I am at my parents' house, drinking cider and looking at property prices for the local area (like some weird future-nostalgia, I imagine living in the memories of a past hometown, in a hypothetical future in which I have enough money to buy a house). One of the large country houses that I see has its picture at a 3/4 angle, from high above. Like a police helicopter filming a shooting. That guy who shot his family then burned his house down. He drove his car in front of his gate and set fire to it, but no one came to stop him, so it never served its purpose.

When I walk around this town my mind is heavy with old things. They build in me like constipation. I cannot shit here. It comes out in forced, painful meat lumps. Like dead sausage.

I try to explain it to my girlfriend. She says she knows what I mean, but you never know what someone else means.

I imagine how I could never work here, never really make anything here. It would be sucked in to the goo. French-cropped-macdonalds-paste.

A man in a service station without a top on. His fucking arse is fucking hanging out. He is disgusting. In my head I think, 'this only happens in Essex'. It doesn't. It happens everywhere. I see him a minute later, sitting in his car waiting for the car wash. This seems weird. Not exactly rank hypocrisy, but a definite paradox.

In a book, the camera zooms away from the action while the chracters are in mid-sentence. Suddenly you realise that their actions have no consequence and there will be no conclusion. This is how the book should end.

These past few days have seen a rhythmic faecal cycle emerge. I wake up, sit at my computer and don't drink any coffee (I have more than enough once I get to work. Injecting caffeine in to boring work at least makes it seem frantic, even if it can't quite be fun), and then, just before I'm meant to run and catch the bus, my bowels decide that WE ARE RELEASING THE POOS. I stiffly walk downstairs and drop my logs.

I had a sudden theory outburst in the staff room yesterday, and people were kind enough not just to ignore me, which meant that when I got home I felt like it was an idea worth elaborating on.
  I see the Anglican church, under the leadership of Rowan Williams, as an essentially liberal faction of Christianity. Rowan Williams is just one of a long line of Christian reformers who iron out the inconsistencies in Christian doctrine, and attempt to remove the contradictions from their faith. John Gray, who I've quoted before, makes a wonderful point about Liberal Humanism being a product of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment being a product of changing attitudes towards ideas of faith, rather than a break from faith. To me, the Anglican church represents less of a religion, and more of a Humanistic attitude. Where is the need for a god and a god's unbending will in William's pronunciations on gay rights or his views on Sharia law? Progressive religious sects dismantle the very idea of faith, and replace it with a very (post?)modern idea of acceptance and human (but not self-) centered living. The idea of God has outlasted -for these progressive, Humanistic sects its - usefulness, and so God must be re-defined in order to make her/him more pragmatic, more reasonable and more human.

In a similar way, art has outlasted it's practical application as recorder of the real, and so art began to re-define itself through distortion, and abstraction, and non-art, and actions, and spaces, and words, and games and ideas (order them as you will). Artifice is dutifully removed; deemed inauthentic, or ridiculed as affectation. Maybe, like the progressive Christians, only once we have dismantled our God, do we realise that it was the contradictions that formed out faith.

Maybe artifice is all we have?

On Sunday I took a poo while reading the recipe page of the Observer.
I call this holistic shitting.

I've been eating fried chicken, sleeping on floors and not brushing my teeth. Here is a poem I wrote on the bus, and then I'm going to go an have my first home poo of several days.

Red Stripe Lesbian
Hey, Red Stripe lesbian.
It is so early
to be drinking Red Stripe,
and coming on to women
at the pedestrian crossing.

Surely, the first poo of summer. After a particularly dehydrating bus ride to work, I went to use the toilet and passed a very dry turd. The only moisture present in the whole experience was the sweat around my arsehole. It came out easily enough; I can only assume the perspiration in my crack acted as a basic form of lubricant.

Coincidence, or evolutionary imperative?