There is nothing better than travelling around Europe to see my favourite opera singers [19th Sept 2006]

There is nothing better than travelling around Europe to see my favourite opera singers. While there enjoying the brothels and strip clubs and pubs as well. Travel seems the only point to life. To travel is to be held in suspension. As soon as you come to rest, everything stops and falls. You are just left waiting until you can travel again.  Between travels I will just drink and drink to make the time go faster.

I will go home today so I can get drunk while listening to music. That is all I do every day on my days off, get drunk. Just waiting for the time I can travel again. Thursday should be thundery, and Friday showers. The paper says we are heading for a period of high winds, torrential rain and abnormally high temperatures! Phnom Penh weather. It remains to be seen whether I can resist the lure of the illicit thrill during these atmospheric conditions. I do not want to go back to the Bell and Sunset Strip and Sunset Cinema and Demi and Pamela until I am also ready to travel. Even when I get September out of the way, there is still all of October, all of November, and all of December to get through! Can I really resist travelling in December? Maybe I will just pop to Brussels?  

I live for gambling, I live for saving my money in periods of abstinence just so I can blow it again on wicked women in London and Brussels and Vienna and Munich and Berlin. This boom and bust is what I live for. "What Rodin depicted in the Burghers was the birth of a specifically modern form of despair: an acceptance that there is no external source of redemption and the knowledge that one's life might not be capable of generating its own capacity for redemption. What solace is available in the face of this dilemma? One possibility is work, the unswerving devotion to a craft that so impressed Rilke. The other is the sexual promise offered by women. In his later years Rodin achieved a blissful combination of these possibilities, devoting hours and hours to making thousands of drawings of naked women, often in states of sexual rapture. 'People say I think too much about women,' he explained. 'Yet after all, what is there more important to think about?' In Milton--as in the Bible--the Fall comes after Adam has tasted Eve in all her tainted sensuality. This inverts the reality of the situation: that the lure of sex is one of the things that makes the fallen state not simply bearable but desirable. Wittingly or not, Milton provides a glimpse of a paradise that is endlessly regainable: 'Carnal desire inflaming, he on Eve/Began to cast lascivious eyes, she him/As wantonly repaid...' Rodin trained himself to draw without taking his eyes off the women who were happy to surrender themselves to him as he abandoned himself to his gaze, (William Rothenstein, to whom Rodin made the remark about the importance of women, recalls him 'caressing his models with his eyes, and sometimes too with his hands'.)" 

I abandon myself to my gaze. I have a deep attachment to Brussels, Munich, Vienna and Berlin. I used to spend all my spare money in the Bell and Sunset Strip and Soho. Now I save it all for travelling in December and January. I can moan about all the money I have wasted on sex and strippers over the past few years, but isn't that the point of life?!!!! There is nothing I would rather do with my money. I just need to control it in London so I can also enjoy the womanly delights of Berlin and Brussels and Vienna and Munich.