Funny how secrets travel...

Rain is good, and after looking at html for two hours, that's about all I can think of to say.

Continuity and meaning.

When I was in my early teens, I began to develop a desire to track the daily aspects of my life.  This began with notes about trips and travel (such as they were), grades from my schooling, lists of the most popular radio songs of the week, the names of girls who entranced me, and so forth.

As the entries grew, and began to include more small drawings and typographical experiments, the agenda-style books I'd been using began to feel stifling, and I changed over to undated journals (usually with unlined pages).  Although I still enjoyed the format of the daily agenda, once I made the switch those books caught far less of my content, became scarcely used or referenced, and increasingly remained untouched from each February onward.

In these journals I developed much of my calligraphic flexibility, my computer-friendly date/time coding system, and my voice as a writer, all while compiling a fairly detailed record of my experiential, psychological, emotional, and intellectual histories.

The frequency and size of individual entries certainly varied (heh - that's what she said), and there are gaps from time to time, but I still have a remarkable record of my moves, relationships, big thoughts, drug experiences, moral intentions and material ambitions, lies, and general events, from my teenage years onward.

Over the past three or four years, my journal writing has dropped to effectively zero.  I don't even have a book to use at this moment.  This would mostly be due to computers and my job.

To imprison writing in physical form, rather than letting it float in a constant state of editability and as potential copypaste material, seems almost Luddite.  And now that every week is moreorless indistinguishable from the last, I certainly have less to say than I ever have.

I remember the gradual realization that I was losing my ability to write pen-in-hand.  It began to require far too much time and patience to record even the simplest ideas, and the keyboard beckoned.  Now, of course, I realize what is lost when one gives up contemplation and brevity in favor of an ease-of-use-enabled word-dump process.  There isn't too much that's better about how I write now, which is usually closer to shallow recreation than to creation.

My smokinggirlsinaction journal project -- named after my realization that most of my early musings centered around smoking, girls, and inaction -- was always designed to record and track my progression as a person.  Since I no longer have that continuity, in a sense I am that much less a person.  And I already know of several other aspects of my being that are less than they once were.

So a radical revision may be in order, something violent -- not to the world, or to myself, but to the order of things as they have currently settled in my controllable environment.

I can shore up my circumstances as they are, and charge ahead in the direction I'm already facing.  I can quit my job tomorrow, run out on my established habits and my spoken or unspoken commitments, and hit the road.  I can opt for a flight later in the year when I have had a chance to liquidate and plan.  But regardless of which choice I take, or if I avoid the challenge and continue to drift, I MUST re-establish my written journal, and the pattern of staying in daily touch with it regardless of how empty I might initially feel.

Mustn't I?  After all, this is a core life function I am neglecting...

However, questions remain.  This weblog was envisioned as a continuation of that thread of self and meaning, but this post says a lot about the state of the project in general.  Accepting Leary's proposition that a life lived openly and publicly is defensively and actively effective, do I decide to go with the future and the evolution -- as it legitimately can be seen -- to an increasingly digital mode of operations?  It will require bravery and dedication, and since I've broken my continuity I don't feel confidence in my position to judge how much I have of either... (Or perhaps today's loss of Sparklehorse simply has me in a contemplative mood.)

Someday soon I'll be able to speak and have instant text accurately transcribed.  Will this lead me to abandon typing -- I already feel that wear settling in -- and become lost in a cloud of Franklin Gothic anal fixation, like the dream addicts of Until the End of the World?

Everything good, within walking distance.

I was in the scuzzier part of the downtown core.  My cohort and I were checking out a venue of some sort.  The main floor consisted of indie gallery and performance nooks, and a lobby that was reminiscent of what it would be like if an old style hotel was repurposed by the art crowd – couches, lamps, ironic classiness side-by-side with kitsch and comfort furnishings.

We found the elevator, and made it up to what I think was the third floor.  The front windows looked over the street, with an inspiring view of a mixed-up neighborhood.  Little restaurants and shops, people on bike and on foot, cars, sidewalks and alleys, animals and garbage, a perfect city microcosm.  At the back, the balcony opened out onto the street, which was at a higher level, and the streets led to a gentle maze of residential lanes and quaint low-rise apartment blocks and houses.

If bohemian literary characters lived in a common neighborhood when they weren’t busy being in the stories they came from, this would be the neighborhood.

I cannot recall what it was I was there to investigate.  But I did find a good Holmesian loft, and a couple of interesting businesses that I felt would support my lifestyle if I were to move there.

And this leads me to the realization that my dreams have been exceptionally cooperative lately in supplying me with magical settings, as demonstrated by the images above, with the added benefit that all of it was taking place along the stretch of de Maisonneuve between Atwater and Guy metros – which in '99 was my first home turf in Montreal.

A true initiation never ends.

And here I am again.

Montreal is an international city. Not a huge one, but still. Cheap European New York in French. I have the best group of friends here I've ever had.

Victoria has a couple of good friends, the promise of tolerable employment on the fringe of an interesting industry (in other words, much like my current job). No winter. Army town.

Winnipeg has the worst winters, the least connection to the world. Dead center North America. Also a couple of good friends. Art calls to me from here, as well as interrupted emotional arcs. I might feel tall there.

I dreamed of being in New York last night. Am I ready to give up?

Cows in the city.

I woke up unsure if I was still dreaming.

I looked around my loft, and considered rearranging to make best use of the available space.  Then I remembered I still had another little bachelor apartment downtown -- I could even remember the feeling of the neighborhood, from the other dream months ago in which that place existed.  Was I still renting that too?  Is that why I didn't have as much money as I thought?

I looked down and saw the store where we all worked.  Eric and Christelle were on the floor, and I dangled my legs over the edge of the loft floor.  I went down to look around at things.  I found some industrial breath mints for smokers, named after popular bands, in large format packages.  I took them to the counter to show Christelle, because I thought they were funny, but she mentioned that she thought they were detergents, which they were.

Then I retreated to a car-interior-like pod on the floor, where I watched Eric drive some cleaning machine back and forth.  I realized he was taking the place over out of necessity, and they were basically humoring me to be kind.

I left, facing a long semi-industrial street.  My door was one of the few on a long stretch of low, white buildings.  Across the street was a field with train tracks, beyond that, trees in the distance.  I realized that this part of Ontario was very much like the prairies with its wide open blue skies, and how I missed that (and would continue to miss it in tall cities or regions with mountains).

I turned right and walked east.  I was wearing my plaid pyjama pants, white bathrobe, some kind of shirt, with my backpack and headphones.  Every once in a while a car would pass and I laughed as I thought what they must think of the sight of me.  Occasionally I'd spy someone inside a building or car, always silhouetted.

I tired of walking quickly and turned to go back, but the street was different, and I couldn't find my place.  I realized this wasn't a dream-case of the territory changing, but was actually a sign of mental illness, and that I was basically lost and confused, stumbling around the streets in a bathrobe.

I changed streets in hopes of finding something familiar, but just ended up in more commercial areas, with no bearings on where I was.  Did I even know the city?  Would anyone know me?