"I am sick, I am sick, Mister Proctor, pray, pray hurt me not!"
-Arthur Miller, The Crucible

For those of you who believe in kismet, voodoo, dramatic irony or good, old-fashioned God, it will no doubt come as a spectacular vindication of those beliefs that today I am ill. Yes! Each of these characters represents the frail peck of a single withering finger, one hand crawling like an o'erturned spider over the keyboard as its companion clamps a soggy, disintegrating piece of once scented tissue to streaming nostrils, another hand -no doubt an extraneous growth symptomatic of a burgeoning strain of lycanthropy- tilting thin lukewarm gruel from a worn wooden spoon down my gullet and blue-and-white striped pyjamas in equal measures. Well! MA expects every man to do his duty- and as, according to Van Richten's Guide to Werewolves, I shall technically still be a man for at least the next four days, I suppose it were as well that I expended the last portion of my rationality in snee(r/z)ing over Diaryland and its chattels.

Now look here! Marked Accordingly, contrary to popular belief, is a perfectly humane kind of entertainment- indeed I, myself, was human once, and have therefore a fairly good understanding of what makes the little fellows tick. Hypothesise the case of someone who has asked one of his old University tutors for a reference, and who receives back a sealed envelope enclosed with a note saying "To..ny, here's the reference; it just says you're exceptional."- is it not natural for that entirely fictional person to say "Exceptional? Exceptional how? Would you care to estimate?" and start holding the imaginary envelope up to his non-existent lamp in a vain attempt to discern its contents? Conversely, if another hypothetical person -let us hypothesise the same person, for simplicity's sake- were to receive a phone call in the middle of the night from someone who betook it upon themselves to deliver a lengthy and detailed analysis of that person's failings and unsuitability for affections of any kind, a presentation replete with visual aids and pie-charts delineating the "Selfishness/Selflessness" ratio of that person's conduct, would not it be equally natural for the person in question to say "I? Why, I do not give a coupl'a monkeys what you think of me, my dear, and I have to get up at half-six tomorrow, anyway. Do feel free to e-mail me if you're not done being flagrantly IGNORED by me yet. Toodle-oo the noo!". Naysayers of the world! People in general will only accept even constructive criticism when it struts with the buxom babes of Effervescent Praise on each arm. Reviewees know what to expect- and that is all they are prepared to believe in. Fine- but what do you say to someone who is okay?

I think it's quite possible that I have incurred more wrath in my 22 years of existence through admitting lukewarm sentiments than through expressing feelings of violent aversion. To think someone is 'okay', as a person, an artist, a writer, an athlete, whatever, is to condemn them to an infernal halfway house on the peripheries of your existence; it is to doom them to ever hover around the hub which is your warmest affections, close enough to see and hear, far enough away to neither be seen nor heard, wandering like a vagrant around the walls of your estate whilst a raucous tea-party may be heard within. To be thought 'okay' is to suffer a blow to one's pride that cannot be countenanced- yet, there it is! Despite all this, I have no option but to say that devilish- is okay. Not bad. Satisfactory. A reasonable effort.

Devilish- freely admits that he is no writer, and it is therefore to be hoped that his ego will not be as massively dented by this pronouncement as the egos of others have been. His entries are short and humane, occasionally empathetic if never more than superficially so, his humour sometimes worthy of a smile, his stories every now and again interesting, his recurring spells of self-exposition rather blatant yet clumsy and artless in a way that may remind us of our own, younger days. Do we care what DVDs he owns? Probably not- but his listing of them is indicative of an earnest desire to be understood and liked, a love of self-catalogue and Hegelian delineation of self through possessions than I, at least, fondly recognise from my misguided youth. But, unfortunately, in the crazy, mixed-up world of Marked Accordingly, making the same sort of mistakes as I once might have doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

Devilish- is, I stress, perfectly decent. It's fine, it's alright. It's nothing much better or worse than I would probably have written when I was 17 or 18 -a statement which is doubtless going to fall back upon my shoulders like a blackjack when it emerges that Devilish- is in his mid-twenties- and there's absolutely no reason why it shouldn't go on to become much better as its writer matures. But there is no handicap system in Marked Accordingly, no separate set of standards for writers of greater or lesser experience; and for that reason I am forced to confess that, by universal standards, Devilish- is....

Okay.