There is no spiritual ailment that the songs of the Red Hot Chili Peppers cannot fix.

I usually walk around the world trying to conform. Today is not one of those days. Today I will not hide my tattoos.

The end of my tether. Whatever image I portray to the world ... I am not that, today. Today my house is bulging with mess, my inbox has exploded, the vulture at the end of my bed when I woke up greeted me with bile. It's been a while.

The ringworm on Rocco's leg is almost gone. I have remembered to rub tinea cream into it twice every day. Max has a swollen finger .... perhaps a beesting, or a teeny sliver of glass. We're not sure yet. Tim is a big strapping boy-man. We have had a hard week, been annoyed at each other. The trickiness and second-guessing of step-parenting crept in. He was in bed the other night; unprompted I took him up a cup of tea and a freshly baked iced vanilla cupcake. He was surprised as I am. I want to teach Tim that families stick together - even when you hate each others guts, you come back and love them. Feelings pass. If I can teach all of my boys this at their ages .... they will have a much bigger head-start in the world than I did.

When I made the cupcakes, I licked all the batter off the mixer and bowl. And when I iced them, I ate so much icing that there was only the barest whisp left for each cupcake. I marvelled at my gluttony, again. At the bottom of my bottonless gluttony lies an insatiability of things that almost killed me.

Icing won't kill me.

::

This morning as I scraped cereal off the kitchen table with my fingernail, I thought about the element of water ... how it's a constant thing in this strange physical world. I wonder where the amniotic fluid surrounding me as a fetus has travelled and passed along? The Ganges, or the Nile. Or pouring out of a rusty tap in Africa.

Maybe some of those same atoms spilt onto my head on my way into the car this morning with all that rain, christening me anew. I hope so.