Scribblings from lagoon-ah beach, minus fifty-one degrees celsius

When there is no stimulus left anymore with which to keep myself awake - no radio, no book, no porn, nothing to really even do besides move the dredge back and forth once an hour - I have to write. It's that or just sit out here becoming a tiny bit more stupid with every passing moment.

So I'll write, and if I remember, I'll tear these pages out. If I don't remember, my fellow dredge operators'll have some reading material to enjoy. Barely legible though it may be.

It's inhumanly cold at the moment, and plates of fog are moving across the lagoon. Pinpricks of ice float in the glare of the lights on the bank. I open the door to spit and the heat floods from my closet of a shack over the door jamb, a guilty trail of smoke, to disappear into winter. In five seconds it is gone, voided, destroyed.

If I stare too long at the lights on the dredge the image begins to swim through the darkness - the dimensions stretch lengthwise. I blink the bleariness away and the lights snap back.

Sherwood Park is a dull orange haze in the distance. Carcinogenic particles are frozen in the urban light pollution.

I sit and contemplate my cigarettes, trying to hold myself to one an hour.

Man, am I glad this night-shift bullshit will soon be a thing of the past. It gives me such a sour mood. We composter employees are kidding ourselves if we think we're immune to shift lag (here, under the shack's naked hundred-watt bulb, my swimming retinas transpose the words to "shitflag"). It's turning all of us into beaten animals. I used to get carded in liquor stores and bars all the time. In the past few months, nobody's asked. I'm finally beginning to look my age.

Two songs are running laps around my starving brain. There's the Cocteau Twins' "Cherry-coloured funk", a swirling bit of 1990-or-so pop impenetrability, with Liz Fraser's angel voice at mid-gallop over guitars run through a dozen chorus pedals. Then with the bumpy seam of a nicotine-and-solitude-addled synapse, it jerks into the theme from "The Facts of Life", which I'd found planted whole and unbidden in my head when I woke up this past morning. I'd terrorized my girlfriend with it, amazed that I knew the whole thing.

If you hear it from your brother, better clear it with your mother
Better get it right, call her late at night

Seriously, what the hell kind of advice is that? How totally implausible. You're living away from home, and your brother somehow imparts to you some bullshit factoid pertaining to sex - let's be clear, the show is called "The Facts of Life" - and this person wants you to call your mother at three in the morning with a question about penises and vaginas? Come on. In the first place, you're living away from home! You haven't got it figured out yet? And secondly: at three in the morning? Just make sure he wears a rubber and save your question for the daylight hours, okay? Your mother does not need wee-hour phone calls about venereal disease, you thoughtless cow.