A friend of mine has been doing quite a good blog so it's made me want to start it up again. In the four months since my last blog I've been thinking about death a lot less and more about life. Maybe I should introduce myself? I am a struggling musician in London, working in an office job. When I started blogging I was someone who called themselves a musician without much proof to that effect apart from a small collection of guitars from eight years of student loans. Now I have played a few gigs and written some decent songs so I'm more like a musician tha snomeone who hasn't. But it is a bit of a nightmare, I want to get people down to my gigs but to do that I need to get a following which to my mind involves writing some great songs and playing loads of gigs. But some promoters, it seems, don't like you playing loads of gigs because that means that fewer of your fans come to each; but until you have a fanbase to split I can't help but think that this is a secondary consideration. It's quite liderally a "Catch-22" situation.

I've been reading a collection of articles by Bertrand Russell about religion which have really convincing arguments about the way that, not only does religion inspire and manipulate fear (not a reason against organized religion par se), but it is inspired by fear. When you look at it that way, religion prevents people from conquering their fear. And then there's all the baggage applied by the organisations themselves. I think Russell was writing at a time when Christianity was more powerful and so he had more reason to state the case so strongly. But he wasn't writing explicitly about Christianity. I don't really think intolerance of religion is good idea, I think persecuting people for their beliefs is not a mistake, it's easy to pick on people who have the courage to profess their beliefs - but many of them are so arbitrary. The idea of attacking other people for a heavenly reward is pretty fucked up, too. This is all incredibly obvious.

I will be more interesting soon, I promise.