Lua and I are chilling out on Andrea's bed, enjoying the silence of an empty apartment. I used the laundry facilities in my building for the first time today and aside from a small hesitancy on behalf of the washing machine to work properly, my clothes are clean. I decided to retire three shirts from my rotation. While waiting for my clothes to dry, I finished reading The Sound and the Fury. Now I'm going to look up some criticisms to find out exactly what the hell it's about. My guess is that it's sort of a cross between plot elements found in A Streetcar Named Desire and Chinatown set against the Gothic south that only Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor can emulate.

I had dinner with Rachael at the diner last night and we talked for a couple of hours, though we were both kind of tired. I tried explaining to her how I've felt about writing so far this year and I got bored of listening to myself. I really don't make a whole lot of sense. Better I should just write and keep my opinions about it to myself until they're actually worth a damn.

Rachael asked me how I was doing, and I told her I was happy. And I am, to tell the truth. Everything feels nice at the moment. No complaints, no real worries. I used to worry that I was the kind of thinker who would never appreciate happiness if he found it, but I've always been too willing to criticize myself for feeling as though I'm not getting a fair shake. The shake is fair. Ottawa is becoming a new sort of home, one that doesn't stand for the negative things it used to stand for. I'm no longer driving myself as crazy as I used to, or at least I'm being crazy about better things.

There has been a copy of The Tommyknockers by Stephen King sitting at the top of the lobby steps for the last week. Last night I picked it up and brought it inside and started reading it. I've only read one Stephen King book before, and it was under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, so why not?

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.