works of wanderlust

Month: December 2025

  • unreal asia

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Did you travel in 2025?

    In 1998 I went to Europe for the first time.  Until that moment of stepping off the plane and riding the train into London’s Victoria Station with my giant backpack over my shoulder, Europe was an abstraction in my head. It was this place I had heard about over and over and over but seemed more like a story that I could read about than I real place I could visit.

    Since then I’ve been back to Europe multiple times, travelled through a list of European countries so long I struggle to remember exactly when and where I’ve gone there, and have long since settled Europe itself in my head as just another option for an interesting (if expensive) vacation.

    And. Until a couple months ago my thoughts about Asia were pretty much in line with how I thought about Europe in the 1990s. That is to say, I have friends from all over Asia, I have seen it in media and read about it in books, I had been studying the Japanese language, and I’ve certainly eaten the food of nearly every Asian immigrant group who serves it in Canada… but the place itself was almost an abstract concept in my head that I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around.

    Earlier this year were contemplating our annual travel options and one of us suggested Japan.

    If you are even so much as a sporadic reader of this blog that should be no surprise to you. We ended up spending nearly three weeks on the little island in November of this year after all, and I still haven’t caught up with my recap posts about it (blame this blog every day thing, I guess!) 

    This abstraction that I am talking about is not a lack of perception. I think the world is kinda chunked up into sections of people and culture that until you spend a day wandering through their streets or trying to buy lunch from a local or sitting in a hut on the side of a mountain listening to a story or lace up you shoes and run a five klick race through one of their parks… many places on this globe can be little more than an idea in your head that is hard to get a sense of what it would be like to spend time there. What does the air smell like? What are the sounds? Is it big or small, dense or wide open? A thousand questions of the moments and how it all might become real. So much of what we see from those places is framed as news or art or otherwise showing us the shiny bits that are worth sharing. None of it is any more than a story. It is not until you arrive there that it all gels into something more.

    For example. If you had never visited my city or even come here to Canada it would be really difficult to describe to you what my day-to-day was like, say, even yesterday. We woke up and it was twenty five degrees below zero with yet another thin layer of snow… that I had to go out and shovel. I was squinting in the sunlight and bundled up in four layers to clean the sidewalk all so that we could hop in the car and drive down a highway over drifting snow and patches of ice to go for lunch with my mother-in-law for her birthday. The air hurts. The place is dirty with spatters of muddy snow all over everyones cars. We live in the suburbs and all there is around is the sound of engine noises echoing over the snow and the sky is filled with the chimney exhaust of everyone’s furnace running twenty-three and a half hours a day.  In other words… it is absolutely nothing like the vibe you’d find on the tourism sites if you searched for us. Nothing like the story we project out to the world for people who can’t or don’t come here to know about us.

    And I think that was like me and Asia. I had a story in my head but I knew it wasn’t actually real. Until we walked through the streets of Japan, until I went out and did a community run event, until we bumbled through the subway trying to find our way, until we were hungry and needed a quick lunch between touristy explorations… until all of that and a thousand other little things… all of it was a bit of an abstraction to me.

    But we’ve been to Japan now and Asia as a whole just seems that much more real in my head now… almost like I should book another trip soon.

  • actually right

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What was your biggest achievement of the last year?

    Here it is again.

    I find I’m often getting tired of writing about my professional pursuits. And after all, sitting here penning out another post telling you all about them and how great it is going with the tech jobs is the so-called “right” answer. I’m supposed to have a shiny perfect resume. I’m supposed to have academic achievements under my belt. I’m supposed to rack up contract wins and be out her bragging about other business-type successes. At least… that’s what I’ve been railroaded to believing my whole damn life. Make lots of money. Have the perfect LinkedIn profile. Nine to five with benefits, right?

    Yet, I’m so very much realizing that I’m not that person. Not anymore, at least. Or, maybe it’s that I’ve never been him. It’s almost as tho I’m faking it most of the time, doing a solid enough job being a guy who can get shit done in technology or all the related bits and bobs in which I’ve worked for most of my life. I’m not half bad, and that might just be twenty five years of tallied up hours in that field playing out as raw experience, yet… it’s all a mask.

    See I left that world two and a half years ago… even tho the gravitational pull of it almost daily makes it seem like I will never fully escape. I walked away from “The Career” and tried to be something else, and after two and a half years I feel like I’m still explaining that to everyone, even myself.

    I panicked in my transition and I took a University program in Business Analysis last spring, finishing it up as the summer arrived. It looks nice on the resume, but until I actually lock a job in it it doesn’t mean much more than that I passed some tests and did well on some assignments. And I never really knew if it is actually what I wanted to do, but it seemed… again… like the “right” thing to do. 

    I started a small business, too, and most people in that position would be exclusively occupied with making that work and finding new customers and building and growing and on and on. I do work but it’s more just like a part time job I have, sitting over here on the desk, that makes me feel less disconnected from the world in which I was mired for multiple decades. It felt like the next “right” step in whatever this adventure was, but now it’s just there taunting me.

    But then what did I accomplish this year? Actually.

    I didn’t sell any art.

    I didn’t finish my novel.

    I didn’t complete the code for my game.

    I could give you a very unsatisfactory answer to all this tho and it goes as such: this year I’ve broken down the problem even further and revealed the raw skin under the lifetime of metaphorical wounds. I am starting to get it. I am starting to actually understand myself and the purpose of where I need to go, what I need to do, and who I need to be: it’s more than the “right” answer of a professional such and such or a guy in this or that job. It’s bigger, at least for me from my perspective it is. It may mean almost nothing to anyone else, but then everyone has their own to worry about don’t they. But I am figuring out mine… which has never been entirely clear even though I’ve always been told what the “right” answer is.  But then the right answer was never a very good answer, and figuring that bit out might just be my biggest achievement of the last year.

  • bardo the air privateer, part one

    Well, darn. The new-ish Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 was ported and released on the PS5 …in late 2025 …which is almost 2026, so you figure that one out?

    But anyhow.

    I, like a fool, bought it and now I’m trying to rekindle my virtual flying madskillz to set off on another adventure in and around this slightly updated simulated virtual earth. Where will I go this time?

    Alas… and for those who were not paying attention during the pandemic of 2020, one of my “locked in the basement” projects involved splurging on a copy of MSFS 2020 (the previous release to this one) but on my PC. I bought a joystick “flight stick” and customized a little Cessna plane and set off from Edmonton west in an attempt to fly around the globe. I didn’t make it. Strangely enough after flying to the west coast and up to Alaska, then Russia, I found my way to Japan, and…

    Well.

    It was a combination of summer arriving (as if on schedule), a well-intentioned game patch causing an issue with the playability of my particular installation, and then mostly me overworking myself trying to record and log every leg of the flight adventure… and so I parked my little plane in Osaka or something (I don’t actually remember, but close to there anyhow) and we never left. As far as I know my imaginary pilot has settled into a life of eating delicious street Takoyaki, married to a nice girl all while he struggles to improve his Japanese awaiting his gamer guy to return and whisk him off to continue the flying adventure.

    Jokes on him.

    My new little virtual pilot, Bardo, has spawned to life in MS2024 on my PS5 and has set off on a clumsy flight of a similar ilk to the cut-short flights of 2020 Lazy Joe—though I’m feeling a bit lazier and so the notion of rigorously recording on the PS5 (which is decidedly clunkier for long videos) does not appeal this time, so his adventures will be far less fulsomely documented.

    We set off once again in a new Cessna and this time flew south, first to Red Deer Regional and then on another hop down through a snowy afternoon storm to Calgary International. Alas, this poor new guy had a bit of a rough landing in both situations because (as good as the sim is) the control scheme is a little more touchy on my console controller (versus that steady-as-heck joystick.) I may need to figure that problem out before we keep travelling… but I digress.

    There are missions and challenges baked into MSFS2024, but that all seems a little touristy and I have this notion of keeping the adventure going leg by leg, treating the sim as if Bardo is actually (as I write this) sitting in the pilot’s lounge in the hangar at YYC waiting for some mechanic to sign off on the fix to whatever damage I caused listening to the landing advice from the AI co-pilot (which on another side note is weirdly another Microsoft product unrelated to flight simulator… hmm… maybe that’s why it’s advice nearly caused me to crash on a mile long runway in the easiest plane, huh?)

    Nevermind. We’re off once again.

    This is the first entry in my flight log as Bardo takes to the open air and sets off on a new adventure. Maybe if I make it all the way to Japan again he’ll check up on Joe… or join him. Either way, I’ve got myself a new game-slash-project and you, dear readers, better settle in.

  • purposefully lost

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Compared to this time last year are you more lost or found?

    In accordance with the current theme and title of this blog, I will remind you that “not all who wander are lost” [J.R.R. Tolkien].

    However, I did kickstart this blog back to life in the early months of this year and landed on a theme and a title that relayed a sense of abstractly lacking direction, for better or worse—I suppose.

    Wandering can be a form of losing oneself in a familiar space, or it can be a directionless pursuit of the spontaneity of being purposefully adrift in a world of structure and plans and schedules and rules and… deep breath.

    I choose a bit of both. And for the most part as I wake up each day looking at the lack of clarity and direction in that moment, well, I don’t see it as lost, so much as existentially adrift.

    Yet, my life over the last few years has transitioned of one of structure, an over-packed meeting calendar and creeping project deadlines to something that is a little more digitally nomadic.  Though I may not necessarily wander in corpus, I have become something more of a wandering soul, seeking experience and inspiration around and about. In that sense I am far more lost from the structures of proper society than many of you may find comfortable for your own ways of being. It even makes my family a bit discombobulated sometimes as I embrace the day each and every morning with a lack of clarity of how those hours will be spent.

    On the other hand there is a formality of purpose in how I spend those days, and one that didn’t exist even a year ago. I have a small business to bolster.  I make for myself some pretty strict creative goals around writing and music and coding and art that are driving me purposefully forward towards a kind of personal productivity of being that I had a vague sense of last year, and so perhaps I’ve taken a more rigidly “found purpose” approach to this past twelve month. In that sense, alternatively, I find myself more “found” each day with that sense of purpose and pride and personal accomplishment.

    So how do I answer this particular question? Lost or found? Am I more found because of the strategic intent of my life or am I more lost because I’ve embraced a wandering affectation upon which to take the individual steps and moments of my days. I might suggest it balances out, but that is unsatisfying an answer as it is a cowardly reply. 

    What matters the most? I think the perception of the day-to-day is what matters to me right now. I can continue to wander comfortably because most people see me, know me, relate to me on a broader timescale: weekly run friends, quarterly visits with acquaintances, sporadic family get togethers. To them the data points of the wandering life is smoothed to a gentle upward curve of momentum and achievement, perhaps. And like any and many of us, we can embrace the rolling toils of our lives on the moment by moment perception of it in the closer packed analysis of those moments, and that is what matters to us—for me that is a perception of wandering and distraction and engaging with the flicker of something new and shiny on a horizon I may never reach, running down a trail that veers off from the obvious path, or waking up and not knowing where I’ll find myself by lunchtime.

    In other words, I’m a little bit more lost, but maybe that’s on purpose.

  • ask me again next year

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Compared to this time last year are you happier or sadder?

    At the end of this month it will have been exactly two and a half years since I left that stable job and set out on an adventure of random and self employment. Two. And a half. Years.

    It was a story of burnout and change and balance and adventure. It is strange however, how I always seem pin that transition back to personal happiness—even now, a quarter of a decade later. 

    Last December I was quasi-employed at one of my side-gig adventures. I can’t tell you if I was happy precisely. The job was great on paper, shitty in reality. The people were interesting and fun, but the relationships were fleeting and shallow. The hours were trash, but I simultaneously had a lot of free time to write and code and a kind of routine of stability and hope that it was going somewhere.

    A year later I’ve left that place behind, been through a professional training program, started my own corporation, earned money doing technology things, and seem to have found a bit of professional balance (even if the pay is still pretty sickly.) 

    Happier was inevitable, I think.

    If that is the only measure, though, I don’t think it paints a fulsome picture.

    I am healthier, too. I seem to have solved (at least diagnosed) the problem behind this chronic cough I’ve had for a couple years. 

    I am sleeping better. Or, at least I feel less tired than in a long time and—well, you know how it feels like you had a good sleep because you wake up alert and remembering these vast and rolling narrative dreams that fill your head and heart with a blur of “what was that all about?” vibes. Yeah. That.

    My kid is doing well. My dog is cuddlier. I have good friends.

    The weather is still meh, but apart from moving across the ocean there is not much hope to fixing that part of my life besides embracing the winter.

    What else can I say, I suppose? I started posting here again in the interim between of those two points in time, this time last year and now, so perhaps the very act of routinely writing and posting and feeling like I can articulate the very notion of this passage of time and in doing so step back and look at it with even a bit of objectivity? Maybe that helps. Maybe seeing those notches of my year all lined up and progress being made, tracking the adventure of this thing untethered from some kind of vague professional virtue signalling, maybe that’s the thing that sets the tone of everything else. 

    I dunno. Ask me again next year.