works of wanderlust

Tag: blogging

  • works of wandering

    As of two o’clock in the afternoon I have logged nearly seventeen thousand steps. Walking. Wandering. Vaguely destinationed towards places where I could sit and write after walking and reading and trying not to trip and fall flat on my face.

    I’ll be the first to admit that I had no real plan about what to write in this blog. Maybe that was on purpose. Maybe. But too, correlating with that lack of a plan came a lack of a name. Anything I have written in the last decade or so has pretty much started with a clever name after which the words on the corresponding topic seemed to flow with clarity and abandon. I had no real plan this time, though, and so when the blogging software asked me to type in, dammit, something, anything, what are you calling this blog, man? I typed in something about “wandering” and off I went to post.

    This struck me as an adequate title, at least to start. Why? Well, obviously because as it stands I seem to be doing a lot of wandering lately. Literally and figuratively. Wandering through life. Wandering through my career. Wandering the trails. Wandering up and down and back and forth and wherever the trail seems to be taking me.

    So that the first few of my posts have been about wandering and walking is, perhaps, no surprise.

    And so that I spent my latest day off walking until my feet hurt was, perhaps, also not much of a surprise.

    This may turn into a blog about wandering after all.

    As of two o’clock then I have wandered at least ten kilometers through the trails and streets and neighbourhoods, and though I have found myself having not gone very far nor accomplishing very much, I have logged some serious wandering steps to that specific nowhere in particular.

    I have been inclined to write for as long as I can remember. I would even suggest that there has never been a conscious moment in my life when I have not felt that my purpose—my raison d’etre as it were—as a sentient human being wandering around with my senses alert and recording was not also part of some grand universal plan to turn those thoughts and observations into words on a page. 

    Sounds like an ego thing.

    If that sounds egotistical, it should not. 

    I usually struggle to find any other equally driving force behind my own existence, as if my fingers are simply the equivalent of whatever constitutes the USB port of the universe and my role is to turn everything I see, think, and hear into data output. It’s a silly idea, but rationally it’s not a terrible thing to have a role that one can articulate—even a role as silly as being a data port on a computer analogy. I wander and I write and then I wander some more and I write some more. Click save…aaaaaand writing to disk.

    So here I am, writing some more.

    Writing about writing. Writing about wandering and then writing about wandering and then writing more about the irreducible loop I find myself in writing such things before I go out and wander and write and wander and write some more.

    I have been trying to write an introduction to this blog. I don’t attempt to do that because I expect some grand audience to dive into these words and make sense of them, or to make sense of me, but rather to try to formalize this role I have taken upon myself: recorder of things, stenographer to the universe, guy with a keyboard and a website. This is important shit, after all. These are big shoes to fill. If I don’t know what I’m doing here, what’s the point. I gotta make sense of it if no one else but for myself.

    As of two o’clock in the afternoon I had logged a helluva lot of wandering steps and typed a few hundreds of words and landed in a cafe where I could sit and channel all that data into a keyboard. And out the metaphorical data port comes this: a purpose and maybe the best explanation that I can muster.  These are works of wandering the world and wherever, opening my eyes to the universe and logging it into yet another website. 

    You want a reason for something or anything at all? I write because it is who I am, and I can’t explain why else.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • those autumn vibes

    There is a pale soft mist floating upon the grass this chilly October morning.

    I realize that is has been nearly a year since I wrote here, and in the meantime I have complicated our little relationship—a transaction that should be simpler—by adding and twisting and doing things that were never going to work without a full on manifestation of effort towards turning this thing into a full time career.  Also, I am cheap (nay, thrifty) so I have reduced my digital footprint into a subdomain where I can properly secure the invisible-to-you code that helps create this website.  Yet, I won’t bore you with the complexities of it all here. Not today. Not in a vague sort of explanation post.

    There is a mist on the grass that is indicative of a change in the weather, the temperatures trying to fall into winter temps while the summer sighs its failing gasps and in the middle of it all, a pale drift of mist sits atop the green grass which itself is flecked with orange and brown leaves.

    Back when I started writing this blog it was a hobby project meant to reflect a certain sensibility—the kind of sensibility that notices the clash of ethereal nature with the drumbeat of technology. Cast iron cooking became a bit of a symbol of that in my mind.

    Those were some ambitious years.

    In the meantime a dozen other “guys” have done cast iron much better than I ever could have, spending money and time on tools and collections and techniques and ideas that turn me, relatively speaking, into a mere rambling philosopher of something less cast into iron and more cast into words, something that I can’t quite pin down.

    And a lot has changed during that time, too. I was a guy who did technology professionally and food for fun, and now—somehow—I am a guy who does food professionally and technology for fun. My newest, latest gig immerses me in exotic ingredients, asks of me that I learn the nuances of the smoke points of oil blends, the protein content of breads and pastas, or the result of fat on the flavour absorption of soft cheeses. I am turning into something of a roving expert on these things, helping people eat and enjoy and cook and be healthier.  It is amazing.

    And somehow I have been sitting here on a blog archive that is almost perfectly lined up to support that—at least support my introspection and deeper personal learning about that.

    I won’t bore you with the boring technology bits about domain name security certificates and 301 redirects and complexity of securing a blog, even a little one like this, against hackers but I will tell you that like the mist on the autumn grass all of that is kind of a symbol of seasonal change and that something different is afoot on this site.

    I can’t say I’ll write daily, but I will write more.

    About food. About cooking. About the outdoors and healthy living and running races through the trails. About a cast iron kinda life that doesn’t necessarily always mean a cast iron frying pan—but then sometimes it just might.  Stay tuned.

  • Just A Re-introduction

    The Cast Iron Guy was my pandemic project.

    I needed an optimistic moment in every day, something thru with to look out onto a crazy world and find something solid and reliable.

    If you’ve come here looking for in depth cast iron cooking advice, or one of those guys who uses electrolysis to do amazing things restoring cast iron pans, or somebody who builds a raging bonfire in his backyard and slays a piece of meat to perfection… well, you might be a bit disappointed.

    If you’ve come here looking for a guy who is a little disillusioned by technology and writes about some of the simpler things in life like exploring the outdoors, finding spaces in local nature, cooking real food, and trying to be a good citizen of planet Earth… well, you might be closer to the right place.

    At the time I started this I was incredibly cautious about using my real name because of my job and my role supervising people and the fact that I’d been burned in the past by people twisting the things that I’d written against me, words that were genuinely innocent and largely apolitical, but honest and real and left me a bit exposed to people who use those things to their every advantage. I’ve kept my real name off this site for that reason and I write under the moniker of Bardo. The name has a couple meanings and you can look up the eastern spiritual meaning yourself, but it was also the name of a character in a book I read decades ago that stuck with me for his personal philosophy and the struggles he had abiding it. It worked for me then, and it still does now.

    I haven’t written here in a while because life has been full of chaos and change.

    Most notably, I burnt out my professional soul to a deep fried crisp and voluntarily left the job that had done the burning out. As I write these words I’ve been on a “career break” for almost exactly four months, in which time I’ve been on three international trips, trained for and run a marathon, started a personal journey of pursing the creative life I abandoned when I was young for more practical and “paying” jobs, and generally tried to heal that aforementioned burnt out soul.

    I logged into this site again this morning and noted that while I’ve been off exploring the woods, travelling the world, and making art, people have been reading what I wrote here during those pandemic-writing years. Some of the posts, I kid you not, have over a hundred thousand clicks, and if I had comments turned on I’m sure would be filled with neglected interactions.

    So, what’s a cast iron guy to do with a mature blog in which he’s not sure what to write anymore? I suppose, this reintroduction is a start, but maybe a promise that I’ll try to come back here, while not daily, routinely to post more stuff. I still cook. I still explore. I still take excellent care of a respectable cast iron collection.

    If that’s worth anything, stay tuned.

    -Bardo