The Peep Diaries

Okay, so here’s my report on dinner with Igor, purveyor of the RedClouds and VoyeurWeb amateur sex exhibitionist websites. The dinner happened in Toronto last weekend. Igor invited five couples – one from Toronto, one from Buffalo, two from Michigan and one from Windsor. Some of the couples posed mainly for the soft porn VoyeurWeb, but the couples from Michigan were into the more explicit and hardcore action on RedClouds. Those are the wild ones, Igor told me in his impish German accent. We had a semi-private room in an Italian restaurant which, as it turns out, was a good thing.

First off we had drinks and got to know each other. The couples were all older than me. I was probably the youngest person in the room, everyone else was in their Fifties. They were suburban empty-nesters with time to kill. They all had decent jobs and most of them had adult or near adult age kids. None of them were ‘out’ about their hobby to their families and friends and communities.

We sat at a single long table. I sat near the Michigan couples (best friends since they met each other online) and next to the Windsor couple. Igor – who has the air and appearance of an amateur sex Alfred E. Neuman – held court down at the other end of the table. The mood was jovial. We talked about how often the women are recognized going about their daily lives and what that feels like. Apparently, it happens occasionally, just enough to make it an event. It feels good, when it happens, though it can be a bit weird if the guy doing the recognizing gets a bit too excited. We talked about RedClouds parties at which the attendees wear different color wristbands so that the camera toting hordes know who they are allowed to photograph and post online and who doesn’t want to be publically identified.

Wine flowed freely and the jokes got increasingly ribald. At the same time, there was just a bit of awkwardness to the proceedings. The women on VoyeurWeb were quieter, insisting that they only posed because their husbands wanted them to. They wanted me to know that they did other things too – they golfed, worked, volunteered. Their men talked about camera lenses and photography courses. In contrast, The Michigan couples had pretty much engulfed themselves in the lifestyle. They no longer spent much time with their other friends. They traveled to parties and group holidays. It was clear that those who embraced the more social element had a totally different take on it than those who just privately snapped pictures and posted them. The posters were more into the voting and the comments. The socialites were more into the discussion boards and the gatherings.

Still, some commonalities: the women liked the attention and the men liked the adventure and sense of transgression. With the main courses cleared and new bottles of wine opened, body parts began to be flashed. The Windsor husband pretended to drop something under the table. He crawled around under there with his camera. When he emerged, the camera was passed around so we could see his up-skirt, no panties conquest. Everyone oohhed and ahhed about the picture. I looked over at the woman whose genitalia had just been photographed. She was, surprisingly, one of the more reserved VoyeurWeb posers. She was flushed, a little shocked at her behavior maybe. I wondered what was going on in her head. Everyone else kept looking at the picture, an object of fascination, a kind of totem around which to order their collective presence at the night’s festivities.

Tonight I’m having dinner with 15 or so amateur exhibitionists all of whom regularly post pictures of themselves naked and/or having sex on the websites Voyeurweb and RedClouds. [in case you haven’t figured it out yet, these are both explicit sex sites so be cool with that if you click on the links.] Voyeurweb is one of the longest running and probably the most visited amateur sex site online. Anyway Igor, the founder and owner of these sites, who I met up with last night, has organized a gathering in Toronto for my benefit. So I’m going to go meet everyone and, uh, see what happens….It’ll be really interesting to talk to the couple and get a better sense of not only why they chose to peep themselves in this way, but how they interact with each other — is a common interest in online nude exhibitionism enough to create friendship and community? More early next week!

So I’ve been fighting with my brother lately. He lives north of Toronto in suburban Vaughn. It’s about 40 minutes to get there from where I live, downtown, longer in rush hour. Our fight is mainly about the fact that he only wants me and my family to come to him. He hasn’t been down to our place in 8 months. Nice. How about you make the drive one of these days, big brother?

Anyway he had this barbecue on father’s day and I said we weren’t coming. 1) because he never comes to our place even when I go out of my way to invite him and try to make plans with him and 2) because these family barbecues are, ironically, a terrible way to actually hang out with my niece and 2 nephews — they are too busy playing with their cousins (my sister-in-law’s brothers and their wives have, like, 10 kids between them). If I’m going to drive 40 minutes each way with a screaming 2 year old in the backseat I want to at least be able to spend some time with brother’s kids. Plus all those screaming older kids carrying on freaks E. out so she gets scared and spends the whole time sitting in W.‘s lap looking worried.

All in all, very annoying and not likely to be resolved anytime soon. Right now, we’re at an impasse. We usually talk on the phone everyday – but that’s come to a standstill. Of course this happens every few months, the adult equivalent of when we were kids and we used to absolutely wail on each other with a real, heartfelt desire to do damage.

There’s nothing like fighting with your sibling. It’s pure hate and pure love all at the same time. Whatever we do and say, it’ll all blow over eventually. In the meantime, I’m gonna do the mature thing and lay down the gauntlet: I’m not going to his house until he comes to mine and that’s final and forever no matter what.

We celebrated our 10 year wedding anniversary on the weekend. We dropped off E. at her aunt’s and headed off to a fancy inn for the afternoon and night. We went for a stroll in the Forks of the Credit Provincial Park then checked in, napped, tried out the giant Jacuzzi tub the room came with, and otherwise relaxed.

It was a pretty great weekend for a number of reasons. Not only were we celebrating 10 years of marriage and our even longer relationship (W. and I have actually known each other for almost 20 years!), but this was our first real getaway on our own since E. was born, almost 3 years ago.

It’s not exactly a new idea, but, yes, it’s very very good to get away from the kid(s) and be on your own for a while, even if it’s just 24 hours.

We picked E. up around 4 or so the next day. She’d had a great time with her cousins, but was pretty exhausted. The next morning she hit the wall and put on a 2 hour temper tantrum that was pretty impressive. Possible that she was sending a message?

Hey kid, do your worst, it was well worth it.

An incredible amount has happened in our lives over the last 10 years. I’m actually kind of hoping that the next ten will be just a bit less eventful. Not boring. Just not involving almost every possible major life transition there is including marriage, pregnancy, starting careers, buying a house, etc. It’s amazing, really, when you think about how much two people go through together. Okay forget all that nonsense about wanting things less eventful. Bring on the next decade! 24 hours of rest and I’m ready for anything.

Pretty good day of writing today. I’ve been writing about the relationship between secrets and gossip, connecting the ubiquitous human tendencies to gossip and tell secrets to the rise of Peep Culture. I used PostSecret and Twitter as examples of arenas where gossip and secrets now go global and also function as entertainment. Then I started connecting the whole shift to the institutionalization of confession in various forms including the catholic church, bookkeeping, the keeping of social statistics, and psychiatry/the talking cure. So I guess what I’m wondering here is – does that sound like something you want to read? I’m trying to keep it relatively fast-paced, despite the plunges into history and theory.

In other news, lately I’ve been hurting trying to come up with good things to cook for dinner. I’m usually in charge of cooking since W. doesn’t get home until 6 or so. It’s always tricky because I’ve also got to pick up E. from daycare so whatever I make for dinner has to fit around that schedule. Anyway, I’m in a rut. Last night I reheated leftovers and supplemented with a can of baked beans and a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches. I must do better. I can do better. I’m pathetic and lazy and can’t think of what to make tonight and it’s already ten to four.

Upcoming blog posts I will write eventually: Hal wants more Twitter friends; Jerry’s looking for guys to do it with Dena; Lifting the 5,000 friends limit on Facebook; W. thinks E. is rude to her little friends but I don’t care as long as she’s nice to me.

Okay I was the only guy not in a tie at the Walrus lunch fundraiser I participated in yesterday. I probably should have guessed, given that it was held at the tony old school University Club in downtown Toronto. Anyway, that wasn’t the only surprise the event held: it was sold out and packed with famous Canadians including Pamela Wallin, Valerie Pringle, and others. Plus it was being moderated by Carol Off from As It Happens and taped so that a short bit of the talk could be aired on her show. (Was it? Did anyone hear it?)

I felt a touch nervous as I waited for this shindig to get going. But it all went well. I started off reading a list of books that Amazon.com recently suggested I might want to buy including The Sexual Revolution 2.0: Getting Connected, Upgrading Your Sex Life, and Finding True Love — or at Least a Dinner Date — in the Internet Age; Working Sex: Sex Workers Write About a Changing Industry; Start Your Own Adult Web Site Business; America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction. That set the tone and away we went. Science fiction writer Robert Sawyer was my foil (he launches a new book tomorrow) and the ensuing 40 minutes or so were a sprawling battle about the future of surveillance, privacy and transparency. Afterwards, Carol told us that we should take our show on the road, which I’m pretty sure was a compliment.

So that’s what I did yesterday. It’s been a frustrating week in terms of getting writing done. E. has been sick battling a flu cold so she’s been miserable. She’s only now recovering. I spent Monday with her, then spent all of Tuesday shooting a trailer for the peep movie, then half of wed. at a Broken Pencil meeting. Then yesterday the Walrus debate. Today I’m catching up on blogging, emails and general organization. Next week, I’m writing. Nothing but writing. And blogging. Of course blogging.

So my cold/flu finally receded on Friday. Despite the cold, last week ended up being alright, mainly because it was pretty quiet and I could just focus on writing. I had a few important realizations about the book, but I think I’ll tell you about them a bit later in the week.

Today the kid is home sick, she got whatever I had. She’s got a bit of a fever and is very congested. Poor thing is just lying on the couch watching cartoons and demanding a steady stream of gummy bears. I am happy to oblige, what else can I do? The timing isn’t very good for me, since I was hoping to put in a full day of writing today. The rest of this week is pretty packed. Tomorrow we’re doing some shooting for the peep documentary (full report after it’s done, I promise). Then on Wednesday I’ve got a Broken Pencil meeting that should take up quite a bit of the day. Then Thursday I’m speaking at a Walrus magazine fundraiser lunch organized around my article about how we’re learning to love surveillance. On the bill with me is the sci fi writer Robert Sawyer. We usually have pretty divergent points of view so it should make for an entertaining conversation.

As you can see, things are busy so losing a day of my work week really sucks. But I’ll be stoic and hopefully earn points with W. Speaking of W., she tried but failed to post to the blog, responding to my post complaining about how she can’t say no to E. so I always have to be the bad guy (pretty ironic considering I’ve already fed her about 30 gummi bears, but she’s sick okay…) Anyway, for some weird reason I got her comment on the blog in my email but it didn’t appear on the actual blog. I will post it again and let everyone know when it’s up there, complete with detailed analysis. This is, after all, a bit of a breakthrough moment…the first indication that W. is actually reading this thing.

In the meantime, wish me luck dealing with the needs of a fluish two year old while earning points with W. If anyone has advice finding the right balance between stoic acceptance and the need to be rewarded for my amazing sacrifice on behalf of the family, I’m all ears.

Sick with a cold today. I tried and failed to get much work done. I’m working on the 2nd chapter of the book, but spent most of the day just kinda staring at the screen then off into space then back at the screen. I still feel like I accomplished something in some weird way. Maybe what I accomplished is a 2 hour nap. Anyway, I wrote about 2 pages total, which takes the page number total up to 60 or so. Enough for the book to take a kind of shape. More on that soon. For now, suffice it to say that my head feels like it’s the size of a watermelon. The highlight of my day was my next door neighbour telling me he accidentally bought a giant sized white daikon radish thinking it was, for some reason, swiss chard.

Okay, so overall the whole 'first mean comment' controversy was good for the stats. Between March 18 and April 17th I had 547 visitors who looked at an average of 2 pages each. Our web consultant Andreas parsed the numbers and informed me that although absolute hits went up and stayed up, new visitors declined. In other words, I'm developing a regular readership but the 'controversy' failed to bring in new eyeballs.

Anyway, it generated discussion and debate, which was fun to be part of and is hopefully a sign of things to come. (See the debate between Janine and Mark M.) Looking back over those comments I realized that somewhere in the midst of this whole discussion I picked up a real 'mean' comment : "No offence, but you are a boring man. Do you have nothing better to do than writing a lot of BS? Go get a job." The comment was by "anonymous". Anonymous obviously has no idea what a great blog is all about. Get stuffed, buddy! Ah..that felt good. Seriously, though, the comment doesn't bother me in the least. Anonymous is irrelevant. If you aren't willing to put your name to your opinion then what you say won't ever matter. Anonymous is probably my brother.

Okay the very fact that I just felt the need to upbraid Anonymous suggests that maybe his comment does bother me. Is it true? Am I boring? Whatever dude. Seriously. Get a job.

Okay so I’ve figured out how to survive Passover.

First off, have the inevitable fight with your parents a couple of days before they get into town so that when everyone’s in proximity it’s already make up and make nice time. (For the record it was W. who started the fight, I was an innocent bystander, as always.)

Second, have your heavy boozing uncle from Windsor come into town so that you have an excuse to drink heavily throughout the two day campaign, after all it would be rude to let him drink alone, right?

Third, give all your attention to the menu. In this case, taking advantage of the beautiful weather, I focused much of my energy on the cooking of an elaborate beef rib dish that was meant to take the place of the traditional brisket. The ribs involved 4 hours of slow cooking/smoking on my barbecue before a few more hours of simmering on the oven in a complicated mix of white wine, beef stock, and porcini mushrooms. So that took up plenty of my time, kept me near the rapidly emptying wine bottle and I could claim I was doing it for the family.

Finally fourth, and this comes highly recommended, get your parents’ rental car towed. Yes, I managed this amazing feat special for Passover. You see, I parked their car in the alley behind my house adjacent to my garage. I’ve done it many times before and there’s never been a problem as it doesn’t block anything or inconvenience anyone. This time some jackass decided to have the car ticketed and towed, probably because it had New York plates. Long story short, Saturday morning when me and dad and the kid went to go pick up a few things for the evening festivities, the car was gone. I figured dad would be freaking out but he was actually weirdly calm about the whole thing. I on the other hand flew into a rage, jumping up and down and sputtering on about how they’re still persecuting the Jews and how I wouldn’t put up with it and don’t they know it’s Passover and when I find out who towed the car I’m gonna brain ‘em with a matzoh ball and so on and so on. Well we got the car back and from then on, thanks to my boozy uncle and some over zealous Toronto parking guy, it was smooth sailing!

Hey my article on How We Learned to Love Surveillance, published in the Walrus Magazine, is now available on the newsstands. You can read it online here but please also consider picking up a copy or subscribing since we need to support Canadian magazines!

“What exactly are you attempting to achieve here, Hal?” writes Mark McCawley. “Where’s the personal risk? Or is this going to become another very large coffee table book?”

Okay so that’s not exactly scathing but it’s mean, at least. It’s my first mean comment! It’s a dig at my writing career (though a strange one, since the only book I’ve published that could be remotely construed as a coffee book was the Original Canadian City Dweller’s Almanac – available on Amazon.ca starting used at .25 cents) and a dig at my blog. All neatly done in three concise sentences.

Well, look, he’s got a point. So far, not much risk happening on this blog. I’m not exactly opening myself up to you, my readership. I want to get more personal, but every time I try I cringe inside and pull back. But this blog is just beginning. There’s plenty of time for me to work up to it and spill my guts. I will reveal! Just give me time.

Anyway, according to Andreas who presides over all things peephal.com my stats are slowly growing. His last report said that I’ve got about 30 more daily visitors than I did last time he checked. But in total only 12 people have visited the site 15-25 times. He figures that I’ve got roughly 9 regular readers. Welcome back once more my loyal 9! If I’ve disappointed you, I apologize. But I’m doing my best here.

So I was going to write about my weekend but, honestly, not much happened. My hockey team was in the finals for our division but we lost. It was a fun game. That’s about it. Next week my parents are coming in for Passover. That should provide more fodder, I’m sure.

In the meantime, I did a CBC interview today that will air Wed. morning between 10 and 11am on CBC Radio 1’s Sounds Like Canada. I’m discussing the extremely important topic of “my favourite pop culture saying from when I was a kid” or something like that. My choice was Mr. T’s: “I Pity the Fool”. If you want to hear me waxing nostalgic over the A Team, be sure and tune in. I actually thought I sounded like a bit of a doofus, despite my genuine love for ‘T’. Still I managed to work in my 2nd favourite Mr. T tagline – “I ain’t gettin’ on no plane, Hannibal” while I was at it. Truth is I always leave radio interviews feeling like I was terrible. Especially when I’m trying to be funny. Well, listen in and let me know what you think. Be mean if necessary.

So on Friday’s post I promised that every other post would be about my life so that the blog would have a better balance between the more diarist stuff and links, thoughts, ideas and ruminations about the rise of peep culture. Then I promptly broke that promise by posting about US domestic surveillance centers and a link to piece by a columnist who was briefly a cam-sex worker. In my defence, I had forgotten that I had set up a few posts to happen over the weekend automatically. Then yesterday I was too lazy to blog. Actually I was slightly hung over from drinking beer with my hockey team (we won and are going to the finals this weekend) and wanted to finish putting a bunch of research into my peep culture database so I could finally get back to writing etc. etc. basically I was putting it off.

But no longer. First off, an update about lost shoes. Faithful readers may recall that in the last blog post that had anything like personal commentary, I wrote about getting in trouble with W. for losing E.‘s shoes. Well, I never found them. I called the community centre where I left them (after changing her into her boots) and they said they’d look but they never called back. So high up on the agenda upon arrival in Florida was new shoe acquisition. Luckily we found an outlet mall pretty quickly (wow, what a shock) and amazingly we found a pair of lavender New Balance running shoes to fit E.‘s tiny feet. They were probably half the price of what we would pay in Toronto, and we bought them and the same shoes one size up for when she grew out of them. E., meanwhile, was having a great time tearing adult high heeled shoes off the racks and shoving her feet into them and then tottering around. Finally, we made it to cash. Happy times for Hal as W. was so pleased with our acquisition that she forgot that I was the one who lost the shoes in the first place and so pulled out her credit card and paid! My inner cheap skate grinned and we all piled back into our rented Chevy Malibu and headed back home.

“Home” was the tiny island of Goodland, a short drive from Marco Island and about 45 minutes from Naples in southwest Florida. We rented a place there that had a tiny swimming pool E. refused to go in. It overlooked a bay filled with jumping fish and pelicans. It wasn’t far from the beach, which pleased W. and E. but it was also pretty near the Everglades and other nature areas, which pleased me. Goodland features about 10 roads, 3 different bar/restaurants, a trailer park, a seafood outlet that sells great key lime pie and friendly residents who like to troll back and forth to the bars on golf carts.

Here’s a pic of E. touching a snake at the makeshift zoo off the highway on the way to Everglades City that I’m pretty fond of.

The zoo was called the Skunk Ape Headquarters, the Skunk Ape being the Sasquatch or Yeti of the Everglades.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m awfully fond of cryptozoology in general and the search for Sasquatch in particular. Anyway, we stopped at the zoo on the way for an airboat ride, which I thought would be a nice way to see the Everglades mangrove swamps but which turned out to be a super loud super fast hurtle down narrow channels crowded with weeds and roots. W. held on to E. for dear life.

When we stopped halfway through we took the ear muffling headphones off E., she shook herself out of a shocked stupor, looked around and said, “I all done.”

So am I, for now.

Okay so there's lots going on in peep-land but first an announcement. As of Monday, this blog is going to get personal. Anyone who's been reading these posts knows that I've mostly been concentrating on outside links, interviews, research and other aspects of the peep phenomenon. But part of the point of this blog is to see what it's like to peep my own life. I haven't really done that yet. I haven't even managed to post promised pics from our Florida trip and an update about E's lost shoes. So no more! It's time to get personal. I'm clearly going to have to force myself to blog about my day to day life, so here's my plan: every second post has to be about my quotidian existence. I'm making a rule and sticking to it.

So what inspired this momentous decision? Well I did an interview yesterday with a young woman named Emmalene who hails from Hamilton, Ontario. She's a video blogger on YouTube (a status I'm hoping to work up to). Anyway, she's a funny eccentric who doesn't seem at all phased by negative comments, giving her opinion on evolution vs. intelligent design ("that's just my opinion...I'm not not sure what to think"), or posting videos of her singing songs that she barely knows the words to.

She talked to me about lonelines and community and how YouTube has become a major element in her life. And I realized talking to her that I'll never understand what it's like to have total strangers cheering you or telling you how much you suck until I actually give people a reason to make an emotional connection with me by sharing more of my life. So that's the plan. But not today. Not yet. Next post for sure. Probably Monday.

So got the first stats report on the blog. 32 readers so far spending an average of 2 minutes and 30 seconds on the page. I’m flattered. I haven’t really put it out there yet, they only way anyone would know it existed is through my Facebook page so 32 is probably pretty good. It’s also interesting to see the amount of detail that you can get regarding the visitors to your page. I know what city you are from and how long you spend on the page and in some cases even where you work (someone, for instance, from the CBC was reading the page…I know who you are by the way!) So I can peep you peeping me. I’ll try and keep a running update on the whole stats thing as it develops. In the meantime, if you are a total stranger who just happens to like reading my blog, by all means please do get in touch and let us know how you came to the site.

***

In other news tomorrow we leave for Florida for a week or so. I won’t be blogging from Florida, primarily because the place we’re staying has no internet access. Otherwise I would blog for sure. I’m not that big a fan of vacations. I like to work and I like to hike and canoe and get away from the world. But beach and sightseeing isn’t my thing. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying that’s my preference. W loves the beach and so does our two year-old and all in all it’s pretty fun making sand castles and collecting shells with a two year-old. Still I’m looking forward to when E is older and we can take the adventure quotient up a notch.

***

Trying to pack up to go always leads to fighting in my family. This morning in the midst of packing W discovered that I left E’s shoes at the community centre on Saturday. I got yelled at. I’m a bad boy. I would probably have gotten yelled at less if we weren’t going to Florida tomorrow but I think W sees it as my subtle way to sabotage the family holiday. Not true. I’m just forgetful…By the time I got back from dropping E off at daycare and W was heading out to work all was (somewhat) forgiven. Called the community centre to see if they had found the shoes and they said they would look and call me back. They haven’t called back yet, which doesn’t bode well. How long could it take to check and see if anyone turned in a pair of white and pink New Balance sneakers? E wore her brown shoes to daycare today instead.

So in addition to facebook, myspace, linkedin, friendster, twitter and probably a bunch of sites i don’t even remember joining, i’ve now joined GoodReads, a networking site for book readers. Basically you put up books you ‘ve read and give them a rating and share them with your “friends”. You can search by title and see who else has rated or reviewed it and read their reviews. Naturally I did this for my books then added all my books to my page, rating them 5 stars so that their rating would go up on the site overall. Pathetic. Maybe. No. Probably.

After that, I thought, okay, I’ll add a few books I’ve recently read and give them a rating. Then I remembered that I had already done that on Facebook, having added some book sharing application so that I could once again list my books and reccommend them highly. According to Facebook I’ve been reading Mr. Pip, a relatively short novel, since September. I’m either a really slow reader or having trouble updating my “currently reading” list. Anyway, did I want to start adding books to this GoodReads thing too, knowing full well it would probably be the first and last time I was gonna add anything?

In the end I added a few books just to see what it felt like. I added two books, actually. A book by the friend who invited me to join GoodReads (I sent her a message saying if she added my books I’d add hers and we could give each other 5 stars…pathetic? Maybe. No. Definitely.) Then I added Derek McCormac’s novel The Haunted Hillbilly about a gay vampire tailor who sucks the life out of Hank Williams while making him famous. I gave that book 5 stars. Then I started thinking about other books I might add. And I started thinking about the various writers and publishers and editors I know. And I started thinking, what if those people join GoodReads and see my ratings and are offended and then decide not to publish me or give me a grant or whatever?

I’ve been spending too much time thinking about the power of peep, clearly. But as of this moment I’m struggling. Do I really want to start rating and reviewing books for all to see? Granted, no one cares what books I like or don’t like. But it all just seems a bit too close to home. And I always get anxious and uncomfortable when people come into my office and start scrutinizing my bookshelves.

So yesterday was the first annual Family Day, a new rather lame “holiday” invented by the Ontario government. Daycares were closed so I was home with E. I guess that’s the point of family day but of course when you are freelance you don’t have anybody giving you paid days off. W went into the office for half the day. As I was busy keeping E entertained I started to think of how weird it is to have a holiday that utterly lacks any kind of tradition. So anyone got any ideas? I’m thinking deep fried raisins, a televised parade of crying toddlers, and a marathon of family friend video games that goes deep into the night and leaves all parental and kid units bleary-eyed and vaguely hostile for the rest of the week.

One more thing on family day: what about people with no family? won’t they feel bad sitting at home alone? Family Day, coming just a few days after Valentine’s Day, is a double whammy for those without any source of love in their lives. Will Ontario see a rise in suicides and help-line calls in the 3rd week of February? Help me, I’m at home eating my deep fried raisins and watching the toddlers on floats bawling their eyes out but I’ve got nobody to play Wii with and the only Valentine the mailman brought me was from McDonalds and I’m thinking of ending it all, damn you Dalton McGuinty! (premiere of Ontario, responsible for holiday…)

In order to celebrate family day after E went to bed we watched the first two episodes of the second season of Gene Simmons: Family Jewels. I was impressed with his star turn on celebrity Apprentice and wanted to see more of this aging pseudo-Lothario in action. Very disappointing. The whole thing just came off as Ozzy-lite. Everybody wanted to be wacky and histrionic but nobody seemed to have the chops to do it. Gene’s family lacks dysfunction in a big way. According to Gene’s website season 3 debuts in March. Maybe it gets better? Never mind. W is obsessed with that new HBO show In Treatment anyway. More on that later.

So a long gap between my first post and the next two posts. That’s because the launch date for the blog got put off until Sally (director of the peep culture documentary) got back from Paris. You see, the doc people want to film the launch of the blog. So everyone’s coming over today to capture this exciting moment. I spent the morning cleaning my office. You can see the floor now. It’s nice. I’ll take a picture.
Anyway, I’m feeling a bit anxious about the whole thing. I’ve never blogged or really had much about my personal life out there. As a writer I like to re-read and re-think everything I put out there. I’ll need to get over that. Plus, of course, the whole idea of developing an audience of people interested in peeping my life. I can honestly say that I have no idea what that will feel like. So we’ll see.

We’ve just passed Belleville, Ontario and I’m listening to the woman one row up shuffle through papers and talk loudly on her cell about how she needs help figuring out how to reboot her suddenly inoperative Blackberry. I don’t know who she’s talking to since it’s only 8:00 am. Anyway, it’s a fitting start to this blog. Am I peeping her or is she happily exposing herself to anyone who cares enough to listen? I’m not really peeping, because what else can I do but listen? On the other hand, I am doing more than listen – I’m paying attention and writing down what she’s saying.
This blog is about the rise of peep culture. Definition: a culture of mass voyeurism in which we get more and more of our kicks from peeping in on the entertaining foibles of the real lives of others; at the same time, we become more and more amenable to others peeping in on our lives.
So a bit of a peep into my morning: The train left at 7 am. I woke up at 6:10, five minutes or so before my cab was supposed to show up. Actually I didn’t wake up, W woke me up. Who knows when I would have gotten up if left to my own devices. I was counting on the kid to wake us both up at 6 am exactly, like she does every morning. Today, the little bugger decided to sleep in. So much to W’s annoyance I ended up waking them both up as I fumbled for something to wear and stumbled into the bathroom to brush my teeth.
Anyway, I grabbed my carefully packed bag, kissed everyone goodbye and jumped into the waiting cab. Five minutes later I realized I had forgotten my laptop, so we turned around. I ran back into the house past W and kid, and bounded up the stairs. W, who is the kind of person who has to get everywhere at least an hour early, shook her head in horror as I waved yet another frantic goodbye.
At this time in the morning it takes less than 10 minute to get from my house to the train station so I got there with fifteen minutes to spare – time to hit the bank machine and grab a coffee before the train pulled out. Stepping onto the train a few minutes before it left the station reminded me how annoying flying is and how great train travel is. High speed rail please!
I haven’t told you why I’m going to Kingston yet: On Monday, while compiling peep related links for this blog I dropped in on a site I’d been meaning to visit but hadn’t gotten around to yet. It was the website of the Surveillance Project , founded by sociologist David Lyon and located at Queen’s University in Kingston. I noticed that they had a talk scheduled on Thursday. A criminology prof from University of Montreal was coming to talk about public perception of CCTV surveillance cameras. Perfect material for an article I’m writing for The Walrus magazine and for the peep culture book I’m researching. So I called them up and asked if I could come visit the Surveillance Project and talk to David Lyon and the University of Montreal Prof. They set me up with 3 interviews – Lyon, the Prof and a grad student doing research on Facebook. That plus the talk seemed to make it more than worthwhile to spend a day in Kingston. I’ll be arriving in about ten minutes, so we’ll soon see if I’m right. (By the way, 2 more audible cell phone conversations took place on the train while I wrote this: One woman trying to coordinate a meeting and one woman just chatting about her life.)