If Desi bumps into anything while holding a pen, blocks of super-literate grafitti come gushing out of his hands, man. Desi Quintans http://www.desiquintans.com/index.php 2008-06-27T18:58:00Z+1100 http://www.desiquintans.com/ Copyright Desi Quintans, 2008 Writer's Block Desi Quintans http://www.desiquintans.com/permalink.php?PostID=178 2008-06-27T18:58:00Z Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like food in general has markedly declined in quality and flavour since, I don’t know, four years ago. Maybe the — not just the pollution, but the hardship of modern farming life given worldwide urbanisation — maybe pollution and the time importing takes and maybe the hopelessness and surely the microwaving have zapped the flavour out of it, like a quiet word in a thunderstorm. I’ve got some KFC in front of me and, man, this stuff… Desi Quintans http://www.desiquintans.com/permalink.php?PostID=177 2008-06-16T16:12:00Z So I don’t have any new pictures of the blacksmithing. There’s a reason for that. And the reason is that I’ve tried to make tongs twice this week, and twice I’ve failed. The first time I had left the steel in the fire too long, and when I came back it was sparking everywhere and the front part of the tongs had melted off, leaving me with the rein in my hand and a knowing look on my face. The second failure, this afternoon, I tried to adjust a tong half while it was … Desi Quintans http://www.desiquintans.com/permalink.php?PostID=176 2008-06-05T21:36:00Z So maybe I am a crank and a killjoy and any number of things, but more than any of those, I feel old. More and more I subscribe to the idea of a soul age; that, man, we float around forever and might settle into a body for a few years or so, and then get moving again. It makes sense that I would be literally old when you consider the fact that I am not surprised by anything, that eating is a chore and food is ash in my mouth, that I find it hard to connect with other young people and understa… Desi Quintans http://www.desiquintans.com/permalink.php?PostID=175 2008-05-31T22:11:00Z I recently took up blacksmithing as a hobby. Being into typewriters and fountain pens and The Good Old Days, such a classic and dying craft was only natural progression. I spent about three weekends puttering about trying to get everything hunky dory. I made a makeshift anvil by bolting steel angle to a sawhorse. I made a forge out of a shallow wok, with plumbing pipes leading to an 18v hairdryer fan. But as I tried to forge things, I noticed great deficiencies. The ‘anvil’ was… Desi Quintans http://www.desiquintans.com/permalink.php?PostID=174 2008-05-27T21:50:00Z With select people I am going to begin communicating by SMS solely in Haiku. I think that the pace of life and the crushing tragedy of work and study and The Real World have removed people from the beauty of words. I have certainly been removed from it, and for much too long. So let’s start something now. Waiting for the bus Lovely girl drives past me, and The wheels keep turning. Desi Quintans http://www.desiquintans.com/permalink.php?PostID=173 2008-05-06T22:14:00Z From a year of waking up at three in the morning every weekday to go bake cakes for strangers, I still wake in the early hours even though I do a normal shift now. I generally fill this time with computer games, or reading nodes on Everything2. But really what I’d like to do is pick up my friend from her house, knowing that she’s probably awake at that ti… Desi Quintans http://www.desiquintans.com/permalink.php?PostID=172 2008-04-30T20:20:00Z So maybe it was a bad idea to burn all the two-by-fours from the garage, who really knows. But there, it's done, and now there’s a — not to say bonfire, because maybe a bonfire would be more organised — conflagration, about the size of a kitchen, raging on the grass in the backyard. People say that looking into a campfire makes you think clearly on who you are. If only someone had told you that making the fire bigger will not make you feel anything more. And what’s wor…