So. There’s someone you can’t have. They don’t love you. This might be for several reasons: because a relationship ended, because it never began, or because you have never actually met the person at all, perhaps due to their being famous.

The best way to get over your disappointment, crush, or delusion is to keep the person out of sight and out of mind. Once upon a time, this was largely possible. Short of physically stalking them, or bugging them by phone (terrible and impossible behaviours for the sensitive neurotic), you were unlikely to interact with them. So you could, just about, careless conversations aside, quietly forget them. Or turn the page quickly if they popped up in a magazine.

But then, along came the modern world. The internet, in other words. Now, as you know, I love the internet and all it has brought to society. But, like bit-players in a perpetually revolving Day of Judgement, everyone on the internet just keeps coming back. Including, of course, the person you can’t have.

There are immediate steps you can take. You can unfollow, or even block, the person on Twitter, or unfriend, or even block, the person on Facebook. But this really does nothing. Even if you can’t see someone’s private Facebook page, you can still read their tweets, because the public timeline is just that.

As if by magic, yesterday I received an email about one person’s attempt to address this. Step forward the Ex-Blocker. In their words, once you’ve installed the plugin and filled in the person’s Twitter and Facebook details:

…any information posted by your ex will be blocked from you with a splash warning whenever you’re about to “accidentally” come across news regarding that special someone from your past.

This solves one problem. If you have mutual friends, the Ex-Blocker will stop the person popping up when you’re at someone else’s virtual party. But this would all be accidental and beyond your control, and the responsibility is therefore lifted.

The challenge arises when you have to actually stop yourself going looking for the person. As you well know, you won’t have to look hard. Most people have some sort of online presence now, even if it’s just a few party photos or something to do with work. However, if they’re in the media, acting, music, or prominent in some way, there are likely to be scads of human pixel-detritus, forming a tantalising trail of ultimately sterile clues that take you back, and back, and back, to nowhere but your own regret. With YouTube, flickr, blogs, and websites, there’s nothing between you and the person you can’t have but your own willpower.

Actually, I tell a lie. Shame at what basically amounts to passive stalking may keep you from too much furtive clicking. But, a bit like remembering not to spend too much money on the lottery, it is a case of attentive self-monitoring.

Of course, if the person you can’t have is a work colleague or in the same party gang, you have to develop your own coping strategy. But then you would anyway, internet or not.

In the case of willpower, I, for example, often been told I have a lot of it. After all, I managed to give up drugs, alcohol, smoking and coffee, and have stayed off them all so far. But, in fact, these had nothing to do with willpower at all, but the mystical ‘switch in the head’ that I’ve banged on about on many occasions. Willpower is vastly overrated as a driving force.

And now I realise that, despite the promised ‘how to’ in the title of this post, I can offer no real solution to this dilemma, save self-restraint and, dare I say it, self-respect. In this mood, even if you were to be extreme about things and have your hands amputated, you would still find a way to google the person, with your toes, nose, or a mouth-operated carrot.

Don’t worry. One day you’ll wake up and it’ll all be over.

This is the second time the time funnel’s got me this week. The night before last I was in a supermarket, searching the shelves of spirits and sticky drinks for something to take to a friend’s house. Each bottle seemed to snatch me back to a day of drinking, 10, 15, 20 and getting on for 30 years ago. That makes me sound very old, but I first tasted alcohol very young and it was probably something sugary. Suddenly I found myself rolled inside snatches of memory, of parties, incidents, moments, even single thoughts I had with my mouth full of sweet stinging liquor.

The last time I saw Spiritualized live was in 1998 at Glastonbury. They were playing in the late afternoon. I’d just had a stupid row with my boyfriend in his band’s tour bus, and a line of something nasty, and I stomped off out into a thick field of mud with a can of beer. Goddamn tour buses with their engines on all weekend! I found a stage nearby and watched Bentley Rhythm Ace, I think it was. Then the sun began to set, and then came Jason and the band. Alone and wired I watched them, and their fuzzy, trippy, blue light show, and the sun went down and the moon came up – I might have invented the moon bit, but it fits anyway – and I can honestly say it was a spiritual experience, and it made my weekend, and probably my summer.

That album sat around in my life for a couple more years, being the soundtrack to many stoned bedtime headphone sessions before passing out. I remember wishing someone was into me enough to write a whole bloody amazing record about me, and feeling very jealous of that bloody keyboard woman.

And tonight it all came back. My friend Kim told me his friend Huw had a spare ticket, which felt like fate. I felt tears coming at the start, even before they’d begun playing, but I hung in there. I’m not enough of a muso to critique the interpretation, except that it was loud and sometimes punctuated by a violent strobe display that went on and on, faster and faster, to the point where half the audience had their hands over their already closed eyes. I thought I would throw up, in truth.

They did an encore, playing one song and ending with Silent Night. I thought they would spin it into a ten-minute cacophony of twisting trumpets and howling violins, but they played it very straight and ended it, gently, there.

I’d forgotten how that music had dragged me up and down and around and told me exactly where I was at the time. Thank you, Jason Pierce.

Without autopsies to shudder over, and bullet striations and car-carpet microfibre to marvel at, what did I do? Well, I tried watching some TV comedy. I didn’t get very far, to be honest, and it all ground to a halt with the utterly unfunny Moving Wallpaper. Who would find this dreck amusing other than people who work in telly? I have no idea.

On the DVD front I was more successful, and managed Zoolander and Superbad, both of which made me laugh – I admit not to the levels of needing Tena Lady, but I laughed all the same.

Over and above all this, though, Jack Kornfield’s A Path With Heart, which was recommended to me by Sally Brampton, and has taken me the whole month to finish, has given me the most to think about. Actually, it’s given me the most full stop.

I must have been expecting some sort of immediate transformation, which was why I was thrown so badly by the ‘grave disturbance in the force’ of last month, but that’s just part of instant gratification culture. The book is quite big, so lugging it around was a labour of love, with my handbag dragging on my shoulder everywhere I went.

I fell briefly off the wagon for Red Riding, and had X-Men-The Last Stand on while cooking the other night, but that’s all.

I’m not going to write a review of A Path With Heart right now, but just to say that I’ve removed the constant ritual of getting a hit of fictional viciousness, and started making a space in my head for other things, and it feels good.