The first feeble trickle of writing in awhile, a post-afternoon-nap, hasty half-hour verbal etch-a-sketch of an apology for Pale Fire; garbled, maddeningly scatterbrained and tangential, temperamental subjunctive clauses and runaway parentheses freestyling across the page, my Art Nouveau writing pad ("pension house for Australians"). Fishing for mermaids in salmon-rich waters. Drilling for drivel. Will-o'-the-wisp exegeses. A pathos special to gauche knight-errants, vagrants askew and attuned to a faraway, quavering music. N's scattered benediction conferred on disenfranchised, dispossessed, self-dislocated mongrels. Assiduous beguilement, illogical impulsion. K fortifying self with fabulation. Brittle valour. Tattered mythology. Cosmic magic of coincidence. Scintillae of erudite association buried under prosaic topsoil. This is the closest I've got to writing while in an altered state, and what a blooming tendrilled mess it is. But I think I've hit a rare note, chanced upon a warped locution. For that period I had an enhanced affinity for purple patches and startling liaisons; momentarily sharpened instincts at the fruit-machine game.