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I feel funnily tired, so very weary, and yet lucid at the same time. Too tired to arouse my usual irritation at the over-an-hour long journey from work, but not nearly lucid enough though to recall how exactly did I get off the bus and cross the road to mrs budak's mum's flat. I must say sorry to my fishy friends, including those who have come from afar and who seek crabby counsel, for having to miss out on the week's festivities, for my weariness extends to all spheres – in body, mind and spirit, and even the attractions of ichthyological pursuits fail to supercede the burdens of time and energy that I inflict upon myself. It seems a bitter irony that slow-and-slothful ducks can find employment in deadline-centred positions where the care and time of a quality job can come into conflict with the diktats, admittedly self-imposed, of a print-run. Alas, it may be at last close to the time when such contradictions are either resolved or result in collapse altogether.

I must also say sorry to mrs budak for shouldering less than my fare share of care, and for being unable to stop, or even know, these grimacing gestures, blinded as I am tonight by hazy street lamps and mind-altering substances that forcibly capture my mood and swing my senses to collisions imagined and ends unsought – lover of life that I am. Better writers have written of it, but I feel it then and now, a weight that fixes the flesh and sinks the soul like a castaway chest of painful yet unopened thoughts, prompting me, among other concerns, to write off tomorrow's rendezvous, delicious as it may be. Can hope be found in the realm of clinical mind-delvers, or might all these efforts be part of the problem? Solace finds me not, for a bleak but empty anxiety has settled in my heart. I find the words to say how, but not why.