2AM Traffic

I fired up my old desktop computer yesterday after not having turned it on for about a year to see if I could salvage anything from it - journals, songs, a drawing of the tattoo I want. It's pretty much a lost cause, and I'm willing to accept it after finding a CD I'd burned that contained the journals I wanted to keep, stuff from a website I had running from July 2000 until January 2002, which covered my last days in Oshawa and my first days in Ottawa. I'm so glad I have them back. I think there's a month's worth of entries missing, but from what I remember I had lost those some time before my computer blew up.

Moving is always a liberating experience, moving into your own place even more so. There's a unique pleasure that comes along with putting everything exactly where you want it, clearing floor space bit by bit as the things you take out of boxes find a home. I had been thinking about investigating that computer for over a year, one of those "I'll get around to it after the move" things. Now I have, and now I can abandon the thought and move on. I'm not simply clearing out one space and setting up in the next; I'm clearing out my mind of useless junk that's been hanging out for too long and opening it for something new.

I started reading Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and forgot how hard he is to understand. I haven't read a Faulkner novel since first year University. He's a modernist who loves to write in the moment, and clarity only comes when one lets the words relate with each other. He writes about people and events without writing about them directly, only offering revelations by inference, indicating trauma and tragedy through the repetition of seemingly insignificant details. It's haunting stuff. Joe recommended I check Faulkner out in order to get a better idea of how to write multiple perspectives, and I'm beginning to see what he means. I sat down a couple days ago and wrote 1200 words on an exercise from Writing Fiction: write about an extraordinary event by describing it in great detail. Another beginning to a story I at least now have the opportunity to finish.

Lots to do today.