works of wanderlust

Tag: backstory

  • 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.

  • pi day

    May fifth is definitely not pi day, that annual nerdy celebration of a happy mathematical confluence between the calendar and one of the worlds favourite pastries, pie. Normally the geeky among us celebrate with an extra helping of dessert on March fourteenth: three fourteen. Three one four.

    May fifth is, however, something of an anniversary for me relating to pi day. 

    See, in 2016, leading into that year’s pi day, I checked to see if anyone had ever bothered to register the piday.ca domain name, found it unclaimed, and placed my stake on the little piece of digital real estate.

    I had plans, and like many half-baked ideas it made a little progress before sputtering out. I wanted to make a website celebrating pi day, but I just couldn’t think of anything more clever to do with it besides essentially creating a brochure for this obscure, silly math celebration.

    One year later, pi day came and went and I tracked a few hits to the domain but nothing of consequence.

    But I had been working on another project at the same time: I had been designing and writing and drawing a web comic that I was pulling together under the name of “This Dad’s Life” which was a kind of kids-say-silly-things and fatherhood snapshots in cartoon form.  But I didn’t really like the name, to be honest.

    I wonder if he’ll mention the dad guy character. I remember that guy. Handsome fellow.

    Then pi day 2017 came around and the kid said one of her trademark silly things: she told me she liked pi day because it was dad joke holiday. She was nine at the time and threw herself into dramatic fits of jovial groaning every time I pulled out one of my trademark dad joke puns. Pi day wasn’t just a geeky holiday, it was a punny celebration and the pinnacle of oddness that any dad-joke loving parent could celebrate with their kids.

    And I had this domain name I wasn’t really using for anything.

    I renamed my comic effort to “This is Pi Day” winking at the parenting tangent that the observations of my kid had brought into focus, and on May 5, 2017 published my first strip of nearly two hundred to that domain name. Eight years ago today.

    I wrote and drew that comic for about three years. The schtick got old, the kid got older and became less a silly kid and more a clever teen, which was great for me in reality but terrible for my content inspiration. The pandemic happened, and… well… maybe not a half-baked idea but it sputtered out regardless.

    I still own the domain name, largely because I signed up for a bunch of social media and other support accounts using an email based on it. And because I printed cards that I handed out with it on there. And too, because I stamped it into the corner of every comic I drew.

    Every once in while I dig out a strip from my archives and share it, explain it, but for a while I was just a guy with a comic strip online and a couple hundred fans.  And every May 5th another reminder comes up in my calendar that This is Pi Day was today.

  • book reviews: may the forth

    (…be with you!)

    It’s Star Wars day and I haven’t done much of anything intergalactic, but I have been doing a lot of reading lately.

    A lot of science fiction, too. So. Almost?

    Worse than my neglect of Star Wars, I checked out a bunch of library books and in such a flurry that a couple have expired before I even got part way through them. I could be here writing a bunch of different reviews if it were not for my distracted self bopping and hopping between titles, I guess.

    That said, the last couple weeks I’ve read:

    Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis

    I don’t know if you’d call Ms Ellis a film maker, reviewer, or an influencer, but it turns out that she’s a helluva author. I’ll be honest, I put this book on my list way back when the algorithm was dropping her video essays into my feed with more frequency and yet my lazy, distractible reading brain took over four years to clamber this clever first-encounter-kinda story to the top of my book stack. But the story sucked me in from the start when I finally started reading it, twisting through the tale of a young woman who finds herself at the centre of an alien government entanglement. It evoked emotions. And it left me adding the sequel to my reading list (though if I’m continuing the trend of being completely honest, it may take me another couple years to finally get around to that one.)

    I Want To Go Home by Gordon Korman

    And speaking of algorithms, whatever secret formula was recommending me digital titles in the Libby app connected to my library account must have pegged me as a middle aged Canadian and realized that I, like a million other Canadian kids who grew up in the 80s, lived on a steady diet of Korman’s goofy stories. I have a whole writer-origin story that revolves around this guy that I’ll happily share in detail to anyone who asks, and so by the way that algorithm might have been onto something. Yeah, this is a kids book and yeah it was a still a little corny like it was when I read it forty years ago, but there is something about the over-the-top silliness of a kid trying to escape sleepaway camp that evoked not only memories of my own childhood reading this same book until the pages were falling out, but the aching familiarity of a youth spent in scouts and church camps I would have fled were I more resourceful. A quick read, but I won’t begrudge the algorithm for taunting me with my lost youth.

    Wool by Hugh Howey

    A different sort of algorithm sucked us into watching the Apple TV adaptation of this decade old collection of linked dystopian science fiction novellas, more plainly called Silo. I had read Wool, the first in the trilogy that is the basis for Silo, waaaaaay back when it first came out and have been telling people to read it ever since. It’s a fantastic story, particularly if you like dark science fiction driven by strongly developed and complex characters. I had told all sorts of people to read it, but sadly I had never read it since. Nor had I read any of the sequels. Having finally caught up with the show, then, I loaded it up and decided to work my way through all three books. I finished Wool this very evening and was reminded of just how much I like this story. I mean, I may let it breath before I jump into book two, but like months. Only months. Not ten years this time, I promise.

  • run club restart

    I tend to have a lot of sentimental vibes for run club.

    In its current form it is a pale shadow of when I first showed up at my local run store for a clinic, oh, seventeen years ago now, but it exists enough that I attended the latest session of it last night and logged a nearly eight klick out-and-back with a few select members of the the crew.

    Everything was fresh after a late afternoon rain. There was a bit of a rainbow tumbling out of the clouds to the east. There were seven of us plus the leader, and she snapped a photo of the group before we set off into the trail system that runs between the houses and the creek wilds.

    Of course I don’t have that photo so you’ll have to deal with mine.

    I joined run club for the first time as a participant in the 5k Learn to Run clinic offered by the store two moves back. The clinic was a speaker and a short run on a weeknight—and then they encouraged everyone to show up for the drop-in run club two more days of the week for the sake of the weekly mileage. I dutiful followed instructions. And for over a decade it was my regular social outing to meet at the store and run.

    Eventually I became a group leader and then a clinic instructor and I have since flip-flopped around and tried to reconcile my status in the group now nearly and neatly without a formal run club mandate, me just the guy who plans a bunch of what we do but who has simultaneous been trying to nurture others to plan when I can’t. No store. No website. Just a chat group and determination to keep it all alive.

    During the pandemic everything shut down and the store moved for the second time, but our offshoot run club stayed put and in the five years since those first should-we-be-meeting social-distancing runs from the parking lot the group has stabilized into a local running coffee club.

    The running store moved about five kilometres down the road and we thought that was that, but after a couple years of nothing they reappeared and cautiously started inviting runners back to the now once-per-week meetup.

    And despite my semi-regular attendance, I go when I can and have no other training obligations than a straight run, well… the Wednesday night run club is not quite the same. It is, after all, little more than a rendezvous of fair weather dabblers up for an occasional run. Most of them come with a friend with whom they exclusively converse and pace. If they are back a week later it is a surprise.

    Last night? We ran into the freshly washed trails. I had not even bothered with a jacket, risking a bit of chill for the sake of shedding the extra weight of carrying it if it turned out to be too hot. And it was warm enough, everyone else tearing down to their t shirts in the warmish evening air.

    Our leader, now on familiar terms as I’ve been making an appearance for three seasons of the renewed club, was quizzing me on our short parking lot walk back to the store afterwards. I’m not sure what you guys want out of this, she said to me. But I insisted that a place to meet and plan was good for me. Gone are the days of fifty people crushed into the store listening to a mini sales pitch before we strike out in group. Gone are the clinics and the annoying shoe talk. Gone are the bring a friend nights and slipping people in for free as pace leaders. People will stretch if they need. People will sort themselves out, I think. This is fine, I told her. 

    Or maybe I’m under-thinking it all.

    This used to be a real thing, you know. This used to be the centre of my week, the outing around which I planned my life. Everything was about making sure I got to run club and made my distances. Run club was my thirties. Some of my best friends are run clubbers. 

    Should it be more? Or is it just fine? I dunno.

    Sentimentality is a crazy drug, almost as addictive as running, huh? The run club vibe remains, but the memory of it will always be grander than the reality I’m sure.