Rangy Manatee

I am saturated by my media. It's my own fault. Christ knows how people actually can be bothered to read the newspaper and watch the news and Eastenders and spend as much time as I have been on this ridiculous machine. Look at it! It's like some dystopian nightmare, it's even got a handle on the top of the tower (for ease of lifting). And it's the Millenium edition which I'm reliably informed is crapola.

But I've been spending so fucking long on here. I download music, just for its own sake. I bought some cds yesterday - all of them bargains, all of them randomly picked up from the promos section of the shop and all of them really good. But I probably won't listen to them much. I'm too busy downloading The Arcade Fire because Pitchfork like them.

I seem to be surrounding myself in media. I bought the Alan Partridge DVD. It's very funny. It makes me laugh. I enjoy watching it. But I tell people that I don't watch telly. That it's (and I quote) "utter gob-tosh". That I have better things to do. Like what? Like read, you idiot. You know, read? Yeah? Get that? Yeah read. Or I dunno, watch Alan Partridge, you know, quality entertainment.

But when it comes down to it, would it make a blind bit of difference whether I watched fucking Changing Rooms or The Office? Ok, I'd enjoy The Office ten times over the pompous taste-mongers, but either way, I'd be sat on my gooey ass, munching Quality Street (it's just been Christmas, alright...), drinking tea and wanting nothing more from my day than to watch another energy sapping episode.

What is it I'm saying? That all entertainment is death? That no matter what we choose to do it is utterly futile, defeating and sick making? That despite our finest efforts at taste; discerning quality and subtlety, that essentially we might as well go fill a hole with sand and watch a dog urinate into it?

No. That clearly isn't what I'm talking about, you sicko. I think the general gist of what I was originally saying was that I spend so long checking email, reading website news, checking blogs, struggling with technical problems on this Orwellian nightmare of a machine and writing this drab excuse for literature that I sometimes wonder whether I have a life.

And I think for now it is probably fairly safe to say that I don't.

I just pray this doesn't last.

I've got to get out of this rut. I enjoy it far too much. I need to go somewhere where people still point at buses (and PCs for that matter) and really 'find myself'. Yeah, that would do it. I could just read books - something that seems worthier than reading a computer screen, and is a lot easier to just put down, because you can't check your email in a novel (yet), and you don't tend to wonder whether someone has replied to your last post about that yachting accident you had a couple of years ago but only just remembered about so had to write down for your blogging community of three to digest.

Again - yet. For who knows the future of the book. I suspect that upon opening a novel people will be given the option to read all; view literary outtakes, extras and typographical bloopers; or fly a kite. We're not there yet, but mark these words. You better print this in fact, just so you can actually mark my words with a fat pen.