I’m following the new-age old / freshly reminded advice of my thesis advisor, to start writing first thing in the morning. Though it did take 11 minutes somehow to get from my bed to this desk without doing anything but heating water for coffee and closing some of my many browser links, it’s a good start considering at this hour I’m often not even up yet.
It’s early fall and it shows. Directly in my line of sight from the window, down the street a young maple explodes in vibrant red, nearly matching the “wrong way” circle with a bar through it on the sign post situated in front of it. There are a few people still heading to work, distinguished from the others passing by the purpose in their step. Otherwise it’s the usual Parkdale scene out there; meanderers, shufflers, mothers pitched forward, towing their kid behind them in an urgency-propelled wake, dog walkers, joggers and a lone, staple panhandler on the ready outside the No Frills. He’s not whom you want to be out and about this early… with his alert movements and his poised, straight back. The slight inward curve of his shoulders unfurls and expands like wings towards anyone passing by, following the reflexive motion of his extended, cup-bearing hand. He looks like someone who could work, you think involuntarily, as though your allegiance to the economic machine has overridden your empathy for the pitfalls of humanity. And with just like that, he’s gone. Maybe he did have a job to get to after all.

It has been a while since I’ve written here, and that’s okay. It shifted from one season to another and much has happened in between. Hopefully now with the chill a routine will instil itself, with daily posts full of images just writing themselves. As long as I keep rising with that dimming orange ball I briefly confused for a still-lit streetlamp, my chances are looking good. I feel like I’m writing like Norman Mailer, or trying to, and I’m okay with that too. It’s what’s coming out, and if channeling Norman Mailer leads to getting a post published, then so be it.

I don’t really know where to begin. Where I left off, I suppose, but that may result in a novel, and no one but my grandiose Norman Mailer wants that. I had been documenting the process of recreating a world out of a Japanese woodblock painting, a project that I abandoned soon after because my interest in the work was not keeping in measure with the amount of time it was taking. I think I also walked into a creative dead-end when I attempted to mimic the stylization. Those blocks of grass I was working on, with their spike-brush rendered blades, made to resemble the fast strokes of a small ink brush, felt a lot more like props from a stop-motion recreation of Beetlejuice (first reference that came to mind, it’s too early to remember where the past 30 odd years have gone). Though that may have resulted in a refreshingly new type of production for me, I just wasn’t feeling it enough to commit to the daunting immensity of the whole scene.
Then came Colloquium, the tradition that is maybe unique to my school – the grad student equivalent of the opening ceremonies. As I sat here remembering how as first-year students last September, our classes had been cancelled so to, along with the faculty, participate in the audience, it occurred to me for the first time that there’s a whole cohort of first-year students who are presently embarking on those Creative Computation classes from the solitary confinement of their home residences, which could be anywhere from here to Iran. Sorry guys, that this hasn’t yet been my concern. Colloquium, right – a good excuse and an even better segue back to the point. But seeing as I still intend to follow through with my self-imposed commitment to devoting an entire post about my Colloquium presentation…. I was about to say that I’ll spare you the details but (just then!) my caffeine-accelerated thoughts leapt ahead to the incongruity of attempting to steam-roll over the Colloquium presentation as though the sequence of mental events weren’t relevant (they are to me, goddammit!). So I guess that’s where I should start.