works of wanderlust

lots to say, and lots of time

There will be cross-posting, I warn you now.

Who’s to say what is the right way and what is not? After all, log onto any search engine or social media tool and do a quick query for blogging advice and it all revolves around these vague concepts of user engagement and click-thrus and follower counts and blah-blah-blah…

So few people are writing about the zen of writing. I even fall into that trap myself sometimes. I just write about what I think other people want to read, rather than writing about what I want to write about.

I have a laundry list of other sites where I post.

You may even know about some of them.

I have a place where I write about art. I write about art when I do art, and then sometimes I don’t do much art at all, or I don’t feel like being all that introspective about my art, so I just don’t write about it.

I have a blog for my video game. I’m making a video game. Did I mention that yet? Oh, maybe you already know that. I am coding a real-to-goodness video game in real-to-goodness code with art and music and ideas. Oh, the ideas. And I write about that when I hit milestones.

I have a professional blog. I’m not that good at writing about myself as a professional, though. It is a lot of words about learning to learn and thinking to think and working to be better at working, or something, I don’t even know half the time. I am doing it to try to parse out the bits of my brain that think I might still have something to contribute to a business world. Is that working?

I want to write more about just stuff. You know. Stuff. About travel and the dog and some book that I read that felt good and oh, did you know I sat on the couch and played this video game for a while and it was fun and mindless and no I didn’t learn any deep and abiding lessons from it, but it was how I spent my day and so I want to write about it?

This is just a blog.

I have blogged for half my life now. And that’s almost literally true. I say that because on June 27, 2025 that will be literally true, to the day. Wow.

So here I am, resurrecting this notion of a random writing blog. And I’m going to write in it. And I’m going to cross-post into and from it. And some days it will be about nothing at all.

And that’s the zen of it. Warned yet?

April 14, 2025
hiragana

We have loosely settled on a trip across the Pacific.

Unable to confidently travel southbound across the border for our semi-annual pilgrimage to the house of the mouse in California, my wife has set her sights on the sister park near Tokyo for sometime, hopefully, next year. And of course a couple weeks checking out more than just Disney, too.

I love the idea of visiting Japan. The art and culture and food and architecture and everything that I feel would be familiar from the exports of media and such in which I partake locally.

And as is my oft-usual approach to these things, I’ve started to prepare for this still-hypothetical trip by taking language lessons. In other words, I’ve been studying Japanese…for about a month now.

And while the actual need to speak the language as a European-toned North American tourist has been repeatedly called into question by many friends, many Asian-descended themselves, I can’t help but feel having a basic grasp of how to (at the very, very least) read some of it might come in all too handy.

I mean, let’s just forget for a moment the academically-rewarding aspect of learning any language, and take that as a given: Learning new languages is simply, well, human.

But instead picture Brad stumbling through the Tokyo subway system or down a bustling alley and having some basic ability to read the signs for a shop or a washroom or even an exit. In that aforementioned Euro-centric approach I’ve taken to travel, the languages are almost always close enough and use the familiar latin-descended alphabet system. I get by. But arriving in Tokyo I would assume that recognition and some general familiarity with hiragana and katakana script will give me some advantage. And increase my enjoyment and comfort on such a trip, too.

Thus, I have been learning. Learn slowly, of course, using apps and flashcards and online resources. But learning.

And that hypothetical concept of a maybe trip to Asia next year seems a little bit more real in the process.

April 14, 2025
blog-iversary

This coming Sunday, April 20th 2025, marks the twenty-fourth anniversary of my first blog post.

You can’t even read it.

I can.

I mean, I have an archive of it somewhere in a document, stored away safely on multiple hard drives and backed up to the cloud and generally tucked away for some future time when I want to read about how I spent some random, idle day in April 2001.

But you can’t read it.

That said, I have been thinking about that blog lately because of a long list of reasons, not the least of which is the state of technology, freedom, democracy and more in this world, and how so many of us enthralled by the idea of cheap fame are dumping billions of hours into populating the apps and websites of private companies. And how some of those companies are revealing just how much of a bait-and-switch this aways was, how sinister and self-serving they have always been, how much of this gets fed into the AI behemoth, and how we have collectively tethered a decade of creative energy into feeding a corporate beast that does not care a whit about the soul of humanity.

I should never have shuttered that blog of mine, the one that would now be twenty-four years old and a few millions of words strong.

Every so often I sit down and try to resurrect something of that vibe, though.

Every so often I kick off a new site with a grand idea and think, now if I could just get some momentum on this topic or that theme and maybe I could start writing more again.

But it never sticks.

And maybe it never will again.

But it doesn’t mean I won’t keep trying to write, because as I realize with each passing day, not writing as much as I can, logging what I want to write about and not caring my own whit about cheap fame or filling up the follows or feeding some corporate social vortex, I can maintain my own little bit of that human soul.

And you can definitely read this.

For now.

April 14, 2025
cacio e pepe

A little over a year ago we were wandering the streets of Rome in the blazing heat of an August scorcher. It’s a far cry from where I am sitting writing these words in a suburban strip mall Starbucks as the first flakes of snow for the season fall outside the window.

It was hardly a food focused vacation, but I as whenever I travel, I had my heart set on trying new and interesting local dishes, from the unique and interesting to—of course—the typical and regional tropes. One evening, after a long walk through the narrow streets in and out of tourist shops and a museum or two, and maybe I think we strolled under the dome of the Pantheon that morning, we succumbed to the call of a barker who was standing at the entrance to the patio of a street restaurant and took a table for a mid-evening dinner. We perused the menu, ordered a bottle of wine, and noshed on some breads. It all looked great, but my eyes went to the cacio e pepe, a (literally) cheese and pepper pasta that is everywhere in Rome.

Properly made, this is basically a creamy pasta sauce of pecorino cheese melted over pasta and peppered with a hearty kick. Italian food likes to label itself spicy, but personally I find even the spicier Italian offerings generally on the milder side compared to Asian or, say, Mexican cuisine. But, I do find cacio e pepe, at least the offering I tried, ranked pretty high on the spicy scale. Peppery spicy, obviously, and not melt your face off spicy, but certainly reach for the water hot.

I hadn’t thought much about cacio e pepe since that evening Rome until, at work, I cracked open a case full of ready to serve pasta sauce that had arrived on the back of a delivery truck. This isn’t meant to be a brand specific review, so I won’t bother writing a run down of the quality or taste or any of that. Chances are you have your own brands at your own stores in your own countries anyhow. But I will say that I spun up my discount one evening last week and bought the ingredients to reconstruct a fresh-from-the-jar version of that Roman evening.

The Kid hated it. She likes her share of spice these days, but hasn’t warmed up to pepper apparently. We had half a bottle of chianti left over from the previous weekend and so over some pasta secce cooked al dente we followed the jar directions and recreated a quick and easy cacio e pepe at home.

Couldn’t you have made it from scratch, you ask?

Well, sure. But that’s kind of the thing isn’t it? It is very easy to leap to these home cooking solutions, reaching to achieve great feats of regional recreation from your own kitchen post-vacation. Sure. But I also am a strong believer in incremental steps. Jarred sauces are not great, but often they are pretty good and set a base line for what a dish should be aspiring towards. I like to think of it as bracketing. I had tried a version in a Roman street cafe and I had tried a version poured from a jar purchased from a local grocery store. I won’t put a stake in the ground and say those were the top and bottom of the scale, heck no, but they certainly have now given me some solid context for the flavours intended for this probably-famous dish.

The same thing happened to us in Milan. We stopped in a little restaurant and tried a Milanese risotto, a dish heavy in saffron spices, creamy and rich and oddly enough reminding me of an upscale mac and cheese. Then, when we came home back to Canada, we bought a couple packages of rice and spice “just add wine and water and heat” mixes from the local Italian food market and made our home version of it.

In both cases, cacio e pepe and Milanese risotto, I now have a kind of bracketed expectation of taste and preparation and final result from two very different sources. And I suddenly have the confidence to, maybe when I have some time to cook, make each from scratch. Ambition, in my heart of hearts, blossoms from familiarity and confidence in the pursuit. Both of these things are bolstered by, yeah travel blah blah blah, but also shortcuts and incremental steps. A bag of rice and spice, or a jar of sauce—both cut a path to a bolder effort to make these from rawer ingredients. After all, that store of mine doesn’t just sell jars of ready to serve sauce, it sells pecorino cheese, too.

October 21, 2024
mountain campfire

Atop a mountain this past summer, backcountry camping for three nights an eight hour hike from civilization, I spent an hour each day keeping up my writing by scribbling narratives of our daily advenutres into my smartphone. This is one of my entries.

day four

There is something about a campfire that brings people together.

Perhaps it is just a primal urge to gather around a heat source, particularly in the cold, particularly when a second bear has been spotted foraging nearby. But then maybe there is something more to it. The glow of burning logs signals a kind of control over nature. We are sitting atop a mountain, a still lake a dozen paces away, the towering peaks lurking in every direction. Even the sun dips from view earlier up here, and we are all left sitting in the shadows of hulking stone with a million trees, flowers, insects, and animals just out of view. Then we build a fire. We use our big brains to ignite dry wood and hold it captive for our amusement, and in doing so we all are drawn to the light and the heat and the community of it. So around the fire we sit, and strangers sipping tea from tin mugs, eating rehydrated meals from plastic bags, drying their socks, warming their hands, or just sitting, all of us strangers gather and talk. Soon the stories flow with ease, people talking over each other and interrupting to participate the drive to converse is so strong in the flickering glow of the fire.

Together, alone atop a cold mountain.

October 18, 2024

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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