I want everyone who reads this to ask me three questions - no more, no less. Ask me anything you want. Really. I’ll answer anything. Then I want you to go to your journal and copy and paste this, allowing your friends (including myself) to ask you anything.

Questioning now closed.

darren asked:

question the first: when i need to escape from my fucked-up existence, i throw pebbles into the stream at the bottom of the village, near sam white’s hill. how do you escape?

I play improv rhymthm ‘n’ blues instrumentals on my keyboard in the corner facing the wall. I can go on for hours. Sometimes it’s guitar. Sometimes even that doesn’t work, though, because my fingers are so tired of life, and they don’t want to dance, and I just watch the clouds, or if there are no clouds, I see how far I can see into the sky, and of course there’s no limit. But really, everything I do is to escape, because I refuse to accept that this, my fucked-up existence, is it.

question the second: my little brother is my life-line. when i’m sad, i think of my brother, and how he wants to be a pirate when he’s ‘all growed up’. it makes me think of better things. what do you think of when you’re depressed?

I slip into a fantasy future where I live - with an unbelievably sweet girl (but not so unbelievable that I don’t think she’s out there somewhere) and a cat called Orson - in a nifty bungalow, with round oak doors and sofas you can get lost in, somewhere just within the countryside. There are lots and lots of little details, but I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.

(This is generally thought of as “sad”, but in less cynical circles it is known as “hope”. I don’t care what it is; it makes me feel good.)

question the third: next summer, will you help me produce “let it grow”?

Do you have shelf space for the 2006 Palme D’Or?

Wait, that sounds really arrogant. It was meant as a compliment. If you didn’t already think I was arrogant, read it as “I can’t wait”.

Wow. I spent a really long time figuring out how to answer those. Questions like those are kind of theraputic - I learn something about me.

Louisa asked:

What inspires you?

Ah, the old classic. I’d like to say, “Life is my muse”, because it sounds kind of profound (which is always a good reason to say something that isn’t true), but honestly, I don’t know. Probably, strangely, things that I dislike rather than things I admire, because I’m this idealist who’s determined to find perfection, and somehow I have a predisposition to believe that that means arguing with everything…

But I suspect most people couldn’t give a straight answer to that. It’s kind of nice to think that these ideas we have can come from anywhere, at any time.

Looking back on that answer, I’m not very satisfied with it, but the question makes my head hurt. Sorry! The mark of an inspiring question, I suppose…

jess asked:

when are we going to see the hdm documentary?

* Sigh *

When I go out and get a job and buy a new camera so I can get everything we’ve recorded onto my computer and edit it all together again (the original got deleted, but it needed help anyway). It’s entirely down to my laziness. The tape is sat here pouting at me.

what makes kinders kinders?

A lot of very dodgy genes.

I tried to answer that question seriously/philosophically, but I’m kind of happy to be able to say that I don’t really know. Whatever it is that makes everybody different from everybody else: lots and lots of surplus that.
(Sometimes referred to as “strange”)

what have you last read?

A review of “The Passion of the Christ” which mentioned the scene “when Jesus invents the dinner table”, which made me laugh. I also read darren’s journal entry imploring people to come read my journal, which was nice of him. It’s been far too long since I read an actual book - Catch 22 has been sat by my bed waiting for weeks, but it looks like such a heavy commitment…

Sara asked:

I would like to know…

1) What are your top three emotions that you’d like to eradicate from your brain never to return? Worst first.

I don’t think there are any emotions that I’d want removed… but for one exception: the only emotion that I see no purpose for is regret. Guilt makes you feel bad for things you feel you shouldn’t have done and stops you doing those things again in the future, but regret seems to make us want to go into the past and change those things, and I don’t understand how we came to have this useless feeling. Perhaps the next step in our evolutionary journey will have, uh, learnt from its previous mistakes.

(”Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.”)

2) Imagine the most perfect sky. What does it look like?

Words are beautiful, but some things are more beautiful.

3) What’s your biggest regret?

I wish I’d looked after my teeth better. I don’t mean to be superficial; it’s just that, given the chance, it’s the only thing I would have done differently knowing what I know now.