I started this blog because change was afoot. I would soon be moving out of the house I was sharing with roommates in Ottawa, moving to Toronto and into an apartment with Samantha, and starting school in the fall. I wanted to write about those changes. But I’ve had a complicated relationship with writing this summer. This entire year, really. There have been things I’ve wanted to say, and things I know I’d want to say when the time came.

I’m not sure the time is now, but here we are. I’m either going to start writing again, or I’m going to let it go and concentrate on other things. But I want to write, partly out of a lifelong habit – I’ve loved writing since the age of five. There’s a reason I’ve kept blog after blog over the last twenty years. I want to put it all down somewhere, if only so I can go back to it later and compare. If I don’t, it wouldn’t feel right. Beyond that, I like the idea that friends of mine are reading along, and maybe keeping their own blogs. Maybe we can keep an eye on each other. (Let me know if you’ve got a blog I’m not reading.)

This blog will contain the requisite daily events, your snapshots of a middle-class white male life spent high-rising in downtown Toronto. Occasionally that’s all it will contain. Sometimes it will contain the kind of stuff I wrote about, often gratuitously and without a shred of self-awareness, in my younger days – stuff about art, love, pop culture, the world – this time without the cigarettes to fill in the holes in my personality. On its best days, I’m hoping it will encourage me to write in other arenas, because I’m trying to get that atrophied muscle working again.

On Tuesday, September 6th, I’m starting classes for my second Master’s program, the mouthful that is the Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management program at Ryerson. This blog you’re reading is called “An Act of Restoration.” No coincidence. I started a blog with similar intentions back when I went through grad school the first time. It’s been nine years since. A long journey back around. A lot of restoration work. Get it?

All right.

Today Samantha wriggled around on the couch.

That is all.