Thursday 12th June 2003 - 12:30am

The evening comes, I suppose. What daylight there is grows heavy, grows apathetic, grows sickly. I’m thinking of dinner dates with pretty Georgian girls, but that’s in the past, and memories should be left to lie where they drop. The music, well, it’s just feedback and harmonics and howling, the sound of fingers grown thin and wasted, throwing the seconds before them into oblivion. It’s the only thing, I think..

..and there’s that line: “Our struggle had a difficult, a heavy side”. I’m drawn to this understatement, this modesty of emotion. Yes, it’s there, but, no, it’s not important. Don’t worry. It’s ok.. really.. One of a few lines that resonate beyond all context. Others are from Neighbours, from the video to ‘God Give Me Strength’ (mouthed, unheard), from a text message I once received, and from an Elizabeth Young quote of a phrase from the third novel by an opinion-dividing American writer. I turn the light on. Night retaliates.

And I’m thinking of a fashion show I attended when I couldn’t have been more than about sixteen (ah, these awkward memories again), and how people gathered afterwards to discuss macramé and future plans whilst I stood brooding on the bitter and vacant words of some rock song. You will say that there are parallels, and I will ask: do memories ever really drop, or do they weave themselves through our futures to be experienced over and over, a dropped stitch repeated endlessly?

The weight of the evening manifests itself across the temples, and a headache appears. How much more satisfying to have a symptom to lament!

I pick up three books and throw them aside, reading little more than a page of each. I haven’t the patience and, really, all I want to read now are the collected prison letters of George Jackson, and I don’t want to read that because it’s too sad. I finished it on a train, an hour shy of London, thinking guiltily of how I picked it up as an account of idiot martyrdom, of life wasted for an abstraction, and how it brought to the fore that part of me still believing that there exist things other than abstractions.

I would like to claim that I’m willing to die for what I believe in but, unfortunately, I don’t believe in anything at all, excepting, perhaps, common courtesy.

Fourth novel. From the fourth novel – I just checked.

My present philosophy is of doubt, of doubt and nothing besides, because I don’t know anything that could stand alongside doubt and survive the experience. I know what you’ll say, and I even despise it too, but it just rolls its eyes at me and I can’t think of a response. And I’m typing quietly now, because my parents have gone to bed in the next room and, I don’t know, perhaps I should down tools and retire myself, but I abhor the idea of concluding an evening with no token of profit – whether it be a kiss on the cheek or a few scrawls on a page or a confession of love via text message - to show for the time passed.

I can’t go on, I say. But I will go on. And I will do so because the Audrey Hepburn diaryring promise to throw me out if I don’t update at least once a month.

I was going to write a detailed character assasination of Tom McRae for this website. Along the way, it would discuss the position of the artist with the regard to the public, the temptations of the solo artist confronted with new technology, and the true relationship of escapism and music. But there seemed to be nothing to say – and I tried, teeth gritted, eyes deadfocused – beyond the opening line. “What kind of fuckwit uses marimba?”

There are others no less guilty. I’m presently playing Wagner to keep myself awake because, curiously, his tunes are far more enjoyable than most of pop’s recent releases. You would imagine that the average consumer had forgotten how it feels to fall in love, record companies therefore supposing that they needn’t make the effort any more. One can only choose between the products offered, after all. Nonetheless, pop music is in a sorry state. To the extent that Monsieur Dupont sounds revolutionary, as opposed to simply very good.

(For ‘pop music’, read: Whatever you’re listening to at the moment).

Ah, perhaps popular culture is disappointed in me, too. Oblivious, I leave the computer and step outside for a cigarette, admiring my hair as reflected in the kitchen window.

I’ve been thinking about Ultra-pop again, about how it’s the only thing that makes sense at this time. How it provides a context in which the most ungainly ideas can appear as the prettiest truths. Stars call it ‘the soft revolution’, but they’re wrong, so wrong.. Why not just christen it Scaredy-pop and have done with it? It smacks of defence, retreat, regression, of everything we ought to be rejecting. David McNamee, in his largely incoherent Trembling Blue Stars review on Tangents, is halfway there, describing “a Top 20 that never happened”. Or Billy Childish on some tv documentary a year ago: “I don’t think think I’m an Outsider; and, if I am, I don’t deserve to be..”

It’s all in that single word, ultra. Sharp, weightless, pointed straight at the future. And when the television news reports street clashes between Ultras and police, in who among us doesn’t it summon up, just for a moment, images of mythical autonomist superheroes?

So, forward! Moving in the right direction, in hopes that we’ll think of something to do when we get there.