When things in your life are going along swimmingly, do you ever get a searing poker of foreboding slicking through your happiness, making you lie awake at night wondering when the hammer is going to fall? I know "slicking" isn't meant to be used that way, so I'm coining a new meaning. It means "to slice through something with a burning heat, like a flame licking at the edge of a thing, leaving a melted puddle behind." It's early, I have a bad headache, I meant to type "slicing"- so sue me. Sweet fancy Moses.

I'm generally hopelessly, eternally, inexplicably optimistic, even and especially in the face of shittiness, but sometimes I get a chill down my spine as if up in the road ahead, wrapped in a gown of gauzey tragedy-coloured grey, lies Disaster, laughing softly and licking its chops. Since life tends to have crappy moments no matter who you are, most certainly something is waiting up ahead, ready to clobber me. The not knowing how far up the road It is, and what form It will take, sometimes robs me of sleep.

I've got to stop watching C.S.I. -style shows before I go to bed, for they give me a very twisted view of the world and its testicle sportin' inhabitants. I don't know if this is good because it makes me act with caution and suspicion, or if it makes me a nutbar. Nevermind, you...