a couple of weeks ago i was sitting in a cafe that is now around the corner from me, having a carrot & ginger juice, discussing sabaticals in italy with a friend, when he asked me about a certain cadence i had written: 'i will wait for you in cuzco, / will that make me the fool?' and i blanked. i had no idea what it referred to, or what i was thinking of when i wrote it. i knew it had something to do with pound (vaguely) and a poet-friend of mine (w.b.). cuzco remains a mystery.

this is not my first blog. it is yet another start-up project in a long lineage of failed endeavours; perhaps a gene for a weakness for public writing. or something. there have been many abandoned works, some were explanatory rants about a current mission of mine, some general blah-blah about the monotony of everyday life i so adore, some just filled with things i like. either way, something always got in the way - the mission aborted, too much information exposed, a lack of time. this time, i vow to be committed. at least once a week, for 30 minutes, i will make the time to indulge myself in my own thoughts, if only to never forget why it was cuzco, after all.

let's take my first online endeavour. it was a livejournal, the ideal venue for any moping, hormonally-inbalanced teen. i was 15, i loved the colour 'maroon' and wanted to play lead guitar in an imaginary rock band in which my best friend was the frontman. trapped in the convent walls of an abbey, i was rather pleasantly confound to my catholic-all-girls' school existence. self absorbed in endless issues of academics, school board politics and choirboys i found plenty to rant about. it helped to have a circle of friends with livejournals - we would post comments on each other's blogs, fuelling each other's 'talent'. our lj's had names like 'theholyseeinc', 'suchagoodexcuse', 'adyingatheist', 'dreamyambience', 'pretteepink'. there was 'meloise' who posted the most dreamy drawings & later went on to study art at OCAD, & 'fairyfetus' who is not living in a caravan with some hippies (i think). but for the life of me i can't remember what my own lj was called. i'm sure it had what i thought was a 'witty & clever' name, probably taken from some U2 lyric i was obsessed with at the time. maybe someone out there still remembers it. in the end, i deleted & purged it, which i now regret a little, dreadful as it was. there were posts about broken hearts coded as 'dusty roses' and posts about my favourite bands and 'artistically written' posts about the cute biology teacher i flirted with after hours. i snide at it now, but i remember those late nights procrastinating on msn & livejournal, agonizing over a boy or checking out new portishead songs rather fondly.

livejournal was also the first place i made 'online' friends. i would have been uncomfortable with the term then, but i couldn't resist the curiosity of what other people were posting. i specifically remember one chap, bluetouchpaper or something, who i met online. he would post photos of himself in a white peacoat - unusual for a chap, i thought, but trendy. we exchanged addresses (he lived in san francisco) and began to write letters. mine were always written in pencil (in case they got wet) and looked somewhat ephereal, they were so light & pale you could barely make out the lines on the page and the writing between them. they discribed the electric field just by my house and other trivialities of the oncoming autumn. his in turn were written on thick, manilla paper with field flowers pressed into it. he wrote in blue ink, heavily slanted to the right, with loopy letters but jagged ascenders/descenders. he told me about drunken nights in alleyways and parks, and a butterfly. there was one letter about a butterfly. years later, when i bought my first typewriter, i found these letters and decided to write (or rather, type this time) a letter back to see if he still lives there, and if not, to the current occupent. i sent it, but never heard back. but a connection had been made, even if ephemeral.

after i deleted my livejournal (i saw an as an immature reaction to Life and was desperate to clear my image of any immatury, as at the ripe age of 18 or 19 one tends to do) i didn't write for a while. i moved to paris & started a short blog that tied into my college online publication -- this one had an objective purpose: entitled 'fluctuat net mergitur' (i thought i was being clever) it served to detail my experiences of moving abroad to paris at 19 and living on my own. my first post was about a trip to a brocante where i acquired a new pair of opera binoculars - the perfect tool for my tiny 8th floor apartment. subsequent posts included a voyeuristic view into the apartments across the street; lives of the french, realtime. i did not see anything wrong with this. there were posts about another golden-voiced highly literate young chap i was crushing on back home. a few posts about the french patisserie downstairs (that i now regret not having used to its full capacity), a few about the french revolution, (and french men, and french cheese) and posts about my endless walks, flaneur-esque, through parisian streets. often i would come home at 3am, having been out walking with a friend, or alone. however, my hobbies soon faded, as did my blog. i have kept some of the posts this time, but no trace of it remains.

my next endeavour was a tumblr. i got one because my best friend had one. i could post pictures & songs and general useless shit that i happened to deem important because it tickled some fancy of mine, or appealed to a certain aspect of my oh-so-refine aesthetic. i recall what seemed like a never-ending flow of pictures of k.d. lang, who i was crushing on at the time. there were melodramatic imagined conversations, always one sided, always in first person. those spurred many individuals who narcissistically assumed the 'you' was them -- this was the end of my tumblr. posting personal affairs resulted in unresolved issues. and plus, i was 'too melodramatic for my own good'. i kept a few mementos, again, but that was all.

from there, i embarked on my latest project. i decided to stop indulging the 'general public' (usually about 5-10 readers who were all my friends anyways) in the affairs of my private life which they would hear me talk about in person anyways, and started a blog with a mission. my mission was to cycle across the uk, known to those that do it as 'lejog'. you can, i think at this point, guess what happens.