i think this is grade two. i switched from st bernard's to uplands for the start of grade three, so it's either one or two.

and, because i didn't carry on my schooling with these kids, i actually don't recognize any of them - except the two girls i'm standing beside, strangely enough. i don't know who arranged us, probably the teacher, but i got a choice spot, didn't i? the blonde actually ended up at the high school i went to, and gave me mixed signals for years - i was never sure, so i just kept a distance. the thing is that she grew up into a very, very shy teenager, so i could never figure it out, and felt the consequences of getting it wrong could be kind of crushing, for her. she seemed like an ornament you don't want to sit on - and i state that with as much gender egalitarianism as i can muster; she was legitimately delicate, right down to a falsetto voice, and i truly feared breaking her. i haven't seen her in years.

i liked the brunette, might even say we were friends, but i never saw her again after i switched schools.

i don't remember any of the other kids, here. at all.

that's my cousin erin and i, who are about the same age.

erin and i were inseparable for a time, but she moved away to saskatchewan when we were toddlers and i haven't seen her since.

that's my best friend gabriella, from chile. early 1985, judging from the candles on the cake.

there came a point where gabriella's dad decided i shouldn't talk to her any more on account of the (mis)perceived gender mismatch.
.

this is the day i finished in the top 10 for the....i think it was 5000 m....at the cities. it was the longest long run. there were like 500 kids running.

the truth is that i went to an absurdly small school (there were six grade six students in my graduating class), and these positions were kind of just handed out at random. i don't remember competing for the spot, and nobody expected me to compete at the meet.

but, even at that age, i spent a lot of time bicycling. what happened is that i jogged with the pack all the way around and then sprinted past 200 people on the final lap. it was clear to everybody, including me, that if i had sprinted a little earlier, or jogged a little harder, i would have easily competed for a medal. and, i actually think that if i had spent any time training at all i could have actually won outright.

*shrug*

today, i'm more concerned about maintaining my health than competing in bourgeois competitions. and, while i wouldn't have articulated myself that way at the time, the truth is i felt the same way then, too.

it would have been the spring of '93, so it just missed the cut-off.

this is an undated shot of me doing a killer thomas pynchon impression.

'92, i think. maybe '91. it's just a little too old.

and, this is the corner unit i inhabited in the public housing project / ghetto that i grew up in.

my dad built that fence in about 1990 or so. still there, apparently.

i have dozens of pictures from a bike trip back that i took in 2012. we'll go over this in the right space...

and, this was at about the same time - and key, as it was the actual gateway into punk rock, for me.

listen. i was 12/13.

the pivot was actually this.

i'd have never listened to anything this loud before this point.

but, i decided that this wasn't stupid, and it kind of was a mind-opener. so, that's mid-94. i need to get there.

so, here's the new link:

https://thejournalofj.blogspot.com/

which is also on the side...

and, we'll say that dad got a scanner for christmas.

so, i've finally reached a pivot point, and there's going to be a slight change of plans.

i have now copied every file that i can find - from laptops, external drives, usb keys, cds, dvds, etc - on to the new external drive, and organized everything by year. it's very rough, and there's a lot of overlap, but it is all in roughly the correct place. so, the next thing ought to be to restart on the rebuild, and quickly run through 2013-2016, with the intent to get back to where i was.

....except that i'm deciding that the process is incomplete, in the greater context, and want to rewind back to 1993. 1993!? yes - 1993. and, why 1993?

i started in mid-1996 for a couple of reasons. it was early 2016 when i decided to switch directions, my first demos were from the summer of 1996 and my earliest memories of internet access were from mid-1996. a lot of things added up with that. but, at the same time, i was picking up a story halfway, one that had undefined bounds. now that the bounds are better defined - the current story begins in mid-2013 when i moved to windsor, meaning the alter-reality ends in mid-2013, with an intended completion date of mid-2033 -  it makes sense to pull the alter-reality back to 1993, to allow for some symmetry in the process.

that would mean the alter-reality will run from the summer of 1993 to the summer of 2013, in the end.

there's some other reasons for this. the earliest files i have are dated to 1995, but i have pictures going back to the 80s, and i wanted to find some way to work some of these things in to the story. starting in 1993 lets me do that. i also wanted to do reviews of records and books from 1993-1996, which was actually the most formative years of my life - starting over again in mid 1993 means i'm starting in the summer between grade 6 and 7, which is of course right before i went to junior high school. if we're going to do a portrait of this artist, that's a better place to start.

but, if i didn't get online until 1996, at the earliest, how am i going to have a journal from 1993?

what i'm going to do is split it off into a separate blog that will run strictly from 1993-1996. i will be sorting through some papers over the christmas break of 1996 and find an old journal and decide it would be neat to put it online. so, the mechanism is that i'll be typing in a journal that i had already written up by hand. when it's done, it will exist in a standalone file.

what that means is that i'm going to be thrusting myself back into the alter-reality almost immediately; i just need to spend another day or two organizing all of these files, first, before i get to posting to the new journal, dated to july 15, 1993. i'll push forward with this as i push forward with the rebuild, until it connects back together in early 1996.

i'm going to try and be as honest as i can as i run through this. i have the benefit of a lot of hindsight, and i'm not going to pretend i can be a 12 year-old again, but people go through a lot at that age, and i'm going to try and get down as much as i can. some of these things will no doubt surprise you. it's been so long, that i may even end up surprising myself.

i am obviously a different person today than i was then, as we all are.

but, in a lot of surface ways, not much has changed - i spent most of the summer between grades six and seven awake at odd hours, in my room reading, specifically through the stephen king catalogue, iirc. i had no friends at all over this period, as i prepared to go to a new school that none of them were going to go to. i'll have to start off with a broad statement around that. i was living with my mother during this period, which is something i haven't talked much about. i played some guitar, but was not really into alternative rock music yet - i listened to a lot of what was called "college rock" during those years, as well as a lot of pop music. there was no computer around, but i had a big tv in my room that was either tuned to muchmusic or to conan. we'll have to go through the process of moving from mom to dad in mid '94. so, that was life and how to live it, and where we're starting over again with this...

i wouldn't be doing this if i didn't think it was going to be worthwhile.

i think that what the russians really want is to get netanyahu out of israel.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/russia-wants-to-get-iran-out-of-syria-netanyahu-says-after-putin-meet-1.6978647

yeah, those poor genocidal thugs that were involved in the most dangerous organization the world has seen since the nazis. awww.

listen: nobody should be surprised by this ridiculous display of "humanitarian concern" for these koran-thumping monsters, given the dominance of arab money in the media. if there was any question about the kind of influence that gulf oil money has in london, ottawa and washington, this ridiculous display of concern for what is truly absolute scum should eliminate any doubts about it. if you can't make sense of this, if you think it's absurd, that's your answer - follow the influence through the media, the think tanks, the institutes, the lobbyists and the banks back to the dirty, blood-soaked, muslim oil money that commands it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-middle-east-47421627/the-people-fleeing-the-end-of-the-islamic-state-in-syria

you kids nowadays probably don't even know what i'm talking about.

this was supposed to be a kids show, at the time.