AN EMERGENT ENTRY

Coming out from long radio silence...

Last entry more than half a year ago, and impossible to summarize all that's been going on since then...

So, I'm picking up the thread again...a late night at the console, just finished reading Ondaatje's 'Anil's Ghosts', a stunning and heartbreaking piece of work, almost shimmering in its emotional clarity. Lay in bed sifting thoughts, unable to sleep, and then decided to put in this entry, a way as it were of reigniting this project started so many months ago in KL.

For a while I considered wether or not to 'retire' this blog, so long unkempt and un-nurtured. And going through a rethink...mostly a consideration of purpose, from being the public 'face' of reporting from the frontlines of last year's travels and adventures/misadventures to what I think will become an entirely different kind of beast. Mostly I was thinking, how personal do I want to get with this thing without going outright into simply fullblown, indulgent confessional? Meaning pondering a little at the nature of this business...how much disclosure, how much does one reveal, and then realising that till now the idea of even a modest broadcast has entailed for the most part a formal observation of 'conduct', more rightly a kind of self-censure for formality's sake – just the news, sir!, when there's much more than just news going on.

I think that's all going out the window. What started as an untidy journal for friends and family will still continue as just that, perhaps even more untidily, for friends and family, with a sort of fundamental redirect. And all this lengthy preamble just to say that if I'm ending radio silence now (and I state the obvious just because I've left so many friends and contacts languishing in this silence for quite a while now) then it's for the sake of hitting an entirely new frequency...so a journal, yes, as well as notes and thoughts on works and life in-progress, less armchair reading/writing (and probably less visuals since I regretably returned that Nikon camera to its rightful institution).

I guess most of this stems from a nature of always probing the 'why' of any given situation...and the idea implied in what's essentially a form of open address (as opposed to writing in a private journal, which I don't practice) is of relationship, both internal/external, and I feel there's a potential merit in that I haven't explored yet, which might very well touch on something real, and not merely polite or anecdotal.

So, what has been going on? Well, Tess and I came back from the East in late February, on short notice, for my Dad's surgery in March, which thankfully went well. But a sort of tectonic process, that had started showing signs while we were still in KL, raised its head in a very sudden way, along with a number of other life crisis situations. The short of it was that we both woke up, in a very sharp and painful but necessary way, and this has been a long summer of transitioning and realigning lives, and personally, of figuring where to strike the next root.

I'll probably come back to this...as I'm still sifting through a lot of the experiences of being away (and back) and what it was like to be back 'home', and all the stuff that brought up...complexities of feelings and emotions that I'm still trying to understand.

And for the last few months I've been sort of adrift on the surface of the day-to-day...a kind of amorphous, all-subjective emotional 'soup' which I'm just now finding the paddle to steer out of. Have a job presently, with a 'branding'/design firm, which pays decently (after months of percunary weightlessness) but, knowing full well is really not my 'bag', am also trying to reroute from to something in which there's greater reaturns (in terms of value). So considering a shift, not only of occupation but possibly of place.

Right now Vancouver's sliding into mid-fall. Bright days, cold nights...a new pinch in the air. Soon the town's going to get heavy-lidded with rain and grogginess...

It's late now...will end with an ubiquitous 'to be continued'...

K