works of wanderlust

Category: writing & communicating

  • third-place-less

    I’m sitting in a coffee shop trying to do some writing, but first I needed to get some words off my chest: this was fifth place I tried. It’s shortly after lunchtime on a Monday in October and the first four places I tried—including three other cafes and the local public library—were so stuffed full of people that I would have been squatting in the corner hoping for a sympathy chair had I stayed longer than walking in and right back out again.

    We’ve stopped making third places.

    Or, if you want to call coffee joints third places, we’ve stopped making the kind of third places where you don’t need to spend anywhere from three to eight bucks to buy a drink so you can use their wifi guilt-free for an hour… tho, even then, I had to drive in a loop of about fifteen kilometres just to find one with a spare seat.

    First places are where we live.

    Second places are where we learn, work and contribute.

    Third places are where we go to be social and thrive and be outside of the other two places. I like to write and create and think in third places… but this usually means I do most of my writing and creating and thinking over an expensive coffee in a local Starbucks. 

    Fair enough, there’s a teachers strike on right now and the library being packed with teenagers who are off school because of the labour dispute was not a surprise, but I’ve been there on any other given day and finding an empty chair is always a roll of the dice.

    And true, when I go out at 8am with my writing device ready I usually have my pick of places to be a write and create and think and sit pretty much anywhere I want in the doing of those things.

    But we’re not a society that creates public buildings to just hang out in. There’s a local rec centre, but I’ve checked there, too, often and found it just as hopping busy as any cafe or library, it’s thirty or forty seats filled with people who beat me to the punch with their computers or whatever.

    Parks are wonderful third places, as is the bragging rights of the city having an absolutely enormous river valley trail system filled with nooks and crannies. But too, we live in a winter city, so on a cool, late-autumn day when the rain is off and on and the wind is blowing a pre-winter chill, sitting outside is not a great place with a sketchbook let alone an expensive laptop computer. 

    Where are our third places?

    Certainly if you have a few bucks to throw at a coffee or a beer or a hamburger you can sit in a cafe or a pub or a fast food restaurant. Is that the healthiest situation for a society? I have written elsewhere, or maybe even here, on the trouble with losing our third places, the virtualization of our seconds and the isolation of our firsts. The ones we have left are filled with social media trolls and AI ghosts in the machine or pay-to-play hot seats at a bustling corporate cafe, and it all seems a little sickly and sad. Even more so as winter creeps closer day by day and I remember that I’ll be trapped in my house for weeks on end soon, hunkering down and trying to find the motivation that is so much more clear and urgent when I’m out and about in public.

    Either that, or I’ll drive around looking for a warm seat in what is left of the third places, shell out my three bucks for a mediocre coffee and try and feel like the world is not blurring into something even more isolating than in already seems.

  • state of the blog, one: un-curated

    When I relaunched this site back in April I suggested that I would try not to write too many navel gazing posts about the blog itself.  I mean, to be fair, I like reading about how the sausage is made—as it were. I wish a lot more people who maintained personal websites and writing projects were actually interested in the creative process as much as they are interested in click-through optimization and search engine manipulation and all the other topics that seem as much about duping users into reading your drivel as is was about actually creating extensive collections of online expression.

    I probably don’t need to mention that writing this as I am in October 2025 the world is in a period of retracting rights of personal expression.

    I have been consciously moving further and further away from the corporate social networks and continuing to build a slow-but-steady presence here online. To my earlier point, this site was never about click-throughs or search engines or tricking you, the reader, into reading anything you don’t want to read. This is just the manifestation of opinion from one guy here on the Canadian prairies and the things I write about span a hundred different topics—you’re going to find something interesting and you’re probably going to be bored by just as much.

    When I relaunched this site, scraping it together from the remains of about four other niche blogs I was maintaining, while I was trying to find my footing and my rhythm I did stray into writing far too often about the blog itself. So, I declared that I would only drop one of those navel gazing “meta” posts no more than once per week. I’ve held pretty solid to that, and the number has been more like once per month.

    But here’s the sausage-making part: a lot goes on behind the scenes to write the words and collect the photos and too, keep the lights on here. No one would or could afford to have me sit here and recreate this kind of thing for them. It is a kind of work of personal madness that it even exists. My blogs have always been a kind of personal passion project. 

    All of that is to say that I do appreciate readers. I do appreciate clicks and when you find this on search. I have some light stats running and so I have a rough idea that people are visiting and they are reading certain topics. I know that, for example, if I shared more cast iron recipes I could flood this site with traffic. If I posted more hiking tips for the rocky mountains, I would probably build a dedicated user-base. Or, if I complained more about oddball observational neighbourhood gripes the search engine would light me up like a firework. I’m not a performing monkey, tho—so you get whatever I feel like writing about and you can feel free to dig through the archives and look for anything that is more interesting.

    Social media really has trained us to expect an internet built for an audience of one. That’s the simultaneous beauty and danger of the algorithm. When it’s acting nice we call it curation. When it’s isolating us to niche information we call it siloing our perspective.

    This blog is my perspective, but there is no algorithm. I have written about that before—somewhere here—and all to the point that like in yee good ole days, when papers and the evening news showed us everything they could jam into their publication-slash-broadcast allotments, we didn’t live in these curated silos of expectations. We just read everything, whether it was something that made us clap like a trained seal or not. 

    I’m no news outlet, but as I keep writing on this blog and filling it with stuff that interests me (knowing only a fraction of it will interest you) I do so understanding that I have far more in common with traditional media publications than I do with corporate social media feeds. There are (as of right now) about four average-length books worth of writing on this site and not a word of it is curated (or siloed) to you. And I think that’s a good thing.

    Thanks for reading.

  • meta (not) monday and other stuff

    Starting with an aside, I’ll just note that it drove me nuts when the company that makes and runs that dystopian social network—you know the one—decided to call itself meta. Many wager that they stole the term from Neal Stephenson’s classic novel Snow Crash which itself was a fiction-shaped social commentary on the explosive expansion of technology into our lives and his “metaverse” was, at least in my opinion, an analogy for the navel-gazing narcissistic amplifications that would inevitably extrude from every pore of an increasing entrenchment of virtual spaces into human lives. Zuckerbot probably just thought it would be a cool name, so now when anyone uses the word “meta” —which simply and properly in English just means something along the lines of “self-referencing”— one can’t help but seem like they are talking about that perverse social network, and not say, being reflective and talking about one’s own work and platform—which is where I was going with this…

    For years when I blogged I used to routinely use the term “meta Mondays” as an excuse to plant a flag in the ‘state of the blog’ and write about what I was working on in and around it, or more often write down excuses about why I wasn’t writing more or building it bigger and better. Meta Monday. Alliterative and clever and whatever.

    I apologize if you are a reader and were expecting a sudden explosion of new and insightful content about my random musings. I apologize if you have stumbled here from my old urls and are now wondering why those more focused brand-idents are a guy blogging about his weekends and his fitness.  My energies have been focused on other stuff.  Who knows how long that will last. I have put a lot of those energies into a couple project about which I may or may not ever share—professional stuff, ahem, you know how it goes—and when I’m spending six to eight hours at a keyboard doing that stuff, finding time to be expressive and philosophical here is a slipping luxury.

    And those damn social networks, amiright?

    The wasted human potential that has been sunk via billions of human life hours every day into this fuzzy digital existence. Gah!

    I was always a bit of an optimist. 

    Do you know why I started blogging?

    It was the afterglow of the science fiction idealism of the eighties and nineties. Authors would create this abstract setting where virtual spaces were pure and engaged. A place where truth was challenged, sure, but where rational thought and big ideas prevailed. People would write and share and create and build and make incredible things.

    What did we get?

    We got the shitty shadow. The Internet. Influencers selling their souls for clicks, deep fake images and video, AI slop, hate, rage, unfiltered racism, the masses looking at reality but then jabbing their own fingers in their eyes to avoid seeing it.

    If you can’t express your idea in an eight second video clip no one cares. 

    Ninety-nine point nine percent of attention goes to zero point one percent of the voices and creators. We haven’t broken celebrity, we’ve amplified it and commodified it.

    Long form expression is all but dead.

    Why write a post if no is going to read it?

    Why write a novel if an AI is going to steal it?

    Why host a blog if search engines will bury it?

    Why engage in a discussion if the brain at the other end of the connection is unwilling to consider it?

    What I used to hope for was a kind of online world where everyone has a place to write and share and create, at least a little something worth reading, but that was always a kind of long shot idealism—I will admit—and I honestly never even considered that it would go this badly for us online. In the last year or two my hope for a lovely digital future has faded to a kind of dystopia of necessity, of me eventually eluding escape for but a single reason: that ceding even one more byte to the darkness would be a betrayal of my life’s work. The internet is deeply broken for good and all that is left is a commercial platform run for the sole purpose of harvesting as much cash out of the fibres before the whole thing burns to the ground, and worse. 

    How’s that for a not-Monday morning thought?

    I guess what I’m saying is that my optimism is on life support.  Objective reality is apparently broken. The internet is a bully platform. The nerds built it and then the rest of the tribe saw merely another space that could be used to induce hate and pain and hurt—and for every one of us there and ninety-nine of them, and now they are shifting algorithms to amplify the ninety-nine to ninety-nine millions. I am drowning in a sea of digital stupid and I sometimes feel as though I am on the precipice of a post-internet phase of my life.

    And yet, here I am still writing.

  • half life

    This is not a game. 

    I did the math. I was exactly half the age I am today when I wrote my first blog post. Maybe that’s nothing. Maybe that’s everything. I’m not sure I’m equipped to tell you either way.

    Take my age today, divide by two and that many years, months, days ago I sat down in front of my aging desktop computer, logged into a web server hosting ftp something or other and uploaded a thing that I would identify from then on as the first blog post I ever wrote.  I think I had been for a walk through Vancouver after recently moving there, and figured rather than send endless emails—that’s what we did back then, wrote emails to our friends—back to my family and University chums I would start one of those blog things and post updates confirming my continued survival out and on the coast.

    I enjoyed writing it. 

    I used it as an excuse to invest in the cheapest portable digital writing set up I could afford so fresh out of school: I bought a battery-powered keyboard for my palm pilot pda, and then would go sit in cafes or the library or the park at a picnic table and fill the memory of my little greyscale pre-cellphone mini-computer with words and anecdotes and stories and opinions and fleeting words. Then I would go back to my little studio apartment on Oak Street and plug the pda into the serial port of the computer, sync the text files over, format them into crude HTML and add them to my blog as pages.

    Within half a year I had moved to Blogger, and even paid for a premium ad-free account. And then when, shortly after they were acquired by Google, I got a Blogger-logoed hoodie in the mail and decided to migrate all my words off to something more customizable. 

    I poked around in MovableType for a year or two, learned a stupid amount about server management and web design, so much so that it blurred the lines at my job and they promoted me into running the website. I eventually turned that into the main part of my career: running websites. 

    In the end, and I can’t recall when, I found WordPress and even to this day use that CMS as my software of choice. I have skimmed the surface of other tools, played around in Drupal quite a bit for a while there, built at least three custom CMS tools from scratch if for no other reason than to learn, but ultimately decided that I want to write for the writing sake and that dabbling in the tech is bothersome and distracting, so I just use WordPress now because I don’t want to muck around any more than I need to than to just blog.

    Blogging is, all these years later, a clearly dated form of expression. Sure, people still write blogs, but you’re more apt to find people tiktoking or substacking or vlogging on video platforms, than you are to find self-hosted long form writing as anything but a niche hobby for the “olds” as my kid would call us. I don’t mind. I have stuck with it for now literally half my life—which, if you haven’t done the math yet, is approaching a quarter of a century—because it suits me.

    Sure. I have made content for all sorts of other platforms and—meh—because first, they are someone else’s platforms, but second, I’m not cut out to make six second video shorts or speak into a camera or sales pitch bullshit into the algorithmic feeds of the social-network-de-jour. 

    Nor is this form perfect. Blogging too has been tainted by monetization. I remember getting so disillusioned about the whole thing when, having joined a Reddit forum a few years ago, seeking people who I thought would be kindred spirits discussing their love of the long-form personal blog post instead therein sharing advice on gaming search engines and using AIs to generate content and employing bot nets to drive engagment in any of a hundred sketchy ways. No one there want to discuss writing habits or idea generation or platform optimization, no, they wanted to hustle and then hustle some more to make money on their shallow content with the least effort possible. “How long before I make money at this?” Was the most common inquiry. 

    I tell you this because I don’t want you to think the last quarter century has been smooth sailing.  Between the tainted reputation the form, the deep competition from other platforms, the saturation of generative content in the internet itself, and the constant security and piracy threats, it is odd that anyone would want to have this hobby at all. And, while I never really went dark, I have shuttered blogs routinely, gone incognito in my writing output, and even for a time wrote a blog that was completely private and set up more as a web-based personal journal behind a password. It was not all fun and games these past years.

    And yet here I am still blogging: writing just another rambling post on the topic of writing. Which is maybe exactly why I write so much metacommentary on the act itself. Half my life blogging, being one of the last stragglers in the art, clinging to an aging digital art form and self-publication tool there must be a few more folks out there who can relate, who are looking for something besides SEO advice and hustler cheat codes for gaming the blogosphere. There must be someone who needs to know that some of us have done it because we just love to write out loud into the universe while we still have the freedom to do just that.

    If this it the first post of mine that you have read, thanks for reading.

    If you have been along for the ride since the beginning, I probably don’t need to explain to you that have helped keep me sane in this crazy world, given me an outlet for expression, and made the internet a fun place for a while, too. 

    That’s worth a digital high five. 

    And let’s just keep going, shall we.

  • writing: enough

    It’s all well and good to write about writing but at the end of the day you’ve really just got to sit down and do it.

    It’s mid-June and Father’s day is approaching. This is something of an anniversary for me because on the day after Father’s day, two years ago, I had a meeting with my then-boss and resigned from my job.

    I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. I’ve been thinking about it because—as my kid told me just yesterday as she prepares to transition out of grade school and into adulthood—you kinda put on rose coloured glasses after you finish something, don’t you?

    I’ve spilled uncountable and unpublishable words on the reasons and follow-up of quitting a job and avoiding the perceptions of others that goes along with that: weakness, disloyalty, presumptions of cause, and all those things. Really, it was just an opportunity that I had and it was time to make a switch and take a break, and the stars aligned.

    Inside that opportunity was the notion that I was going to fill at least parts of my days putting words to paper. (Well—digital paper.) And heck, inside of these last two years I have typed out what has probably amounted to a quarter of a million of those aspirational words.

    I mean, along with writing, I’ve done a long list of other things. Frankly, I need to. Writing is as much as chore as any task. You get tired. Your brain needs breaks. I gave myself a modest daily goal and was persistently reluctant to push past those goals as a means and a method to avoid burning myself out on writing. SO I write for a bit each day and then do other things. Though, oddly enough, those things have varied, but the writing has kept pretty consistent.

    Yet here I am, almost at the two-year anniversary of that transition, casually poking at the pursuit of full-time work bear again, and looking back on what, if anything, I accomplished in the wordsmithery field that defined a big chunk of the last two years.

    Sure, a quarter million words including probably what amounts to a hundred mini-essays, the first 90% of a long novel, a string of blog posts, a small collection of short stories, and lots of vaguely reflective writing.

    Tiny goals, two years… big results.

    Just sitting down literally every day and writing… something.

    Is any of it worth anything?

    I mean, if you are judging my productivity in the context of publication and sales, then look: the world is fickle. I’ve written thousands of those words on the frustrations of commercially viable wordcraft. We live in a world where barely a fraction of the people read, and then when those people do read they are doing it as an escapism, and it seems from where I sit that most people are hoping to escape into romantic fantasy or comic book absurdity or political theatre or—well, heck if I knew maybe I would have gone viral and we wouldn’t be having this one-way conversation, would we?

    If, on the other hand, you are simply judging me by the fact that I write, say roughly, about 500 words per hour and have produced, again roughly, about a quarter million words, then this means that I have spent about 500 hours over the last two years writing. That’s a lot of practice… and a lot of personal value.

    Yet, at the same time, it doesn’t feel like enough.

    What even is enough?

    I don’t have a number, per se, but I feel like if I was to tell you that I am happy with my output despite the fact that a quarter of a million words and 500 hours of effort seems impressive, I would add to the end of that statement that I probably could write a bit more.

    Now, maybe you see the posts on this blog and you read some of it and wonder why I write on the topics that I write on. But heck, it’s all practice tho, isn’t it? Movie reviews, updates about my weekend, stories about my garden, meandering philosophical essays on the productivity of a Saturday afternoon. None of it’s breaking news, but writing enough is often about putting in the time and practice. That goes for anything. You don’t judge a runner for training multiple days per week for a race or begrudge a chef for prepping ten thousand meals before opening her own restaurant. Why point a questioning finger at a writer for just writing and writing and writing and then writing some more—even if the topic is blah or not of interest to you in particular?

    As such, my only advice on this topic was right there in the lede. I realize that even for myself I’ll only feel like I’ve done enough when I actually just done it. I just gotta sit here and keep writing, practicing, honing this craft, and perhaps amounting to something of that even I approve is enough.