23rd July 2001 - 8:59 p.m.

How many times do you allow yourself to fall head-long before you hit the rocks? How many spins of the barrel before the bullet finds its target?

It's the not-knowing that kills you. It's the half-guessing that destroys you. It's the expectation of tragedy that finally finishes it.

"Is this all there is?
I wanted so much more
The gold in those hills
The silver of the moores.."

Nancy Griffith is a great comfort. You, my friends, may laugh, but somewhere in those dust bowls of the Midwest, somewhere amongst the lush empty fields of the South, somewhere in a barren state far far away.. my heart has a home. I could never quite relate to pop music, much less indie music, for the simple reason that it revolves around people who like people.

I take the opportunity to unsubscribe from the Sinister Belle & Sebastian mailing list. I decide it inappropriate for someone as unfortunately misanthropic as myself to be reading endless backlogs of emails about strangers' whims and fancies.

I am Me, and other people are not Me. As such, we have very little in common.

A bastardised quote from memory:

"Having failed utterly to find any human being to whom I could devote myself, I have decided to devote myself to humanity".

Genoa diverts my attentions. I think of the fallen, I think of the footage I was shown of police surrounding an injured man and beating him with clubs. I dream of bodies in the streets. I flashback, vicariously, to the Gli Anni di Piombo, to that horrific Aldo Bonasia snapshot of the death of the student Zibecchi, to the words of the policeman after the decapitation: "I did not think that the brain of a communist could be so large.." Out on Saturday night, my mind cannot escape the broken images of street-fighting, of blood (who knows whose?), of struggle. Not surprisingly, I am dreadful company.

Of course, I refuse to condemn the actions in the streets. In the end, it is only a question of tactics.