The most natural way you would attempt to cope with something inside you that is affecting your moods and your energy levels is to intervene with chemicals to help and because medical science hasn't come up with pharmaceuticals that do particularly well you tend to reach for the chemicals that are outside the Pharma counter, i.e. narcotics and alcohol because they can guarantee your mood more or less.

As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.

As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called stylish that does not function superbly... yes, beauty matters. Boy, does it matter. It is not surface, it is not an extra, it is the thing itself.

I'm a bit of a coward, and lazy, oddly enough.

I met too frankly preposterous, if it weren't for their banal evil, politicians and pastors who told knowing lies about the evils of homosexuality in order to attract bigger flocks to their churches and more votes and power to their corrupt councils. LGBT people seem to be being scapegoated more and more just as at the same time in more enlightened countries more and more freedom to express themselves, marry, be given official intersex status and so on is offered.

If there is a sort of national American emotion I would call it optimism. If there is an English one I would call it embarrassment - not even pessimism - just sheer shame, embarrassment and confusion.

The Greeks understood perfectly that if there were divine beings they are capricious, unkind, malicious mostly, temperamental, envious and mostly deeply unpleasant because that you can say well yes, all right, if there is going to be god or gods then you have to admit that they're very at the very least capricious. They're certainly not consistent. They're certainly not all loving.