The idea for one blog has actually turned into two. I took all of my movie reviews and created a blog specifically for them called "Joel's Ticket Stub". I've got 17 reviews up now and I'm going to try to have 20 in total before I take off for Europe. I may expand it in the future to include other features.

Be the first to check it out: Joel's Ticket Stub

I'm going to work on the other for a bit longer before I make it public. I'm still messing around with the format and writing about different things to figure out what I'm going to use it for.

I have had a series of blogs that I've gone through in the past nine years. Titles have included:

The Standard
Mental Piracy
Life on Drugs
Dave the Moon Man
Field Trip City
2AM Traffic
Things to Do Before I'm 30

That's seven altogether. Almost one a year. I've kept some going longer than others, but I've always moved on. I don't know why. I get to the point where a part of me thinks, "Enough is enough. Time to start over. Time to clear the slate and get on with life. Time for a new set of thought processes." Each move to a new journal has signaled a shift in my personality or what I regarded as dawns to new times in my life. Almost one a year.

I'm finding readers increasingly hard to hold on to. The most fruitful of my blogs was undoubtedly "Dave the Moon Man", the blog I kept up at livejournal.com. It was because I became involved in a network of other people who also blogged and everyone seemed to share a mutual appreciation for each other's entries. Almost all of my friends had blogs or started them. Now, livejournal is all but a barren wasteland of community and university updates and the occasional collection of film stills. Most of those people who kept blogs have moved on.

I have seven blogs belonging to friends that I keep an eye on. Of those, only two of them are updated with anything close to a regular frequency. I have two friends who update still somewhat regularly on livejournal, bringing the grand total to four. Blogs used to be a great way to keep track of my friends' lives. It was a great way to find out their thoughts and activities and desires. Now I have no idea what anyone is thinking.

Just ask them in person, right? Sure. But blogs sometimes afforded my friends the chance to really get their thoughts into the words that they couldn't summon when I would see them, which is also happening more infrequently than it used to. I get that. People move on in life. Some folks just aren't writers. Blogs were a phase for most. I just miss it. Because the old network is gone, people are also not as inclined to read what I have to say, and I generally have to keep my blogs under lock and key with invite-only type friend lists and other nonsense, which makes it harder.

I know I mentioned this recently, but I've been thinking more and more about it - a completely open and honest blog that I can fully admit to having without worrying about repercussions. It's what I've always wanted. I think I can pull it off now, because I don't write as much about the same things I used to write about (re: girl problems). However, I'll have to write it under a slightly different name. I'll use my middle names: Joel Crary.

I'm still working on what kind of shape it will take and where I'll post it. I just know this new phase is coming, and soon.

It's another late night up browsing the Internet, usually dwelling on Wikipedia for facts on things for which I sometimes have only the most general curiosity (searched in the last couple of nights: Amsterdam, Jesus, Krakatoa, the K-T boundary, Tsar Bomba, Venus). I had lunch with my dad and brother this afternoon. My dad brought up the issue of subjecting the spirit to questionable content found in horror films and such. I tried to put my thoughts into words for a while before resorting to staring on the window in a defeated haze.

Later, though, I thought: What has become of my "spirit"? Has it succumbed to years of desensitization brought on by viewings of material that might bring my parents to give up on the world once and for all if they were to witness it? There are still films that I won't subject myself to, but it's for the reason that when a film becomes an exercise in testing the will's endurance to tolerate the darkest recesses of the human psyche, all of the entertainment value is sucked from it. Even if a film is bleak, I'm entertained by the deep questions it can ask. If it poses none, I fail to see why I should bother with it at all. But that's a hard idea to communicate to one who seemingly tries their best to shut the bad parts of the world off.

Then again, I've never worked in a hospital, so what the fuck do I know?

I've been eating poorly again lately and it's gotten to the point where I'm feeling self-conscious about my weight. It's kind of new territory for me and I've become fed up with it. I feel like it's finally time to make a drastic change to my diet and exercise regimen. Since I finished work I've been sitting on my ass and basking in the glory of doing absolutely nothing. That has to stop. When I get back to Ottawa on Wednesday, I'm going to hit the grocery store and stock up on better food. I'm going to start walking every day and I'm going to go back to doing the stretches and exercises I was doing to help my back (while being careful not to return it to its former fragile aching state - around this time last year, some overzealous crunches broke a straw that softened my back up to slip out).

I'm going to Europe in two weeks. Dear God. I've got this bizarre feeling that if I don't start paying more attention to it, it's going to go by far too quickly, even though I've thought about it every day for a over a year. It's EUROPE. It's the kind of trip I've been wanting to make for a decade. It's London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Paris and Amsterdam, with trains and planes between each. I'm so excited to see things I've never seen before. The thing I've always loved about traveling somewhere I've never been is that it completely opens me up to the moment. New surroundings make for guaranteed brand new thoughts and memories. A month from now I will have new images and experiences burned into my brain for the rest of my life. It's a liberating expectation.

I want very badly to write about the things I see and do while I'm there. I feel like I should be doing the trip justice that way. Not in the moment, but slightly removed from it, sitting in the dim light on an overnight train to a new destination, the darkened shapes of foreign terrain passing in the distance. Words and sentences finding their way onto the page while the heart rests in suspended animation.