364 days to go... Salmon in my belly. My attempts at intellectuality embarrass me, I read and re-read yesterdays entry and corrected the spellings and felt I had OCD. Even though there are very few (if any) people who will ever see these entries my mind was restless last night with bad grammar. I realised that I haven't exactly explained what happens after this year. Let me try to explain... After 10 years of working in jobs which paid for holidays to destinations I didn't want to go to, clothing I no longer wear (or own), booze filled nights which usually ended up forgotten (except for the constant reminder of one evening where in my drink-fuelled paranoia I lost my temper with a stranger and punched the sign on a taxi rank and lost the knuckle on my right hand above my little finger), I have decided to present myself with a self-inflicted wage cut. I am going to spend the rest of this year paying off my credit cards. When it's year is over I will no longer feel the need to work in a job that chose me. I want to study and be amongst people with conversation and real opinions, I want to reject the possibilities currently presented to me and hand them to someone who wants my life so much that when they attain it they will have reached their peak. I don't deserve it. I don't deserve a lot of the things I have. I have spent the last 10 years worth of wages and also the next few ahead of me. When I am truly free of debt I will have nothing to show for it. I am positive though, believe it or not I would have it no other way. I will take you for a walk by the side of one of my many tributaries sometime... it will explain how I got here today in this small village on the outskirts of a large city married to a girl from Canada in a resurrected frame of mind.

One More Year... 28/08/05

Sitting in these surroundings looking at a screen which will display my thoughts as they arrive in my head. Diaries and emotions and public displays are odd in this town if you are a 28 year old man. I am cautious even now as I type in the privacy of my own home. My wife will read these thoughts and make up her own mind about where my mind currently resides. Another attempt at reaching inside to find something I think. I don't know if this ever reaches others nor care. I enjoy giving these thoughts some kind of organisation rather than leaving them to wrestle in my head. I sometimes wake up and wonder if it's the same day. My daily routine entirely forced upon me by my younger self. I can only dig my way out of the trench of debt I have climbed into with a spoon. Weight gain...Five years ago my mind was obsessed with nuclear holocaust and now I am more concerned with ensuring that my white uniform hides the embryonic but all too visible paunch I have "suddenly" accquired. It's an everyday story of an everyday life. Hull has been my home for 28 years and I have seen it drag itself up from the gutter to the cheap tailors then eventually into the interview room waiting with all the other "evolving cities." Never has a city wanted so much to be like another city. Leeds is a school bully who seems to change those around him into miniture versions of itself; expensive city centre living, tiny clubs and tiny guest lists, stoical old working class men vowing "never to set foot in a coffee house where ordinary coffee is not on the menu." In the same breath I love people and I hate them. My wife and I have escaped the wrath of urinating, drunken men and women. We lived near to Hull's current favourite pub run. When I stepped out of the house it was as if I had stepped back into my childhood. Naked children running around the dirty front yards playing on discarded sofas, old people sat in their front gardens watching as mothers carried overloaded bags of discounted German imported food home. It is all incredibly sad to me. I love how on the one hand we can celebrate as a whole community when we get millions of pounds worth of investment into our tired old town but on the other hand we ignore the uneducated children who will go on to live lives in dark mornings and dark evenings and dark factories. Weekends filled with Stella Artois and sweating, nicotine sex; the kind of sex that allows no tenderness only the ambitious need to reach climax no matter what. I see these people everyday and judge. I think about myself and how close I came to being one of them. This last final year is going to be one of documentation, the final year of living this comfortable life and one that brings about a change or two.