Soon as I get back from Devizes, we'll blow some smoke back into this anthill, yagitme??!

A greeting to our new, and indeed only, reader. May your tilling of the turf prove useful.

I've humped my ways and why and wherefores, folks, over to a place where a couple more people might actually read the pointless scrap I scribble out on low days.

The good people at Londonist.com have welcomed me into their pool of writerly types. The swell fellow, and all. So you can find more of my chopped and changed semi-sentences right there, where I'm posting under the creatively lubricated pseudonym of "DeanN".

Of course, I'll still kill time at this copperplated sinkhole when the mood sees fit.

The Zooseman's been neglectful of them, there's no denying it. Events have threatened to overwhelm his grobbled cranium, that much we do know. He's moving house yet again, these things have a tendency to overwhelm his petty system. More soon, soon.

Ah, life, that endless displacement, the curly welt balled up in a fist, the canker and chances that piss by while you're spending your life haggling over a bus ticket trying to wrap your jaw around a new acronym every few weeks. Wasn't it always thus?

We must take the thin weeds that grow up through the cracks, though, and cultivate them into a Babylonian garden fit for a Sultan. To take but two examples: I recently noted that an upmarket ladies lingerie shop has opened its doors across the street from my house. Things are moving up, literally.

thanks to my main man Squiggly Pete (a pseudonym) for reminding me of the absence of updates on this hear crab-pad. Seems Squiggs (as nobody calls him) was up late one night, drunk on bourbon and bad karma, and found himself fondly racking through the laundry list of unpaid parking tickets that is this blog, reminiscing about good times had with whores in Tucson motels and other blue times too lewd to mention, hoo boy. So here I am, back again to holler down into the mousehole once more with flared nostrils and throat dry as bone marrow.

I've scuttled to India for a few weeks, a sweaty country if ever I found one. When the locals are complaining about the incessant heat, you know you've got problems. Constantly bathed in a salty patina of my own secretion, the cities and villages and roadsides have flickered by in a swampy, seethy mass, as my sun-blistered eyes gaze through their cowering slits at a strange tapestry of organised chaos. They're saying one sixth of the world's population lives in India. Jump on a bus, or a passenger train, or wander the markets and streets, or hitch onto the back of a rickshaw and just ride. It's easily believed. The place is packed solid, so much that when things work, you're amazed that they do. But they do, regularly, intermittently, off-hand. There is a flow and function.

Had to postpone my project to document the glazing over of Crotch End's smugness with the grizzled veneer of estate agent carbuncles, mainly owing to a club foot that has landed me grazing up in a retirement home grimier than Attica for the past month. Seems like my snooping around the corridors of power has shut down all the options available to me. Firstly, I got news that I'm being made redundant from my job. No biggie, and the payout means I have a few months to sort out my stamp collection and stare at my reflection in cracked bathroom mirrors before the financial wheel of this proto-capitalist spins round again into the lockstep of necessary employment.

Secondly, I found out today that my application for an Iranian tourist visa has been ixnayed. No grounds given, am I a security threat? Do they imagine me to be a covert agent of some description? Have I accidentally strayed onto a 'persona non grata' list holed up in some clandestine Tehran ministry? If I am the kind of lousy agitator to warrant such a bracketing, then I'd damned like to be aware of it. I'm sure I could use it to my advantage.

With these two blows to the kidneys, I feel chastened. The dust and lint in my hovel-like room has risen to epic proportions but I have not the inclination to remove it.

So I did finish that novel. It is called Habitation. It scrapes in at over the 50,000 word mark, and was completed in the space of one month. I should feel proud of that achievement, perhaps, but the rank funky awful stench that the combination of pages and ink, ink and pages - in the particular confluence that is the words arranged on the page in the order necessary for the novel to have shape and form - is more than any mortal sinuses should have to bear.

I'll write more soon, more indeed, about the disturbing upturn in estate agents in Crouch End. By my reckoning there are just three non-property related premises on the Broadway and its tributary roads. This is not good, but is an inevitable byproduct of the obsession with Propp of all shapes and sizes that grips the middle classes and squeezes the precious pennies from their joint accounts.

Yes, more soon.

My National Novel Writing Month entry has consumed large chunks of my time over the past three and a half weeks. I'd love to say that it was all worthwhile; sadly that would be a magnificent lie, as the resulting output is about as intellectually stimulating as a spread of cat vomit that resembles a picture of Bernard Manning. If you so wish to torture yourself, an extract can be viewed online here.

... in which he's chewed through the characters and tropes and stylistic ticks of his entire back catalogue and defecated the digested remains into a slim book that resembles a dog trying unsuccessfully to bite off it's own tail.

I've long been a fan of Auster. Sure, his work can be repetitive, and willfully meaningless, and humorless, and (appropriately) austere. And there's something in the argument that, Joseph Heller-like, his best work will always be his first, the intricately layered triptych of New York Trilogy. But for me he's one of the most important American novelists of the past twenty years. Works such as the aforementioned NYT, The Music Of Chance, and The Book Of Illusions represent some of the best examples of experimental fiction to have achieved mainstream notoriety. His style of hauling Camus into agreeable Americana, of offering dense philosophy in eminently readable prose and page-turning plots, is rarely bettered.

But Auster's latest is a mess. And what a mess. I'm only halfway through Tales of the Scriptorium, a slight and sorry-looking tome in it's bleak dust jacket, but it's making me reconsider whether he was any good in the first place.

By reintroducing characters and leitmotifs from his previous novels, and offering them up as vague dream-like apparitions to the all too familiar character of the confused old man sitting in a windowless room with no idea why he got there, Auster is asking many of his usual questions - about the relationship between truth and fiction, between a writer and his characters, between fate and random occurrence - the only difference this time is that all these worthy themes have been denuded of interest. Auster himself seems bored; the prose is tacky and laden with heavy adjectives, and his trick of making pages fly by seemingly untethered is conspicuous by its absence.

Like I said, I'm only halfway through, but I don't think things are likely to improve. My only hope is that this is some kind of line in the sand for Auster; that he's drawing a close on all these characters and themes, and his next project will have a freshness reflective of the mental clearing-house that Scriptorium represents. It almost feels like a book tossed-off to fulfill a contract, with no real interest or input from the author, much like a band releasing a half-hearted album simply to get rid of the label. Hopefully Auster is something of a Lou Reed, and Scriptorium is his own personal Metal Machine Music.

God Bless Jann Wenner. While Rolling Stone may not be the required reading for the hip masses that it was in the 1970s, when it strutted proudly through the detritus of that debauched era, publishing the heavily sedated Mojo wirescraps of Hunter Thompson inbetween chiaruscuro Annie Liebowitz prints and dissections of the latest prog-rock, it can still pack a heavyweight ham when it feels the urge. And by Lord it has the urge between it's teeth in the latest edition.

The headline says it all: "TIME TO GO - Inside the worst Congress ever"

Nothing more to be said, other than that this long, blistering piece skewers the facilitators who walk the House and who in the end are the ones responsible for facilitating the slash and burn and rape that the Bush administration has taken to America these past six years, turning back the clock on civil liberties and fatally poisoning the country's standing across the globe. Read this intro, find the rest on the website.

There is very little that sums up the record of the U.S. Congress in the Bush years better than a half-mad boy-addict put in charge of a federal commission on child exploitation. After all, if a hairy-necked, raincoat-clad freak like Rep. Mark Foley can get himself named co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, one can only wonder: What the hell else is going on in the corridors of Capitol Hill these days?

These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula -- a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.

To be sure, Congress has always been a kind of muddy ideological cemetery, a place where good ideas go to die in a maelstrom of bureaucratic hedging and rank favor-trading. Its whole history is one long love letter to sleaze, idiocy and pigheaded, glacial conservatism. That Congress exists mainly to misspend our money and snore its way through even the direst political crises is something we Americans understand instinctively. "There is no native criminal class except Congress," Mark Twain said -- a joke that still provokes a laugh of recognition a hundred years later.

But the 109th Congress is no mild departure from the norm, no slight deviation in an already-underwhelming history. No, this is nothing less than a historic shift in how our democracy is run. The Republicans who control this Congress are revolutionaries, and they have brought their revolutionary vision for the House and Senate quite unpleasantly to fruition. In the past six years they have castrated the political minority, abdicated their oversight responsibilities mandated by the Constitution, enacted a conscious policy of massive borrowing and unrestrained spending, and installed a host of semipermanent mechanisms for transferring legislative power to commercial interests. They aimed far lower than any other Congress has ever aimed, and they nailed their target.

Rolling Stone

erkum, another month ticked off and little on the platter worth scribing into infinity. Work shrugs indifferently at my morning scowl-face. The heavens occasionally part but the persistent warmth of a 21st-century mid-October leads to the sense of a perpetual twilight of human existence. Added to the rumblings out of North Korea and one could be forgiven for thinking that we have been ushered quite rapidly into a period of endgame.

Please excuse me, my torpor will no doubt lift eventually.

TO THE LADY ON THE EASTBOUND PICADILLY LINE, 18:30 (approx.), 18TH SEPTEMBER 2006:

Lady,

News for ya, bub: I didn't offer you my seat because I thought you were old. as you suggested in that cock-headed arrogant tone of yours. Hell no. You're no springing lamb yourself, not by a good few decades, but there's no way you'd normally be getting the gracious offer of my seat on account of your elevated years. Nope.

Lady, I though you were pregnant. Seems that you were just fat. My mistake, an honest one, and one made out of glance at your ample belly as you waddled onto the carriage and a snap decision to be a decent human being outta this sort of thing, when most other commuters are blackening their noses on the freesheets or thumping the hell out of their eardrums with some kind of techno beat piped in from their personal jokeboxes (sic).

That's it, bubba, I thought you were pregnant. Sue me. Slap me. You didn't. I think I'da preferred a snap rather than your tart retort and your haughty turnaway.

The profile of your figure that you offered me for the remainder of the journey, well, that sure looked pregnant. Sure you're not in denial, cheeks?

What's tanking?

Been some moolah's since I kicked over a turps bucket or three and washed up the greasy remains of the night before. These old steamers don't roll in the bay so often, not these days, most of the dockworkers have been laid off in the meanwhile and truth be known not many people round these parts don't remember the last time a green bottle bashed up against the hull of a newly-minted vessel. Those that do would rather keep quiet about it, hush their lips rather than risk the sinking of ships, wasn't that the wartime lament?

Vines have grown thick in the midst of all this. Since the chief of police hung a nice "Suckers!" sign round the local borough by declaring it a "crime free area where people leave their doors unlocked" (not just doors plus windows in our house! - and if that's too hard for ya then you can just find the keys underneath the welcome mat!) things have quickened tighter than a horseshoe round a giblet. A prang of menace on the pavements. People are dropping their eyelids and refusing to collect their mail until well after sundown. Times are shifty.

Topsfield Parade looks like a nice spot to drop dead. Two ambulances parked outside in the last week, both treting heart-attackers munching in the small cafes that line the street. Today we had some variety in the form of a hit-and-run. I came upon the aftermath, when the police had arrived and parked their silver-coloured motor across one of the lanes and questioned everybody in the vicinity. I imagine the offending vehicle was one of those thirteen-wheeled Sherman-inspired baby tanks that crush all they roll over.

I ordered a creme caramel from the trolley as it trundled past the aisle. The woman behind the trolley was a wide-berthed matron whose backside brushed against the armrests and shoulders as she stalked through the carriage. Her lipstick was a bright shade of majenta, similar in colour to the receding gums that she showed off with the smile that accompanied my dessert.

Bugabears, it be a long time since I rapped at ya with my flows and tresses, drummed up the police like crack spot addresses..

It's been a rum month or two of sideways glances and paranoia at road-crossings. I spent a few weeks living the wrong side of the Thames Barrier in Woolwich, a minute away from the river and near to the yeasty stink of the Tate and Lyle factory with its green faded warehouses and sugar-slurry pipes ready to pump only the wholesomest sweetness into the gaping yawns of container ships. It was a good time all round, as I became a friend in need to the slow wind of the river which ferried me (via its unique vassal, the firm of Thames Clippers) to work and back on good days. Other times, it was down to a circuitous tube-tube-bus-walk backflip on a twice-daily basis.

Times change though, and barely more than a year after first departing I find myself nestling in the sweaty elbow of Crouch End once again. Seems to me that upon my first exile from N8 I blamed the mothers with their sixteen-wheeler child-carts for driving me away. Well in my absence they've spawned violently like the duckween in Limehouse Cut. Pavements are no longer safe for those whose mobility is strictly limited to two legs (occasionally supplemented by one or more arms). These behemoths, piloted by the most implacable lumps of humourless motherhood, obey solely the rules of the stock-car race, buffeting and barraging their way down the winding lanes and curved corners of Park Road and Topsfield Parade and demonstrating scant awareness of anything other than their own existence.

Time will tell if the inaugural Buggy Burn-out! bonfire I have planned for the end of August will endear me to the locals or not.

So it's true, read it and weep, better hide your pipe in your pants again: I ain't been around these here parts much, nosir. I had fish to fry, avocados to slice, pomegranates to mush, a whole banquet to prepare.

I've been moving around a few times, just chopping and slipping and sliding, and have wound up for the next two weeks at an apartment in Woolwich. It's right by a river. In fact, it's by THE river - the Thames, that maligned skank of dirty headwaters and uncertain banks that will one sunny day get bored with our scrabbling around on its floodwaters and yank us into the mulch. Doubly likely, in fact, where I'm sitting now, as the complex is about a half mile the wrong side of the Thames Barrier.

Broken skull pieces, a Wurlitzer piano, the prescription for a rarebit ideology, some pretty bona-fide looking amusement park tickets, an arrangment for Eine Kleine Nachtmusik for the glockenspiel, and a magic thumbler.

Sunday night, didn't go out as I was too tired and wanted to sleep early, but I jumped into bed with a birchful of insomnia and now it's creeping into the early hours of Monday and the kkkats keep running up against my wall and the prick upstairs is replaying the same chugging song again and again and suddenly the room seems too big, like there's too much air in it, I feel like I'm sleeping under the stars but they're hidden away.