Drawing flow charts for reveries and how they come about, and then moving on to brainstorm flow charts for others peculiarities of my personality. It’s Friday night. I realised this after thinking of texting my brother. He will be out somewhere. This led me to reflect on the differences between our lives and to question the extent of my own lapses of empathy for others - do I recognise this social life he has? This led me into a reverie.

At a dinner party at his place. I am cooking. Just like cooking at work, I do this often in these reveries, sometimes finding fish at a farmer’s market or fish mongers he never would have thought to go to. Sometimes doing a chinese. Usually, I argue there with a boorish conservative yuppie type. This time with a woman I eventually resort to calling a ‘captious bitch’ who asks me incredulously about my lifestyle. How I don’t go out, don’t like social groups. I round on her, saying that I don’t have a handle on the social dynamics around the table (this after the deployment of a favourite tangent, that the woman - though sometimes this is a man - involved is an invidious interloper, a girlfriend of someone there for forms sake) but that neither do I care, and that if she wants to eat my food she can damn well give me some respect and not pick my brains andpass judgement on my life. In some iterations too I make reference to my being from the midlands, telling her that such manners might be acceptable in London but they are not were I come from.

This kernel has been doing the rounds for at least five years. I think I can trace it back to when I was working in a hardware store in Scab City stacking boxes at a time I had similar reveries about a friend of a friend (and a girlfriend) whose brother had written and published a novel. [Indeed, the reveries I can remember about that writer confirm and elucidate the aetiology of my reveries, since one series, in which I take apart the friend of a friend’s assertion that said novel failed because the publisher did not sufficiently support it and that he will see to it that they do so, demonstrates my intolerance of illogical statements (the publisher in my opinion had taken him on in the belief he may be developed over a number of novels, the first of which was taken as an unmarketable apprentice work; any subsequent novel would be a success not so much if and when the publisher backed it up with marketing, but if the novel was of a sufficiently superior standard that the publisher felt it would attract an audience), whilst another series of reveries, in which I dwelt with disdain on the epigraph from Andrew Marvell  in the book I had looked over, with this cannonical poet linking this Oxford arriviste manque to an ex at Oxford and the circle around her, to Ms Double-barrel Blunderbus, a particularly invidious witch of a reactionary lecturer I had been unfortunate enough to be lumbered with at university, the straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of my move in my first term from English and philosophy to Politics, a plimsols and leggings-wearing Daily Telegraph-badged octogenarian who had once studied under Helen Gardner, the woman whose New Oxford Book of Verse contained a poem by Marvell praising him on his return from the Ireland campaign in which he had slaughtered a goodly portion of that country’s populace which gave a pretense for this antipathy in which I contrasted my background with those of his, who spoke (and wrote) not at all intelligibly, didn’t scruple to condescend to the rabble they were putting before her in the newly democratised university, and was privy to countless of my solecisms.

I have tied myself in knots writing the above as a single sentence and doubt it makes much sense, but I can’t embroider any more into it and I really need to sleep.

Provigil tomorrow. There again, thinking of that, there is another series of reveries concernign it. Talking to various people in certain situations about what I have been doing at the weekend, namely, taking ‘benzedrine’ and writing 200,000 words. Saying this to the beautiful cook I have never found it easy with - she being one of the numerous people at work an initial mutual suspicion formed with which then becomes hard to shift - while she speaks to a gay guy I work with who has formed a close friendship with the girls in the kitchen, a situation that had happened once and made me feel uncomfortable because I would find it impossible to join in.

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