2AM Traffic

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.