2026 in reading so far
Heights: Wuthered ✅
Paradise: Lost ✅
Lady Chatterley: Loved ✅
Rainbow: Gravitational ✅
Tristram: Shandied ✅
Absalom: Absalomed ✅
Dracula: doesn't fit with the rest of the bit ✅
I painted this self portrait from a photograph the New York Post and Daily Mail ran over and over again alongside horrible stories about me. They averaged about 3 stories a day between them for years. The image came from their complete theft of my digital life. In the photograph I am in the worst stretch of my addiction. Exhausted. Contemplating how I could end everything.
They published it over and over because they believed it showed something disturbing, something degenerate, something people would recognize as evidence of whatever they were accusing me of that particular day.
I set out to paint it because I wanted to take back what they were trying to steal from me. It wasn’t just the image they had stolen. They had stolen thousands of images. They wanted to steal my humanity. Their portrait was of a monster. My portrait is of a man being reassembled piece by piece, bit by bit, pixel by pixel through the hard work of recovery.
A portrait of someone worth saving. Someone worth forgiveness. For all of me. Past. Present. Future. Gratitude for all of it.
The images they meant as weapons are no longer weapons to me. The man in them is no longer theirs to describe. He is mine, and I love him.
We do recover.
I recently found out that Americans don't use the phrase 'busman's holiday'. This shouldn't come as a surprise given they don't have much in the way of public transport or holiday allowance.
Sorry Instagram but I'm never going to a concert by candlelight. Youse enjoy your diluted Fleetwood Mac in the Anglican. This isn't lip service; I never even watched Game of Thones in the first place. I am unbreakable.
will never forget the late night uber driver telling me they died so fast they don’t get to go to heaven; they just became nothing. really wish i knew more of his theories.
Today is both Bloomsday and my stalker's birthday. One is a turgid, overly verbose exercise in vanity banned from several countries; the other is Ulysses.