This is part one of a two-part series* on how infidelity comes to pass**.

Disclaimer up front, the love of my life has a bit of experience in the cheating arena (what with the husband and all) and neither of my theories apply to her experiences. So… do with that what you may.

Part One: Chicks.

I may have rambled about this in the past, but you must understand how the brain works with regards to models. Car analogy, why not: you come from a little island to a big city for the first time. Lots of stuff you’re unfamiliar with. You see a bunch of four-wheeled metal machines and hear them referred to as cars. Your brain now has a model for ‘car’. If you see something, even a car you’ve never seen before, your clever little brain will see if it fits the model it has for ‘car’. If your brain deems it close enough, it will tell you you’re looking at a car. As you come across more and more cars, if you’re interested, you may begin to notice ‘sports cars’, or ‘SUVs’. You can continue to branch these models into more and more specific models. This is what becoming an expert in something is. This is why some people see ‘old sports car’ and some people see ‘1972 Porsche 911 2.7’. I have one model for ‘tree’, one for ‘shrub’, etc. My Grandma, god rest her soul*, has hundreds of models. This one has about a million.

It’s also why some people see an ‘Asian’ and some see a ‘Korean’. If you’re seeing North Koreans then you’re either in the wrong place or you’re right where you are now and it’s 2022*.

A little aside: I’m miserable today, writing is helping.

We should get to the cheating. Let’s imagine for a moment I was the type to have a person who was in my life on some sort of constant basis. Shudder. I would see her in the day and in the night. By candle light and with the sick fluorescent light shimmering on her skin***. Through short hair and long, blonde and brunette, makeup and no. Onesies and ballgowns, naked and whatever the opposite of naked is.

The model in my brain for this ‘significant’ other would even out all of these differences. There would be just her. When I looked at her my perception would transcend the physical; my eyes would see light reflecting off her epidermis, but my brain would see the model of my beloved, everything she is, and is to me. Everything that was and all that will be.

Which means I won’t notice that she changed her hair.

Meanwhile, Nathan, the new delivery guy at her work has no such model. He sees her once a day for 100 seconds. So of course this dick notices that she’s wearing a different shade of eyeliner today. Casanova cunt face.

And that’s just swoon-city for bitches. They’ve got Mr. Notices Everything delivering the goods and Mr. Oblivious at home seemingly unaware of the minor facial tweaks taking place.

It won’t take much of this before her giney tingles every time Prince Perception walks through the door, and hey presto you’ve got yourself an affair.

* That’s right, I can see the fuuuuutuuuuure.

** Comes to pass? That sounds wrong. I recently learned that I’ve been using ‘benevolent’ incorrectly. Oppositely, in fact. Which explains why verbal attacks on my enemies hadn’t been landing with quite as much force as I had hoped.

*** Not my lovely words.

Assuming, dear reader, that you’re not an idiot, you’re all over this climate change business. With that out of the way, I pose to you a question. Gonna try some quote mark style, see what that looks like.

If you could turn off climate change, would you?

Forget about how, just keep in mind that you can’t tell anyone. Scientists will simply begin to discover that there is, in fact, no climate change. Everything is fine. Always was. The whole thing was just a big misinterpretation of the data.

Great, you might think. The Maldives will stay dry, the Nigerian rainforest uninhabited, and the reason Iceland got it’s name will remain quite obvious to future generations.

But.

Every climate-change denier on earth will think they were right all along. You will want to tell them, but you will have no comeback. They will mock your science; you will sit biting the crap out of your tongue. I can’t begin to imagine the form that Donald Trump’s smugness would take. I couldn’t find any recent quotes from Michael Crichton, but he’ll no doubt have something to say about it. And around 4% of taxi drivers. Those cunts knew all along.

Not to mention all the people who didn’t really care, but will jump on the yeah, I didn’t think it seemed right bandwagon. Oh, god it would be terrible.

So, would you?

Just answer quietly to yourself and go on with your day.

I’m not much to look at, folks. Erica likes me, but there’s something wrong with her. In just the right way, mind you, but still, she be broken.

Every part of me is off by just a little bit in either the X, the Y, the Z, or two of those axes. Never all three at once, and never none.

But none of these things are why I’m at the keyboard right now. I’m here tell you one thing, and one thing only: fucking hell I’m having a good hair day.

Business idea, mutherfuckers:

I call it check in/check out. It’s a website for those about to end it all. It’s a place where you go to write your innermost thoughts before jumping off that bridge, drinking that AJAX, doing that car exhaust thing*.

As a potential check-out-er (it’s what we like to be called) you have a place to go in your final days. None of us are sure we’re going to go through with it, but we might. We don’t want leave a note lying around the house, lest the housemaid find it (Consuela counselling: no thanks). But to enter a note in online? Something with a time-delay that will be sent to mum/dad/hubby/wife/poor sad child of a parent that can’t stand them, or the psychologist that failed pretty damn hard. This is a great idea.

To be honest I don’t give any more than zero fucks about people that kill themselves. We’re all on holiday on a lovely island that’s a bit cloudy at times; the guests that chose to leave early mean nothing to me. Good riddance, they were bringing the whole place down anyway.

But I like the idea of giving the healthcare professionals page upon page of depressing data on the final thoughts of those that actually followed through with it. Something they can reflect back to their patients (the aliveys, we like to be called).

And I (kind of) care about the ones that can be saved… the ones that are just sad, that think no one thinks like they do. The ones that have 40 years of pretty great shit ahead of them that they can’t see for the sun-blocking pile of shit currently in front of them.

These are the losers I give a fuck about (a little bit). These are the losers that should be typing this shit out. Seeing it on the screen, the pixels reading it back to them. Typing in your parent’s e-mail addresses. These are the losers that worry about accidentally sending a suicide email to their dad and haven’t yet thought about Dad finding their cooling carcass on the bathroom floor.

Day’s will go by. The loser that just talks about suicide will panic a bit that all their writing will be sent to their loved ones if they don’t log in and put it on hold. They will imagine how it others will feel, they will re-read what they’ve written, they will think about it. Maybe.

Monetisation I haven’t worked out. It might be one of those things I do just for the joy of reading suicide notes helping others.

*A lot of people kill themselves. A lot of people are stupid. A lot of people drive a Prius. Think about that.

You know what I miss most about Erica? Yes, you do. Or maybe you’re reading this on a watch and it doesn’t show titles, so… I miss her walk.

The way she lifted her cute little feet up… First the heel, then the front part. Then back down again, neither the heel nor the front part touching down first. Did I use ‘nor’ correctly?

And OMG when she stepped up a gutter. She seemed to get it just right every time.

Her arms would swing; not too much, not too little. Not all at the shoulders either, there was the perfect amount of elbow action with just a twist of the wrists. And oh my, the swivel around her central vertical axis was sublime. Nothing strutty mind you, but sinuous enough that it was clear she knew her way around the bedroom.

You’ll see them on busy street corners, in areas of high pedestrian activity, malls, parks, thoroughfares and so on. Must I keep giving examples?

They wear bright coloured t-shirts. Green, purple, yellow. Nothing is too much!

They are fresh faced and full of enthusiasm. They have clip-boards and a shame deficit.

Up until a year ago they would say to me “excuse me sir, would you be interested in saving the [some animal/place/way of life I don’t care about]?” A closed question.

“No thanks” is the correct answer.

Then one day this changed. “Hi there sir, how are you doing today, off to work?”

“No thanks” is still the correct answer. It feels odd, but don’t let them fuck with your brain. You’re not saying “no thanks” to what they just said. You’re saying “no thanks” to the next thing they will say if you enlighten them as to the quality of your day. They have their second question locked and loaded; they know it, you know it, so there is nothing wrong with answering it. And for the love of baby Jesus don’t slow down.

I actually had one of these rodents say to me “but I didn’t ask you that.” Indignantly! Like, they promised him in interrupting-people’s-personal-thoughts school that if he asked an open-ended question he would get the person to stop walking and engage him in conversation.

Today I was waiting to cross at the lights (green = go, that’s how I remember) and the normal human next to me produced a clipboard, a smile and an air of superciliousness.

Bam, just like that, they could be anywhere. She asked me “what was your favourite sport as a child?”.

That is not a lie. I paused; I was flummoxed.

After a moment, I put my hand on her shoulder. Squeezed it ever-so-gently…

“Murdering”.

Her pupils looked like the black pool ball getting closer to the pool table hole from the perspective of the pool table hole.

I breathed out heavily. I’d just eaten a banana and figured the smell would make it just that much more uncomfortable. She breathed in and furrowed her brow. She turned slowly and looked at my hand caressing her shoulder. She looked at the other one, it was doing ‘peripheral jazz hand’.

I feel recently that I’ve lost the ability to wrap up storie

On the bus, I like to sit in the sideways seats. I don’t know if they have those all the world ’round, but I wouldn’t live anywhere that didn’t. Firstly, no one can pin me in up against a window, and I need not pin anyone in. Plus, I get to sit directly facing the people on the other side of the bus. If there’s a backward facing seat I’ll take it, naturally. I won’t make eye contact with anyone, but the idea that someone could be looking at me the whole time will make me feel sick. I like that nowadays.

I’ve digressed (in life, this story, etc).

I sat today in my sideways seat, staring at a wrapper of some sort on the floor of the bus. I don’t know what the wrapper was from, it was maybe green. It was under the seat opposite, up against the wall. To the left of it was a right foot, to the right of it a left. I was, as it turns out, staring quite intently between a woman’s legs.

As the bus crossed the Harbour Bridge, I went to bring my eyes up to the sunset, but my gaze dragged from the wrapper, up the flubber of this woman’s legs, bumping over her pregnant belly and boobs, eventually getting stuck on her eyes, which were looking right at me with some sort of emotion I’ve probably never felt. General shittiness I suspect. I’m going to chuck out ‘indignation’ without bothering to Google it to check I’m using it correctly.

“What are you looking at” she said with her eye holes.

“Not you. Pregnant chicks don’t do it for me. Ya fat skank.” I beamed to her soul with photons.

“Take a photo, it lasts longer” she spat through her glasses.

“Oh don’t flatter yourself. What are you, 40 or something?” I growled inaudibly and threw her an imaginary copy of this I keep with me for just such an occasion.

This went on for quite some time. Or maybe it was all in my head and she was just constipated.

The fact that she looked old and was probably 5 years younger than Erica made me happy.

Suck it, pregnant bitch.

As I write this, I’m listening to a Dubstep Christmas Gospel song. I shit you not.

St Vincent and the Grenadines, you are my country of the week.

For the longest time I haven’t been able to put my finger on why I feel so drawn to you.

At first I thought it might be the sheer immensity that is the syllable count in your name, but I’m not drawn to the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (they call themselves a country!) like I am to you. I thought maybe I was drawn to the sandy white beaches and crystal clear water. But sand isn’t that exciting, neither is the colour white for that matter, and even right here at home I have things that are see-through.

No, it is none of these things.

It’s that you – more than any other country – sound like the name of a really cool band. St Vincent and the Grenadines. An independently wealthy gad with a penchant for jazz, along with two of his friends, weave a web of audio wonderment with their instruments that are blown into and strummed with great vigour and candour to produce tones that would be dulcet like nothing else on earth.

*It’s amazing, isn’t it?

Having recently discovered the key to happy living, I have found that it in no way relates to actually being happy. In fact it was recently after my discovery that I discovered that it made sweet fuck all difference to my level of happiness. I was and is miserable.

And so here we are with part two. Or the letter i, written twice, if you’re fucking roman.

Fucking Romans.

This time around it’s not all about shaking car keys, it’s about not being the opposite to happy.

I’m going to imagine that the things that annoy you, dear reader, are the things that annoy me. And therefore we are one. And furthermore (first time using furthermore in a sentence, yeeha) I know what makes you happy, ergo (yipee!) I know how to make you happy.

And here it is: wake up each morning and think about all the things that could possibly make you mad, and get mad, get fucked right off, gi nebtak** before getting out of bed.

This morning I woke up and got pissed off that a gaggle of twits, after a lady’s lunch, blocked the footpath with their prams while yammering about what Jason was doing WRT his career. Although Jason exists only in my imagination, he can burn in hell for all eternity as far as I’m concerned.

I was also pretty pissed off that I had to do a whole lot of work that someone asked for, then when I was 80% of the way through, they changed their mind, I didn’t need to do it at all! And would you believe the lift took ages to come and also there was a dude on the bus watching a movie on his phone, without earphones.

All this angered me greatly, before my feet even hit the ground. I got out of bed, had a shower, did morning stuff* and went to work. I didn’t come across movie-phone-bus guy, nor the baby wheelchair muster. I did have to abandon a task halfway through due to fucking whimsy, and that brought me joy. I had pre-empted anger and frustration. And so, just like if you fix yourself up too much before sex, when the moment came it wasn’t quite so spectacular. I wasn’t angry. I wasted hours of my life on a pointless task due to the inconsideration of another human and it didn’t matter, I’d already done the mad several hours earlier.

Later, driving along, (I think you know what I’m about to say) the taxi driving in front of me stopped abruptly to let a passenger out. I had to break so suddenly that I was too close to pull around them. I had to sit and wait. I did not care. I got angry about this exact scenario last week, I’m spent, in that respect. Thank god I wasn’t driving, just running along behind a taxi yelling choo chooo.

Did I mention that I miss Erica? Not relevant but still something going on. Also that’s my outro.

* I still don’t really know what the other humans do in their lives. I feel like I’m writing a movie. You all wash and stuff, right?

** No, if you don’t know what gi nebtak is, I can’t explain it.

Dear Reader,

You might be new here, you might read this vapid bathroom wall of a blog all the time. You might be Erica (hello there, sexy).

What you should all know is three things:

1. I’m a geek.
2. I’m interested in human behaviour.
3. I like numbered lists.

So I track y’all. You are my guinea pigs, and thank you for being so. I look at visit times, scroll rates, sharing to others, a bunch of stuff. This is nothing you haven’t been subjected to before, but I have more time to care. And so a special shout out:

You are a reader in Brazil. I don’t know your name. You read every few days. You scroll down at a thorough reading pace. You scroll down, and up, and down. You re-read, you process. You share.

That’s sweet.

But your friends don’t care. They don’t keep coming back like you do. They flick through faster than someone can read. They bounce off the bottom of the page; like suckers, the fuckers.

I don’t know your gender, your address, what you look like, or anything creepy (oh except maybe your address and gender). But I think about you. I know I write some pretty suicide-y things, and I know you check more frequently afterwards and see no new posts; you must worry. I apologise for that. I’m back here today for you. You should know that. Nothing creepy though.

We are connected. I might come and visit.

As I sit (yes I realise* I’ve already said that in the title to this piece and it’s probably like an inch above and four to the left of this text) I wonder what I can write to Erica.

She is gone now.

Kaput, vamoosh, the past tense of ‘arrivederci’ and so on.

It was an amicable parting. I do not think she is awful. And I’m pretty sure she does not think I am awful.

awwwwwwww

I’m going to chuck it all on the table and say that I miss the crap out of her.

[Pause for effect…]

Imagine you are the only one not colour blind. On the whole planet. That you see for real that all traffic lights are actually green, red, and a pictograph of free-willy fucking a penguin. And the penguin is bleeding pretty badly, but the photographer isn’t doing anything, she’s like, oh this f2.0 is giving me so much bokeh I’ve got a lady boner.

Everyone else just sees red and red and green. Obviously the Nazis see red and green and green. cunts.

But Erica sees the orca/penguin fiasco too. She sees the silliness. She sees that no one else sees it. She sees that I see it, and that I’m excited. I see that she sees it and if you’re still reading then fucking good for you.

She makes the insanity of everyone else more bearable. More than that, she makes me feel like maybe I’m the sane one.

I miss her for that.

I miss her in the conventional sense that I liked being with her, and now I am not.

I miss her because she’s fucking hot, and it’s cool to fuck a hot chick.

I miss her because she is Erica, and she’s the one for me.

God I love her.

*And yes I realize Webster was possibly the most short sighted cunt on the planet. “Oh, a Z would look better than an S here, let us change the fucking dictionary.”

We’re all different.

You, me, every fucker. We all have different emotions and … fuck, why am I doing an intro.

I had a new emotion today. I will call it sorrow-joy*.

I felt a little weird, I left the pub. I bought food, I walked home, I started to cry in the lift, not too bad.

I laughed as I put the key in the lock. I’m laughing as I tap at my keyboard. It’s still with me, this … fuck …

Fuck I’m happy, fuck I’m sad. I’ve been both, but never both. I dropped to the floor once I was inside. I’m lucent enough that my back hurts. Lucid enough that it’s weird. Lucid enough that I’m scared.

I’m pretty scared, to be honest. This isn’t right.

My mouth is open, my eyebrows are up. I’ve never felt further from what I feel I should be. And I’m a nut-case at the best of times.

A tear is on my cheek but I want more. I’m trying to cry. To cry properly. But it’s turning into laughs.

This isn’t right.

* My picnic of love with portmanteaus was shat upon by the pterodactyl ‘Brangelina’. There will be no witty conjoining of words.

I’m starting a social club at my place of work. Introverts only.

Meetings will be held at a fabulously exciting location every month and you are expected to make excuses to not come. You are free to not come with a +1 as long as you don’t discuss it with me before hand. Although you are not required to not show up, it is highly recommended that you don’t.

If for some reason you have a genuine excuse to show up, I will be disappointed but understanding. However if you say to anyone the next day “where were you last night?” you will be expelled from the group.

Each month I will present an introvert of the month award; the winner will be notified by email. No one will be cc’d and I don’t want you to discuss it with me in any way. There will not be a meat tray or gift basket that you need to carry home on the train with everyone looking at you.

At the end of the year I will hold an awards ceremony where everyone that won introvert-of-the-month will be invited to not come up on stage and give a speech about the year that was. This once-a-year event is a great opportunity for you to not get to know your colleagues better and it is mandatory that you do not attend.

If you are eligible to join The Introvert’s Social Club you will not be notified at all. I look forward to not speaking to each and every one of you more than I have to.

I have discovered the key to happiness. And from what I understand, it’s very similar to the key to raising children.

Distraction.

Always have something at hand to distract the unruly child. Maybe a toy, or a snack, or the back of your hand.

Life is pointless. If you think about it, you already know this. Any task that is only about doing the task itself is pointless. That kid from the Karate Kid thought washing the car and painting the fence was pointless, but it turned out that there was a point to his actions. Unless, at the end of this life, we discover that we’ve been preparing for something else, then you gotta admit, it’s all kinda pointless.

Once it really dawned on me that there is no real reason to do this thing we call life, I was surprised that so many people seemed to not feel this way. Happy cunts. And this made me feel sad, sure, but also disconnected. I thought about joining the ranks of the tens of thousands of people who check out each year of their own accord.

Then I started thinking about why it is that all these perfectly intelligent people (the happy cunts) managed to ignore the fact that everything they do, everything they get angry and frustrated at, is all entirely optional, and makes no difference if you do your 80 years or finish up whenever you feel like it.

But I think I understand what I guess everyone else already knew:

Forget about it.

Focus on something else. Shake some keys in front of your face if you need to, watch TV, or just cheer the fuck up. So that’s what I’m working on now. Yes, everything is pointless. Everything I do now I have done before and will do again. And nothing I do now will exist when I’m gone. There is no reason to do any of it.

But … just forget that and do it anyway.

I finished off a deodorant roll/stick thing this morning. I was halfway through the application process. So now my left armpit is slathered in Lynx Chocolate Action Extreme and my right armpit awash with Rexona for Men Original 48hr Rugged Protection.

It doesn’t feel right. I’m worried that something will happen, that they will seep in through my skin and meet in the middle of my chest right near whatever the fuck is in the middle of my chest and cause some chemical reaction that travels to my brain and I’ll start thinking of weird shit about giraffes. My eyes will start shifting from side to side as the two forces battle it out, I will go to a bank to cash a cheque because that is something I need to do today and they will think I’m casing the joint and I will be arrested. In jail everyone will think I’m looking at them sideways and I won’t make any friends and I will be lonely. I will get lots of reading done I guess.

I’ll do the cheque thing another day. But I need to be careful that I don’t veer to one side while walking, just for today. I’ll focus on a point on the horizon and make sure I walk directly towards that. In fact I think it’s best if I stay inside.

“Ex-teacher resentenced to prison for raping teen”

So another teacher/student relationship is making the rounds of the news. And of course the word rape is being used liberally.

This has to stop.

From the story: “The two had sex for three months in late 2007”. The girl was 14. She wanted to have sex with the teacher, but 14 is too young to be making that call.

It’s a bad thing. Agreed.

The teacher should be punished. Agreed.

But there are heaps of combinations of letters. I think we have the scope to come up with a new word to describe this sort of thing. Because ‘rape’ already has a meaning in the minds of us English-speaking humans. And that is to fuck someone when the other person doesn’t want to be fucked. It’s a powerful word. Rough and bold and reprehensible.

So when you take a word like ‘rape’ and say, oh well actually it can also mean sex where one of the people was under x years old, then suddenly all rapes are potentially a beautiful love story where the two lovers are at opposite ends of high school.

Do we want to dilute rape like that? Do we want to water it down and make it not that bad?

But nothing will change. What sane journalist is going to take RAPE out of their headline because they think maybe the reader will have a different definition of the word to the meaning in the context of their story.

Ladies, oh ladies. You’re not going to like this one.

There is, it would seem, an itty-bitty gap between what the average male earns and what the average female earns. It’s easy enough to believe that this is because chicks are undervalued, and/or that men are jerks and under-paying broads to assert their jerkiness.

But I care to differ. I think what has happened is that the labour market has become efficient (the first sentence is about 80% of the gist of it).

Read it? Good. So the market ‘knows’ the value of a company and reflects that in the share price. Pretty amazing when you think about it. People yelling and screaming, buying and selling, building faster and faster machines to trade shares in milliseconds, but the market doesn’t care. The share price will be what it wants it to be. A share price can’t be wrong, right?

And so the gender salary gap adjusts itself accordingly. But what is the extra information that the market has its grubby little hands on? Why has the market decided that girls should get less money? What could there be that makes a woman worth less?

Nothing. You idiot. That’s the wrong question. Who let you in here, anyway?

The average woman isn’t worth less. She needs less. (Yes, Jim Jeffries got my mind a wanderin’ down this track.)

It’s the men that are paying for dinner, buying the big cars, buying you dresses so you stop wearing that awful $12 thing you got in Thailand that reminds you of ‘when we used to have fun’.

Let’s do some sums. Average salary: $60k? I’ve got no idea. Average wage gap? Let’s call it 18%. So the ladies be takin’ home somewhere around $6k less after tax per year. End result $120 a week less to the fairer sex. $60 per labia.

Hmm, $120 you say… That sounds suspiciously similar to half the cost of dinner and a movie with a few drinks and a cab ride home.

Are you ready, it’s about to get magical…*

Let us all, together, think of the last 10 dates we went on. Not ‘date night’, don’t be lame. I’m talking about with someone that you don’t share toilet paper with. Now make a mental note of how much you spent on those 10 dates compared to the total cost. You see where I’m going with this? You probably don’t.

This is the extra information that the market has. It has notihng to do with gender. Oh happy days! No, the gap in salary is tied to the gap in paying for things. The market adjusts. I’m gonna copy paste: It has notihng to do with gender.**

When I was fresh out of highschool, there were fellas that didn’t like to get their wallet out when it was their turn to go to the bar. Zero-or-more decades later and guess who’s earning more? Nuffin’ to do with gender.

Show me a woman that sees no reason why the man should pay any more and you’ve got the kind of lady that’s earnin’ like the boys.

Find yourself a lady that believes the man is expected to pay and you’ll find a woman whining about glass ceilings while drinking the glass of wine you just bought her.

If you know a man that thinks it’s the role of the woman to pay well, I’m not even sure what that poor misguided twit could do for a living. Is loneliness a job?

So you see, the market knows. We don’t know how it knows, but it does.

* Oh my god, there really is a need for a question comma

** I even left the typo in so you knew I’d copy pasted.

As I walked from my bus to work one frosty morn’, I passed a homeless man reading a book, and thought to myself “oh, I wish I had more time to read”*

That’s right, I lamented my lack of leisure time. I didn’t notice that he was soaked from the rain, had no shoes, or that the book was upside down. I think that makes me an awful person. How does one go about finding out if they’re an awful person.

Also, where are all the homeless women? My efforts to find a homeless Asian was a bust, but I kind of get why. All Asians are good at math, and really, if you do the sums, being homeless is a pretty bad idea. So maybe you just don’t see the homeless women because they’re, like, stay at homeless mums. CEO of their home(less). Yeah, I don’t know.

I saw my favourite homeless guy on the weekend coming out of a 7-Eleven with two litres of milk. Milk, you may have noticed, is one of those substances that cannot be consumed on it’s own. By all means, pour yourself a tall glass of milk. Sit at your weird wooden table that’s kind of in the kitchen but not really, and sip sip sip until the glass is empty. On your own. With, like, no music playing or anything. You’ll be collecting butterflies and taking photos of people watching TV from behind a camellia in their backyard in no time. Fucking weirdo.

This leads me to believe that the homeless man had something for the milk to go with. But what! Cornflakes? That, in turn, needs a bowl (I’ve tried, cornflakes and milk really needs a bowl). This man doesn’t have a bowl. Coffee? How much milk does he have with his coffee? Even if he’s having lattes, that’s still many many litres of coffee. And WHERE IS THE COFFEE MACHINE! Maybe it’s to feed the ducks and he thought they’d had enough bread. But WHERE ARE THE DUCKS! Maybe he showers in it and just grossly misunderstands some things that are obvious to you and I.

Oh my it’s all such a mystery. I just hope that the milk didn’t go to waste. No word of a lie, when I walked out of the 7-Eleven behind him with my 600ml of milk, I felt a little milk envy.

* “Thought to myself”. Who the fuck else would I be thinking to?

I was in the shower; soaping myself up. I’d finished, and was putting the bar of soap back in its container. This made me laugh. The shape of the soap – rectangular with rounded corners – in the soap holder – rectangular with rounded corners. The insanity of everything came into focus. That nothing fits together, that everything fits together. Maybe a sane thought sprung to mind. If it did, I didn’t notice at the time. But oh my, I laughed.

And then I cried. And fuck me did I cry. So deep. I thought, until I was cold and the pain came, about the word deep. So often are there no words to describe how I feel. There’s something nice about that. I can’t be bound by language! I’m a complex human fucking being! But no. Today, ‘deep’ did it for me. Deep was the sorrow that I felt. Deep was the joy, at nothing. That depth of sorrow and joy, it’s uncomfortable; it’s not right. Not at the same time. Not today.

I have no right to be this happy, crying on the floor in my bathroom. The blood tastes nice and I know this is wrong. I shouldn’t like this. But fuck it’s good. I love it. My skin is tingling at the thought of it.

I bit harder to see if I could. Something cracked. It’s nice, the pain. I lift it up and let my head drop to the tiles. The world stutters, like it isn’t sure. It’s nice.

I don’t know, I can’t articulate … the lack of connection to it all. Is that what I mean? The thought that I’m so different to the rest of you that I can’t possibly matter. This thought seemed magical.

I know, these words don’t work. But it was magical.

I can taste metal. Like a watch. I can taste time, I remember thinking. Then I don’t remember for a while.

I’m shivering, it’s broad daylight, the pain isn’t good any more.

I stand up and it’s the worst moment of my life. I won’t even try to make it words.

The soap in the dish. So without meaning. The fact that the soap is a rectangle with rounded corners, the soap dish is a rectangle with rounded corners, and the fact that I exist.

That you exist.

It all seems like there’s some connection. That there’s some reason. But there isn’t. It’s all just a mistake, we’re all a mistake. A star exploded and we met; any meaning is imagined.

The soap dish doesn’t need the soap, and this world doesn’t need me.

You don’t need me.

Not to worry, it won’t be tonight. But it probably will be at some point. Think about it. We’re all going to live 100 years or so. There’s only so many crossword puzzles.

Tonight, I kinda wish that was me: 103 and legitimately sick of it all. But I ain’t, so I’m sitting at my computer when I would rather be stewing in bed or flying off the balcony, because I want to capture the moments before a suicide. Before I go on, some destruction of suspense, a little planning and a smidge of foreshadowing:

• If you’re reading this, I hit publish. Nothing you read ends in a surprise suicide. I’m a human.
• Tonight is not the night. I see bed, I see soberness. I see the girl of my dreams next week. Heaps to live for. If you’re thinking I’ve got hope in similar quantities to what Walt Whitman had chocolate then you’re  on the ball.
• I promise you that I will endeavour to sit down at this very keyboard on my final evening*. I will tell you why, I will tell you why not. I will not be filled with conviction, I’m quite sure of that. My struggle will be a little well-formed poo in a flaming paper bag that I leave for someone else to clean up.

Tonight is not the night for me. Goodnight everyone, and Erica, if you’re reading this, everything is OK.

I’m OK.

*Seriously, who commits suicide in the morning. I’m not an animal.