It's hot outside. All the burned Lobster like Irish pale skins are wandering around in a daze, desperately seeking something else to moan about now that the weather is beautiful. Of course its too hot, but that would be worse than blasphemy to say out loud.

Heat makes the afternoon slide by in an almost creepy dream like hazy way. Indoors with what laughingly passes for air conditioning;

Blink. Slow day moving. Sitting at my work cubicle, drinking a lucozade energy drink that is making me tired. Customers dribbling in on my phone extension like drunks crossing a road. Weeekend sounds good. It's quite slow overall right now but hopefully a couple of good orders will slip in over the next 6 hours and balance the scales out somewhat.

Watching the last disc on Angel season one DVD- some very good episodes but the main thing that I'm enjoying is the excellent arc with Wolfram & Hart and some very striking actors such as the guy who plays LIndsey MacDonald and his immediate boss in W & R.

Lunch-time ending. The afternoon, my unfavorite time of day ( yes, I am using made up word combinations and, what's more, I don't care- words are there to merge and match to suit our needs) beckons me in and gives me an interminably long magazine to read whilst I wait for Evening to see me. An interesting week off to an interesting start; so many vagaries, so many things in the air, floating around and shifting direction, subtle shapes being altered in almost indeterminable ways.

If a man sits in one spot for long enough, the world will revolve around him. He'll also get mind-numbingly bored and get nothing whatsoever achieved but that's a different story.

Friday is the racehorse of the week, shadowing all the other days until it leaps forth and streaks past it's closest slacker, Thursday. It's the day of perfect positioning. Friday evening is a psychological classic with the promise of Saturday being real and the addition of Sunday bringing a nice warm glow to one's thoughts. So Friday afternoon has that slow-build of gradual adrenaline accumulation.

We made the magical shift a short while ago; my coffee and work addled brain recognised the abrupt click as Evening took over from the sluggish afternoon. Evening is alert with potential- anxious to sweep us under it's dark cover. I feel like an old-timer sitting at a dark dingy bar off of a side-street, nursing a too weak drink with trembling fingers. Except I'm just on the late shift at a computer sales call-center so it's a tad different , less dramatic and not quite as cheesily romantic a picture.

But a shot of bourbon would help.

Physical pockets of time that run slower than others. Some afternoons stretch into eternity but like a black hole and it's relationship to gravity, time can be, in all real physical ways of experiencing it, much slower than normal.

Another afternoon- another half-asleep post lunch. Afternoons are an expanse, as I've rambled about before. A vast reaching desert that just seems to stretch on and on. Evening is the anticipated relief at the end of a yawning too bright afternoon stretch. The cool darkness calms our zombified nervous system.

Afternoons stretch. I have a three dimensional imagination, meaning that my mind projects information into a three dimensional form when I think about a structure or a list. It's a form of mental visual acuity which some other weirdos like me do as well- other people just see lists and dates as flat figures on their mental pages. It means that I see things very visually ans so dont like phrases like ' You're shitting me' or ' Go take a crap in a hat'.

Afternoons stretch in my mind forever. They're a no-mans land period of the day. Just like Sinatra's ' wee small hours of the morning' , physically, afternoons are weird and stressful for our bodies as we're away from waking but not yet close to laying down for the night.

They stretch like a slo-mo head turn, until suddenly we snap into evening and then our night senses kick in and we become different people. Studies have shown adrenaline surges when we mentally connect the fact that we have passed the afternoon threshold.