Nobody likes getting up for work in the morning. Whether you're roused from your slumber by a shrill, ear-piercing digital shriek, the more traditional ringing bells, or whatever tune happens to be blaring from the selected station on your clock radio at that particular time, those first moments of wakefulness are typically a groggy, disbelieving misery to experience. "It can't be that time already," you think to yourself. "I feel like I've barely slept at all."

It's even worse when, in fact, you really have barely slept. I seem to have a traitorous body in that regard. In any situation where I don't have anything particularly pressing to get done the next morning, or when I could do with staying up for whatever reason, tiredness almost invariably overtakes me, and leaves me passed out on the sofa in the living room, snoring peacefully to myself only to awake some seven or eight hours later, chin coated in a thin layer of drool and all sense of the passage of time completely out of the window. On the average weekday, however, when I'm consciously aware that without at least six or so hours of sleep I'm going to be a particularly cranky, shuffling excuse for a man for the following day? Insomnia rules.

I've tried everything to get to sleep on these occasions. Tiring myself out by doing exercise. Mugs of warm milk or cocoa. Soothing music (well, as soothing as my collection allows for, anyway, dominated largely as it is by Scandinavian death metal artists) played quietly in the background. Deep breathing exercises. Herbal sleeping tablets. I'm pretty sure desperation on one occasion even led me once to trying to beat my head against a wall to induce unconsciousness. I haven't found anything yet that works.

The worst part about insomnia is the self-defeating nature of it. The later it gets, the more urgently you want to get to sleep. The more urgently you want to get to sleep, the more you concentrate on the fact that you're still awake, and thus the less likely you are to actually drift off. This just leads to even more crushing disappointment when the alarm goes off, and you groan with the knowledge that you've got to drag yourself to work feeling like ten pounds of shit in a nine-pound bag.

That's the situation I've found myself in today. Further befouling my mood are the following circumstances:

- I haven't had chance to go shopping yet this week, so I don't have anything to eat for lunch at work, adding hunger to the list of things that are making me grumpy today.
- One of the earphones I use to listen to my MP3 player while I'm at work gave up the ghost yesterday, meaning all I have to listen to today is the inane ramblings of my colleagues, the drone of the cleaning lady's vacuum cleaner, and the insipid shite pouring forth from the radio in the other office.
- I haven't actually got anything much to do at work today, as I've managed to pretty much clear my desk over the last couple of weeks. Ordinarily, this would be a good thing - except, without the distraction of my music, I'm doomed to trying to stay awake, staring listlessly at a blank monitor, bereft of even a basic task to while away the eight and a half hours I have to spend here.

So, yeah. Today's probably not going to go down as one of the greatest I've ever experienced. Still, at least writing this killed half an hour or so. I'm off to see if I can fall asleep in the toilets for half an hour or so without anyone noticing.

Once again, it's been a while since my last blog. And, as before, the reason is mainly that there hasn't been a sustained level of mishap-born hilarity in my life of late. Sure, the odd few incidents spring to mind (the denim-clad man using rhythmic pelvic thrusts in place of headbanging at the Dark Tranquillity concert I went to last week, for example), but generally speaking, things have been pretty quiet at Casa Del Dill lately.

That said, a couple of you have been asking where the blogs have gone, so I figured I'd better make an effort to get back on the horse. So, today, I'd like to share with you my conception of how I would like my funeral to go. Morbid, perhaps, but the subject's been on my mind recently, particularly since my friend Chris' funeral yesterday. The guy impressed me mightily by having Iron Maiden's 'Only The Good Die Young' played at the secular, Humanist service (the first line of which being 'The demon of ages will rape you in your bed at night' - rock!), and thus sent my perpetually free-wheeling thought processes spiralling along the funereal path. So, here's what I want when I eventually pop my clogs (the two likeliest possibilities for my cause of death being either terminal liver disease or being taken out by a police sniper when I finally snap and take to the top of my old school's water tower with a Barrett .50 calibre rifle):

The service is to take place outdoors, on the White Cliffs of Dover. Mourners are to stand in two straight lines, facing one another. Between the lines of mourners will be a large cannon and a paraffin-doused hoop right on the cliff's edge. Two funeral attendants, one for each line, will hand out a party popper and a party hat to each of the people in attendance, while 'Night In Winter' by Envy plays in the background.

Once all of the mourners have been handed their party hats, the funeral director will be instructed to read a letter from an envelope I'll have left with an attorney before my demise. The letter will consist of an itemised list of who I expect to be at the funeral that still owes me money, and how much they owe. Hopefully, this will shame them into coughing up, and thus more than likely provide a decent college fund for my kids, should I have any.

Debts duly repaid, the main part of the service will be over, and all that will remain will be the commital of my earthly remains. This will be achieved by having my mummified corpse stuffed into the cannon, the paraffin-soaked hoop lit on fire, and my body fired from the cannon, through the flaming hoop, and into the ocean. At the moment my body hits the water (and, hopefully, skips on the surface a couple of times), the mourners should set off their party poppers.

Then, time for the wake. Mourners will be instructed that they are all to get as hammered as humanly possible, this being perhaps the fittest memorial I could ask for.

I think that'd be a funeral that everyone can enjoy, whether they knew me particularly well or not. How about you lot - ever given any thought as to how you want your final send-off to go?

Coming soon: a blog about how my ideal Valentine's Day would involve a flamethrower and a schoolyard full of terrified children. Or maybe not.

So, it's my birthday. I'm now 24 years old. Much love and thanks to those who have sent messages, texts, cards and especially to those who came to my little shindig at the house on Saturday - the celebration of shuffling one year closer to the grave is always a lot more fun with good company, and the fact that you made the effort to come and party with me was greatly appreciated.

The last year has flown by at a frankly staggering pace - I've joined and subsequently quit a band, moved house, met a plethora of new people (pretty much all of whom make welcome additions to my list of friends and acquaintances), had a school reunion, and blogged repeatedly and obsessively about pretty much everything that has occurred that could be mined for comedic content. Things have moved quickly, but in a lot of ways, very little has changed. I'm still in the same line of work, still single, still no further along in my intended aim of becoming a studio engineer. I think that's all going to change this year, however (well, apart from the singledom thing anyway - that one's not entirely within my power to change, unless I go for a Fillipino mail-order bride) - it's about time I pulled myself up our of the rut I've been dilligently driving myself into for the last six years or so, and I'm really not getting any younger. I figure if I haven't started making at least some strides forward by this time next year, I may as well resign myself to a lifetime as a keyboard monkey.

First step - I've got a practice booked with a group of guys with the intention of starting a new band. It all looks quite promising so far - sure, we still need a bassist and a vocalist, but the influences, enthusiasm and organisation of the group we have so far makes me rather optimistic that I might finally be able to get back on the stage at some point in the future. It's been a good few years since I played live (I was rhythm guitarist for Rose Petal Funeral, a band comparable to a genetic cross between Bad News and Spinal Tap in our incompetence, yet strangely popular among the Wolverhampton metal kids at the time), and I've been itching to get back into it the whole time. Fingers crossed, it won't be too much longer.

Next step - some further education. Dicking around with Guitar Rig and Cubase at home is all well and good, and I've been getting decent results, but I really need to start getting some hands-on experience with proper equipment if I want to start making any real headway into becoming an audio engineer. So, I'm looking at enrolling in a college course pretty soon to enable me to do just that. I'll probably have to drop out of full-time work and go back to doing part-time bar work to keep my expenses covered (although I imagine a loan of some variety will be forthcoming), but to be honest, anything's better than the purgatorial employment I'm tethered to at the moment.

So, there you go. You guys reading this - do me a favour. Keep nudging me to sort myself out. I lapse into complacency all too easily, and may need encouragement/cajolement/threats of physical violence to keep me motivated. Remind me of my general dissatisfaction with my lot in life thus far. Point out that I should be doing better. I'll thank you for it later, unless of course everything spectacularly blows up in my face.

So, it's been a while since my last blog. That's mainly because, for the first three weeks or so of the year, nothing particularly amusing has happened to me. This blog is fuelled by the little mishaps that befall me on a regular basis, and for whatever reason, there's been a drought on. I haven't been so incapacitatingly drunk that I ended up bringing home random people/mementoes, I haven't been irked by friends, co-workers or random passers-by, and I certainly haven't woken up to find Wheetos in the toilet bowl. Some sort of moratorium seems to have been called on the metaphorical banana peels being surreptitiously placed under my feet.

However, something has happened this week which isn't amusing in the least, but I feel the need to write about it anyway. I warn you all - what follows will contain precious little of the levity I try to inject into this blog. In fact, it's downright miserable.

You see, a good friend of mine was discovered dead in his flat on Tuesday. He was thirty years old. The cause of death is, as yet, unknown. We have our suspicions - he had Lupus Erythmatosus, which is an uncurable auto-immune deficiency. What shocked us (and I'm using the plural because my flatmates knew him too) was the manner in which he was discovered. There had been a horrible smell coming through the floorboards of the guy that lived above him for a few days, which he eventually felt compelled to investigate. After receiving no answer at the door of the flat below him, he eventually kicked the door in, and found our friend sitting on the sofa, partially decomposed, while the television blared in front of him. He'd been there, as far as we can gather, for around five or six days.

The guy who found the body ran into Jack on the street, and told him about it. Jack then phoned me at work and told me about it. When Logan got up, he was told about it. Before long, I was let out of work because I was fairly clearly in shock, and returned home to an equally shell-shocked house. We began phoning everyone our friend knew, letting them know about it too. I phoned my mom about it. I told myself it was because she has a tendency to hear about things like that pretty quickly, but really it was just because I was shocked and wanted to talk to my mom. Then we pretty much all just shut down, because we were so numbed by the news.

This guy - well, it'd be fair to say I spent a great deal of my spare time from 2003 to mid-2006 round the flat where he was found on Tuesday morning. He was an intelligent, articulate person, and an astonishingly loyal friend. I remember Jack and I turning up at his flat at 4am on a weekday once, after having been wandering the streets for a couple of hours following a huge argument with one of our flatmates. Rather than being put out by our arrival at such an ungodly hour, he pretty much immediately just handed us a spliff and asked us what was wrong. He gave Logan a place to live when circumstances saw him temporarily homeless, despite only living in a single-bedroom flat himself. When Jack was between jobs and low on cash, he'd bring round bags of food raided from his own cupboards, that he insisted he would never get round to eating himself. This guy would pretty much do anything for his friends, and one of the things that is really hitting us all hard right now is the fact that we'll never now get the chance to tell him how much we appreciated his friendship.

I'm not the finest writer in the world, and even if I were, I imagine it would still be next to impossible to articulate the loss that we have all suffered with his passing. He had his quirks, as do all people. He could be arrogant and stubborn, and by God did he take his video games too seriously. But he was honest, and he was considerate, and he was generous, and he will be missed.

Via con dios, man.