The hole in the ground that, this time last year, had only just been dug has been filled quite suddenly with a twelve story building. Like a delicate flower, it must need loads of direct sunlight to keep growing (thirteen stories? fourteen stories?), for it seems to have stolen all of mine.
Now I make do by turning on all of my lamps and overhead lights in the middle of the day and pretending that I am in Barrow, Alaska, waiting out the long dark winter, rather than in a ground floor Hollywood studio, muttering in the artificial light, spending endless hours on the phone trying to get my car repaired or replaced by the insurance company of the man who totaled it, growing my beard out longer than perhaps I should, feeding the stray cats in the alley behind the building, thinking that these are the conditions under which manifestos are scrawled on stained butcher paper.
