Hello, welcome, hi, welcome, hello.

Kerouac wrote On The Road on ten-foot lengths of teletype paper. He claimed that sliding the typewriter cylinder back at the end of a line, installing new paper at the end of a page, damaged the spontaneity of the prose. Said that mediums imposed their own artificial consciousnesses.

It may also be relevant to mention that he popped Benzedrine like Maltesers.

I'm heading over to New Zealand next week to walk the length of the Southern Alps. My best guess is that this will take around 100 days of actual being in the middle of nowhere, which will generate around 100 days of profane rambling journal entries, scrawled onto any piece of rubbish I can't burn -- soup packets, route notes, the back of topo maps.

Exactly whether this will approach the genius of the author of a Great American Novel is debatable -- some would say unlikely -- but, hey, you can rest assured that every word you read has been dragged across rivers, up mountains, through cliffs and probably sautéed in my blood.

Which might make for an entertaining artificial consciousness.

So check back here once a fortnight and you can read up on my adventures and check out some photos. If you like, there are links to the right that should let you syndicate it via RSS, or receive notifications via e-mail. I think. They may not work. Let me know.

Will write again from across the Tasman.