My life makes absolutely no freakin' sense right now. What I said this morning notwithstanding, at some point recently - I am not sure of any exact date, though I suspect it was 4-6 weeks ago - I simply stepped aside and let this be the case. Whatever pain, anxiety, depression I was feeling in such great quantities must have blown what gaskets currently reside in my cranium, because a strange, detached peace has descended upon me of late. Most of the time, I just regard these various goings-on as being not unlike some great circus act, complete with sideshow attractons barking at me about things that go bump in the night and red-clad divas stripping down to nothing in the middle of the street just, you know, to do it. Honestly, there's a giggly astonishment about the far-fetchedness of the proceedings, like watching a bus hit a car which hits another car which flips over and hits two more cars and then falls off a bridge landing on a car, causing two other cars to hit that car and then cartwheel into a ravine where they land neatly upon a car... and then thirty clowns jump out unscathed and start trying to sell you dental insurance. You know, like that.

So, essentially what I'm saying is: don't ask me, man. I don't even work here.

Meanwhile, I'm reading From Hell, and I literally can't put it down. I've been avoiding Alan Moore for years, mostly because I'm afraid of him, but I had managed to accumulate a rather hefty stack of "indispensable" Moore items that begged attention, so I started with Killing Joke and then moved through Watchmen and Miracleman, and now I'm here. Best thing I've ever read, or near enough anyway. Reaching deep inside myself and twisting things around, and working on my mind and emotions in harsh, unexpected ways... the extraordinary placement of sexuality and the human body on the stage of the storyline... the rich, too-well-thought-out structures of history and myth being drawn into the Gull character.... the strange, post-hypnotic trance state that the story seems to go into immediately following each murder, each of which seem to come upon the reader not unlike a sexual rush before fliipping to the other side of the thana-coin to show all the dread that man is capable of. Blood in every frame of a black-and-white comic book. There's something really vampiric about it, actually, and I'm drawing that together with a bunch of things I've picked up in the Fighting the Forces essays... and I'm thinking about Jung a lot, and therefore The White Hotel, and suddenly "only connect" is as much a mantra as it was back in grade 11, back in good old 3A6. It's quite good, really. The mind is going to new places, even while the external world is turning somersaults. It makes me see the humour in the tragedy, the misery in the comedy, and the throbbing undercurrent of balance that lives in every single thing we do.

"I shall tell you where we are.

"...In order to escape, we must go further in."