I went out to a store on Queen Street called “Pages” the other day, looking
to take my first tentative step into the wonderful world of Zines. Thinking I
may have something to share with the world, and having done a bit of reading
online about the phenomenon of underground magazines, I clutched some money
in hand and took a look at the teensy tiny alternative publications shelf.

(I highly recommend Pages, by the way, despite it’s small zine shelf, because
it had a zine shelf at all, and that’s more than I can say for Chapters)

I have to admit that I was less than smitten with what was there. And that’s
not to say that there wasn’t a shelf full of hard work, hard journalism, and
hard times available to me, it was just that… none of them spoke to me. At
least, almost none.

There was a little hand-bound book with a note inside mentioning it had been
pressed by hand and contained the fruits of someone’s very hard labour. It
was called WindBags, and it was a photographic and poetic study of bags that
had been caught in trees in and around Toronto. It was so completely
different that I may just have to go back there an buy it, because I haven’t
been able to get it out of my head. The only problem was that it was only
like 5 pages, and that’s hardly enough to last me to the door of the store,
never mind the subway ride home or an evening spent curled up on the couch.

Notably, I -did- pay a lot more attention to the phenominal number of grocery
bags stuck in trees on the way home. It’s really staggering just how many
there are. Amazing how you can block them out and not see them after a
while.

I’m not sure to do now that my little Zine craving has gone unfulfilled. Part
of me says “Get to work, put together something that inspires you and might
inspire people like you, and get it out there.”

Another options seems less fulfilling but maybe more practical… perhaps the
printed page isn’t the medium for me at all. Maybe I should be creating
digital content, and distributing it on CD. Or maybe I should be putting it
on the web like the other 3 billion people on earth.

I’ve been so creating nothing lately in my spare time. It occured to me as I
was putting together my demo, work’s been sapping far too much of my
creativity. All of my stuff is old half-finished experiments.

Gott get fixing!