I landed on my arse in the mud the other morning for the second time in a week (it feels strange to type arse. I always say arse but want to type ass). We say we get a lot of rain in this country but we are lying, we don’t really. Nevertheless it’s been raining forever. And the shortcut to the bus-stop has turned into a slippery, slidey thirty degree incline. I assume that’s how it looks because I haven’t seen it in daylight in weeks. I leave in the dark and come home in the dark, so the only gauge I have is the amount of times per week I end up covered in muck. Going the long way round would add five hundred metres to my trip, on a timetable that’s already running on a knife-edge. So I’m running inside to change my jeans and then running the three minutes to the bus and mentally noting all the things I’m pissed off about this morning: the rain, the never-ending dark, the fact that there’s nothing I can do to even see this path in the light until the weekend. That everything would be alright if I could just get a fucking look at it properly. What strange creatures we are, that we can be angry at certainties like January rain and the Earth’s tilted axis.

So I got my hands on that Amy Hempel collection I was talking about and whee — it’s like the most beautiful, pared-down, to-the-point fiction ever. I am beginning to appreciate minimalist writing. I’m thinking about how short most of her stories are, and how if you were to follow this road as far as you goes you would reach a point where you would just be publishing single sentences, or a couple of words that would encompass everything you wanted to say. And if you went even further, down the little overgrown trail that the road petered out into, you would get to where all you’d need to do is write one word and hipsters’ hearts would just collapse into tiny little supernovae. Pretty much the exact opposite of what I’m doing here! And I’m examining the Spartan quality of her work, short stories only, and picturing it being released today, where stories like these might be published in a couple of small blog posts in a raging storm of aimless content, and that someone exhibiting this kind of genius might never even be noticed. I find this idea just about the saddest thing ever, on a very personal level.

The most ridiculous thing happened to me before. You won’t believe it. I tripped coming up the stairs, and I think maybe I had one hand in my pocket, and one hand on the banister, and my face all kind of like mashed into the step? I think that’s the way it went. I have this thing, running down the stairs, I lean hard on the rail and kind of totter down, but there’s this slightly sticky patch around half way down (gummy varnish?) and I always lose my momentum and nearly fall. So I’m always thinking: “Watch yourself on the stairs,” and then this happens to me coming back up! I think I may have broken my nose but the worst part was making up a little story about a frying-pan to tell my co-workers in case they asked which they didn’t but I still had to make up the story in my head like I’m a victim of domestic violence. I think the problem is I grew up in a bungalow: no stairs. I blame my parents. We always come back to blaming the parents. It’s comforting. They don’t mind. They laugh.

I have been having recurring dreams about this girl I know. Nothing overtly sexual, mostly we just walk around cities and look at buildings and have coffee. Sometimes she puts her arm through mine. One dream we got lost down by the docks, but she wasn’t angry. Last night she kissed me for the first time. Without preamble leaned up and kissed me while we were locked outside a party. Her tongue was small and sharp and dexterous. Afterwards she pretended it hadn’t happened. I woke up happy; it feels like the relationship is finally moving forwards.

I got soaked going for lunch again. After promising snow all morning, it started lashing just before I was going to go down and find this book in the bookshop (Amy Hempel collected stories?) so I cancelled my plans and decided to go get a sandwich nearby. I waited for half an hour for the rain to die down and then it ramped up again fifty metres after I left the office. I was drowned. I found out, though, that I can sit on the toilet-lid and put my head under our ancient hand-dryer. This seemed like a positive discovery at the time but now I find myself somewhat addicted. It is pretty cold these days, I am doing it even when my hair is not wet. Plus I kind of like the wind-swept look it gives me. Not that we don’t have wind.. boy we have wind. From the north, it slices visible holes down the length of your clothes. I have ruined three jumpers this week.

They didn’t have my blueberry muffin this morning. I had to get lemon. Perhaps they did have blueberry, and I just didn’t look hard enough. I hate the lemon. It is sickly sweet and artificial tasting. Who wants lemon in their muffin? Why did I buy it? I have a lot of trouble with lemons, now that I think of it. They keep putting them in glasses of water. Yes, that’s exactly what I meant when I asked for water: lemon-flavoured water. I just forgot to say the lemon-flavoured part. Thanks for saving me from myself. Lemons are for putting on fried fish. I can’t think of another use for them offhand. Also, there is a pretty gross lemon flavoured soap floating around my house. You can tell it’s cheap because the colour has worn off the outside, leaving it off-white. It smells like Lilt, which is supposed to be pineapple and grapefruit. My hands smell like a fizzy drink. I caught myself singing the Lilt theme song in the shower the other morning. From an ad I haven’t seen in fifteen years. Thanks a lot, lemons.