1. Slept and slept and slept - finally.

2. Had a contest with Bruce (he won).

3. Saw some blackcurrant juice dried on the bedside table and thought for a moment that it might be blood.

4. Liked this poem by Charles Bukowski:

the secret

Don’t worry, nobody has the
beautiful lady, not really, and
nobody has the strange and
hidden power, nobody is
exceptional or wonderful or
magic, they only seem to be.
it’s all a trick, an in, a con,
don’t buy it, don’t believe it.
the world is packed with
billions of people whose lives
and deaths are useless and
when one of these jumps up
and the light of history shines
upon them, forget it, it’s not
what it seems, it’s just
another act to fool the fools
again.

there are no strong men, there
are no beautiful women.
at least, you can die knowing
this
and you will have
the only possible
victory.

because it seems true enough, though I wouldn’t call Bukowski an optimist.

5. Ate a handful of cherries leftover from a package in the fridge and part of a blush pear that never ripened but is going off in the middle somehow anyway and drank half a pint of blackcurrant and apple juice.

6. Thought about how I never noticed until now that chickens in the UK have hair. Even ones you buy from the grocery store have them – these incidental bristles that are a bit tough to pull from the skin before the chicken is cooked. And this makes no sense to me, because chickens aren’t hairy. Am I right? Chickens in Canada do not have hair, which either means they’re different to chickens in the UK or in Canada they employ people to methodically pull those occasional hairs from the chickens before they put them on grocery store shelves, because I’d never seen a hairy chicken until I moved here.

7. Picked dead skin off the soles of my feet.

8. Decided to write something to cover up the fact of my last entry, which was really a non-entry. But also realised that it doesn’t even matter what anyone says, anywhere at all, because it only goes in one ear and out the other, just as it goes through my head and out my fingertips. Because everyone is mostly self-involved and that’s exactly as it should be. If we were involved with other people all the time, we would forget to do things for ourselves like eat and take out the trash.

9. Thought about all the things I have yet to do on this self-established day off. Like have a bath, wash dishes, have something to eat (it grows murkier) and maybe catch a film when Bruce gets back because it’s Friday night and we do what we want.