the response is, the nature of the object being responded to can't be completely irrelevant. Nevertheless I'm sufficiently convinced that this condition originates with me rather than reflects an unlucky run of crap art that I am postponing the reading of a book I've long looked forward to until something changes.

3. Can't remember what 3 was. Probably something about what specifically is wrong with the book Draw Your Weapons but I had best save all my carping about it for the essay club meeting coming up on the weekend.

4. I've found myself wanting to write letters to a small handful of people who I am no longer in contact with, to try to mend bridges perhaps, maybe to justify past bad behaviour or maybe just to apologise. I don't think I will actually write any such things. (But doing what I'm doing right now sometimes flips a lever and gets different processes in motion, so who knows?) The wish to write those letters at all is what I should be thinking about.