F. is sick (F. fell ill). Illness struck F. F caught something, a cold. F. stumbled into another sickness. A cold shivered her. ALL THAT TO SAY I HAVE NOT SLEPT. These days you have to bury your aesthetic within the straightforward and factual. Don’t reach for alliteration or any other rhyme (unless it passes…
When I do a sport, I obsess over the minutia. All my thought leads back to it, in this case kickboxing. If I begin a disciplined attempt to think about a piece of writing, I will emerge from that thought process some minutes later (like awakening from, or becoming, conscious) only to realize I’ve been…
A list of writing projects underway or which I want to undertake: Kingsway Massage – short story Collection of Memories – essays Dying girl – TV Show School Shooter – TV Show Architecture of a Life (Collection of writings over the last two decades on trying to represent my adolescence). Kempowski Ecolot (for Canada) I…
The city doesn’t bother me, b/c so many layers of thought and feeling insulate me, felted layers that only a certain, insistent violence can penetrate. I enjoy crowds my mind cannot ignore. What happens if I open myself? What do I notice? A cute girl in a skirt. Small, circular bruises speckle her upper thigh….
The city’s landscape, natural and constructed, leaves me dead. Is inert a better word? Has familiarity accustomed my eyes? When I travel, I experience discovery. Tempered by my family in Athens; intensified by my loneliness in Cuba. Is it my age? Is it my family? There is less possibility today. Now, I have something to…
We drove to Spectacle Lake this morning. I saw it on the Victoria subreddit. Twenty minutes north on the Trans Canada, left on Whittaker, and drive to the end. Avoid the crowds of Thetis or Durrance. Turning down Whittaker I return to my past: driftwood fences decorate hippy hobby farms speckled with remnant fruit trees,…
I maintain a mental Rolodex of trees. I’ve found most of them driving. These days, I no longer have the time to wander up and down dead-end streets, but I once did, and I would explore the city for hours looking for the unusual, the beautiful, the secret parks and concrete eddies where I could…
“Was that fun”, my daughter asked? “Did you have fun?” “Yes.” We stared, and finally I said, “Good” with the punctuating mark used by parents to mask their confusion sometimes anger. What is fun? A moment before we realize we just had it. I held pads for B. last night, a trainer and fighter at…
NOTE: I made two entries for August 4th. I believe the one previous to this entry was mislabeled. Took me this long to specify the day of the week. Sure, the date contains this information, but why obscure it and require a calendar or Google search? Given the nature of a journal, does the day…
I’ve nearly filled these 3 small journals. They weren’t cheap. I should buy larger, practical, ring-board notebooks. Their size puts me off in the same way I always stop reading Gravity’s Rainbow at the same paragraph after flipping through twenties pages and not seeing an end. I can only sustain effort if I feel the…