works of wanderlust

book reviews: fathers day

Coinicentally perhaps, all three of the last trio of otherwise-disconnected books I recently read had a thread of fatherhood-related importance running through them.

It was Father’s Day yesterday, and my last as the dad of a kid (because The Kid will be An Adult in a couple months) so while I’ll be a dad for the rest of my life my role is changing a little bit this year, and I’m not sure what that means yet. The fathers in each of these books were important narrative elements but each in a very different way, one a paragon, one a lunatic counter-example, one a steady hand in a storm.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

I have listened multiple times to the audio version of the entire Hyperion Cantos, a four book hard science fiction series set roughly six hundred years in the future in a society of humanity resettled onto hundreds of worlds interconnected by technologies, both alien and AI, that they don’t truly understand. This first book is a kind of Canterbury Tales story, a collection of backstory narratives told by a collection of pilgrims—one the aforementioned father travelling to complete his daughter’s journey—travelling towards certain doom towards the mysterious shrine of a threat that has defined each of their lives yet which is understood by none of them. The Shrike is a kind of technological demon of unknown origin, built by aliens or sent back from the future, with control over time and space and a merciless agenda the pilgrims can only speculate upon. I decided to read the text version of all four books after I obtained a complete ebook collection, and even though I’ve heard all four novels more than once I find I am reading more details on this pass though. The author incorporates as both a theme and a character throughout the novels a kind of embodied homage to poet John Keats who died tragically of tuberculosis in the early 1800s at the age of 25, and while visiting the Spanish Steps in Rome in 2023 I happened to see the commemotation of this marked upon his final home, if nothing else grounding this now-comfort read for me and urging repeated readings of this wonderful collection.

The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux

If you have seen the 1986 film adaptation of this book which stars Harrison Ford as a misunderstood inventor driven mad by his pursuit of a Swiss Familiy Robinson-like escape from america to the jungles of Honduras, you’ve been misled about the tone of this novel. The novel is decidedly darker, and whomever turned this into a PG-13 romping adventure into the wilds did the source material a deep disservice. The novel’s protagonist Allie Fox is witnessed through the eyes of his fourteen year old son-made-narrator who details with gaslit devotion the madness of his father as he rages against the world as he flees with narcissitic paranoia further and further off grid to escape the perception of modern society as a prison. In a modern parlance we would recongnize these sorts of men who rule their families with thinly disguised emotional abuse as fountains of toxic masculinity, ripe for the propagandas of the right wing sovereignty cults or the red pilled movements. Seen from the eyes of his son, the collapse of this man into destructive madness is simultaneously pitiable and fearsome even knowing what such men have done to our societies over the last couple decades when they don’t take flight from their own shadows. This book shook me.

Dust by Hugh Howey

I did it. I sunk my teeth into the final book of the Silo trilogy and read the conclusion to this dystopic tale of society’s collapse at the hands of madness and righteousness. Even more than the previous two volumes Howey seems to lean into the misguided evils of people who blindly believe in things: their own infallibility, patriotic furvor, religious ideologies, among other subtler concepts. All of this emerges from the narrative web that Howey wove with the rich collection of characters and stories that only just started to interconnect even as the second book concluded. In the third and final installment the disparate storytelling becomes an obvious whole as the plot bounces between the characters and their chances of fortune that have led them on a plot-based collision course with each other and the ultimate conclusion of the story. The author isn’t shy about raising the stakes with any and every chapter, beloved characters meeting fatal fates with a regularity that would make Game of Thrones readers blush, but the harsh reality at the end of the world is that between desperation and ignorance is the rawness of survival against the odds. I wonder how the mini-series that prompted me to dig deeper into the orginal novels will handle it all.

June 16, 2025
head over feets: zen edition

I have been doing a self-experiment. (That’s what I am going to call these things that others might call “challenges” or “streaks” of trying to build a habit over the course of 30 days. Experiments on myself.) I have been meditating every day.

And before you get the images of me all new-age yogi omming on a cushion with incense and such, I’ll tell you instead that it has been an effort much more of a timer-based mindfulness exercise. Me just sitting there with my eyes closed focused on stillness and breath and focus of thoughts. I read a more science-focused book on meditation and the author compared the health-based meditation to mental pushups: just repeating the focus, correcting ones form, adjusting, repeating, and building mental strength and stamina. I mean, it’s all the same stuff in the end, but instead of chanting I have an app on my phone that makes a gentle sound when the timer expires.

I’m working on a whole article about that experiment that I’ll publish in a couple weeks, but I’ve had some reflective thoughts on the effort and how it relates to another kind of meditation I’ve been doing for nearly twenty years, thirty day challenges be damned.

Running solo and sans music is, believe it or not, meditative. At least, data point of one, it has been for me. I just didn’t really recognize it until my efforts to be mindful on my living room floor and my solo running efforts overlapped.

Yesterday morning I went for a run in the rain.

I followed a familiar route that led through my neighbourhood avoiding as many roads that I could and focusing on finding a route towards the river valley. I dodged onto the asphalt trail and followed that fo a few minutes until I found the exit into the single track through the trees.

Mindfulness is about focus on the body and a stilling of ones thoughts. It is an impossible feat for nearly everyone, I am given to understand. One can creep ever closer towards the goal that is infinitely out of reach. Running through the woods my mind turns itself over to the trail, each step a miniature obstacle that requires a kind of focus and attention. The meandering terrain of a single track course maginifies that focus, forcing the mind into a single purpose machine tracking the undulating and potentially dangerous footing while modulating the body for pace and breath and the beat-beat-beat of a racing heart.

To be fair, this is not the first time I have made this connection between mindfulness and my chosen sport.

I used to write a lot about the space that running gave me to think creative thoughts, work through problems, or ponder philosophical ideas. (I know, I’m odd.) Going for a solo run has always been a way to slip into a mindful trance of sorts and plod around the neighbourhood working through stuff with an unencumbered mind. People even ask me how I run without music, to which I would reply that I sometimes do run with headphones but most often I just prefer the space to think. What I never really recognized until lately was that this thing that the zen folks and the yogis and the chanters sitting atop cushions are all trying to achieve is a state of mental clarity and calm that I already kinda found out there in the river valley trails, and I suspect is a familiar state of mind for countless other runners and trail racing folk.

I am enjoying my daily fifteen minutes of mental pushups. I turn on my timer and find a quiet place to sit and then just listen to my own breath for a spell. When my little experiment is over, this effort to build a new habit has reached its milestone, when the final chime rings I will need to decide if it remains something I find space for each day. Or, instead, does this become another tool in my health toolbox, like strength training or eating well, is it something I just do to make me a better runner.

June 13, 2025
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.

June 12, 2025
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?

June 12, 2025
war of the ants

I really do hate using my entymology powers for evil.

Yet, I have been waging a war out my front door on an ant colony as they wreck havoc upon a beautiful and otherwise-thriving plum tree I’ve been trying to grow in my front yard.

Let’s back up.

We’ve been in our house for twenty years, and one would assume that roughly nineteen years since completing the landscaping around that new-build home we should have had time to grow a maginificent tree of some sort in the front yard.

Most of our neighbours have trees that tower as tall as or much taller than their roof lines, granting shade and a sense of maturity to the property.

My tree is only about two meters tall, spindly and could use another decade before I consider it a success. Why? Because it is the third tree I’ve attempted to grow in that spot. The previous two perished because of, frankly and humbly, my presumptions about my own ability to thwart the climate in which I live—and too, that Home Depot is an asshoel for selling trees to people who don’t check closely enough these things in their local nurseries that are not rated for our climate zone.

On about six year cycles I’ve had to replant, tend, try to rescue, and eventually remove the two previous attempts at a front yard tree. And most recently, in 2020 (I remember this because it was in the peak of the pandemic’s first summer) I found a plum tree in a pot, ready for transplant, similar if not identical to the one thriving in my neighbours backyard, rated for our climate zone, and I bought it and planted it in the hole from which I’d just dug the remains of the last stump.

Fast forward to twenty-twenty five and past four bitter winters and a couple years of light but successful plum harvests from this young tree… and to me noticing that a lot of the leaves were curling up this year and—oh shit—the ants, I suspect a species likely lasius neoniger, had infested it and had built some kind of critter farm filled with hungry little insects and webby, silky, munching aphids turning entire branches into a tree apocalypse affecting about a third of the host organism. They were killing my third tree.

Here we go again.

Or…

My last week has been spent trying to rout the invasion.

Diatomacious earth powdered upon the ground.

Insecticides on the leaves to curb the livestock explosion.

Bait traps seeded around the colony in hopes of poisoning the queen.

And, most rudimentary, spirals of sticky tape twisted around the trunk face out to capture hundreds of drone workers and glue them to their doom.

I studied entomology in university. I often tell people it was an unofficial minor in my science degree—unofficial because I never took the time to declare it—and I could have, should have gone on to do something with that because I love insects, particularly the eusocial ones like ants who I used to rave to anyone who would listen about the fascinating properties of ants who did agriculture.

I mean, I just don’t want it in my tree, in my front yard, wrecking my stuff. A bit nimby of me, sure, but I’ve got property values to think of, right? And, I mean, what a waste.

So I sit here writing this, drinking my coffee, and thinking with the backburner thoughts of a guy preoccupied by a problem what my next move in the battle is going to be.

Those ants outnumber me for sure, but I won’t let them outsmart me.

June 11, 2025

blog.8r4d.com

Ah. Some blog, huh?

I’ve been writing meandering drivel for decades, but here you’ll find all my posts on writing, technology, art, food, adventure, running, parenting, and overthinking just about anything and everything since early 2021.

In fact, I write regularly from here in the Canadian Prairies about just about anything that interest me.

Enjoy!

Blogging 400,992 words in 530 posts.

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