Today I rediscovered The Point of it all. I was getting worried there for awhile. I got so much done today - neatened up things on the site, changed the pictures (which were taken by the amazingly talented Monica Mitchell), updated all kinds of things. Know what’s been missing lately? I had fallen out of touch with everything I loved about doing this, I could only see exhaustion, work, long hours. I couldn’t see satisfaction, creativity, accomplishment. For a few days there it felt like I was unravelling. To the chagrin of my naysayers, I’m back with a vengance. It’s weird how sometimes all I need is a small shift in perspective. I also checked the site stats for the first time in a few days - nearly 325,000 hits in nine weeks!! Whenever I think that no one’s listening, I read the stats and realize that there’s anywhere from 2,500 to 8,000 people listening. Every day. That’s kind of crazy. +++ Re-read some of Tim O’Brien’s stuff today. He’s a Vietnam writer and I absolutely love him, one of my all-time favourite authors. Oddly enough, it was him who really turned me on to what documentary means - from him I picked up on the idea that there’s no absolute accurate way to tell anything. You can recount events, but what matters is the emotions that drove you and compelled you to make some choices and not others. Example: Say there was this one crazy night where something happened and you were scared you were going to die. What’s more true - telling the exact events even if they don’t convey why they made you scared, or embellishing events to make the listener understand how scared you were? Interesting. These blurring lines. My favourite book of O’Brien’s is The Things They Carried, which is a collection of short stories about one troop of soldiers in Vietnam. He writes war stories, these gripping, believeable, funny, tragic, human, technicolour war stories that have these indelible characters that you feel you’ve known all your life. Through the book he constantly reminds you that you’re reading fictional events, but there’s an indelible truth to it all. What I think is brilliant is that the line between truth and fiction starts to blur - the truth of the events starts to matter less than the truth of the emotions and memories involved. Reading that book was the first time I realized that there was more to documenting and “truth” than recounting events. For the first time in weeks, I am going to bed before 2am. Shock.