Why talk about now when I can reminisce?
Perhaps it's something about the climate or light quality of this time of year that inspires a penchant for nocturnal nostalgia (and the consumption of cheese). (Or perhaps it's something about my procrastinating rustling up the Rasputin ensemble for one more tired trot around the track for tomorrow's bombastic Outlaw Band Hallowe'en show in Quesnel.) In any case, a sum of recent experiences have been putting me in mind of a certain critical but largely undocumented transition period in my life spanning the end of the honeymoon with everything2 and the final "regular" adoption of livejournal use, running from roughly 2001 through 2003 -- and tellingly encompassing my final rejection of poetry (hum, and post-secondary education, along with one of my two changes of house) and glacial baby steps into accordion fluency. Also, perhaps the period in which my hold-over adolescent optimism in regards to my personal life finally gave up the ghost; I was not only interested in girls, but had not yet adopted what I concluded to be the fair, cool and civilized abstract approach of not treating people any differently regardless of whether I secretly thrilled at the remote prospect of someday possibly engaging in mutual physical gratification with them. (For lack of ability to stop actually objectifying them, I figured the decent thing to do was to at least not treat them like objects, ie to not subject them to any special or extraordinary treatment at all -- I will act as though you are all monkeys to me! It's a pity that this approach, while motivated by some twisted distortion of respect, is so easily mistaken for disinterest. It was easier while I laboured beneath the (proven erroneous) assumption that my generative organs were defunct -- since of course there's no point in longing after what you (think you) can't have, a good case of that old attachment leads to suffering chestnut.)

In any case, recently-exhumed memories from this period reminded me of my ultimate conception of the callowly selfish nature of immature lust and fear of the plainly anti-social behavior passion could drive one to. My blithe intensity frightened me and ultimately I concluded it was probably for the good of all that we put these feelings aside where they could do no harm to others. (What? Repressed emotions, harmful? Only to one's self! And who's the one trying to eschew selfish tendencies here?) Thinking back now, these were probably an extension of self-imposed behavior censures I clamped on myself after observing how making a big fuss of someone's public self-harm in the late '90s likely contributed to further harm; I must have resolved on some level to only acknowledge and respond to positive bids for attention. I dubbed my emotionless selfless ideology "post-humanism" and proceeded around the turn of the century to play a part in breaking up an engagement between two people I'd never met. (Still had some bugs to work out.) This may not all follow because hey, it was after all a turbulent period of transition in which some secret and apparently unrelated (if not outright self-contradictory) truths revealed themselves fully-formed; I don't need to explain this because I know it to be self-evident! Also, I may not be giving them the clearest voice at 5 am. (But with pickup in four hours, what else am I gonna do?)

I suppose I am beginning to reveal why the period was so undocumented; some thoughts are just too big (or amorphous at least) to gather until reflection and life experience endow the thinker with a basket large and tenacious enough to hold them. Curiously, what documents remain from the period are vague and elusive; was I preserving the identities of the innocent or merely trying to appear more intriguing through the omission of key details?

...

Over the Columbus Day / Thanksgiving weekend en route south with the Planks (a tale still awaiting processing; perhaps you'll get an "October in review" photoblog) I was struck with vivid memories of an earlier trip to the Peace Arch crossing, starting with a sighting of the closest bus stop to the border crossing and side-stepping with discussion of the continuous public transportation coverage from Horseshoe Bay to Portland, Oregon for eight dollars, providing you have three days to spend doing it and a good friend in Olympia to put you up for the night. (Particulars fudged from memory; qous can surely dig up his original research, however outdated now. Someday I still hope to put the hypothesis to the test.) But when I began pointing out where I had camped out for two nights fasting in a tent next to a floral display, I suppose there was no getting around vaguely invoking the bizarre circumstances that had led me there. (And why did I not make back-ups of that entry's photos? While I know that hotlinking is inelegant at best I suppose I never felt I had many alternatives at my disposal.)

The rest of the month was spent more making memories than looking back to existing ones; Thursday night Conrad was showing prospective partners a potential underground arts venue, which resonated deafeningly with the Church of Pointless Hysteria, a onetime studio / gallery across the street from the onetime Woodwards' building, where I first took up Living Closet reins before some years later dismounting from the overworked and expired steed, eyes X'd out and gaseous clouds in the shape of skull-and-crossbones emerging from its ears. Have I learned anything in the past eight years, I asked myself, that would keep me from plunging back into the same activity and making the same glorious mistakes? (The Butchershop was a suite of similar but different mistakes.)

Today I'm able to make the first visit to the library in months, strike finally "resolved" however satisfactorily, and anticipate setting back into motion my lifestyle plan of living well provided I take out my library card more frequently than my bank card. From there I proceed to Media Democracy Day, an annual outburst in this, possibly the world's most concentrated area of consolidated media ownership, and one that I have previously attended as a visitor and as a journalist. This time I was sitting in at a table on behalf of my father's newspaper, the Columbia Journal, but remarking to myself that for lack of it I could do as much good for other organizations there playing far greater parts in my life, Co-op radio or Spartacus Books or even FreeGeek (a gut nearly busts when I remark that when thinking of media democracy, e-waste recycling is one of the first subjects to my mind also!) I am assigned a table to share with a lady from the SFPIRG and gradually (through my casual vocal characterisation of Conrad, proclaiming the natural relatedness of cycling, nudism and anti-consumerism since, after all, they are all things that interest him) determine that she's been a part of "the rest of the story" of threads I'd long since set aside. And so I tell her of the founding of the Work Less Party, its roots in anti-war protest, and strong ties to Vancouver's Critical Mass community, first having catastrophically launched from that very (SFU Harbour Centre) site 9 years prior at the Free U teach-in event.

Then a stranger came to our table to inquire regarding our various causes and asked me how the last few years had gone. Egad, I must know this person but from where? Turns out that upon dropoff at the airport en route to my New Year's Eve 2003 party in New York City, I made sure before catching my flight to put a rock-paper-scissors-by-mail move into the post box there for her to mull over while I met a cognizant and various and sundry (for cultish reasons that are no longer entirely clear) in Kansas. That was to be my postcardx year of mail art but things (and my burgeoning scrivener's palsy) got in the way. If you are going to send love letters it should be clear that that's what they are, but I was not cool enough to sustain coy flirtation and eventually, playing games with myself unrelated to the one I was playing with her, I experienced a bit of an emotional meltdown, my last great desperate flaring of want before settling into a stable sort of resignation (very occasionally punctuated with stabs of surprise and disbelief.)

What astounded me was the way this person who for a time consumed all my idle thoughts (last in a long line of relationships largely conducted safely in my head) and dismissed as lost forever (last known sighting: Trieste) now went completely unrecognized by me! Have I so thoroughly dismantled my desire that it can no longer even identify its own remains? I found this failure to identify her so astounding it shocked and rocked me in a fashion even more profound than the news of my (phrase omitted for privacy reasons, then compared for totally relevant reasons to how little kissing I do) but I suppose that won't happen accidentally, however bizarrely lightning struck twice four years ago. I probably shouldn't follow the model of that farmer who, once observing a rabbit running against a stump and breaking its neck, starves to death waiting for another rabbit to come by and do the same.)

I suppose if her very appearance could be banished from my mind (but what is mine still doing in hers? well, sticking -- it seems to be good at that), I could be said to have gotten over her. (But were that truly the case, would I be waxing on at such great length?) In any event, if that were so, the record seems to indicate that would be a first. After all, my journal appears to suggest that any event in my past, no matter how seemingly trivial or inane at the time, is more significant to me than than right now. Right?

(Guess it's time to pull that costume together. I'd like to think that over four hours I would have come up with something a bit more coherent. Who knows, with eight hours of editing something focused might emerge. A sonnet perhaps, or (with a further eight hours) a haiku.)