a room, a lamp, a friday night

It’s been a good session. Not often do I miss my morning session and come back strong later in the day. I wrote for three hours, from 7:30 to 10:30, on a Friday night while white-faced girls with pink mesh caps were filing into bubble tea places around Richmond Hill. As I was chipping away at my long paragraphs, I had forgotten all about the shirt I wanted to order online, the shirt that was now discontinued and how it upset me as recently as 7:00. I decided to have dinner then (a good idea), listened to the first inning of the Jays game, made me a milk tea, came up, and wrote. And here I am.

on living the life of a swordsman

I was walking down Yonge Street. Went to Mel Lastman Square to check out how Connie actually feels to sit there. My description is quite accurate.

At the talk today, I was lining up to ask the author a question. A girl was in line ahead of me. She told me to go ahead because she had a whole list of questions written on a paper that she wanted to ask and cross them off. She looked very young. Maybe grade ten or so. I asked her, “Are you working on something?” She said a weak ‘yeah’ and sort of nodded, and I didn’t ask further. I should have said, “May I ask what you’re working on?” That would have sounded less intrusive, I suppose. And I suppose writing is a bit different from other arts. I don’t know why, but it’s hard to actually tell people what you’re working on. Now, as I look back at my own thus-far not-yet-published writing career, I have come a long way because I can now actually tell people, “I’m working on a collection of sixteen stories…” and I can say this fluently now probably because I’m actually writing. It’s easier to say you do something when you actually do it! I hope this girl is writing and that she isn’t just thinking about it. She’ll come out of it. I just hope that for her. Not sure why.

Then I walked up Yonge Street, all the way to Finch Station, passing by balconies on condos that I might never afford to buy. But so what.

trespass

I have nothing to say. But I’m here. It’s like being in an empty banquet hall. Wineglasses line up along this table. White tablecloth. Other round tables and chairs and plates and utensils set up as though all the people were here. I take a seat to catch this perspective of the hall, and I try another seat to catch another perspective. But I mustn’t touch anything, and lay my fingerprints on the knife handle or crumple the napkins. I mustn’t leave clues where I don’t want them left. As I sit back, it does get to feel awfully eerie. The ceiling’s too high and the air’s pressing down on me. I sink lower, and lower, and there, under the table. I’m totally under the table. It’s where everyone’s hiding. How my feet never kicked them even by accident, I don’t know. But they’re all here.

drafted on 070918

china and istanbul

This morning I have gotten up late. I had stolen an extra hour of sleep. At 7:43am now, I have less than three hours before work starts, which means less time to write, but it would all work out if I turn in a productive session. My window is only slightly opened. The air is cold, but my head is clear, at least I’m not yawning and dragging to get back on the bed. Not at all.

I bought two books last night. In Oracle Bone, Peter Hessler writes China with such delicacy that I see and smell the streets as if I’m there. His tone is confident and his facts are solid. Each piece of history connects with a human story, and I learn the history through my own interest in the human stories he narrates. Orhan Pamuk writes Istanbul from a line of memories accumulated from having lived in the city from the time of his birth. How does a writer accurately record a place and a people without the story being blurred by his own attachment?

I was reading these books last night and I ponder if I might want to be a ‘travel writer.’ But first I have to solidify my own writing. Solidify what I do, not just in the sense of coming to write every day, but being able to record things for what they are. I don’t have the money to travel now. Yes, I want to volunteer in Africa, study in England, but very soon, later. Now I work on my craft.

around this time ten years ago

We took the train to Tenjin. 150 yen. Four stops. Had dinner at Duo Pietro, an Italian restaurant on the 13th floor of the IMS building. Maya’s sister worked there and gave us free salad. She was the cashier when I paid the bill. “Date?” her sister teased her. Maya nodded embarrassedly.

It was night. We sat at Kego Park. There was a little pond. Next to the pond were benches. Around the benches were skateboarders. We sat ourselves at the back end of the park, overlooking the skateboarders and the benches and the many couples that sat here and there and the pond that was glittering under the lights. By that time, there was nothing to hide.

every little thing

So yes. About this report I’m writing. It’s nothing special. In fact, I can try to enjoy the writing process (though I'm not sure if I can type through it with my CD player playing). And what am I to do with my stack of CDs yet to be listened to! The weather is too nice outside and it makes me think I ought to be doing something productive in the sense of building something or giving bread to somebody rather than dancing around on my keyboard and hearing myself think out loud.

Lucy Maud Montgomery likes to say… “Well, this is nice… and look, that is nice… and how we had such fun… and it’s another rainy day… and I did this nice thing for this person and that thing for that nice person. (She doesn’t write like this exactly. My stupid tone captures nothing of the depth of her world). But what I mean is, you don’t always have to record ‘things’. You can just write about whatever's in your head. It’s like there’s this liquidy little ball thing that moves within my head so that whenever I type in my diary I just let this little ball take me to wherever. It’s all in my mind. Wherever I go. No matter the colour of the ceiling I’m sitting under or the texture of the table I’m writing on or the view beyond my window, it isn’t so much what they are but what I make of them. I don’t think I’m very good at recording the colour of the ceiling or the pattern of a dress or the way the petal of a flower curves and bends, but I can tell you quite accurately how this little ball moves inside my head while I watch over every little thing.

as of tomorrow and my scribbling habit

This, my last day of part-time work, living the life of getting off work at 1pm, I've spent the afternoon hours listening to the tall stack of old CDs I bought. As of tomorrow, I'll finish work at 4pm, which means less time to listen to CDs, and some of CDs will go 'unlistened' for a little while, at least until I figure out a way to steal time, which can't be too hard to do. But tonight, I just thought the day'd be more complete if I type here, dust off an old composition, post it, and watch these beautiful words appear on the screen in the neat little manner that my blogger account has gotten them to do. It'd be even more complete if I read a little before I go to bed (and scribble down a few more words before that), and yes, get up early so I can continue Connie's story tomorrow.





this written just now

New songs posted!

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What to make of this Pocket PC and my blog and my getting my writing friends to blog and my complaints about the directionlessness I've been sensing about my blogging habits and feeling tired from just writing random thoughts? What to make of the old-fashioned handwritten diary which I have turned to for the sake of making it more 'publishable' so that others would read it after my death and to lessen the amount of rambling and extra words I would otherwise put if I were to type? The process of handwriting my diary allows me to reflect as I write.

But yes��� The idea is simply this. I will bring a computer with me and there will be typed diary entries. Sometimes I'd take one of these entries and turn it into a 'bloggable' or 'presentable' piece. This is exactly what I'm doing now. I'm stealing a pensive midday moment to scribble something, a piece of something that would be archived into the 'diary' section, and then if I want to, if I feel up to the whim, I pull it out and turn it into an ���entry���. As simple as that.

This is what blogging is about. I don't like to just post random thoughts. I'd like to edit each entry a little. None of it is publishable by any means, but it's still fun to have a literary presence. Online, even.

It's funny. Each time I pull out my diary and start writing, I end up writing about my writing. It's like a frame around a frame. A photographer taking a picture of himself taking a picture. A picture of a person holding a picture of a person holding a picture.

But what about now? What about this fear of just diving in and writing about what I see now and what I do now? I don't want to write about what I do now. There's nothing interesting about what I'm doing now. Doing nothing now, but typing, sitting here in the coffee shop and feeling thankful that my Iced Hazelnut Latte still tastes sweet even after the ice has melted. See nothing now but this party of Taiwanese people ahead of me, six of them, a middle-aged couple and their daughter (late teen or early twenties) came first, then joined by another middle-aged couple, then joined by a middle-aged man who just left. The latter looked like a real estate agent, or I assumed he was because he just came, asked them to sign some documents, and left. And now, as I���m writing about them, all six of them have gotten up and left.

Having lived. These two words enter my mind as I thought of this question just now: What's the point of me carrying this machine around and recording random things I see (like these six people I wrote about, people whom I don't even know)? The daughter did catch my attention at first. I thought she looked shapely. I liked her frizzly hair that wasn't overly colored or punkish. I liked how the white long-sleeve sweater fit her in a shapely way. But yes. Having lived. It's the same with people who carry cameras around and taking pictures here and there and posting them on Flickr. This is what they saw and this shows they've lived. Do I need to write all this to indicate I have lived? People who don't write, have they not lived? Why is it that I have to have this typing habit to sustain me? Uncertainty about my own existence? And what needs to happen, Mr. Adam, for your existence to be more solid? Do you even want your existence to be more solid, especially after how you said 'solid lines win solid love'? But there's this part of you that says: it is the dotted-line about me, this fleeting aspect of me that makes me attractive. When you talk like this, we have nothing to say.



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