"My God, you were hard work," the black girl said, wiping my come from her lips after I had struggled through a numbing alcohol, weed and cocaine haze to orgasm in her mouth.

Brazil. Onde a puta goza, o traficante cheira, e o abogado vira amigo. There is something so strangely gentle about her. "I like you, you're nice," she says. "What, most of the people who come here aren't?" She shakes her head emphatically. She soaps me down in the shower and we talk about where I'm from and why we came to Sao Paulo and why she ended up in a brothel in Santana. "My mother has brain cancer. The treatment is so expensive," she says. "Huh. Life is brutal," I agree, and she gives a small sad smile.

My friend is relaxing downstairs, chatting with the doorman and some of the girls. "Shit, man, you've just been waiting sitting here? Sorry I took so long." "It's nothing, it's nothing!" We walk. I say thank-you to the girl on the way out and he reprimands me for thanking a whore.

I feel indifferent to everything, but my senses are open, soaking in the world, the insane city around us. A change is coming. I can feel it.

Like above the roofs of Katmandu, of Benares, Peshawar and Kabul - the sky out here in the periphery is full of kites. A strange mixture of sadness, longing and joy, a sense of places lost and far away, falls on Lazy as he watches the kids duel in the skies (cruzando pipas, they say here) and run through the streets after the defeated kites fluttering down trailing cut string.

This is where to drink when up in the vila, o chileno's bar. Or really it's more like a trailer wedged between two houses to get R$2.50 beers or glasses of pinga to drink in the street in front and with a covered yard behind where to sit if you like or if it's raining or if there's a game on the tv.

No one knows why he's called chileno, least of all himself. Like he's not chilean for a start. But he's not just a grumpy grizzled half-cracked old guy who's heard too many appeals for credit and waters down the sao francisco either, he's an artist and a songwriter, though you might not think. He is camera shy but my friend managed to get the first known picture of him.

He brought out his big notebook for me and we discussed lyrical writing. He writes lyrics in spanish now, which is eccentric in itself as, as i said, he has nothing to do with chile and he had to ask me how vivo sonhando com ela would be, and he's translating them into english as well, and how would i put tô apaixonado por ela, and like this. He wouldn't bring us beers in return even though we demanded, but i was honoured when he sang us a few of his lines at least. If I ever vanish for days I might be here. Good luck finding it

Happy Bloomsday innit

Turn to face the strange

Hahahahahahahaaa. That Ishmael. "I have come to believe in the total malleability of human nature: anybody can be anybody."

That was when we were young and zealous Nietzscheans and before this lapse into a morbid and impotent fatalism.


It is time, again:

Face the world and walk out into the strange. Find what you fear, and do it.

I am a brain in a bath tub

Life is great

Pour me more bubble bath, please





get your own strange ribbon here

leafing through a book like "the correspondance of henry miller and anaïs nin", it makes me wonder what sort of legacies the writers of my generation will leave behind. "the collected facebook updates of alex nichols"?

it's too cold to write

i have a theory, based in part on observing lazy's narcissism, and in part on seeing on the webstats how many people click through from here onto their own blogs, that most people spend more time admiring their own blogs than they ever have to spare for others'

sometimes lazy hates people. so he stays in bed all weekend with his russian fucking course book, a volume of borges in fucking portuguese, a friend's novel he hasn't finished reading yet, and a bottle of scotch whiskey. 36 hours later his liver hurts alarmingly and he decides to give up drinking. life feels empty...