Category: Blog

This and the I’m Tired post are marked as asides—think of them as little detours on the general narrative of the new life project you’ve all signed up to join me on.

mid 18th century (as a noun): from French détour ‘change of direction,’ from détourner ‘turn away.’

This week’s change in direction comes via a hardware failure in my networked hard drive. All of my files are offline. All my words and photos and music… are all sitting right in front of me, but the little black box I use to get at them refuses to start. I’ll be able to recover everything, but it’s going to take more time, and, odd for time traveller, I sometimes feel like I don’t have as much time as I used to. Am I doing it wrong?

No—everything you’re doing is part of the plan. This is the part where everything breaks and you fix it, remember?

Oh, right…

See—I forget to remember sometimes in the face of where I’m going the path I’ve taken. I don’t see the progress I’m making because I’m always looking forward. I don’t want to look back so badly I forget it’s sometimes good to remind myself I am making progress. Two months ago I posted about having to move out of my apartment—I did it. For years I’ve wanted to work in a new industry, to do something positive for my world—and now I am. See. Progress.

The last time my life fell apart I told myself I wanted to be able to sit on my own couch and watch my own TV in time for my birthday, several months away at the time. It involved me getting a real job at a fake company and moving into the CityPlace apartment I would then leave again just over a year later. But I only missed my mark by a day. One day! Imagine if I’d actually tried at something which actually mattered…

Well—this time I am.

With that in mind, so what if I’m detoured by computer failures? I’ve recovered from worse. Bring it. And so what if I have no time this month for writing or photography? There is always next month. Or the month after that. If I had to work all through June so I could move and work all through July to get settled and work all through August to get rid of all the extra stuff I’ve been moving around with me for the last decade while I figured out what I wanted to do with myself and then toss in a rebuild of a terabyte of data just for fun—we’ve covered this already: bring it.

In fact, all these detours, all these journeys, all these trips, all these trials, all the no time between them—it’s all adding up. I remember something about me now, about how I used to be: unstoppable. It didn’t matter what needed to be done—I’d do it.

Now—where’s my swan or dolphin or rocket ship or whatever it is…?

Well… I made it. I remember a massive wind farm near Creemore, tacos from Momofuku, Sloan performing in a barn, I think my birthday was in there somewhere, and then it’s a blur of caffeinated four to five hours of sleep a night for three weeks, more trips to and from my apartment than I care to remember, and a bunch of stuff I don’t think I can remember. But somehow it all worked out. I’m here. My new home: the city I’ve always but never quite lived in. Let me explain…

My decision to move out of my apartment was mostly practical—but the other part, since there’s never been anything fun about a mostly practical decision made in the history of decisions ever, was made with a sense of fun in mind. I wanted it to be an adventure. I wanted a new way to live and experience the city. I wanted to be mobile. I wanted to be different as a result. And I lucked out. I found a room in a house near school where things feel out of time—Paris in the early thirties I’d say, when art nouveau and art deco had been overlapping for years, but if it were happening in a hundred year old house in Toronto with stainless steel appliances in 2016. It’s like living in a hotel at the end of the universe. Everything’s taken care of so there’s actually little for me to do when I’m at home except for write, and that’s the point. I’ve got two months to do as much as I can with my writing before school starts, so if I’m not working I’m at home writing, and if I’m not at home writing, I’m out exploring. I’m a happy time traveller.

Tomorrow marks a week since arriving. It’s amazing how quickly a place can start to feel like home after cooking a few meals, reading quietly, and hanging your underwear up to dry. I’ve left my car on the street and use transit to get to and from work now. I’m exploring a familiar but often only just passed through area of the city. There is a 24 hour diner where I had steak and eggs at 2AM after work yesterday. There was a pickup truck full of raccoons in traps I passed by on my way to work this morning. There’s a coffee shop where I can get a double Americano made with more coffee instead of just hot water, plus they put chocolate in it. There’s a dog park and fruit markets. There’s a fancy grocery store. There are several terrible ones. I haven’t even started on all the shawarma places. And it’s only been a week. Yeah… I’m a happy time traveller. Except maybe about the raccoons in traps. They were cute, but it was a sad sort of cute.

The best part so far, by far, is the sleep. It’s so good. It’s quiet here. I don’t need ear plugs. My room is cold and dark. I can even leave the window open if I want and listen to the sounds of the wind in the trees at nighttime. And I’m dreaming again—big, long vibrant dreams where I forget I’m sleeping and then wake up and remember I was. I rally for words and they are calling back. I hear them again. I don’t worry as much as I used to about coming back. I know I am. I don’t have to believe it anymore.

The night I arrived here for the first time it was late after work. The power was out, weirdly, and I’d stopped for a drink with a work buddy, so I was being extra careful in this ornately decorated, cramped, completely foreign, totally dark house in my giant work boots, many backpacks, and cellphone flashlight. I make it to my room, breathe a sigh of relief, and in the silence of the house hear the faintest of footsteps on the carpet.

Freddy? I ask to the darkness.

The lights come on as a black cat with two white whiskers chirps at me, purring.

Welcome.

I’ve been working long nights these last few weeks. Once I came home as the sky was lightening. By the time I was finished eating dinner and getting into bed the sun was already up. I couldn’t do it—I was back at work hours later on no sleep. It’s too loud to sleep here at night let alone in the day.

This amount of work is temporary. I am doing what I need to do to get what I want done. I told myself I didn’t care what I had to do, I was going to do it. If it means little to no sleep until the end of the month, I’ll do it. If it means hauling each box and piece of furniture to where it needs to be myself, I’ll do it. I will do whatever it takes. I’m back.

The moon is keeping me company through it all. From my new vantage point in my apartment it will swing around the buildings and shine in while I work on packing or attempting to write. My hands hurt from work. It’s tough to type, but I do. My head hurts from building skids in my mind. I can’t find my words, and I dream of irregular shapes I form into cubes and then wrap with clear plastic. I walk around inside transport trucks and pretend to unload them. I think in reverse picturing how each order will attempt to rip itself apart as the deliveries are made.

But my hard work is paying off. I’ve been promoted at work—I’m now a pack leader.

Like I said—I’m back.

They—whomever they are—say not to get drunk and read old LiveJournal posts. Well, we’re in luck. I’m only 2.5 drinks in, far from drunk, and it’s not LiveJournal I’m going through, just the collection of half‐started and half‐finished—and there is a difference—blog entries sitting on my computer.

I drink directly from the small Jameson bottle mistaking it for a beer immediately realizing my mistake as my head burns and waters in a wave of sudden whiskey…

In preparation for moving I’m drinking all that’s left in the bottles on my shelf. If I like a bottle, I will leave a little left in it so I’m reminded to buy another one. I don’t keep what I don’t like. And this is almost the same way I treat a blog post on my computer. If it’s still there, undrunk as it were, it means there’s something to it I’m hanging on to. It’s unfinished. So in the spirit finishing what I’ve left unfinished—bottom’s up. I’ve dealt with the Canadian rye and polished off the Irish whiskey. There’s one bottle left and the Dj just mixed Missy Elliot into The White Stripes.

…I don’t know how to delineate the post I’m making now from the scraps I found on my computer from then. They tie into the next two posts I will be making as part of my Departures series as it turns out, a spot of good luck, although Egon Spengler maintains luck is for the ill‐prepared.

Let’s try this—October of last year: I’m covered in cat scratches and there’s half a body’s worth of hole in the apartment wall. It’s my first Saturday to myself in what feels like years. I don’t know what to make of it, so I dig out my old 35mm SLR, walk, and write.

---

You typed “flim” for the filename—nice.

Shut up.

—

I take the last roll of film I’ve got with me for a Thanksgiving walk. My camera comes too—it all works out.

The previous roll of film I shot was May of this year. The roll before that, almost a year and a half ago. The previous roll before that, likely five years ago. The film I’m using is at least that old.

Digital equipment affords me, usually now anyway, hundreds to thousands of shots—or an unlimited amount with deletes. With film, usually 24. A hard 24. No deletes. There is a finality to the medium I suspect makes me craft a shot more than if I’m shooting digital. Or at least that’s what I tell myself as I pass by picture after picture waiting to find that one out of 24.

I think film makes me a better photographer because I think about each shot more. I think film makes me a worse photographer because I do just that. Think. Too much. I think too much. I walk with my 24 shots. The digital vs. film debate not entering into what’s still an empty camera.

And then I remember: take the picture. It doesn’t matter. Take the picture.

—

The film canister sits on my desk—full of pictures. I know what they are, but I don’t at the same time. A USB stick from my dad loaded with preview images of shots I took with him the other day sits beside it. Twenty‐four shots takes up more space than over three hundred.

My mind races.

Is the stick of files more real than the undeveloped film? I can’t look at either without an interpreter. For one, electronics. And chemistry. For the other, chemistry. And electronics.

It doesn’t matter. Take the the picture.

I start to think about black holes again. Fascinating objects. All you ever see of them is what just crossed into them. An echo of something that was there that now isn’t.

An abusive relationship.

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The title of this post— 한 —is Korean. Pronounced han it haphazardly translated and highly‐simplified means grudge but has also been described to me as a feeling of unfinished business.

Like many nuanced concepts in other languages there is no direct translation into one English word. Do we have a way of encapsulating the feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one’s guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong—all these combined into a single word? Not that I know of. Lucky me, right? But this concept is woven into Korean culture. It’s part of an identity. And as an outsider looking in I am acutely aware of being a foreigner in someone else’s language as I talk about a concept steeped in otherness as if I know anything about it.

Yet—if I put some thought into it—this otherness isn’t as foreign as it seems. Those feelings are not unfamiliar. The scale might be. But to claim it as unique to a single culture and not within grasp to those outside it—as it often is—is a disservice to the second greatest cross‐cultural bridge we have: solidarity. How do you reach a concept so wanting to be understood yet maintains there is no way you could ever understand it? It starts to look like an impossible problem. And I’m immediately suspicious of an impossible problem because I don’t believe it exists.

Does English contain the same raw trauma where a concept such as 한 would result? Possibly. Show me a language which doesn’t. But in exactly the same manor? …Not really. So I’m left with an attempt at the greatest cross‐cultural bridge we have after solidarity: relation. If 한 is representative of a complex set of thoughts and emotions spanning past, present and future, experienced by the individual both as a single entity as well as part of a collective then the corresponding English must sit on the other side and have a similar complexity and weight for it to properly relate.

Revenge seems like a good choice. But it’s too narrow in focus. Too procedural. Too active. The initial translation of grudge by comparison seems far too small a concept in of itself. Too simple and juvenile. What word within English has the power to unify with such sharp and heavy concepts so thoroughly entrenched they become part of an identity that’s both lamented and—perhaps inexplicably—quietly celebrated?

Just one bottle left…

Addiction? …Addiction.

That’s what I’d offer back from English to put on the other side of 한. But not the state of being an addict. I’m talking about what addiction does to people who aren’t addicts themselves. If you took those effects, scaled them up, applied them to a nation’s worth of people, and let the clock run, I think you’d end up with what could be considered 한.

Or as Mark Twain in the 24th century via Star Trek: The Next Generation puts it:

CLEMENS: Any place that doesn’t stock a good cigar doesn’t rank high in my book.

TROI: If you must have one, I’m sure we can replicate it for you.

CLEMENS: You think one of these imitations can take the place of a hand wrapped Havana?

TROI: I wouldn’t know.

CLEMENS: Well, that’s the problem I see here. All this technology it only serves to take away life’s simple pleasures. You don’t even let a man open the door for a lady.

TROI: I think what we’ve gained far outweighs anything that might have been lost.

CLEMENS: Oh? Well, I’m not so impressed with this future. Huge starships, and weapons that can no doubt destroy entire cities, and military conquest as a way of life?

TROI: Is that what you see here?

CLEMENS: Well, I know what you say, that this is a vessel of exploration and that your mission is to discover new worlds. That’s what the Spanish said. And the Dutch and the Portuguese. It’s what all conquerors say. I’m sure that’s what you told that blue-skinned fellow I just saw, before you brought him here to serve you.

TROI: He’s one of the thousands of species that we’ve encountered. We live in a peaceful Federation with most of them. The people you see are here by choice.

CLEMENS: So there are a privileged few who serve on these ships, living in luxury and wanting for nothing. But what about everyone else? What about the poor? You ignore them.

TROI: Poverty was eliminated on Earth a long time ago, and a lot of other things disappeared with it. Hopelessness, despair, cruelty.

CLEMENS: Young lady, I come from a time when men achieve power and wealth by standing on the backs of the poor, where prejudice and intolerance are commonplace and power is an end unto itself. And you’re telling me that isn’t how it is anymore?

TROI: That’s right.

CLEMENS: Well, maybe it’s worth giving up cigars for after all.

Was the last post too sad? Who’s sad from the last post? This will cheer you up… I’ve got a new track on repeat. And—I’m working!

I’m doing something I believe in for the first time in my life instead of doing it for the money as I have previously. It feels so, so good.

My new job is at a local food warehouse. We work with farms around the city to distribute sustainable and ethically grown and produced food to restaurants in the city. The hours are strange, but I don’t have to get up early in the morning, and I’ll be driving around the city late at night to get home—I love it. Plus there’s lots of moving around and heavy lifting, so I don’t have to exercise anymore. My job is hours of exercise! My coworkers are friendly and welcoming, and they nod in agreement and respond when I say things instead of just saying their thing even before I’m finished saying mine. It’s refreshing.

But the most important thing is I’m working in an industry attempting to do something other than just get money. I was sick—physically and mentally sick—of helping people who already had more money than they and their families would ever need get even more money. Money is like energy—you don’t make it, you just convert it and move it around. You can’t get more money yourself without moving it from somewhere—i.e. someone—else. You can play with convoluted conversion paths to hide this process, but that’s how it works when you do the math. Anyone who attempts to convince you otherwise is either ignorant of how our current economy functions or a bastard flush with other people’s cash.

It matters to me how and why money is distributed the way it is. And I know there’s enough here for everyone and everyone else, so rather than going horse trying to explain it I’ve decided to live it.