These are still the young years of the millennium. It is our age of Youthoria. The future will gaze back on these and think, the Teens, the start of it all – what an age to have lived in, to have grown in, to have helped grow; and envy will rise up in them, and pride will live on in us.

I didn’t gaze out of the window in school wanting to live a different life to normal people. I gazed out of the window knowing I lived a different life to normal people. I simply wondered why that should be; how rareness was so easy for me, and stability so natural for them. And I frowned as I grew to suspect that perhaps normal people were a myth, made up to drown the mass, to make a multitude many-billions-strong comprehensible with a shallow glance, reducing all that chaos of infinitudes down to different avatars of the same soul: the ‘normal human’, along with a handful of the ‘strange ones’. But we are not seven billion different outfits worn by one great ‘normal human’, backed by a tiny set of others, the heroes and freaks! We are seven billion heroes and freaks. A sense of similarities need not trick us so pathetically into believing we are one normal human, only differing in how we dress each day, instead of our truth: seven billion individuals wearing one human theme. Normal people are a more ridiculous creation of fiction than Buffy, Legolas, Laputa… Never worry that you are only a ‘normal person’; you are a person: there is no more profound, vast and individual entity in existence.

Riot and dance and charm and bluff and mock your way through the beautiful cities of Europe, draping yourself in costumes of silk and lace and the gods and the company of beautiful young wastes; submit to the winds of fickle fate with a smile knowing it to be true sibling of your own eternally bright novelty-craving temperament; taste every pleasure within your reach and pull even more into your grasp; touch the hearts of a hundred friends and lovers and fill their minds with marvelous stories of your escapades; and then when the strength to live such a life has finally left you - then, then write. But collapse yourself into the pressed blank pages no sooner than necessary. A youth spent full of writing can never be quite so packed with - well, the days of which the great tales are made.

I wander through the Outer Hebrides of the soul. But don’t you see that for some the Outer Hebrides are the native centre, and Piccadilly Circus the strange superlative distant? Who do I cohabit with there then? - Ghosts and vague future forms.

We wander about on the rocks our own hands build and tear down in turn, in absurd turn, beneath grey sea-mist ever rolling in, drawing out, rolling in again. The land beneath our feet is green, the air loaded with salt, the clouds cowards receded far above, the horizon unstable, our own figures likewise, and we do not speak language so much as gasp it.

None of us can take each other’s hands - even those of us living. To the ghosts I am a future hypothetical; to the future hypotheticals I am a ghost: we cannot even share realities. We just try to believe in each other. We do that because we must. Otherwise we would be truly lonely. And then the terrifying ground on which this violent island was formed would be understood.

We are geniuses. We aren’t in it for understanding: all we do is create the new. Above that we survive.

I scream back in the face of the storm winds. Salt water whips into my face and I arch my body over the grey wave-smashed rocks and I laugh.

This is why madmen howl: it is this or collapse. And I would eternally prefer to cackle from the cliff-tops than throw myself off them.

I don’t know what a genius is but I look for them through the thick hanging mist. I see shapes moving, shifting, skulking, like the future has always skulked, and the past has always shifted. I am the one moving. I would call out, but I would be embarrassed. Let them speak first. But we all feel the same. We all fear. If we did shout and got no reply - we would know ourselves truly alone. So we continue in silence, tentative, terrified, believing we believe the vague figures our peers. I am not alone, we whisper. Then we stand alone on a desolate shore and watch a horizon too turbulence-wracked to reveal if it is midday, midnight or sunset.

We try to believe the cries of the crows in the distance are lutes. We try to believe there are crows in the distance. But nothing innocent lives here. We are the world beyond the world. We are too human to live amongst the humans. People need oxygen to live, we are told - so we fill the room with oxygen - then discover that intensity proves destructive. We didn’t know. We are used to this deadly level. You need to remind us of things the real species-members understand on instinct; you need to say ‘in moderation’, 'to a degree’, 'not literally’; or we will fill your spaces with pure oxygen, thinking this is what you asked for. Be patient with us, or we will inadvertently devastate. We are geniuses; we are not smart.

I cut off my hands at the wrists to try to fit in here. It was a difficult procedure; it required contortions. Now the stumps aren’t short enough. I will take the feet next. I am whittling myself down until my whole form is dispersed enough that I belong; until my body matches my reality, as a shade amongst shades. I don’t know how the others have done it. I suspect I might have to cease to exist to achieve that final sensible state. Of course I shouldn’t envy ghosts. But they are so much freer than I. Seaweed gets entangled in my hair and I can’t lie down on the breeze.

Careless Thoughts Cost Minds is finally, finally (so it seems) available to buy and download this very minute right here - unless you’re coming from America, in which case it would seem there it is still Friday. Weird. But hey, in five hours time it’s your turn! Your patience is greatly appreciated. I would spin this world along faster to your midnight if I could.

I’ve no urge to late-night bombard you with salesperson speak - if you’re intrigued as you ought to be, provided the weekend’s not already made you dull & sleepy, there’s all you want/need to know on the book page or here - even download a sample from Amazon, as I hear you can do now, to try before you buy if you’re not yet trusting enough; but really, read, and you’ll see.

Ultimately that’s the best advice anyone can give with honest book promotion; at the end of the day, it’s the words themselves that are worth it or not. I have enough faith in mine that I’m able to simply say: read, and see.

So start your weekend right. With something new. An exciting, earnest kind of new. And for £1.53 - there’s nothing else you’ll be buying so potentially entertaining/enlivening/euphoria-revealing for that price today, this week, this month. That £1.53 is loose change which, thrown this way, will return you infinitely more than mere money’s worth.

Well, would you look at that: I guess I did somewhat chat on.

But I don’t see how you’re going to be able to sleep without it.

To hell with this: let’s find some gin, a lime,
And tonic cheap to mix; drink glasses fast
And quit the house, roam through these streets; assault
The eyes of passers-by with smiles far-gone
From soberness; sway wild in crowds, collapse
On walls, enjoy our youth; somehow schlep home
And fall on beds; fall into sleep, grateful
For sleep, god-blessing sleep; next morn: awake,
Repeat.