intermission #2

You should be listening to something soft, intense, and melancholy as you read this. Like this.

Now I will tell you - I'm all over the place this evening. I'm not interested in writing something tidy or entertaining, or something I won't regret tomorrow. I will regret it tomorrow, I'm sure of it. Public ramblings are not usually my thing. But I digress.

Conversations come and go. It can feel like the sun is pouring through, for a second, and then after the shade is drawn again, and I carry on, the same. Is anything changing? Does anything need to change?

I suddenly, last night, felt this gust of air pass into me - like a shock of cold water when the heat is killing you, and every molecule is there, awake - so unpleasant and pleasant - and something true came in, and I wrote it down, and shared it with friends, and a conversation I was wrapped up in continued - and it wasn't, after all, what I was feeling at all. It came out, a bit, a little hint, but got lost in some other distraction, the need to make sense of what doesn't make sense. The language wasn't one I speak. How can you feel and speak, and expect one to be faithful to the other?

So it felt like something was emerging, and because the feeling was so powerful it felt like it must be right, but what was said was hopelessly incomplete, off on the wrong tangent, mortifyingly self-indulgent, and, in the end, words and nothing else. I felt, afterward, like I had no voice. So I'm wondering again, what has changed?

The satisfaction of expressing an idea - just to know that the idea can be shared, and listened to - is something everyone needs, probably. But ideas don't manifest themselves. I believe, now, in failure - doing a thing knowing that I will probably fail, and delighting in it none the less, because it is more than words. I'm interested in what can happen, what I can do, now, as an attempt to make the world viscerally mine, without fear of failure. I want to feel what is outside of my presumptions, fears, and manners - not just feel, but grasp it and caress it and throw it through a brick wall.

 

 

Night of the Emoticons

Last night I dreamed I was walking at dusk through a dense forest, and as the light began to fade I emerged into a clearing. I suddenly felt that something was deeply wrong - and then I saw them.

The emoticons.

Thousands of them, motionless like beach balls on the ground, staring at me in the near-darkness with their colons for eyes. Then, they started chanting.

BLOG

BLOG

BLOG

BLOG

BLOG

BLOG

BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOGBLOGBLOGBLOGBLOGBLOGBLOG

And then I woke up, cold.

I was uncomfortable, before, with the word "blog", but now I'm downright creeped out. I think, to avoid confusion, the only solution is to use b**g. The nice thing about b**g is that it leaves some room for interpretation - a first-time reader might think it means "boog", which could be a truncation of "booger" - or perhaps indicating a plethora of boogers - or maybe one would think of "bong", "bang", or "borg" - it all depends on your state of mind and familiarity with marijuana and Star Trek (please avoid mixing these two things). What is really cool is that some people will think it's a new secret swear.

So anyway, I'll get around to writing more about Montreal.

intermission

I began this...thingy - I'll try to choose a suitable word later - with a wide variety of ideas circulating. I thought about being serious. I thought about being philosophical. I thought about posting poems and sketches and scanned hand-written letters and making it all very analog and cozy, but here's the deal: my apartment has no internet. having moved here for four months, I have no scanner or printer. I have a camera which takes, at best, mediocre photographs, and that's before you factor in my below-average photographic talents.
So it was clearly the perfect time to start using the web as a regular creative outlet. It's certainly true that your limitations can help to funnel those normally scattered creative impulses, so i'm interested in seeing where this takes me. So far I've decided to just write down whatever comes to mind and post it, even if it's stupid. It's probably a good exercise in letting go of the desire to be clever and intelligent.
So ok - sometimes it works, sometimes not. A mix.
Writing is usually hard, only sometimes easy - and either way it usually needs a lot of editing. I'm saying this mostly for my own benefit, to remind myself - there will be times when the one door - writing - that allows the mist of ideas and emotions and remembrances and hopes and terrors to liquefy and pour out and, upon cooling, stare back at me as something solid, is not opening. At those times, there will be no posts, but I'll probably be having a decent lunch somewhere, so that's encouraging.

I've decided to write a blog. I'm hoping the blog goes something like this:

SOME WORDS

SOME PICTURES

SOME MORE WORDS

I BECOME RICH!

But if that doesn't happen after the first couple of posts I'll probably give up.

I don't like the word "blog". Don't call it that. Come up with your own word, as long as it's not "blog". Or "pizza", because that would be confusing. This... thingy is intended to document some of my experiences living in Montreal for four months on a work term. I'm working for the government, doing, um - I won't talk much about my job. Mostly I'll talk about things that happen before and after work, hence the title of this... thingy.

Here's some photos of stuff so you don't get bored:

A big church

A field

Avenue Du Parc, outside my apartment, during a thunderstorm

Me at work

The sunrise from the top of Mont Royal at 6:00am, which I dragged myself out of bed and rode my bike all the way up for and then after rode down and went to work and fell asleep at my desk

The best bakery in the western hemisphere, unfortunately near my apartment

Bored yet? Okay, here's a link to the best song in the universe.

If you were thinking, "that's great, but what I really want is to watch a video about kinetic sculpture", then you're really in luck. Here.

There's a lot to like about Montreal. There's a lot to like about Vancouver, which is where I usually say I'm from, and so maybe for the next post some kind of comparison is in order, with charts and categories, like the Olympics.

I'll get to work on that.