Hello, New York is an inspiring place. On Tuesday I went to see LTJ Bukem DJing @ Centro-Fly. It was wicked. I love the way people move to drum and bass - so much more instinctive and sensual than techno. Met Sarah - she dressed dorky to hide the fact that she was really fit. She was an excellent dancer. I tried to make her kidnap me but it didn't work out.

The other day I made a stencil and did my first bit of spray-art in New York - or anywhere for that matter - it was fun.

Last night I was at a rooftop rave in Brooklyn and ended up going completely crazy with Kevin and Luciana. We were throwing paint everywhere and using fire hydrants as musical instruments and shouting "DESTROY EVERYTHING!"

Jen and Rikky had a party last Thursday. It was mostly a good laugh though a bit awkward at times. There were some really nice people there like that artsy designer girl and the funny fat caner girl who kept getting us more and more stoned. I got a bit paranoid I think. We got a taxi back across Brooklyn Bridge.

Tara's dog's dead. She was fighting back the tears and I really felt for her.

I've been thinking a lot and feel a bit melancholy like something is missing not just in me but in the whole way people interact and the social constraints. I just wish it was easier to communicate and we didn't have to go through so much shit... I guess this feeling arises when you're meeting nice people who you know you probably will never see again, and you feel like you want to get to know them instantly, and you do in a way, because you have to rely on them in the absence of anyone else who you might know better. I feel this underlying regret that it's all so finite and transitory, and it almost compares to deep love. I feel like I really love these people because I know I'm going to lose them very soon. It's kind of beautiful though, and somehow we all feel it I think.

There's still time so lets make the best of it. The thought of going back home and back to how it was fills me with trepidation. I fear the old me will return and I will become weak and fragile. I fear falling back into old cycles of dysfunction. These three weeks in New York have been pure and free and innocent and playful and FUN... Like the time I got drunk in Chelsea and ended up back in a hotel room with two lesbians showing me all the electric goods they bought in the Hello Kitty store, or singing at BMW's and stroking that cute little dog with that Lithuanian girl, or hearing PALEFACE play at the Sidewalk Cafe, or shopping at the Salvation Army on 20th and 8th, or spraying stencils or skidding around in the rain or swinging off scaffolds or climbing big rocks in Central Park or taking photo's of skyscrapers or VIP passes to the Empire State or belly dancers or Energy drinks or Vodka Lime Tonics or scrawling 'hello' on the toilet wall of Esperanto cafe or playing frisbee or laughing or Banana Stacks with Maple Syrup, or saying 'gimme a slice' without saying please or thankyou, or Being Direct.

Yesterday it rained hard. I went to MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) and snuck in for free. Now I'm at Chelsea Piers. Gotta go find my sister..... BYE!

KHAO LAK, THAILAND - Agitated elephants felt the tsunami coming, and their sensitivity saved about a dozen foreign tourists from the fate of thousands killed by the giant waves.

"I was surprised because the elephants had never cried before," mahout Dang Salangam said on Sunday on Khao Lak beach at the eight-elephant business offering rides to tourists.

The elephants started trumpeting -- in a way Dang, 36, and his wife Kulada, 24, said could only be described as crying -- at first light, about the time an earthquake measured at a magnitude of 9.0 cracked open the sea bed off Indonesia's Sumatra island.

The elephants soon calmed down. But they started wailing again about an hour later and this time they could not be comforted despite their mahouts' attempts at reassurance.

"The elephants didn't believe the mahouts. They just kept running for the hill," said Wit Aniwat, 24, who takes the money from tourists and helps them on to the back of elephants from a sturdy wooden platform.

Those with tourists aboard headed for the jungle-clad hill behind the resort beach where at least 3,800 people, more than half of them foreigners, would soon be killed. The elephants that were not working broke their hefty chains."Then we saw the big wave coming and we started running," Wit said.

Around a dozen tourists were also running toward the hill from the Khao Lak Merlin Resort, one of a line of hotels strung along the 10 km (6-mile) beach especially popular with Scandinavians and Germans.

"The mahouts managed to turn the elephants to lift the tourists onto their backs," Kulada said. She used her hands to describe how the huge beasts used their trunks to pluck the foreigners from the ground and deposit them on their backs. The elephants charged up the hill through the jungle, then stopped.

The tsunami drove up to 1 km (1,000 yards) inshore from the gently sloping beach which had been so safe for children it made Khao Lak an ideal place for a family holiday. But it stopped short of where the elephants stood.

On Sunday, the elephants were back at work giving rides to the tourists on whom the area depends.

German Ewald Heeg, who said he came from a small town near Frankfurt, said his charter company had offered his family -- wife, two daughters and one of their boyfriends -- the chance to go straight home, but he had turned it down.

"Our family is OK so we stay here to make our holiday," he said.

"Today, we make a safari. We go by elephants at first, then we make a boat trip.

By Mark Bendeich
Reuters
January 3, 2005

Intimacy is the principle source of the sugars with which life is sweetened. It is absolutely vital to the essential insanities. Without it humour becomes inoffensive and therefore pap, eroticism becomes inpersonal and therefore mechanical, poetry becomes exoteric and therefore prose, behaviour becomes predictable and therefore easy to control.

Tom Robbins

She was swollen, stretched out, swelling beneath that transparent layer of silk.

Resisting the screaming exigency of his own bloated cock he refrained from ripping aside the damp fabric and tearing into her. Instead, a pause. Taut. Fecund. Then, he began nudging at her with his nose. She extended further: a space opening, a slow-motion surge to the tip of clit: the curve of his erection tapping insistently at her ankles.
He placed his hand on her belly and felt an undulation there - deep in her abdomen. Pressing upwards he pulled silk tight against the eddy of her opening, swaying into her with a big, flat tongue.
Her hips went into flux.

1.
Frank crept slowly, aphid-like, through the trees. The birds were shrieking at each other up there, clinging onto those branches and pecking at the berries with their beaks, then prodding at them with their weird hard tongues. Frank was not pleased, not pleased at all. He had no predilection for creeping slowly, aphid-like, through the trees. The humidity prickled heavily on his forehead like a dead hedgehog, and he had lost one of his shoes back there in a bog, running away from those killer bees. No, it hadn't been a good day for Frank. He hadn't planned to embark on some hair-brain adventure when he'd boarded the W7 bus on Stroud Green Rd that morning. He'd had no inkling he would be being stalked by a gorilla on heat in the Amazon rainforest that afternoon, and not attending a seminar on 'Pet Insurance Policy Scheduling'.

"Jesus Christ!" he muttered, "Monkeys"
and then "FFFF, FFFFUCK" as he encountered an unexpected dip in the path and tripped, landing painfully on his wrist and a colony of seven million biting ants.

"EEEEEAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGH!" he said dispondently, extricating himself in as dignified a manner as he could muster, given the circumstances.

2.
Mona swung dolefully through the trees with the poise and grace one would expect from a primate in its natural habitat. In her small dark gorilla eyes was the tangible sadness of one who has been shunned, of one who has offered love but been refused. Hidden within those shimmering black baubles of sadness however was also a seed of determination and hope, and maybe even of joy and purpose. Mona was in love with a man from Stroud Green Road and she intended to have him even if it had to be by force...

if i could write

i would wonder
aimlessly
through forests

picking beautiful words
like magic beans.

i would show you

that paper was trees once

we could count the years together,
draw water,
through stem and node
rooting depths
for nutrients
.

i would invite you
into my tunnels
and show you
concentric rings

if i could write

Klip, Klop, the legless man walks, in his own way, on two stout, blunt, short, black, wooden stools, sitting on one as he moves the other. I too walk: straight past, not wanting to stop and stare. But how can I just walk by? I feel a lump in my throat, and pride in these people: the survivors. The legless man must have perceived me too, yet he ignored me - intent on the rhythm of his progress, shifting the weight of his torso from stool to stool on wiry brown arms.

stop.

stop here, at this cafe, sit down, smoke, order something.
"here's your coffee, the salad will be out shortly"
Klip, Klop.

2.

In the distance two huge cranes stood like insane mechanical giraffes under the clouds.

As she squeezed the over-ripe fruit it swelled and burst open, revealing stringy orange interiors. She offered it up to his mouth and he bit into the dripping flesh, taking a huge sickly mouthful. The juices and chunks of broken fruit dripped down his cheeks down his clothes and he chewed and they laughed.

They were to be married. These two.

His first wife.

The ferry hummed and whirred. They sat at a plastic table and looked out over the water and the gray sky and the cranes and the universe. She thought the cranes resembled lobsters.

" i like your crooked nose"
she said, eyes wet, scanning his face.

" i like you boots"

The heels of her boots were worn down unevenly. She tripped on them often.

She was an extrovert, his first wife, a talented exhibitionist, a good dancer, a mischievous arch-prankster with mercurial eyes. She smelled like sweets and her body was lithe and nimble. They had been friends for a long time. The love locked in the eyes like invisible smoke passing between them. It was white fire held in the mouth of a crocus flower.

3.

The window creaks and I look out at the North Sea. It is foamy and cold and salty. It is too big to comprehend, surrounding us. We'll never understand it, so I take another swig of scotch from the bottle and think about something else. It's still dark. It's slate-blue, 6.38 in the morning, I still haven't slept. The blue slate sky stretches out towards Edinburgh. Scotland hovers before my eyes, scratching itself and waking up.

"NO!"

He stands up, knocking his plate off the table, a brown streak of gravy shit-staining his slightly crumpled trousers.

"30 YEARS I'VE HAD THIS BULLSHIT, YOU WANT A TANTRUM? I'LL GIVE YOU A PROPER FUCKING TANTRUM"

Granny opens her mouth to speak.
"now Felix..."

"DON'T YOU FUCKING START EITHER, NONE OF YOU STAND UP TO HER!"

Gravy, dripping, he stands - trampling half chewed sprouts and bread sauce into the carpet - and walks towards the Christmas tree, leaning forth to grip its piney boughs. The tree shakes, needles dropping, baubles swaying, as he lifts it, ripping the fairylights from the socket, flimsy branches scratching loudly against textured yellow wallpaper.

"Felix! No!"

"ITS TOO LATE!"

He curls his lips back and lifts the tree over his head, a rain of needles bouncing off his blinking eyelids, takes a deep breath and hurls it towards the window with all of his force, hissing through his teeth. An explosion of green and glass, a horrible twist of tree-lights tentacle across the room.

He looks down at his palms, perforated by sickly smelling bright green pine needles. Nobody moves.

"You see? you see what you've done?"
"I've gone mad and it's all your fault."

in the indent of her pulse
were flashes of inspiration
a quiet thump
of soft matresses
flung on the floor

tap tapping
into darkness
we spoke
as if words were animals
baying in the red dusk

their eyelids droop and wane like suns

and small things
is what we were there
as each short sleep
dissolved another layer
like honey on ricepaper

we awoke relieved, younger
closer to childhood
hid under a table
whispering childish things

up to the present
my idea
in collaboration with myself
has been to get off the gold standard of literature
my idea briefly
has been to present a ressurection of the emotions
to depict the conduct of a human being in the stratosphere of ideas
that is
in the grip of delirium
to paint a presocratic being
a creature part goat part titan
in short
to erect a world on the basis of the OMPHALOS
not an abstract idea nailed to a cross

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HQJyAacTnc