Another day, another dollar, another chance not to fuck it up.

I got up a little late and failed to cook lunch, but at least I didn't come home to find my house a pile of scorched timber and blackened insulation like I thought I would. Before I left for work, I was smoking a cigarette, and as I sat at the bus stop up the street, I began wondering if I'd put it out properly. Apparently I did, so good for me.

I started reading Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography a day or two ago. I bought it months ago, but have purposefully put off from reading it, given the number of other dense tomes I was working through during 2005. I'm glad I waited, because this book is absolutely fucking fantastic, and a perfect way to start the new year. I haven't been to London in eight years, and every time I talk to anyone who's been there, or read about it (usually in a psychogeographical sense, such as the works of Iain Sinclair, Smoke magazine, or stuff like Alan Moore's From Hell), I want to go back immediately and wander around constantly. London: The Biography makes this urge even stronger. It also saddens me, in a way, to live in a city like Houston, which, while rich in history of its own kind, lacks the mystery of a city as old and crucial as London. On the other hand, maybe it's because good ol' H-Town is a stripling of a town, a greasy, damp tabula rasa, that it will always be my home. Odds are there will never be a paean to Houston on par with Ackroyd's to London, but hey, I live here, so this town's got that much going for it.

Well, enough wishful thinking about Houston, and back to memorializing it and one of its satellite pseudo-towns (Spring) in fiction. Here's to tomorrow going smoothly, quickly, and free of pyrophobia. Y'all take it easy.