A Buddy Of Mine Was

I Do Transcendental Meditation, Which Is, I Suppose, Derived From Vedic Or Ayurvedic Principles, Which Is Sort Of Hindu Principles.

I Really Love To Be With People. It's Nice, That. To Have Achieved Sudden Intimacy With Strangers Is Perhaps The Most Human Thing You Can Do. We All Love Our Friends And Families, As Much As We Hate Them. When You Can Achieve Intimacy With Strangers, It's Very Exciting And Heartening.

Of All The Consumer Products, Chewing Gum Is Perhaps The Most Ridiculous: It Literally Has No Nourishment – You Just Chew It To Give Yourself Something To Do With Your Stupid Idiot Western Mouth. Half The World Is Starving, And The Other’s Going, ‘i Don’t Actually Need Any Nutrition, But It Would Be Good To Masticate, Just To Keep My Mind Off Things.

From Quite Early On, I Had This Idea Of Compartmentalized Identities - 'this Is How You Are When You Are With Your Mum, And This Is How You Are When You Are With Your Dad' - So It Seemed Like I Could Never Absolutely Be Myself. And The Image Of Myself As Compromised And Inconsistent Made Me Want To Withdraw From The World Even Further. I Had A Sense Of Formulating A Paper-mache Version Of Myself To Send Out In The World, While I Sat Controlling It Remotely From Some Smug Suburban Barracks.

No One Shuts Their Laptop After Looking At Pornography And Says, 'what A Productive Time I Just Spent Connecting With The World!'