At bad times I yearn to be a monk (27th June 1997)

At bad times I yearn to be a monk, to be allowed to live for ever in total silence and contemplation. Then I think I can do that here. All that getting me to talk, it's just stupid. Being with other people just makes me so unhappy. I need my privacy and my silence. That is who I am. It hurt me because Sarah always ignored that. If you can't be alone, you need to carry that peace around with you.

Walking down the road in my coat in the drizzling rain, it felt so much like September; I thought how much I love going to Sunset Strip after Chandos in the dark afternoons. That little cauldron of colour and girls. With no emotion involved, the way it should be. Pouring with rain as I came back.

I'm looking for self-realisation, and I will only find that in my writing. I want to explore that now, now you've helped me find the secret door in.

Sex dancers who create their own fictional world in the orange light amidst the blackness, and drag you into it. God, I can't wait for September. The thought of red Gillian Anderson dancing in black lace dress. Why can't May lead into September? I want Ruby, Sneaker Pimps, Placebo, Swiss gold, Chandos, Sunset Strip, models in Brewer Street warm boudoirs before football in the black Wednesday evenings.

This vampiric period has coincided with Batman & Batgirl! Purple & black.

Am I Blue? 1920s New York jazz club atmosphere, smoky, ferns, illegal drink. The orgasmic sexy intoxication of Tristan und Isolde is no greater than when a stripper's eyes meet those of a certain man's and they just steadily look at each other for a few prolonged moments. 

We've had 11 days of continuous rain and gloom (26th June 1997)

We've had 11 days of continuous rain and gloom. It's been lovely. September weather. Phnom Penh monsoon weather. We've just got a month of hot July to get through, then we're up to August 6th, when everything should get better. 

I can hardly wait for September gloom, rain, darkness, going to pictures, Chandos with my Evening Standard, then walking through the black volcanic cauldron to Dean Street and Sunset Strip. Then coming out to go to Chelsea or the Coliseum. It's a good life. I just need enough to live on. Work for short spells to give me this. 

"But when Wilde put aside the tragic role which he played with such zest, and gave rein to his intelligence, he realised that he had not altered in the least, and that if anything prison had intensified his individuality:" "'At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.'" "'To regret one's own experience is to arrest one's own development.'" "'I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does.'" "'I am far more of an individualist than ever I was. Nothing seems to me of the smallest value except what one gets out of oneself. My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation.'" "'My ruin came not from too great individualism of life, but from too little. The one disgraceful, unpardonable, and to all time contemptible action of my life, was to allow myself to appeal to society for help and protection.'"