works of wanderlust

Tag: why i blog

  • Meta Monday & the Attack of the Creative Heart

    I have a luxury that, I would guess, many people who post stuff online don’t have.

    I don’t need to generate an income from this.

    I’m lucky. I can blog without ads. I can post without sponsored content. Dabble in new media without penalty for failure. I can pay my hosting bills with my real job. This is a hobby. A pasttime. An indulgence.

    That means that after a year and a half of writing, five hundred and seven days of effort and three hundred and eighteen posts in — and though there about thirty or so readers who I get to hear from now and then — the fact that I don’t have a million subscribers (and probably never will) nor viral content on this site doesn’t really concern me too much. It’s like we’re doing a small, initimate theatre show here: just a few of us in a cozy room with me up on stage doing my thing, and that’s kinda how I like it.

    On the flip side, I have a kid who cruelly laughs at the small number beside by social stats because so-and-so teenage youtuber has eight million subscribers or such-and-such streamer in his early twenties on twitch has thirty million subs and a gazillion bucks and ”geeze, dad, you’re barely even…”

    On another flip side, I’m what some of you might call a “Creative Soul” or “Artistic” or (as I like to fashion it) “Inspired to Make Stuff” and, as I mentioned, blessed with the luxury of time and resources to do so.

    I’ve often written on the sidelines of this project that I have a lot of reasons to write and to continue writing. It’s cheaper than therapy, for one. But also it drives this cycle of writing about the stuff I do and so doing stuff to have something to write about about, and so on and so on and so on.

    I’ve also mentioned previously on this blog times and efforts when I’ve dabbled in other projects adjacent (and not so much adjacent) to this project. (Did you know I play classical violin in a local orchestra, for example??) I like the whole Cast Iron Guy project because I get to write about things I enjoy doing, foods I like cooking, and places I like exploring, and thus I do, cook, and explore more so that I have things to write about. The aforementioned cycle works out great for me.

    That said, I have other stuff I work on, and other channels I like to work in.

    I used to do a lot of photography.

    I used to draw a web comic.

    I used to dabble in video editing.

    I used to write novels (though I never did publish one!)

    Last summer, I took a break from writing here. A year ago the push to press the publish button on the daily (which I don’t attempt anymore) seemed to conflict with taking some vacation and enjoying the outdoor weather. This summer I don’t think I’m going to take that break. I think, instead, I’m going to branch out and add depth and complexity to this Cast Iron Guy project. More stuff. More side projects. More experimentation in other media.

    (On a side note, I’ve been backburnering a change of ”brand” and updating the name and general theme on this site to something that is less focused on cooking, but until I go at least two days in a row thinking that’s a good idea it’s not getting much traction even in my own head!)

    Some of the things I’m working on include:

    I added some galleries last year and I’m going to try and get my camera out more to enhance those over the summer. Hopefully you’ll see more photos.

    I already posted about my new Youtube channel where I have a couple ideas to post videos if not regularly, then at least sporadically with some frequency, with films and clips that I think might be interesting and fun to record.

    I’m toying with the idea and preliminary work of recording a simple podcast, but I haven’t completely got my head around the format and formula yet. I figure it will take a few episodes before that gels into something I really like and want to write more about.

    And of course, on top of all of this, I want to get out and explore, travel, do a lot more drawing, writing, and generally enhancing of my content on this blog as it already is, including longer format articles with more focused topics, more photos and videos to accompany the posts, and overall stuff that I think could entertain those folks who already read my posts while attracting others and building a bigger community around the adventure seekers lifestyle.

    It’s a creative-heart attack. I think those are healthy.

    And this is hobby, pasttime and an indulgence, and I can try new things without worrying that I’m going to bankrupt myself. A year and a half on, a little more than five hundred days of Cast Iron Guy blog, it’s time to see what I can do with this whole thing.

    The summer looks to be full of adventure, filming, sketching, recording, and building a collection of interesting stories to share here… and not because I have to, but because I get to.

  • Don’t Take Participation for Granted

    You can read these words.

    You have access to knowledge unknown and unfathomable to any generation before you.

    You are online, connected, exploring big ideas and complex thoughts.

    Explain a valuable life lesson
    you learned in 2021.

    I restarted blogging at the beginning of 2021 after a fairly long absence from the sport. I put fingers to keys once again not because I think I have anything particularly important to say or even to add to a conversation already a billion-voices-strong, but because everyone should be able to have a space among those voices.

    Everyone should at the very least be able to participate.

    Equally. And if not, then equitably.

    This is definitely not the case right now.

    Voices are amplified because they are already louder.

    Voices are lifted because they come from someone famous.

    Voices go viral because they say something ridiculous, hateful, dumb, or nonsensical.

    Some people like to talk about deplatforming.

    Some people opt to complain about cancel culture.

    Others seem to be hung up on who has the right to speak about one thing versus another thing.

    We can and should have authorities on topics of importance, voices who speak with weight on certain topics or issues or policies. We should hear those voices and measure them against rational, thoughtful indicators of truth, reason, and the tools by which we measure the same.

    But we should all participate in the conversation. At the very least, weigh in, converse, listen, and hear each other. Participate in two-way or a billion-way exchanges of position, idea, and respect.

    This is definitely not the case right now.

    You can read these words. You are participating. I am participating. We shouldn’t take that for granted. It is a gift, a responsibility, and part of being alive in this time when we all live.

  • Across the Universe

    This afternoon I was driving through a snowstorm listening to a science radio show on the CBC talking about the launch of the new James Webb space telescope.

    The James Webb Space Telescope is a space telescope being jointly developed by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency. It is planned to succeed the Hubble Space Telescope as NASA’s flagship astrophysics mission.

    – Wikipedia

    That programme got me thinking about how a couple weeks back I looked out across the evening sky while I was out for a walk and noted that three bright “stars” were lined up right there above me. I opened my astronomy app on my phone and oriented the navigation tool to point towards them above the horizon and realized that I wasn’t looking at stars, but instead very likely and as best as I could deduce, three planets neatly aligned just over the roofs of some neighbourhood houses.

    Looking at the sky makes me feel pretty small in the vast scheme of things, peering out into the universe and realizing that even our one little solar system in the backwater of our one little galaxy barely registers as anything but points of light in the vast inky blackness of the multiverse.

    Describe your 2021 in politics, culture, and the universe?

    I point this insignificance out because I think there are those of us who feel the reality of our smallness and rareness in the vast universe and embrace it. I also think there are others who lash out against it in ways that are indecipherable to the rest of us.

    Both perspectives emerge from that mist of confusion in many different forms representing many different things.

    For me, it emerges as rambling blog posts, art, occasionally music, and adventures through my little corner of this tiny planet.

    For others, it seems to emerge in less constructive ways. Politics, online rage, cruelty, crime, and willfully working against the general goodness that is possible in this universe.

    In the upcoming year I hope you find a way to lean into even just a little more constructiveness — for yourself, for me, for all of us — as you whirl through the incomprehensible vastness of the universe, and that you continue to enjoy my attempts at the same right here as I continue to write about cooking, travel, adventure, and filling my face with delicious foods.

  • Legacy

    I’ve never grown older before, so forgive me if you have and I’m just being obvious.

    The older I get the more I think about the balance between the entropic impermanence of all things and the human urge to continue creating and planning and hoping in the face of that impermanence.

    I think it is all twisted up in this idea of legacy.

    What excited you most in 2021?

    I thought about legacy a lot this past year, and when I paused to reflect on what gave me back some of that hope and excitement during the past twelve (give or take) months, this idea of legacy kept popping into my head.

    I’ve had no shortage of unplanned opportunities since starting a blog called “the cast iron guy” to explain my connection to that particular style of cookware, particularly since I can’t fallback to a simpler explanation such as “I sell it” (which I don’t) or “I collect it” (which my wife may argue is where I’m trending but my collection is not worth writing home about) or “I’m an expert in it” (which would be a stretch to sincerely claim.)

    As I’ve often alluded to, occasionally openly written about, this whole “cast iron guy” idea strays into a universe where I adore all things ferrous, but is actually more of a clue to an overarching philosophy of lifestyle that I’ve been trying to embrace more fulsomely: uncomplicated things, life lived, and a mindset that reflects the philosophical practicality of well-seasoned cast iron frying pan, enduring, simple, down-to-earth & extremely useful, as I write in my snippet.

    It’s also deeply entrenched with the idea of legacy.

    Instilling in my daughter a legacy tied to objects like cookware and sourdough starters.

    Building a legacy of lifestyle through travel, exploration and curiosity.

    Maintaining a legacy of worldliness and environmental stewardship.

    Leaving behind a legacy of ideology and an approach to the universe.

    I think as we get older we may not all panic about the dwindling time we have left, but in some small way many of us start putting more effort into shaping what will remain behind when that time dwindles to nothing.

    Maybe it’s imprecise to say I got excited about legacy this past year. Though it is clear that I thought and wrote and waxed poetic quite a lot about this idea of legacy, even if those thoughts were not strictly labelled as such.

  • Picture Perfect

    The nice thing about scaling back on my posting commitments for a couple months is that I’ve been able to comb through the site I’ve built this past year and tweak what’s here, refine how it’s displayed or add completely new things.

    Most of this is “under the hood” so to speak, but regular readers may notice a few minor changes I’ve made to castironguy.ca over the last week or so.

    One of the big things is photo galleries.

    I hastily added a photo gallery plugin at the end of June as a means to do some light updates to the site in between my sporadic summer posting schedule. If you haven’t seen that I’ve been updating a Summer 2021 gallery of random photos a few times per week.

    I’ve been fascinated by online photo sharing for a long time now. Fascinated? Well, intrigued and captured by the potential of sharing a medium that I love in a fluid and barrier-free way, I guess would be the better explanation.

    For years, in fact, I maintained an online gallery that had thousands of photos grouped into hundreds of albums, ranging the gamut from kid-pics to be shared with the family, all the way through to a kind of semi-professional portfolio of my better, high quality images. The effort got dated, of course, content and software-wise. It was lightly hacked. I took it down, archived it and never tried to replace it.

    I did replace it with social media, I guess. Over the last couple years I’ve been active on Instagram sharing photos to various curated accounts, one private for people I know IRL and a couple public themed accounts for everyone else. Yet, social media has lately become something of a tangled mess of paywalls and advertising and fake content and frustrations, so I’ve leaned away from that and other platforms in recent months and chosen to put more effort into private website content like this site.

    So having added that gallery plugin I’ve been getting some photos into it, deciding how I want it to look and act, and posting some updated collections. It makes me excited to have a place to post more photos again. Stay tuned.