9th September 2001 - 10:03 p.m.

I have been writing another journal elsewhere.

Yea, avert your eyes if you must, for this is to be another diary entry about the mechanics and manipulations of the medium. Marshall McLuhan's famed words might here serve to temper my own soliloquy, but I fear that such a frenzy of alliteration so early in an entry would serve only to give fright to those readers among you of a nervous constitution.

If I have one gift, it is in understanding the expectations placed upon any form of social contact. This is no less true in the domain of diaryland.com than it is seated next to a man in the thrall of a cursing monologue on the 123 bus as the skies outside turn to dust and air. Public airings of psyche derive their audience attraction from two points. One: the juxtaposition of peaks and troughs, delirium and declamation. In short, the dynamics of everyday emotion transport our fluttering hearts along to one conclusion after another, from wreckage to equilibrium and back again, and again, and again. This is fascinating, a thriller, soap opera. Two: one will always derive the most profound vicarious excitement from the record of a personal downward spiral. See: Prozac Nation, Ariel, any number of exquisitely torturous online diaries, many of them amongst my favourites.

In recent times, as a cursory examination of my archives will disclose, things have seemed quite terrible, perhaps at their worst. It quickly became impossible for me to reconcile the requirements of the genre - entertainment, faux-emotive honesty, knowing smiles - with the tremblings of my mind, the abundant terror. And, although I made a gesture or two towards continuing the writing, I couldn't help but notice the possibility that this, all of this, was little more than emotional blackmail. Who of you will save me?. Even here, I couldn't abandon the awareness of what was expected, what was intended, what was given and what remained hidden. Even here, in the darkest place, I would wonder who was watching me, and what they might see.

"Somebody had to do it. Self-awareness is everything."

My desire to act with dignity overcame my temptation to open up and let the sparks fly. It's all fun until somebody loses an eye.

And so to a new diary, unheralded, and read only by three insomniac white-collar workers in North America, and one diamond heiress in Argentina. I have been slightly more honest there - more honest than I can be here, in a website read by people to whom I will have to justify myself when next we meet in a battered London nightspot. And yet, if there are things in that other diary which I couldn't dream of mentioning here, where does that leave us? For what could this site possibly stand? The labours of paternity now confessed, the pretence of truth now gone, I suppose I have set ablaze my estate and thrown my papers into the river.

Would you believe that it was an accident?