I’m harbouring some unproductive patterns, and the effort to break out seems immense. Somehow, the two-point-five metres between the couch and my desk has become an insurmountable distance, no matter how many rules I try to impose on myself. Then, even if I’ve made it to the desk, a thousand distractions lurk between logging into my laptop and opening any word processing software. Even as I’m slogging through quagmires of aggregators, clicking link after link to view pointless images, I know that stringing phrases into sentences — however horrible, however few — is a better use for my time than what I’m doing. But there’s always one more link to click, one more comment thread to read, and then it’s too late to go to bed early. Again.

So I write this because I want to return to something without going backwards. Whatever I was writing 10 years ago is not what I will produce now, under these circumstances, with these surroundings. I’m no longer interested in adhering to a schedule or delivering n posts per week. This space is no longer a goal in itself. But it’s as good a place as any to experiment with putting one word next to another, just to see how they fit.

So the intent was always to post something once a week. Not just anything though. Something good. And fuck if that plan didn’t seize up my creative muscles until I was just barely getting by on what I could squeeze out for the unbelievably easy to please office crowd. Between perfectionism, feeling generally uncommunicative, and a couple of extracurricular editing contracts, I have been pretty well silent here for nearly a month.

Someone at work today told me it’s winter. Which is impossible because the world is still green and yellow and red and orange. These West Coasters don’t understand my winters, and I’m not sure I understand theirs. But I am in love with this lazy autumn. My street is littered with big orange-gold leaves, and just today, I conceded that the mornings are a bit too chilly for my heavy summer jacket and shrugged into my light wool coat. The rains will start soon enough, and I’ll have to learn to deal with the damp heavy darkness. It’s amazing what the sight of green grass can do for the soul at this time of year.

Somewhere else it’s NaNoWriMo. And Movember. But I am participating in a different kind of contest. A photo challenge to document aspects of my world with a different focus each day. I don’t have any aspirations to join the ranks of my many photographer friends. It simply seems like a good opportunity to re-engage with the world I find myself moving through. I’ve been disconnected and distant so far. Reluctant to force my way in anywhere. But it’s time to connect with this city a bit more. Learn it for what it is and isn’t. Take us both for what we are.

I keep forgetting to write. But not exactly forgetting. Because my voice my voice my voice keeps getting jammed in all these foreign frequencies. And I don’t remember how to speak outside code. Once upon a time, I knew the translation. Ways to be understood on the fuzziest line. Crisp diction and garbled messages repeating and repeating on remote towers. The distinction between here and there lost in several fractions of a second. We never knew how to compensate for the delay, and sound has never yet turned a corner without help. We were alone in static, in the hiss of a lost line. Clipped click of radio pulse.

10-4, 10-35. Control, out.

2.
I found out about a death. A very specific death of someone I knew obliquely who was nonetheless important. He supported me in ways I didn’t know I needed and didn’t understand the value of. I would like to find motivation in this subtle regret. Somehow use this as a catalyst for courage. How many years can I lie fallow instead of tossing a few seeds to see what happens?

3.
I sometimes think I don’t challenge myself enough. Don’t surround myself with people who push my limits. It’s leading to a strange mix of fear and complacency. Too much self-satisfaction is bad for the soul.

4.
I was feeling chatty before I sat down to write. If you were here, you’d know what I mean. I miss you. In every sense of the word.

Surrealism may be my favourite artistic movement. The subversion of it. Reinvention and reordering. Disorder and absurdity that isn’t nonsense. It turns sense on its elbow and I like that. Although I’ve tried out cultivating order, rationality, and logic in my daily interactions, they aren’t my native tongues. I feel at home in the images of Surrealist works. Bizarre and unsettling and chaotic as they sometimes seem, they remind me that not everything is understood scientific or rational terms.

That’s where it all began to resonate; the Surrealists movement was a reaction to the rationality and scientific emphasis they had been raised with in the context of dealing with World War I. These concepts were (to them) inadequate tools for deciphering the psychological aftermath of the war. So they pushed into myth and subconscious and attempted to recreate understanding by reassembling the known and unknown outside of reason.

In listening to the talk, I realized I often place too much emphasis on making sense of the world using tools that are mostly foreign to me. Like handing a mitre box to a weaver and expecting a brilliant charcoal sketch. I try to use reason to process and communicate my world; I don’t intend to dismiss reason and logic, but I need to recognize that I don’t live in those spaces. I live in the soaring rustle of crows’ wings, the crunch of gravel under bicycle tires. In rain falling through the trees outside my front window. In the sweep of colour against a stranger’s skin. A laugh, a phrase, a perfectly timed exchange passing through my hearing. Goldfish in all the wrong-but-right places.

I knew this. But I had forgotten. I will likely forget again. And this is ultimately what art is for: to come inside and kick around the furniture we thought we had placed so perfectly. Remind us of all the cubby holes where we tucked ourselves away.

My album is Hard Candy by Counting Crows. I don’t remember why I bought it, but for the fall of 2002, it had a near permanent home in my car’s CD player. Beginning to end and end to beginning. The songs were a strange intensified echo of what was going on in my life.

These are the circumstances: I thought I was trying to be in love with two men at the same time. The real situation, in retrospect, was that I didn’t realize I wasn’t in love with my boyfriend of four years, and I found myself desperately infatuated with someone else. Inevitably, without being technically unfaithful, I was lying to everyone, myself most of all. My boyfriend had to have been willfully ignorant (he was pretty smart except when it came to me) because not one of my friends was fooled by anything I claimed. Hence, the comfort of Adam Durwitz’ voice cracking on emotion that melodies could not contain.

The intervening years (and the influence of my husband) have changed the way I listen to music. Reactions are still viceral, but the depth of the experience flows more from the music itself, and less from outside associations. So a couple of weeks ago, I started wondering how I would react to this album if it came into my life now. Because of those few months, a bloated emotion experienced within a negligible duration, I have a relationship with these songs that colours any objective evaluation of their merits. But the real question is does that matter? Do I need to be able to extricate the music from the memory to evaluate it in terms of present experience?

As a mini-experiment, I put Hard Candy into heavy rotation on my iPod (listening from start to finish once every few days) to see if the separation was possible. For the first few listens, the memory was so vivid the experiment seemed like misplaced nostalgia. I could recall the roads I drove, the texture of the air: late autumn, late night sharpness spiced with fallen leaves drenched in late season rain and early frosts. And of course, each song had underlying harmonics of emotions that had absorbed too much of me for too long.

I should have known it was all related to Pavlovian conditioning: the dogs eventually stopped salivating at the sound of a bell. Each time I listen to the album now lessens previous associations. By asking the question, I began being able to evaluate this one album on its own terms. Eureka. Or something. Because it isn’t quite that simple. Complex neural patterns have been established in my brain; I still enjoy the memories and want to maintain some aspects of their intensity while understanding that none of those people really exist in present terms. Weakening the link is valuable only if I want, on occasion, to enjoy the music itself.

I’m not sure these questions will have any long-term effect on my relationship to music in general, but I’m glad I took the time to explore. I know now that Hard Candy appeals to me on a level beyond objectivity. Guitar riffs, lyrics, over-dramatic production burrow deep into my skin and feed me on a level deeper than analysis. The memories can slide in and out of the experience as they please. I’ll just pour myself another glass of wine. And listen.

Politically, I’m a bit ambivalent about the federal New Democratic Party; they seem a little too idealistic for most of my moods. But a good friend once called the NDP the social conscience of Canada. I think that’s true. They are the party that calls us to remember that not all people have the support or the means to pull themselves above the circumstances of their birth. The party isn’t afraid to put people before corporations. Which has never seemed more apparent than under the leadership of Jack Layton.

Regardless of my political stance, I was relieved and excited when the NDP swept into the House of Commons. I was truly looking forward to having Mr. Layton as the leader of the official opposition. He was capable of doing what previous opposition leaders had failed to do: take a stronger stance against Mr. Harper’s Conservative government. The whole political system needs a shake up, and I never questioned that Layton would be noisy, for whatever it would be worth to our close-lipped Prime Minister.

Despite the photos of a gaunt Jack Layton that peppered the internet, his personality seemed too vibrant to let something like a little cancer take him down. So the shock to me is both that he is gone and that the gap he leaves feels so huge. I will miss his presence, and I feel sorrow. But I read his parting words to Canadians, and I have hope that he has left momentum for the party and the next leader to continue strongly as Canada’s conscience. His legacy is hope. And that is good good good.

Recently, I uprooted what feels like everything. In reality, I kept my husband and parts of my job, but we moved our lives to the West Coast, leaving many good friends and a few bad habits behind. The physical upheaval unearthed a capacity for openness that has taken me two months to begin examining.

It could be that just living here breeds both physical and mental activity. In the context of this new life, I can’t seem to stop exploring thoughts. Chasing down ideas and finding the intersection where I can join the conversation.

All this is just the catalyst for a vocal resurgence. I’ve been excusing my silence as a refusal to add to the din of opinions battling inanely in the chasms and caverns of the internet. Which is ridiculous, now that I name it. A thousand others may say the same things, more succinctly, more loquaciously, more elegantly, or more crudely. But maybe I can pick up a few things others have missed along the way. And within this, we may find the beauty of meeting each other inside experience. In plain voice.

The soundtrack bubbles against a crush of bodies. Recorded piano glides between legs and sashays around hips; the silent clip of hard soles against harder concrete outside this microcosm on wires. We are all bound to this route. Lurching to predestined stops. Except when our our minds are overwhelmed with everything we’ve accepted. And we change the sign to flash SORRY, FULL. But not soon enough. Each thought grazes the knees of another, pressed thigh to thigh and arm to arm. Careful never to make eye contact, except in the briefest moments when your eyes make sense to mine.

These memories wander long. Time as convoluted as a cerebral cortex. Months still shiny under all the dust. Polished too smooth from too much tumbling. Does she remember who I turned out to be?

I’m surrounded by boxes after four days of a near empty apartment. We had a miscommunication with the moving company; our stuff was not delivered when we had expected, so we had to make do with what we had crammed in the car and what our new building manager was kind enough to lend us. Sleeping on an air mattress notwithstanding, it was nice to get to know our new living space without our possessions.

The building is old. A little run down, but comfortable. Charming and colourful and compact without feeling cramped. A nice change after the soulless townhouse in Edmonton. Oh, it was a decent place to live for the time we were there, but it had no mystery. This place already feels like it wants to be home.

It has been a week of motion. By car, by bike, on foot. I’ve walked kilometres this week. In sun and shade and cloud. Walked down to surprise tall ships off Kitsilano Beach. To an excellent sushi place. To Granville Island. Up and down the shops near our place. Re-learning my feet.

Tomorrow, I start work. I don’t know if the ordinary style of permanence that a job gives life will tip me into the reality of my situation. Because it still feels like I’m just visiting. Even though everything I own in the world is here. I’m not really here yet. Because if I’m really here, almost everyone I want to share this adventure with is too far away. And I’m not ready for that.