This Is What It Means To Be Me: wake up at 1pm. Check mail. Open envelope full of free money. Go to pub. Laugh. Because I am a Writer.

§ July 21, 2009 Alive in LA. I has a balcony. I may give a sermon. After I sleep for 24 hours. ...Why does the minibar have a glowstick in it? Do I appear AS THE SORT OF MAN WHOD DRINK GLOWSTICK CHEMICALS?

And certainly we're in a time where anger in art has largely gone away. This isn't the cool detachment of post-modernism, so much as just a turning inward. The kind of stuttery lurching rise of emo over the last couple of years is a case in point: a total defanging of pretty much any working definition of punk in service of whining about how you've got no fucking girlfriend. "Emotional punk" = Crying Ugly Kid Music. There should be a sign in guitar shops: "We reserve the right to refuse sale to people who want to write songs about wearing glasses and being dumped by girls who didn't know your name anyway." It's understandable, and certainly it doesn't hurt for Manson to bolster the "outsider" self-perception of his audience. But it bugs me nonetheless. Is it a creative reaction, to answer "nothing's happened" with "nothing's going to happen and you can't do shit about it"? Is that doing anything more than prepping an alienated audience for a doomed life of dyeing your hair back to brown and getting a job in insurance? Is that where we've ended up? That all popular culture has to say is, "well, fuck it"? Even as a transient pose? The lesson of the 1930s is that, in a time of encroaching conservatism and creeping repression, the correct response is not to flush your fucking spine down the toilet.

We invite fiction to leak into our lives. This is part of what Grant Morrison is talking about when he gives his gloriously wild-eyed interviews about creating a fictional world that will emerge into selfawareness. Memetic theory has been an obsession of his for twenty years-the notion that ideas can communicate and replicate like viruses. Lately, what he's talking about is the equivalent of biological weaponeering-specifically designing a cluster of virulent ideas with, at the very least, implicate consciousness. In a way, we've had one of those before. Jack The Ripper. Everything we know about Jack The Ripper outside of the forensic documentation of those five murders is fiction. Even the name is a fabrication. The Jack The Ripper letters, in the most optimistic reading, constitute the actual killer creating a fictional framework for himself. And Jack operated in a landscape already primed for his presence by dramatisation. Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde presented a monster whose identity was unknown to the public, turning the streets of 1880s London into a killing zone. A monster, it transpires in the story, from the educated classes-as Jack, with his apparently trained eye for vivisection, almost certainly was. For all we know of Jack The Ripper, he could have been Mr. Hyde, released from fiction into Whitechapel. And now we fictionalise that, telling stories of repressed Jekyll letting wild Hyde out on to whore's street corners in the dead of night, exploding Victorian morals in a storm of fucking and killing, leaving Jekyll with Puritan guilt and a hangover in the morning.

October 3, 2008 I am watching with some astonishment an ep of Law & Order in which the dead victim was sodomised with a violin bow. a violin bow. I mean, all the shit that was talked about the "horrible,weird" stuff in my novel: and there on us network tv violin-bow sodomy. Yeah, I'm the bad guy, but Mariska bloody Hargitay just got another Emmy for tearily muttering "sodomised...with a violin bow." fucksticks. 15 years of "Warren, why put disgusting stuff in these nice comics?" On TV: "sodomized with a violin bow. now look at some doritos ads."

For as long as I can remember, the primary goal of my work has been to force outbreaks of the future.

April 28, 2008 The last half of this month has felt completely out of sync. Like the planet jumped tracks. Everything's a bit 1986. Gather, children, and I will tell you of 1986. It rained all the time, no-one could smile without bleeding, and Boy George was on The A-Team. 1986 was one of those years where we were waiting for the spaceship to land... Things were so bad we were actually having to talk about Paul Simon's "Graceland" like it mattered. now, 1987, that was an interesting year... (descends lnto senescent unconsciousness) Where's my fucking coffee Buried under messages reading: "i was a discoloured zygote floating in the pool of beer and sperm that was my mothers womb in 1987."

An acquaintance of mine had a Lemmy story. He was living in an apartment building in New York, and heard a terrible banging outside his door. Going out into the corridor, he found Lemmy, throwing himself into the walls, gripping a huge wooden spoon in one hand. Lemmy, he said, why are you outside my door with a wooden spoon? You know how some people have a little silver coke spoon? Lemmy said. And then he held his wooden ladle up like it was Excalibur and yelled, This is MINE!

I sit down every day to tell myself a story. Usually full of either stimulants or depressants, playing some kind of soundtrack to the experience of writing, aware of my environment, sitting in my own little writer's movie and telling myself a story. Anyone who tells you they write to an audience is either an idiot or a fake. You write for yourself. If the story doesn't affect you in some way, it won't affect anybody else. I don't write for the trunk. I'm well aware that someone else is going to read this. But if I don't respond in some honest, gut way to whatever I'm writing, you'll never get to see it. I know writers who play Stone Soup with everything. They'll generate half an idea on the back of a fag packet, ring up half a dozen other writers, tell it to them and ask what they think, and at the end of a phone marathon they'll have their story, with all the ingredients chucked in by their friends. For me, writing happens on my own. It's exactly the same as a ritual, or sitting down at a campfire, or initiating a vision state in silent darkness. It has to come from me and the spaces in my brain.

Did you ever hear My Bloody Valentine, around the time of "Feed Me With Your Kiss"? An ear-wrecking field of noise where they didn't play the note, so much as all the notes that get you to the note? It's kind of like that, without the note at the end. Just a field of dissonance. A song turned inside out and wearing its guts as its skin. A pretty picture, no? So, at this point, I'm playing wak-a-rat, running around with a hammer hitting all the bits that stick out and go off the progression to a note.

I wouldn't think there's much doubt that things are getting strange again. And not the good kind of strange. A woman married a dolphin yesterday. Seriously. A US senator has declared that no woman can get an abortion in his own state unless she's a committed Christian virgin who's been beaten to within an inch of her life and anally raped. He said it on television. Quantum physicists are teleporting light. The truth behind that old "where's my bloody jetpack" view of the future is that the future is clearly not going to be that simple. In the last few months, I've started to get the feeling that maybe old miseryguts J. G. Ballard isn't right all the time, and the near future, at least, is going to be anything but banal. Unless, of course, you're already so dead inside that anything short of Jesus Robots descending en masse from the centre of the sun dispensing immortality juice and flying cars makes you yawn.

Italy is about as intellectually debased as a European country can get. It supports five daily national newspapers devoted entirely to football. Its prime minister own TV stations. You whining Yanks complain about Fox News, but imagine a situation where George Bush owned CBS. That's where the Italians are. I think pretty much every English-speaking Italian I've met told me that at least one impetus to learning the language was so that they could listen to BBC news, the first unbiased news source they ever experienced. The current Italian election campaign is high comedy-if you happen not to live there-with Berlusconi pulling stunts that'd make Richard Nixon wriggle in his grave with envy. And yet Umberto Eco, professor of semiotics and world-renowned author, has a regular newspaper column.

"Cultural leper" is actually a good metaphor for "comics writer" shunned by normal people, but leaving little bits of myself everywhere.

What if something no-one ever thought of happens to make human life no longer viable on this planet? Do we just shrug and say fuckit? I believe that exploration is necessary to the human spirit. But even if you don't share that particular delusion, I think most people would agree that any kind of extinction is bad. Except maybe for dogs.

Seven Songs Written in June of 2008 "List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they're listening to."

These things circulate like a dose of the intellectual clap. "I fucked this disease into your brainmeat. Confess your shame in public and then fuck it into seven other people." You find yourself looking at your friends and fellow-travellers, wondering which of them you hate enough to infect.

Everything Is Happening Written in June of 2008 The things the internet have done to music continue to fascinate me. In times past, people recorded for radio-that is, they recorded in a way that would sound good on medium-wave broadcasting, because BBC Radio 1, the nation's way of discovering music, broadcast on 275 and 285 on the medium wave. FM was, for a long time, reserved for the Chart Show on Sundays, where Radio 1 took Radio 2 s FM slot for two hours. (Or was it an hour and a half?) This is one reason why there wasn't any bass in British pop music for years and years. It didn't broadcast all that well. Pop music was incredibly toppy for a long time; you only got real bass in clubs and at gigs. Today, it's the middle stretch that goes missing. Mp3 preserves the top and the bottom, but the centre loses nuance in the compression. And now I'm hearing people record for mp3. People are starting to complain about it-click around and you'll find "audiophiles" wishing for FLAC and Ogg that preserves more of the music. It's just another cycle. Sooner or later, we'll have another moment as in '87/'88 when people discovered bass again, and everything else sounded kind of insipid in comparison.

[...] i don't think Bo Diddley met a second chord in his life, he made status quo look like Segovia for that. It's all about that beat. "I play the guitar as if I were playing drums," Diddley said.

The Final Solution Written in June of 2008 Did you know that only two species can be removed from the biosphere with no knock-on effects whatsoever? Wasps and dogs. Seriously. I have no reason to lie about this.* Delete either of those two from life on earth, and there's no effect on the foodchain, planetary ecology, nothing. They are surplus to requirements. The wasp exists to just bug people, and the dog is the planet's way of reminding us that pure, genetic Evil exists in the universe. Which makes me wonder why no-one thought of this before: A street-sweeping truck has sucked a dog up through its bristles on a New York street, leaving its horrified owner holding nothing but the lead." How did this act of stark, shining genius have to happen by accident? This is the ultimate Eureka moment for the human race. Send sweeper trucks through the streets every six hours to denude our roads of dogs. No more of their plotting on street corners, their shitting under human feet, their watching, their constant awful watching for signs of weakness. Oh, yes, a human's best friend. Until you show a sign of weakness. And then they eat you. Cats eat dead bodies because they get hungry, and, let's face it, they made it clear they couldn't give a shit about you from the start. Dogs lure you with that masquerade of unconditional affection. But they've been thinking about eating you the whole time. My friend Zo lost her dog Moo some weeks ago. What do you think happened to that little dog, now no-one's keeping their eye on it? That's right. That dog is now living on the fucking moon, collaborating with Nazis. Prove me wrong. Yeah, you can laugh. But I can hear you. It's that shaky, uncertain kind of laugh. Deep down, you know I'm right. You fear the Dog, but I Hate it, and that's why I can say these things out loud. The Dog is the natural enemy of the Human. We should all have street-sweeping trucks. Packs of us should be trundling up and down the streets every day, sucking the yappy bastards up for the good of our children and our children's children. Find that street sweeper guy and give him a medal. He has shown us the way of the future.

Salt. I use Maldon sea salt. You'll have access to sea salt of some kind where you are. Use it. There's a difference between that and plain old table salt. Don't get silly and let people talk you into smoked salt. You should shank those people.

Open a bottle of beer. Not fucking Budweiser or Labatts-a proper beer, damnit.

I'm in Glasgow with Scots comics writer Grant Morrison, who's just scored some brown acid off Bryan Talbot and is explaining to me how time works in comics. He explains to me his discovery that any comic is in fact its own continuum, an infinitely malleable miniature universe from Big Bang to heat death, and that in reading it you can make time go backwards, skip entire seons, strobe time itself, re-run geologic-scale periods in loops... reading a comic is in fact controlling time from a godlike perspective. He was, of course, very full of hallucinogens at the time. This is why people were warned about the brown acid at Woodstock.

The line I always quote in talks like these, the one I want you to take away with you, is something the comics writer Harvey Pekar said: "Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures." And the nice thing about comics, the blessing of the paper craft, is that there's really no-one to stop you.