the greatest hits of all time

+ i have two draft posts, archived from may and march, barely fleshed out and not even pre-formed. i asked, earlier, years ago, who am i then, when i do not write, for months at a time.

i spent three horrible evenings archiving my day-to-day from 2000-2003. i kept an online journal through my first two years at SFU, and, fittingly, i trailed off when i ran for office in 2003. now i've made a series of backups, the complete transcription, typos uncorrected, and have taken the original document off of the internet. i read it all and, well, is this who i am? no, it is who i was, and that is ok, it is what it is.

one draft is the set up for an extended piece titled "how i learned to eat chinese noodles" and it was only today that i realised that this was an unconscious revision of an old project, a personal geography of the lower mainland as told through a guide to sushi restaurants that i have eaten at. i worked my chinese noodle piece out in my head for days on the campaign and ultimately exhausted it. the core was a note that i was now using a skytrain station that, for years, i had been unable to place, with any certainty, in a vancouver that i understood. i learned to eat chinese noodles at penny restaurant on hastings at lakewood, which is how i learned what lakewood drive was.

i have been ruminating over an extended piece on the subject of my boss as a reformed mass murderer.

+ if i do this to track changes, the shifts and perspectives, then here: i have been listening to bob dylan all week. i read nixonland, 20 pages in i needed to get inside and pulled up what i had in itunes from 1966. which was simon and garfunkel, really, in terms of american records at least. so, wikipedia, what else came out in 1966? i get records by jefferson airplane, the rolling stones, the doors, the byrds, tim hardin, the monks, buffalo springfield, jimi hendrix. and bob dylan. and i spent years not listening to dylan, the cultural weight was too much, a shell of everybody, always - you need to listen to this, this is genius, this is as good as it gets - and i can't even cope with this. give me space, let me find this if i do on my own timeline. but i can't stop playing it now. i guess i understand, at last.

+ what i did here i now do, in part, in semesterly book lists. but it's not enough.