Weeks begin with the Presocratics and end with Sartre, with a concept-heavy tour through the history of Metaphysics in the middle (last week Quine and Kant; this week Heidegger and Universals, next week Necessity), great blocks of teaching, travelling, preparation. I've become something of a generalist; a genericist, teaching anything that anyone wants at any time. Someone jokes I should get a scooter and a pager and teach emergency philosophy, seeing as I'm constantly running around teaching as if on call anyway. Never enough time between travel, classes, five minutes late here, miscalculating the distance between buildings, forgetting to answer emails I tell myself I'll answer in the morning, but there's not enough time before I have to leave for the station again. The Dr tells me the sharp pain in my side might be something to do with my gallbladder; quit the drinking, get a hospital appointment, wait the weeks until I get a scan, try and catch up on some sleep. I dream of horrible rubbery undead things, like Ron Mueck's heads or those sculptures that look like plastic but are actually brass that everyone seemed to be making a few years ago. I wake up to autumn mornings that seem already too mediated, visually colonised by the autumns of New England, not this crappy version of England, where there's never enough room and never enough time, and conversations with friends and colleagues are always too brittle and stark with gaps unfilled in between the last time I asked you about how it was going and how was your relationship with thingy and what you were working on now, and how I always forget, and how I should really read some of your stuff sometime, and I bet we'd have lots in common if only I had a chance to understand your project properly.

I come home and realise that I still haven't really finished that article I promised three weeks ago, and I can't bear the emails that arrive asking where it is, and when am I going to do it? We go to a political meeting in a beautiful old hall that seems so anachronistic alongside the chrome and aggression of the rest of the city, and our pleasant surprise at the number of people there quickly turns to real irritation that these things are so predictably monopolised by the same old bastards who clear the room in their bid to out-do one another in their dungeons and dragons geo-politics in which the gentle orks of the working class go and do battle in far-off lands in exchange for the amulet of exchange-value. We go and eat some fish in one of the few remaining old cafes, and we talk about the New Piccadilly and J says that he saw one of the waiters who used to work there working in an Indian restaurant nearby and how we should go there and say hello, and I wonder if it is the same guy I once gave a bar of chocolate to in a fit of silliness, and I think now perhaps he probably doesn't even like chocolate.

And I think about how I want to get rid of all my things, and how I used to want to live in a nunnery although without the religious bit, just because then I wouldn't have to pay council tax or worry about bills or have very many possessions at all, and I think about how happy I am that I have no money, and no house, and no mortgage, and no car, and no addictions that cost me more than I make and that I don't even mind paying rent or spending all my money on other people, and how I really want to have a static bank balance that is always at zero, and then I think how pathological this is but then I remember that someone said there isn't a normal attitude to money, or to sex, or perhaps to time as well, I don't know, and I think whoever said this was probably on to something. And then I think of my student who is trying to combine eliminative materialism with Heidegger's criticisms of technology, and I wonder how I would do it if I had to and I can't think how it would be possible, but it is interesting nevertheless.

I think about all the many things I have lost in the past six years, and how I could do with losing even more, that I could get rid of all of the things I took pictures of because I don't need them any more, and I remember that time when my bag got taken and all it had were my fifty or so photos I had of myself from my childhood that I had been showing a friend on a boring Sunday afternoon and how it was funny that there was nothing else in the bag, but all these photos that I didn't have the negatives for that would be worth nothing to anyone, and that strange feeling of unhappiness and relief that you get when you finally lose things that you had worried about losing for some time. And I wonder what the guy did with all those photos, and his disgust at finding nothing worth stealing, and where they went, mouldering on a rubbish dump somewhere. And I think, good, fuck them.