Every worm to his taste. Some prefer to eat nettles.

The end of a day that has been slightly more productive than those recent ones I can compare it to. I'm sipping on some Suntory Single Malt 12 year whiskey. I'm at the beginning of chapter 5 of Tanizaki Junichiro's Some Prefer Nettles. The whiskey is working like the worm in the proverb upon which the title of the book is based, burrowing into me with its must and memory, and Henry Valentine Miller's words ribbon up to me from inside that barrel that gives scotch its color and flavor. "Now works the calmness of Sheveningen as an anaesthetic." Happy Henry Valentine Miller's day, for today would have been better served to have him its inspiration, that last living boy in the occident, than any of these paper sweethearts applying themselves to love's ministrations with the terror of failure in their veal-white hearts. Do people still fuck? Do people still not fuck? Has it all become a matter of course?
And here I go, periodizing fucking. What an asshole.

A Laz for a willing lass, this boy is trying to come back to life. That will be my personals ad.

Apparently they still fuck in Scotland, if I can invest my faith in the poet of Arab Strap, Aidan Moffat's lyrics to Loch Leven: "A flash of sun between her thighs/a perfect black shape to protect my eyes". Or how about Glue's Sex without love is a good ride worth trying/but love without sex is second only to dying?


I had my first exposure to Pulp yesterday, thanks again to Val, and the healthy sexual abandon of A Different Class floored me. Never since Kahimi Karie's What Are You Wearing? had I listened so avidly to a description of a girl in her delicates set to music so raptly and, unlike with Kahimie Karie, never had I believed so deeply that not a word was cheapened by irony.


Clarity, do you remember when I wrote for you "Silly A-ha, nothing or a cup of coffee instead," and all the same that coffee still gave me the shakes and my room was still a mess, and still I missed you (because here I am a full-body aneurysm of love twisted up like a balloon animal and I'm writing ad copy)?

Bearding at the ancestors, the pentagram hung between my antlers, the white girls coming and going, the yellow girls with their infinite kindness you're never sure are there at all, all this squinting at the second hand to try to make them out in their passing instants, watching to see if the sheets change. The whiskey, in any event, has always been good.

It's raining, it's a mess, but the week is underway and it's wonders are promised. And that is almost better than the whiskey.