I thought you should know something. I've had a blog since 2002, and I haven't written in it everytime. And when you see all those gaps in there you must be thinking, well, then, gosh yeah life probably isn't interesting every day, there probably isn't something to blog about everyday.

But there, a bit like the overused story about there being only 1 pair of footsteps on the beach when there's 2 pairs almost every other time, is the realization that all the stories and the writing dry up precisely when I am at my most emotional, or when things seem to be going by at such a speed in life. When I'm busy, doing something, or when I'm emotional, or even when I'm in bloody Vietnam, when things are happening, you don't see anything on this blog.

I know now why people like deserts. I loved the Mojave and the Sonoran when I spent those weeks at Flagstaff, Arizona. In the desert you can hear everything, with all the clarity in the world, loin de bruit. You see when you are clouded, yourself, with all the thoughts and the worries of the world, how can you be a mirror to life? How can you listen without your own voice butting in? And how do you understand emotional landscapes so different from your own, when you talk to yourself with the same voice that you've known all these years?

How do you stop asking, "Who am I?", until it echoes ceaselessly across the canyons? Can you speak of the secrets that have been entrusted to you? And how do you say, laughter is how I speak to you, and humour brings us together, but maybe I speak to myself only in flowers and puff?

I suddenly have a theory that my father was always trying to shield me from philosophy. When he steals my C.S Lewis books on philosophy, when I steal his CDs containing tracks like "Cut By Wire", mm, Mary Black, there's so much to wonder if we have so much in common, that we're really people who dig this shit, and that we shut the world from outside us. And then we pass, and we argue about how best to take photos, what I should be doing, but maybe besides all that there's maybe a shred of truth that sons think like their fathers, but maybe sometimes they end up doing different things.

I hope really to be distracted, to talk about something greater other than myself, and yes sometimes really I do have a passion for issues, that feeling that I'm right, but the thing I've always hated about issues is that you carry a burden for people, one that sometimes they'd rather not have you touch, because this world is a proud one, no?