24th May 2001 - 5:11 p.m.

Every five minutes, ten new diary entries appear on this domain. Every hour, one hundred and twenty. Take a look at the Diaryland.com 'updates' list. Every day, two thousand eight hundred and eighty; every week, twenty thousand one hundred and sixty. Words piled upon words, lives on lives. A hive, or burrow, of virtual existences. Banalities and trivialities granted import by their own digital codification and self-satisfaction. And mine?

And mine.

You see, they tend to fall into three broad categories. There are the euphorically chatty entries: no musings, no sonorous tragedies, only schoolday recollections (no, no, no - not nostalgia.. The schoolday only finished two hours ago..). Such diaries, lacking as they are in any hint of self-consciousness, entertain in the reader the possibility of the truly lived life, such is their wholehearted embrace of fleeting existence.

"Y'know.. a lotta evil people think something's only worth doing if there's a tape-recorder rolling.."

Alas, if such diaries truly suggest lives lived in blissful ignorance, well... why write a diary in the first place? Why publish it on the internet, so that the likes of myself can trawl through in search of understanding? Why not concentrate on restitching the hem of the Prom dress that Jaz trod upon whilst running to the carpark in order to find Becca who, we're told, was stiffed on cheap whiskey and snogging a 23 year old no-hoper against the bonnet of a Corvette..?

One point to be made about such diaries: being as obliquely brash as they are, they cannot fail to bore the casual reader to tears.

And then emotionally-stark self-help/self-hindrance diaries. Perhaps I shall make little reference to these, seeing as they are a) a rather sensitive area, for reader and writer alike; and b) sadly, embarrassingly, vicariously, the most entertaining of the lot. Smile at the highs! Wait with baited breath.. Wait... There! Into the trough of despair! Am I relating to the wretched words? Am I exploiting the undoubtedly real sufferings? Am I now enjoying the guilt I can summon up at the thought of this?

Emotional cannibalism - it passes the evenings.

Some of us are too self-conscious to commit ourselves so readily to any of these schools of writing. Some of us are just a little too meta-textually aware (you love me! Tell me how you love me!) to give much time to considerations of 'truth' and 'meaning'.. Had my diary a subtitle, what would it be? "Getting Away With It". If I have genius, you understand, it would not be in a traditional discipline. I'm good at tennis, passable at prose, and pretty damn shocking at geography.. I have never attempted pole-dancing, but I have my doubts. No, what I do have is the foresight and malleability of affectations to appear talented in one area after another. If I have genius, it's in watching what everybody else is doing, and then doing the same but just slightly, slightly, better..

I am no Wunderkind.. I am but one of the famed monkeys with typewriters, tap-tapping away towards the prophecised destiny of Shakespeare's 'Collected Works'. The difference being that I keep looking over the shoulders of the monkeys on either side of me, giggling to myself at the state of their syntax, and stealing all their best ideas.

You seemingly have the gall to complain about my tardiness in updating this diary, and yet still don't even bother to sign my guestbook. You shitters.