I don't do this enough at all; I really should add in a little more journal content, and much more frequently. Another boring but busy year has all but run its course; and, while I had hoped that I might find myself gainfully unemployed, that did not turn out to be the case. No, I managed to do little more than file an unemployment claim and then, work just enough to NOT be eligable for any benefits... up until the point where I was put on rotating shifts with a regular crew (in the factory where I work as a temp manual laborer) at summer's end. And yet, it has been a momentous year - in a slow, uneventful way. I went from getting my first credit card - a $200 secured card - to being issued a Gold Card with a $10,000 limit. Quite bizarre, as the ~2 years I've been temping at the factory where I'm assigned is the longest period of time I've ever held one job at the same place. I think it had something to do with the old life insurance policy I discovered I owned this spring (when I started paying income tax on its dividends - the first time I've ever made enough in one year that I would have to pay such taxes)... and promptly cashed it out, so that I could upgrade my computer and install Adobe's Creative Suite of programs. Hey: a REAL credit card - now I don't have to stop eating in order to buy something that I need to make use of right away! That's how I finally managed to get my hands on a decent 35mm camera (over the internet); and how I was able to snap up a factory refurbished color laser printer (over the internet). Now I actually have the equipment I need to do some serious desktop publishing... except, now I live in a relatively small community, where there isn't really anything happening. Ironic. I did, however, manage to put together a new web site, which is featured as an article in the current issue of Rhizomes.net (issue #9). It is located at http://OriginOfWriting.com and outlines my work in deconstructing/ reconstructing the image writing used by the First Nations of North America during pre-Columbian times. I followed a format defined by Gilles Deleuze's 'seven criteria for sign differentiation', as outlined in "Proust and Signs". I'll add in some more stuff, eventually. SO: I can print images myself now; if anyone wants some of whatever I've posted on my site, let me know.

Now, THIS is what I should be doing! I just hung up the telephone after talking with the temp agency that has been giving me work assignments at various local factories. For the past 13 months or so, I’ve been working as a casual laborer at a pharmaceutical factory… packaging products in their “liquids” department. Mouthwash; cough syrup; hand lotion: that sort of thing. A large portion of what is produced there goes to the American market; however, with the rise in value of the Canadian dollar over the past half-year or so, many previously profitable items are now produced at a loss – if at all. Consequently, the drive to increase factory efficiency has been intense; and, for the most part, directed at making the workers do more than was previously expected of them. It has also meant that work hours have been greatly curtailed: now, contract and regular staff are regularly replacing temp workers because all aspects of the factory have cut back production. As a result, my work hours dropped to the point where my three 12 hour shifts on weekend nights were reduced to 19 or 24 hours per week. Of course, the shifts I had been working were the least popular in the entire plant; and thus I was one of the last temp workers to actually lose regular shifts. Had the person in charge of that department not been someone I’ve known for almost 30 years, I might not have been so lucky as to end up working when no regular staff usually wants to. Some temp workers who regularly work more the usual weekday shifts have been out of work for close to two months. Anyway, as I was saying: today at 7:00 AM marked exactly 7 days since I last worked; and that means that I can now ‘request’ my current record of employment… which will be issued due to “Layoff – Lack of work”. That means I am now eligible to file for unemployment insurance. Sounds good to me; the past two years that I’ve worked in local factories as a temp laborer has been the longest period in my life that I have been regularly employed. The 13 months I’ve been at the pharmaceutical factory has been the longest period I’ve ever actually worked at one place (and gotten paid – I’ve ‘worked-for-free’ for much longer periods at non-profit places I WANTED to help keep going)! I’ve got other things that I should be doing – philosophical things! So now, I will once again be able to direct my productivity into things that I want to do. My taijiquan practice has suffered greatly over the past two years, dropping from peaks of 4-6 hours a day to a meager one or two sets a week. Oddly enough, though, I seem to have been getting more exercise of one sort: during two 2.5 hour work periods on one shift not too long ago, I piled 10,000 liters of mouthwash onto skids for shipping. That’s a bit beyond my most intense tai chi practice, where I usually use only 5 pound hand weights; and as a result, my own weight has stabilized at 160 pounds… a good weight for my 6’4” frame. Much better than the 135 pounds I ended up starving myself down to – twice – while scraping together enough money to conduct the field work for my research project into the origin of writing. Of course, my taijiquan felt a bit swifter back in that period, from 1991 to 1998; but realistically, I’m not sure that the extra speed I may have had then isn’t outweighed by the increased mass I can now apply. Either way, the end goal is the same: matching the relaxed density of the muscles with the enhanced elasticity of the tendons, and thus enabling the muscle/tendon groups to function as one in producing standing waves and transferring solitons through the body’s structure. I recently noticed that, a karate practitioner of my age (44) who has been involved in that sport as long as I have been practicing the art of taijiquan (21 years) would be ranked as a 6th degree black belt; but tai chi, of course, does not use a belt system. So, I’m looking forward to once again getting back to my regular practice of taijiquan. It was never so much a matter of available time over the past two years as it was a question of how quickly my muscles heal from the strain of manual labor in a factory context. After seven days of NOT standing for 3X twelve hours on a concrete floor while wearing steel toed and shanked boots, my feet have finally stopped hurting. The tear in a tendon just below my right elbow (from unloading boxes of power tools from transport trailers at another work assignment) finally healed about 4-5 months ago (that took about 8 months); and it is really nice not having to wrap elastic bandages around my knees/legs when I work, in an effort to keep the veins in my legs from collapsing into a varicose state. But most of all, it will be nice not having to go for three days every week with just 6-7 hours sleep between 12 hour shifts; because it is really difficult to consistently apply oneself to the demands of an ongoing philosophic project when one’s time is regularly broken up by that kind of sleep deprivation coupled with the monotony of packing products on a production line. At least now I actually have the equipment I need to properly compose and present my research: I ended up funding my initial research by selling all such equipment I had previously assembled – as well as my personal library – back in the early 1990’s. It was definitely the right choice: I managed to pull together some almost impossibly amazing things; and at this point in time, most of my ground work - physical and conceptual - is finished. All things considered, finishing my research project up should be even more fun than the great time I had after leaving university in the mid 1980’s, when I traveled around Canada working with environmental groups and developing the philosophic ground work (where post-structuralism intersects with visual communications and metalinguistics – I’m also a photographer, after all!) which enabled me to realize, starting with that first artifact which I found in Bute Inlet during a hike in October of 1991, that the First Nations of North America did indeed use a form of writing during pre-Columbian times. Today, I would even be tempted to say that they (or certainly, their direct ancestors) INVENTED writing! Well; back to scanning negatives into my computer while I hand code my new web site. I was a good idea to buy a cheap tower for internet access, and hook it up to my existing system’s keyboard, video and mouse using a KVM switch from Radio Shack… my main computer is tied up for 8 hour stretches in scanning, and I can’t use it at all when it’s doing that. That cheap tower was the second last thing I managed to buy before my work hours finally evaporated: the last thing being a comfortable office-type chair to replace the wooden one I had been using. That was a REALLY good idea. Anyway: back to my HTML text. Gotta love those cascading style sheets; but I can see that merging frames with dynamic HTML for my site map is going to take a bit of work! Later… www.OriginOfWriting.com

I shouldn't be doing this... No, I SHOULD be sleeping. If I sleep, then, I can be a productive worker in the factory where I have been assigned by a temp agency. I did not sleep last night; last night I worked. For twelve hours. Tonight I will be working again. For twelve hours. I don't get paid very much; and a portion of what I do earn goes to the temp agency I am working through, not to me. I've been working at the same factory for just about a year now. I don't do much; just pick things up and place them in boxes or - in the case of those boxes - on shippong skids. Over the last two months, efficiency experts came through: and now, we workers must often simultaneously do tasks assigned to TWO people previously. That is a more productive use of our time. The efficiency experts are operating on the premise that it is cheaper to break workers than it is to fix and upgrade machinery to a higher level of efficiency... workers do not require a capital investment which must repay itself. Over this past year, I have bought computer and photographic equipment to replace that which I parted with in the years when I was doing the field work for my research project, "The Origin of Writing" (see: Sunrise Faces Sunset Mist in Semiotext[e] Canadas). Did I say replace? Well, I had NOTHING then like I've scraped together now... because for years and years I was doing things like, canvassing door-to-door for Greenpeace and various other groups while moving city-to-city, just to check things out here and there; and wandering around wild obscure places here in Canada, just to see them and take a few photographs here and there... ...and reading all the post structuralism I could get my hands on, to continue theorizing away with reference to a rather obscure alignment of deconstructionalist language theory with my own personal and almost life-long interest in (photographic) images. Good thing that I did; all of that work became very useful when I unexpectedly found myself shifting my focus onto my current research project - deals with tens of thousands of years of image writing produced by the First Nations of North America... an existential form of production that is undocumented and suppressed by the dominating EuroCulture which has quite successfully assigned itself the right to define what knowledge can be said to be... for the last few hundred years. Now that I am actually working, I can regain that investment of time in a rediscovery of all the things I had philosophically set myself to doing over those years. And I can share all that work with those here and elsewhere that might be interested in such things because, I actually managed to get my first credit card last month - and with it, I a purchased a web site. In fact, I've gotten togther all of the technical means of production that I need to put together my research, and present it to interested others. So, that's what I am doing. I'm at www.OriginOfWriting.com and, although there isn't very much there yet, there will be. But, I should be sleeping now...