There is no safe place from self-afflicted injuries, all writers, poets, songwriters, academics put themselves through a regime of self-administered S & M and any moment of innocence is only an illusion. Despite up front self-assuredness, we torture ourselves with our own doubt and worthlessness. And why? We could simply walk away and endure the simple life of thoughtlessness, where a stroll down to the pub for a draft of pleasure would quieten the most restless brain. But contemplation can't silence the thinking, can it? Deleuze said, 'Contemplating is creating...' so there is no rest, no respite, even reading doesn't allow me to step away. And twenty-four hour sobriety makes it even more difficult to manage because there are no forgotten hours and it reminds me that I spend my life not being but becoming, always becoming. I have written 33 books in my life but I am hoping to become a writer one day, I live in a house with 9 guitars, 2 banjos, 2 mandolins and a piano which I can play, but I am hoping to do more with them and on it goes, cookery books on kitchen shelves, poetry books on study shelves, notebooks full of jottings, library books in my bag,Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Six Myths of Our Time: Managing Monsters and on it goes in the becoming quest. Its Penelope's knitting and Odysseus' journey, though I guess both of those exercises came to an end at some point. But then, like them, you start all over again...