Why do I feel like this? There appears to be no good reason. I feel like killing myself, there is no reason to be hanging around. For years I have used the spinning plates analogy to describe my life. Either I have too many plates up and spinning. I feel as if they are getting out of control. I say to myself that I cannot cope with so much to balance and so much to remember. So I find myself in the post Christmas/New Year shadow. I have no plates to spin. They are lying about me collecting dust a few broken here and there. I have no desire to pick them up dust them of and start spinning them again. Just as the universe expands and who knows may one day contract, the ennui of my life appears to have stretched out to a meaningless nothing.

In my diary it says that tomorrow is Rodney’s birthday. I am going to buy him a kilo of fucking prawns. I cannot think of what else I might do for him. I suppose I shall try and rouse myself out of my moribund mood for the day. In my diary it says Suzy and Rodney are off to Melbourne on the weekend, to watch the tennis. I will be home with the boys. Whilst they are away it is my friend Johns birthday and shortly thereafter my mother arrives for a visit. I intend to have a bottle of wine and perhaps cook a meal for John. My mother will be here for three weeks. Suzy and Rodney return the day before her birthday. I am uninspired about how to celebrate my mothers birthday. She will be 69 years old, I was born in 1969. I’m not sure if any of that means anything. I wonder if she would also like a bag of prawns? The week after she arrives Agrippa starts high school. He is supposed to be catching a bus across town everyday. Shortly after Suzy starts work I will then have a week with my mother before I too start work. Then I return to my studies for my final 8 months of pain.

These are the plates that lie about me waiting to be picked up and balanced on the end of broomsticks and spun and balanced and maintained. Right now they are lying about me and I am lying amongst them with my cheek in the mud. I don’t want to move.