The Melting World

It has been a while since I last wrote in this journal: there was glitch at the ubc site, and access was blocked, and, alas, I was also running around in headless chicken mode, so that is another reason for the lapse….

My son and I spent a night in Sapporo this weekend. We took a trip to the modern art museum, to a few galleries and past many undergound shops. I think there were at least six shopping arcades (maybe four blocks long each)?, and even though we didn’t see everything, we spent our evening just strolling past store displays, past endless items of clothing and toys and gadgets for sale, on sale, not on sale….

After an hour or so my mind numbed and I lost interest in buying anything, and then a strange compulsion came over me that I should at least examine things for their aesthetic values, as if each thing deserved some sort of critique (good design, bad fabric, cheap zipper, etc) until finally even my judicial game lost its allure and I wished to vanish into the sky. Instead I pushed my son, via stroller, through patches of loose snow, across glare ice roads, carried him up and down a series of stairwells until we reached our hotel.

On the 1.5 hour train trip back the next day, my son was shouting “Cars!” “Train!” over and over whenever we pulled away from a station. He also developed a routine of burbling his lips at the people sitting behind us (who thankfully found him amusing…). As the train compartment was silent except for my son’s one-man-show, it was a bit of an event. Although I secretly chuckled at his high jinks, I did make repeated efforts to calm him down, honestly I did. Children, however, have an energy that cannot be corked easily, and my son is always thrilled about riding trains. I did hope no one was too annoyed, however.

The year is new and I am optimistic that I will reside in a more creative space. I have hopes to make more paintings, poems, stories, essays, make anything really, and to do less practical sheeeeet. I felt the understandable need to be practical the past two years (feed son, dress son, change son, repeat, etc.), but I think it is time to find my inner life again. I hope you, too, my friends, can find a place and time to whittle on blocks of dreams.