Cleveland:

I'm on a high floor of our schmancy hotel staring through white net curtains bordered with faux Louis XIV style valances. I'm tweaky from lack of regular sleep. Tonight we'll drive home after the show. Part of me doesn't want to go back - there'll be mail and laundry and an apartment to clean and an unstructured life ready to swamp me. It's strange how touring can institutionalise you...

I'm listening to Neko sing Dirty Knives and Fox Confessor on I-pod paralysis. I feel autistic but I love more than anything 'getting' something - a song, a book, a painting. It's special when you feel you've caught the essence of a song and it resonates within you. God bless the repeat function on my i-pod. I thank the person who realised that somewhere, sometime in the future, there would be someone who wanted to endlessly wallow in a song or a mood, ad infinitum.

Huge, monolithic, ocean-going freighters navigate the sinewy Cuyahoga river narrows. The ships inch along at walking pace--slower even--past the coal and stone heaps piled high under the overpasses, past the deserted boatyards full of empty hulls waiting for the summer. The ships look too big for the river's twists and turns. Bridges rise in sequence to let them pass, a grinding steel ballet. This is not a beautiful place, unless the rusty mechanics of industry appeal to you. The water is a foul olive brown, untouchable. Birds swoop down to the freighter's wake, feeding on whatever slurry is stirred up by the huge propellors that rake the river bottom. This river hides bad secrets. I am sure there are bodies in the black ooze on the riverbed. Suicides and murder victims staring hollow-eyed through the corroded sunked car-wrecks and chemical silt, waiting to be found.

I've got that Friday feeling again, huh?