works of wanderlust

Category: writing & communicating

  • on writing absurdity

    How does one write for absurdity?  After all, what is the absurd. The unexpectedly humourous. The weird confluence of ideas, people, situations and object that don’t normally belong together? Or more than that, shouldn’t belong together.  Things that clash in their purpose. How does one pull from a rational brain ideas that align with the notion of absurdity, might be the bigger and more important question?

    An example might help.

    That is to say, here I’m sitting at a Starbucks and writing out on the patio. Nothing about that situation is absurd. In fact it is quite mundane. Coffee. Patio table. Sunshine. People gathered and enjoying their drinks. Me with a keyboard.  That is a situation that is in itself complete mundane.

    What would make this situation absurd?  How many elements of it would need to change to create a humourous contrast. Changing something might make it just silly or funny, say. For example, a cafe like this where the barista is a dog is silly. Or  maybe patio where there were preposterously small tables might lean towards the absurd, but it is mostly again just silly and impractical.

    I think there is an aspect of the absurd where the end result of the situation is, yes, important, but also the logic behind how we got to that point that makes it go beyond the silly and drift more into absurdity.  Cause and effect. We see the effect and then are captivated by the odd sort of logic that brought us there.

    So again, back to the silly examples. A barista who is a dog is silly. A barista who is a dog because the dog isn’t really a dog but a shapeshifting robot who is stuck in the form of a dog is kind of strange. A shapeshifting robot barista stuck in the form of a dog because a software update sent out from a megacorporation who misread and misinterpretted a sarcastic customer review and decided by committee that what all customers wanted was baristas who looked liked dogs—that is starting to become absurd.  It’s baked into the explanation.  

    Likewise, a cafe patio with small tables is akward, but if those tables are small because of some middling store manager who beleives that small tables are fashionable and kind of trendy, that’s silly. If the manager is also bad at math and then orders tables that are ridiculously small, to the point that they are essentially barely wide enough to hold a single cup of coffee balanced on the end of a thin table leg and that he has ordered these at great expense and unmasked embarassment but cannot get rid of them because he would need to admit his error, risk losing his job and thinks he would look a worse fool than he already does, so everyone is forced to pretend and justify that these useless tables are deliberate and great—that starts to get absurd.

    Absurdity is an elusive thing, I think.  One of my great role models, Douglas Adams was seemingly great at the absurd, but one immediately assumes that his greatest examples of absurdity were accidents or rolled effortlessly onto the page. In fact, one can kind of tell that he was building absurdity into his everyday experience, picking out weirdness from the mundane by just asking “what if—“

    What if this was slightly and weirdly different, why would that have happened, and what if people tried to pretend it was a completely normal thing to have happened?

  • essays in downshift

    Of all the things I could be writing here, what I should be writing more of is words on the process of shifting careers.

    I’m practically overflowing with experience in that lately. *sigh*

    It’s funny, actually. I am sitting here in the sun of a cafe patio sipping my morning coffee and staring blankly at a keyboard. I was trying to prompt myself into writing something meaningful because the last twenty four hours has been something of a crest of yet another existential crisis dealing with parenting transitions and a funeral and a hundred other little quirks of reality. I was trying to write something meaningful because it feels like a day for meaningful things. Instead, I was reading through my old writings.

    Twenty-three months ago I quit my government job. About once a month now I seriously look at that decision and wonder if it was the right one—then quickly remind myself to read back through my letters to myself or catch a glimpse of the beurocratic trenches that burned me out and remember that quitting was the good decision. The tough decision. But the right decision.

    Existential crisis stand by.

    My old writings are in themselves grounding. If you ever decide to shift careers, or just quit a toxic career and look for a better reality I have only one piece of advice: journal the fuck out of that thing.

    A month. A year. A decade. However long it takes to shift. Just write and write and write. Keep track of the ups and downs. Plot the moments. Grasp the emotional state of each moment and put it into words.

    And then… go back and read it on occasion.

    Two years feels like forever and simultaneously feels like a blink of the eyes. That sounds incredibly cliche, but cliches are cliches for a reason, right?

    My journey over the last two years has been one of a hundred different mental states, from sinking into the depths of desperate projects to flying on the wings of new prospects. I don’t need to inventory here everything that I have dabbled in this past stretch of time, hobbies and habits, meditation and milage, part time work and unpaid pondering, and heck knows that if you told me that I’d be writing something like these words and staring down the metaphorical gate leading into year three of this process I may have reconsidered the whole damn thing, but then that’s why the words have been so important. That’s where the writing has grounded the ride.

    Want some tips? Here are five starting points for reflective journalling:

    1. Write yourself a letter describing your day. Date it. Be blunt. Why do you feel the way you feel right now, what’s driving you up the walls, how are you coping and how does it make you want to react?

    2. Write your backstory. Pick a logical point in time and explain like you were writing a memoir how you got from that point to now. Maybe you explain the course of your education. Maybe you lay out the path of your employment history. Maybe you detail the people and conversations that led you here. I dunno. But you do.

    3. Layout the events of the week. Do it narrative style. You are allowed to be the main character for a few minutes. Like, look back on the last seven days and explain how you spent them, the highs and lows, the blahs, the conversations that made your day or had you tugging your hair out by the roots.

    4. Explain where you think you are going. No one really knows for sure. We’re all making this shit up as we go, to be honest. But unless you’re sitting perfectly still you’re heading in some direction and you must have a destination. What do you expect to find there.

    5. Admit a misconception. None of us are perfect. We make assumptions and misunderstand things all the time. Own up to yourself in your journal. Write what you got wrong, why you thought one way when it was actually another, and call out the moment.

    Existential crisis be damned.

  • black hole blog

    Another navel-gazing blog post to start the week.

    I would avoid fumbing into another blogging about blogging post on a Monday morning, but I feel like I need to plant a flag at this moment and explain some things.

    I doubt you’re paying much attention, but if you were you may have noticed that the post count on this site went from 40ish on Saturday to about ten times that number on Sunday.

    I did not have a mad typing frenzy and write a lot. Even I have limits.

    Instead, while trying to figure out what to do with four years of blog archives living at at least two other domains I decided that I should just slurp all that content into this site and keep trudging forward.

    Context follows.

    On January 1, 2021 feeling (a) new yearsy and resolutionish (b) frustrated by ongoing covid lockdowns (c) blogless and oh there’s that writing itch again and (d) private enough that I didn’t want to write under my real name here’s what happened: I started a new blog called The Cast Iron Guy.

    The Cast Iron Guy was a covid project. It was a hey, I’m stuck at home, let’s write something different that feels big and fun and wasn’t about being locked in the house in the middle of winter. I made up a pen name—bardo—and wrote a lot of posts—no, a lot of posts—about cooking and local adventures and life and the universe and of course cast iron, which was a bit of an obsession for me at that moment in time. I posted with abundance, almost daily for a year and then just frequently for the three years that followed.

    A couple things happened. Covid waned. Career change shifted my life. And a bunch of other “cast iron guys” popped up online who were hard core, forged in fire, sandblasting frying pans to heavy metal soundtracks tiktokers. I was just over here writing sourdough bread recipes and poetry about mushrooms. My enthusiasm stuttered and puttered. But the site has always been online.

    I don’t want to write cast iron guy stuff anymore, tho. That was an era and that era has passed. But there is a load of great content. So… what to do? I pondered.

    Well, I have rebooted this simpler blog (the one you are reading this on) at my original web address url. Why not just slurp all those blog posts (and a few from another similar but much smaller project about writing on art I was doing in 2023) into this site and just keep going?

    So that’s what’s happened. As of this Monday morning basically all the blog content from the Cast Iron Guy is now in the archives of this site. Essentially 95% of the posts prior to April 2025 are the ramblings of an adventure-seeking blogger surviving the pandemic era. I have some mopping up to do because some of the pictures didn’t import cleanly and a few of the links are broken (some of it is half a decade old after all) but for the most part it’s all there. And if you haven’t read it because you had never heard about it because I was being a little bit secretive about it then there is a literal novel-worth of content buried in the archives of this site now, gobbled up like a great big black hole blog.

    And onwards it goes.

  • performance anxiety

    There is a teensy chance that people are actually reading this site.

    I may have mentioned in a previous post that I wrote a blog for something like sixteen years, pulling it down about five years ago when I got into a management role at work and had employees who literally hated me because “me bad man enforce corporate rules and make them accountable for their work” and were subsequently googling my demise. I didn’t need that shit.  

    I have no management job anymore and frankly I may not have perfectly formed and balanced opinions but in the sea of stupid that reigns over the world these days, I’m probably ranking highly on the rational and open minded person scale.

    Point is, I restarted this blog. 

    No, I didn’t just start blogging again. I restarted THIS blog. It is a fresh new wordpress installation, it has a new name (though I’ll likely change it six times before the year is out) and I will not be reposting my sixteen years of archives. But. But. But it exists at the same address.

    All the old post links might be broke, but the important ones are live again.

    I naively figured it would take a year or two before anyone figured out it was back. A window of obscurity to savor and enjoy?

    Here’s the thing tho. Yesterday, just as an example, 884 people downloaded my RSS feed. And it wasn’t like a bunch of russion troll bots either. I think, maybe, y’know, maybe people kept this in their feed readers—which was almost as surprising to me as learning that at least 884 people still use RSS feed readers.   

    And bonus stat, a bunch of those people clicked the link and actually read the thing I posted. Crazy.

    That does change a couple things. I mean, if nothing else I thought I was screaming into the digital void. Sure, archives. I wasn’t writing anything I didn’t want angry future sleep-at-their-desk and clock out two-hours-early expecting-no-repercussions employees to read… but still. I figured slim chance, right?

    But you’re reading this right now. So… you either lurk in the depths of the digital void like a weird mythical creature or folks are still reading this blog. And that’s all the same difference as singing an a stage is to singing in the shower. It’s a lot different when people are watching.

    First of all, welcome. I don’t do comments. It’s a pain in the ass larger than I could conceivably explain. So what I’m trying to say is that if you feel as if you want to respond, I’m on Bluesky, yadda, yadda, whatever, wahtever. 

    Second of all, I know you’re here now. I’ll try not to overreact and just keep writing what I would normally write. I mean… this post is… I mean… it’s reflexive to seeing those stats, but after this… I’ll… well… you get it.

    *deep breath*

    Cue the music and… here we go.

  • keyboard life

    I have developed a lot of little productivity hacks for myself in the past couple years.

    It’s odd, actually.

    Realizing that.

    Odd.

    For the first year of my career break I wrote about it all the time. The career break I mean. I was always writing about it. I was slightly obsessed with working through the whole thing in long rambling essays, very few of them published anywhere but in my own personal files, but all of them detailing my reasons and logic and emotions and everything to do with this whole deal of quitting a well-paying desk job (thanks stress and burnout) and spending the following months and months and months sorting through the effort of trying to rebuild myself professionally.

    So many words.

    It’s odd, because thinking about it right now I realize that I haven’t written much about career breaking in nearly a year now. And yet, no, I haven’t moved on, nor found myself breaking through the far side of that career break quite yet, but then too all the tangled complications of the last year have sort of left me a little less introspective on this thing that I did nearly two years ago now. I think about it. Write words. But those two haven’t really intermingled recently.

    Yet, it was the first thing I thought to write about now, just sitting here looking at the keyboard under my fingers, and I guess that means it still comes up, particularly when I start introspecting on some of the changes and habits that manifested in the meanwhile of my not quite but kinda still a career break era.

    Like, I’m typing on one of those productivity hack things as I write this.

    Yeah, the keyboard.

    About a year ago I bought myself this little portable mechanical keyboard.  Well, in fact I bought two of them, each for very different purposes. First, I bought a really nice one that is amazing to type on and which I carry in a little bag along with my iPad when I go off to a cafe to write. It’s wonderful. Clicky. Solid. Durable. And no I’m not selling them. But then I also bought a cheaper, smaller keyboard. It’s not quite as nice, though still pretty nice, and its a lot more plasticky, and it tends to live in the glove box of my truck. It is a little trickier to type on, I will admit, mostly because it is lacking about twenty of the more familiar keys like number digits and punctuation marks, and when I need them I need to access those with little function key combos that also make it a bit cryptic to type on, but I use it even more than I thought I would, squeezing in a session of writing before work or, like now, sitting in a park at a picnic table waiting for the run crew to arrive and taking these twenty free minutes to pound out a blog post.

    All of this is tangled together, of course, because this whole career break has given me this little new productivity skill of forcing myself to be much more free and effective about my writing. Impromptu. Spontaneous. Picnic table in the park free-ish. 

    Oh, and that’s the other thing I should mention. If nothing else comes of this career break, I am emerging from it feeling a lot more like a writer than I ever did prior. I’ve always fashioned myself a writer, but right now I feel it inasmuch as I would not hesitate to put it on a resume and defend it as a professional skill. 

    In fact. I’m a writer in the same way that I’m a runner, because I practice and practice and practice it a lot. I’ve just logged the time, you know?

    So, here I sit in yet another gap of free time writing on a keyboard in the park on this little keyboard. And the culmination of this anecdote is that I know damn well that I was not a type in the park on a little keyboard kind of writer before the career break. 

    That is the little productivity hack. 

    The hack is that I just write anywhere and everywhere now, shamelessly, even though as I’m sitting here in the park and cyclists and dog walkers and kids on skateboards are passing by looking at me with this idle curiosity, some weirdo at a picnic table typing away like a nut. That’s just what this looks like, I suppose.

    And that is a cool realization for me, fumbling and tangled and unfocused as I feel in the emergent spring. If nothing else, I’ve been productively hacked.