The air this morning was crisp and cold as a virgin daiquiri and there were two crows standing on the peak of John’s house. They were puffing white smoke from their bird-nostrils and looking down on the street, watching a little gaggle of vicious fear-biting cowards trail lamely toward the temple of their blood cult. Crunching the snow in the empty Sunday quiet. Their paper-thin souls shining pure in the blue light reflecting off the icicles that dangled dangerously over them from the power lines.

I have given up praying for them to be rushed forward to the end of the light on the point of one of these. There doesn’t seem to be anyone listening.

I’m reading Craig Murray’s book. I’m not reading it. I’m letting it lay where I tossed it in a corner. He’s an insipid pot bellied fool, a pussy-crazed middle-aged bureaucrat desperate to justify his cock-led professional self-immolation with some crapulous human rights heroics. Just another angry Brit bitching about his hotel room at the end of the day.

I’m painting the kitchen. Maybe that accounts for my mood. You have to be relentlessly positive when you paint, otherwise what’s the point? It’s all about progress and improvement, straight lines and smooth edges. After an hour or an hour and a half it gets too much and I start to fantasize about mayhem and murder, picture jangled twisted lines, splattered with random patterns of multicolored blood.

We went to Next Door Neil’s house a while back. Wine and cheese by the fireplace. Talked about his childhood on the prairies. Big sky and late evenings harvesting. “I only had cowboy boots till I was ten,” he said. “Never shoes.” That completely unnerved me. My suburban compass twitches to the harvest moon. I had pictured him with taped up glasses and books in a satchel, reading on the fire escape at night and hanging about on the street corner waiting to be beat up for his lunch money.

It’s all upside down and in the end I blame Obama. Just when we thought we knew how the movie was going to end, he says it’s all going to change.

NB: if you’re nuts, and you submit a comment, I’ll edit it before I approve it. But I guess you already knew that, didn’t you cheesehead?