Activities, etc.

This morning, Lee and I went back over to Barry’s feeling a little shame-faced. Barry was in the kitchen.

“I don’t care who pays for it as long as it’s paid for.”

We’re planning a reconnaissance of a potential new squat on Sutton Road; it looks as if it could be a worthwhile proposition. Lee, Ian, Philip Monmouth (Lee’s mate from Easterby) and I are planning on moving in soon. We've found out that No. 39 Sutton Road is no longer on the electoral register and according to the canvasser’s reports from the next door neighbor, has been “nigh derelict” for a year. So, the newspaper and the neighbours will get another ‘squat’ and I hopefully will have a room of reasonable potential at long last.

Not since Jervis Terrace days of March have I been anywhere near settled. Perhaps my lack of interest with this diary is a result of this nearly a year’s drifting? I was thinking about how little I actually read, because I can’t remember the last time I read a book from cover-to-cover with the sort of avid enthusiasm that saw me consume over fifteen hundred pages of Colin Wilson last spring. At least then I had some sort of goal, or more correctly, a perspective from which to look at my self and my activities, etc. I felt I had some sort of definition and clarity about what I was doing.

Now there’s nothing except a deadening blank-brained struggle to snatch words from thin air and translate this muddy headedness into some kind of meaning. Sometimes the impossibility of ever gleaning anything of worth from the reams of paper I’ve covered with this diary strikes me so forcibly I could give up on the spot. It’s drudgery to keep going. All the doubts I’ve ever had on this score rise up and destroy any confidence I might have that I’m capable. I keep hearing Ms. Hirst saying “It’s sad that you don’t do any writing for yourself.” At moments like this I doubt I could even write a decent letter. The very effort of beginning is the problem, and dwarfs me.

I can’t imagine the satisfaction to be gained from living a life of wordlessness about yourself, about others, about the world. Because, apart from the memory, what is there to say the day just gone has ever been? Things done and forgotten, lost for always and not even a glimpse of them captured in words.

‘Writer’s Block’? Ha Ha.