From The Centrifuge

I've just spent two hours (not unpleasant hours I must admit, thanks in no small part to Death in Vegas ) fiddling with profile options on Live Journal , trying to get them just right, like the fuel / air mix on an airplane or the pH of a swimming pool, so that I have the most fecund environment into which I could cast the seeds of my imagination. Little tweaks here - do I want all comments uploaded to Twitter and likewise, all Twitter postings captured here? - little permissions denied there - NO FB links, thanks - and just when the time had come to finally stop procrastinating and get stuck in, virtual pen in hand and coffee with chocolate digestive at a convenient distance (not too close to the laptop, not so far away that I might need to stretch), all I could see was the vast empty space of the Internet. Sometimes you eat the abyss and sometimes... All that directionless but febrile activity has burned out the synapses. At least, that's a good excuse for now. I genuinel...

I took a moment last night, between nappy changes (not mine you guttersnipes) to consider a proposition that I have been bandying around for a number of years, more in idleness that in all seriousness. It was something I pinched wholesale from "The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven " by Alan Warner, which I read quite a few years ago it would seem. His protagonist gives up reading anything other than travel guides and pamphlets because he has calculated that the time he has left to live (projected) is less than the time it would take to read every book he has collected in his library. "What a conclusion!" I thought, "What would it take for me to run to such a morbid assessment of my prospects in life? What strength in belief a man must have to make this decision and then stick to it!" I immediately resolved to use this line whenever a conversation came up when, faced by the book-buying public, I was forced to listen to another person bemoaning the lack of space...