October 28 (Thursday): Surgery. Dream: I am sat at my desk at Chernobyl discussing work with Ivan. A young version of Jack (reminding me of Nigel Orrin) then comes over and begins talking to me, telling me how to manage and deal with people. He then goes outside and approaches a couple of lads in suits walking past the office, plainly green business wise. He returns to speak to me with the general air of “there you go” when it is plainly bullshit.

I wake up early, before my alarm clock goes off in the full knowledge that as soon as the buzzer rings, my day will be ruined. It is a bad morning, I feel disillusioned.

Sara hits me on MSN, eventually praising me for being “you’re my best friend, you don’t want to shag me”. Great, this follows up with my other redeeming qualities per her being that I’m nasty and make her laugh.

I go into work beardy and unshaven, a proper mess. Did I not have time to shave this morning? Almost immediately upon getting into work I am whinging about Pier Management and my apparent Forfeit Of Lease on Bohemian Grove and, with courage, I get straight onto the phone to speak to them about it. In the summer the hit me with fines and were not flexible, so dealing with this fine I suspect will be tricky. On the contrary though, I hold/keep my head and the guy on the other end of the phone, who I am sure I have spoken to before, waives the legal fees providing I pay the insurance charge immediately (which is fairly due). Still though, this requires me pulling just over £200 out of thin air and means that I am broke for November already and I have already spent the disposable portion of next months pay cheque. Ouch.

Today is hard work, Stevo is just plain annoying. Somewhere, somehow we get into some kind of argument over religion (probably from me talking about the Fear TV show from last night) and he begins attacking the Bible. Stevo tells me that inside the good book (Genesis I think) he says that it states “if you see a gay man being raped that you are supposed to send out your daughters to be raped”. Oh my god, this is so preposterous and depressing, some weird freaky case/example of really reading between the lines. What fucking purpose does it have being told these things?

At lunchtime I waddle around town on my own, doing lunch on the cheap and bumping around seeing the Wellington House girl three times looking really good. Simple things.

In the afternoon I continue work on Acme Newsagents and the job begins to feel like a bit of a stitch up, it is never ending and severely incomplete, accounts dating back to 2002, the first stretch of three that I appear to be headed for, one long waste of time exercise. The Mickey Mouse previous accountants are withholding serious wage/salary information (prompting an estimate of £40K), I have a big box stack full of unrecorded/unreconciled invoices and it just breaks my back as it is all needle in a haystack stuff. In three days I have cobbled some figures together but its all guesstimates (fudge) due to a limitation of scope and not my incompetence, as probably my seniors will see it. These kind of jobs make days appear to double in size and become a grind. Still, when Ivan comes over, looks at the job and makes positive comments it does rejuvenate things, to the point that I stay in work late.

When I get in, I check my post and there is the big letter from the NHS with regards to my impending surgery. It is time to speak to them and make a date for my visit. I can’t face this right now, this side of Christmas. Ultimately I can’t see myself going through with this, such a procedure could kill me I fear (but in reality will come nowhere near life threatening twat). I dare say I will chicken out of making an/the appointment for the surgery, using the excuse that it will be exam season.

Tonight is half term on the English front and the break week is most welcome, I need more than one night in a week.

I was hoping to get another past exam paper done and out of the way tonight but I wind up fouling up and playing FIFA 2005, Millwall taking on and beating the remainder of the Championship. Just like in real life (ho ho).

Eventually comes a well over due bath and then, bored, I find myself hitting the Friends Reunited website. Oh my, why on earth do I do this? The Friends Reunited seems only designed to perform one act; turn the most rational/normal of people insane as the website stirs up Vietnam-esqe flashbacks as mentally people go through some kind of time warp mind trip back to a persons (or what ought to be) most difficult/awkward days/years. And if it is not bad enough that the website acts to send bad memories/vibes flooding back, enter the where are they now/what are they doing section where everyone is fronting and apparently competing to be doing better than you. Who on earth wants to read about the kid/person/now adult that used to bully you at school and is now able to retire to Australia early next year while you remain in a funk, struggling to pay the mortgage on the most shit hole/bum hole of singleton flats. Mentally, you may as well tattoo “loser” across your psyche. And then even it happens, some sadist (who will remain unknown in the Acme empire) has gone and posted the year line-up photo of 1993. Fortunately I am not in the photo, I had my own little line-up, having been relegated to sit/work with the GCSE retake dumbos that year. However seeing those faces again is haunting, very bad for my wellbeing. And worse, they all look just like fucking spotty teenagers (what a shock) and now I question myself, how on earth did allow them to push me about? I am a bitter man. Or a better man. You decide.

8MM comes on Channel Four at 10PM and this snaps me away from cyberspace grey area/matter. I remember buying this movie on DVD just because James Gandolfini is in it and thinking it was terrible but I never really watched it that closely before. There is actually some interesting stuff in there that the Phoenix brother says (or rather his character) about perversions roping in a person, making them go further with extremes and kicks. Of course the subject of this movie is snuff films and I am never going to see anyone into that within my life time but there is a scary message here really, just by the extent that people now fulfil their pornographic needs in private with the internet, get their peccadilloes filled and move onto more extreme stuff. I have seen porno on the web so detached from sex that you forget what porn actually is. It’s scary when you think about it. I’m glad I’ve found God (wink).

I fall asleep watching 8MM, missing the awful ending which is probably for the best, I have already wasted enough minutes of my life on the hack movie.

np: Blur - Popscene