Feeling quite worthless today. It's two weeks since I spoke to the bank, since I spoke to the C.A.B. and I have done nothing. I'm not even writing. Well not much. Songs, awfully, bizarrely, and they're some of the worst I've ever written. It's hard to maintain an ironic distance, my default setting, when I'm writing the sort of songs I inevitably have to write. Simple clarity and heartfelt feeling are very difficult to convey when Hallmark have bowdlerised vast tranches of human expression and experience, forcing me to try different things: so trite sentiment rubs up next to gnomish inscrutability and everything bursts its corsets, spilling everywhere, like shopping in the rain.

That sort of thing. Rubbish.

The proper writing, the writing about Kelly ( I've given up the notion of children's books at the moment), is barely happening. I absolutely have to do it. But it has become very hard recently. The first 12,000 words came in a torrent. But it's sputtered out to a trickle of grammatical corrections and deletions. The stories about Kelly's past that I was receiving from her friends has dried up too, promises reneged on, requests ignored.

I can't build her a statue, I can't dedicate a library or hospital ward to her. This is all I can do to commemorate her and I can't do it. But why not if I could do it a month ago? My usual solution, the only solution, is to keep writing but I always end up back on the blog, whining into the ether.

I like company, company is amusing and distracting, but I'm always slightly anxious because I feel I should be working. And when I don't have company the depression is too great for me to do anything useful. And I'm old! I don't have the time to fuck around.

It will come. If I just apply trouser seat to chair for long enough it will come. I will sit this fucking thing out.