Hold onto your hat.

When I travel, it’s race day.

No, not for running. (At least not always.)

See, for every race a runner runs there are often months of training. If I’m running a half marathon in August, then in April we’re starting hills, planning weekly increases in distance and working out a strategy for all the other bits that go into a successful showing.

Race day is the last day of a very long era of practice, honing, patience, suffering, and growing.

When I travel, it’s race day for my hobbies: my art, my photography, and often my writing.

I’ve just spent months out in the neighbourhood pointing my camera at interesting suburban things, colourful patches of trees, and posed pictures of my dog. I’ve hunkered down with a sketchbook and inked endless mundane nearby objects, strolling people, and familiar landscapes. I’ve sat in the field and written essays, penned journals, and compiled updates for social media.

All of that is practice.

And then I step off a plane, camera strapped over a shoulder, pen and paper ready, and a blank journal stuffed into my backpack—ready to perform. Ready to take the best photos I know how. Ready to sketch things I’ve never seen before. Ready to scribble notes about experiences and impressions into pages for later perusal.

Race day is the last day of a very long era of practice, honing, patience, suffering, and growing, even if that is about running… or art and hobbies and habits.

A few weeks after this post goes live and before the year is out I’ll be turning fifty.

Five-oh.

Naturally, as I was putting together the list of topics to write about in this writing project, the notion of my inevitable post-existence emerged as a real strong contender… because we might not dwell on it, but we do occasionally remember that someday all that will be left of any of us is memory and artifacts of our time here. If even that much.

Creative folks don’t necessarily make shit because they are trying to leave a legacy, but a legacy of our efforts is certainly a side product of living and breathing and dreaming big ideas that translate into written words or composed music or clever little bits of art hanging in someone’s living room.

Heck, as I walked into my home office I passed a framed cross-stitch sampler we have hanging on the wall that was made by a long-passed ancestor of my spouse. I doubt she sat down to make that, spent hours sewing every single stitch, and pondered whether it would be the one thing that her great-granddaughter someday had left to remember she had ever existed. It’s a morbid thought, but these little things, moments captured in creativity and craftsmanship might turn into exactly that much for most of us—if we’re even that lucky.

Will some painting I’ve already painted be all that is left of everything I ever aspired to sketch?

Are there collections of words and photos yet to be pounded into keys or snapped through lenses that will ultimately and solely remain to mark my interest in those hobbies?

What will the legacy of any of our creative lives become after we die?

Like I said, I don’t particularly dwell on it but under the category of Death & Taxes I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

There is an urgency in many of us who make stuff to fit in. We work towards a certain grade of production quality. We make to fit into a mould of commercial viability. We try to stand out in a crowded field by following the so-called rules.

It’s all so much water rushing past our feet.

It’s the stranger things that capture my attention, the jagged, colourful rock stuck mostly in the muck of the riverbed, just poking out and catching the light in an interesting way, that snags my eye.

I have explored this theme routinely on this project. There is a gentle conflict between the pursuit of high quality products that build one’s portfolio, represent one’s best work, and meet a threshold of acceptable value—and on the other side, transcend formula, represent something new and interesting, and break the mould.

In the middle is a tension in the heart of many artists of any field. To ignore the rules completely is to be overlooked for failing to meet expectations, but then to become little more than a photocopier for ideas of others before us is to be shrugged off as uninteresting.

We all want to be a polished stone. But someone needs to pluck us out of the river of obscurity before that happens. 

Under the category of Pomp & Popularity I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

Let’s define something: I think of a traditional photo as something that someone out in the wilds of a public space might expect one to take a photo of, like say, a scenic view, a bit of shapely architecture, a group of people, an animal, flowers, or some kind of public performance. Everyone takes pics of these things. They are quote… normal.

A non-traditional photo is something else that usually falls outside of that category: say, snapping pics of a crack in the pavement, a macro of the textured bark on a tree, a storm drain cover, a street sign, one’s own feet, or even the whorls of clouds in the sky. Not everyone points their camera at these sorts of things. They are, um… less normal.

My black and white photography tends to stray almost exclusively into the non-traditional realm.

And having partaken in increasingly frequent acts of non-traditional photography over the last few months, I have noticed that with every click of the shutter I have been putting myself into a weird sort of public performance and place and vulnerability.

I stopped while walking through Paris in August (when we were there on vacation) pausing to point my camera at a mailbox. Parisians who for the most part went about their lives indifferent to my existence on that trip, instead turned their heads and payed a bit more attention to my non-traditional moment of photography.

It draws more attention to take odd photos than to take photos of things people expect to take photos of. People’s heads turn. There is a moment of “what’s that guy doing?” and then they move on… but still a moment.

It didn’t bother me, of course.

It was just a curiosity of consideration, and I couldn’t help but ponder what was going through the minds of commuting Parisians as some curious Canadian snapped serious pics of the relatively mundane in an otherwise massively photogenic city like that.

I was a standout, an oddity, and temporarily creatively vulnerable to something I can’t quite put my finger on.

Plonk right in backish-middle of my topic list I need to surface a challenge that defines much of my creative existence. I am certainly not alone in feeling this way, but it really is the problem of being in the middle of nowhere.

I have a small, loyal audience of friends who seem to enjoy what I make, and for many people who make stuff that would be enough: the ability to share your art with the people you love, the practice of writing for close confidants, or performing for local enthusiasts who smile when you play or act or sing… it is all right.

But nearly every artist would be lying to you if they were to say they don’t feel the indifference of the larger world with every note, every keystroke, every bit of ink scratched onto the page.

Creativity, after all, is an expression of who we are and part of me—as I suspect a part of many who create anything worthy of the thought—crave to express that to a bigger world, to bridge across culture and politics, to link arms right through language barriers, and to muddle our souls with humans living in nowheres on the far other side of the planet.

Being from nowhere forces one to look across the gaps of heart and hands and ask how we can bridge that gap and cure the indifference.

Under the category of Rights & Wrongs I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

I Googled myself.

For years, the result has been a modest list of links, many to my own websites, but often to a variety of articles from old jobs and public feeds from old accounts. It’s been a trip down memory lane.

When I Googled myself the other day, though: I was greeted with an AI summary of my digital footprint, and a generated outline of who the search algorithm thought I was as a person.

It wasn’t completely wrong, but it wasn’t a hundred percent accurate, either.

As a guy who spends his free time in the pursuit of creative public expression I gotta admit: I’m a little frustrated that all the work I’ve put into building profile and connections online in the last twenty years has amounted to a couple paragraphs in an LLM.

Search and social, after all, were the bridges between the stuff I was putting out there and the rest of the universe—but lately, not too many people are crossing it.

“Keep making stuff.” I tell myself. “People will find it. And if it entertains just one person, inspires one other human to keep the spark alive… maybe it was worth it. Right?”

This is a cross post from Of Poets & Processors.

Me, not so much.

I prefer the quiet toil of fingers on a keyboard in a dimly lit cafe or sketching a scene from a vantage where no one can peek over my shoulder and ask pesky questions.

But for either of us, and all of us, there is vulnerability interlocked with the act of creative expression. We all need to turn on, activate, be our best selves and show up to tell the story we are trying to communicate through whatever form we choose.

I would love to tell you that creativity is an easy or a comfortable thing, but I really do believe that the best of what we makes comes from opening our hearts, souls and selves to the universe.

I type away in peace and quiet rarely seeing the people who read the words I write, but despite my shyness I still post them and send them out into the universe for anonymous adjudication. Just by reading these words you have transformed into the second half of a mysterious equation that I know exists when I write but I’ll never know much about. That is my personal vulnerability.

Creativity comes from everything we are clashed against everything we are not.

Under the category of Show & Tell I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

Is it a good thing to be creative? Is it natural or purposeful—or maybe just an unserious pursuit?

It’s curious though: my social media feed has picked up on the idea that I’m interested in the topic and so routinely it is peppered with bursts of commentary on creative lifestyles, both positive and negative. 

And with many questions, I think maybe the negative jabs shine a brighter light on understanding the notion.

Your results may vary, but my received negativity seems to shine through that little screen and mock the very idea of a middle aged guy trying to do art, learn an instrument, or write a novel. The universe, it often seems, finds the notion of artistic expression little more than a privileged extravagance for those less serious among us. 

Why am I not feeding the gaping maw of capitalistic pursuit? Why am I not spending time earning or investing or consuming? Why am I telling stories and taking photos?

None of this is a thing I can answer in one post, but I do know that creativity is not an idle excuse to avoid something “real” or “productive” but rather—and for most every self-defined creative person I know—foundational to who they are. It is who we are. It is the shape of our soul and the way we meet the world each day.

All the rest of it is the mask we wear.

Under the category of Inside & Outside I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

Thanks to a new addition to my gear collection I was no longer playing with headphones, but rather I had propped up my small speaker amp nearby, set it to a reasonable volume, and was filling the local air with a bit of my chaotic noodling.

It was not intended to be a performance.

The reality of being outdoors in a park making art, taking photos, or playing music is that it is public. Eyes will connect. Heads will turn.

We travelled to Europe a few years ago and did a lot of plein air sketching in very public places and it’s a whole other thing, let me tell you, to sit near a few thousands of wandering tourists and do your craft.

Back in my little park a man on bike with his dog stopped to look, eyes connected, head turned. He stood in the grass a respectful distance away as if he expected me to crack out a banger and was getting ready for the show. I tapped out the first few bars of a Bach Prelude I had been practicing earlier that week and which was still stuck in my fingertips.

He lingered for another couple minutes then cycled away.

Oh sure, it seems obvious—ice cream trucks, and birds chirping in the trees, Vivaldi symphonies and sunshine bouncing off the asphalt—but I was sitting in the park recently and I had brought along my synth.

Remember my synth? About a year and a half ago I bought an Arturia Microfreak digital synthesizer (not a sponsored mention, by the way) which at about the size of a laptop computer has twenty-five solid state keys and about thirty knobs & buttons for tweaking and tuning the sound envelope. It is not a keyboard or a piano, but rather a proper (albeit budget) synthesizer with powerful shaping tools, a matrix-based sound design engine, an LFO, arpeggiator, sequencer and—oh, the list goes on. It’s also pretty portable, so I can pop it in a backpack with a battery pack and some headphones and—yeah—go sit in the park and play music.

I have about four hundred patches loaded into the memory banks, presets for interesting sound patterns and pads and leads and bass effects and even all variety of cosmic sound effects.

I thought it would be easy to find a summery sound.

Because I was, as mentioned, sitting there in the park with my synth and my headphones and making music for no one but myself and I wanted a summery vibe.

Synths, and perhaps this was merely a factor of my synth and how I had it configured, seem very wintery: echoey and airy wisps of noise, hulking bass tones, crackling shivers, and creaking sine waves. I tuned through my options, scrolling the knob and seeking something with mood that matched the sun and the grass and the mosquitos flitting about in the same and I struggled. 

A tinkling piano sound, a ringing lead that evoked a steel drum, or the croaking higher octaves of a patch named after a frog—I was close.

Summer was all around, but I couldn’t put my finger on something that fit. What does summer sound like, after all?