8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: [2026] The First Year

Chapter List

  • Travel Journal Branch · Part Two

    Of course you keep a journal when you travel.

    You step off a plane or emerge from the car after a long drive and you’ve put yourself into a whole new world. It’s a cliché but travel really does expand the mind… and a journal is like back up storage.

    I write constantly. I write every single day. There isn’t a day I don’t open up a computer, put my fingers over a keyboard and just start typing something. It would be easy for me to be overly judgemental about this and wag my finger at people who don’t write stuff down when they set off on adventure… and I’m not saying you MUST do it. I’m really saying you SHOULD try it. 

    Journalling while travelling is more than just muddling around with a pen and paper when you could be sitting on the beach with a book or a drink (or maybe both) in your hand. Writing things down isn’t extra work you need to do back at the hotel when you could be sleeping or catching up on your social media feeds. Keeping notes about your adventure doesn’t need to be complex or rigid or even grammatically correct. 

    I do believe it enhances the experience, though.

    Assuming the experience is something you care to remember, a journal is a memory capsule for experience. We go about our lives every single day and don’t realize how much we overlook and forget. When everything is familiar at home your brain doesn’t need to remember anything but the handful of differences it encounters. But travelling? Everything is new. Everything is fresh. You step off the cruise ship into a brand new world and every set piece is novel. You blunder off the tour bus and you are met with a world you’ve likely never seen and may never see again. You pay the taxi driver and step out of the cab into a landscape that is filled with things your brain needs to work full time to keep up to understand, let alone remember. 

    And it seems like for those short term few days it will all stick, that you’ll never forget this moment… but you will. It may get filed away in your brain somewhere, but recalling that memory weeks or years later? Good luck.

    …unless you take a few minutes each day—waiting for your coffee order, taking a break at the hotel, or just resting in a park for a spell—to write something down.  Journal. Try it.

  • Neon Cities

    I’ve previously mentioned that I recently built a small productivity web app to try to help me be more accountable to myself.

    Productivity is a tricky thing to get right, and making a piece of software to “force it” seems a bit contrived. I went through a half dozen iterations of the idea and ultimately I honed in on a gamified world that thrived when I logged creative practice.

    Writing, drawing, taking pictures, and playing music are logged in small bursts and all of it feeds a little virtual neon city that has enough complexity that it reacts in subtle and curious ways.

    But I find that having a strange gamified abstraction of my creative journey at my fingertips has resulted in me reacting in subtle and curious ways, too.

    An example: I’ve been meaning to improve my urban sketch crowd drawing.

    You know what I mean, right? You sit down to draw some simple, loose urban sketch in a fast-paced moment. You’re scribbling lines and shapes and adding depth and complexity to the architecture and just as you think you’ve got the scene… you look at it one more time only to realize that you’ve drawn around all the people. You’ve left them all out. Urban spaces are cluttered with humans, after all.  So you try and add a few later but—hey—you’re good at drawing buildings not tiny little blobs that look like tourists.  I should try to get better at that, you think.

    I wanted to get better at drawing crowds when I’m out in the world drawing urban scenes.

    I could have probably approached this a hundred ways, but inside this little productivity city that I built something random happened: I was offered a job. I mean, that’s normal—that’s what the system does. It prompts you to practice your skills by randomly dropping jobs. What was weird was that the first job it picked for me after I added my disciplines into the system was “figure drawing.”

    So I did some figure drawing, and I logged it.

    And then I did some more. 

    And then I decided to add a “project” to draw one thousand little figures before the end of the year. Suddenly, I find myself sitting in front of the television sketching little people over and over and over for long stretches—getting better and better at drawing crowds of urban sketchy people.

    Productivity is subtle, and I don’t know yet if this counts as productivity. But it feels like an interesting thing to wander a virtual world and see what is around the next corner, particularly if it’s leading me somewhere I want to go.

  • Distractedly Entertained

    Technology has supplanted boredom.

    I’d love to pry that phone out the Kid’s hands some day, lock it in a box, and tell her that she’s got it mixed up. She razzed me the other day because I was vibe coding. She literally shouted in my face that I shouldn’t be using AI. “Dad! That stuff is evil.”

    I shook my head and kept my cool and told her that security checking my web code through Claude for hacking vulnerabilities was not the same as generating slop in a chatbot. Both AI, sure, but different realms.

    And besides, I thought later as I was out for a walk alone (exercising the dog and daydreaming up my next article) you have your face plugged into a phone screen ninety-five percent of the day. Creativity is not going to bubble magically through that device and make you a better human, is it?

    Grumpy old man could shake his fist in the air and shout “oh, the kids these days…” but it’s not just the kids, is it?

    When was the last time you left your phone in a different room—and the outside the bathroom door is not good enough of an answer, though that’s getting rarer and rarer too if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by.

    Boredom is the heart of my personal creativity.

    Boredom—when I turn off the screen, leave out the headphones, walk without conversation, run without headphones, sit without a television, lay in the grass without a book or a game—that’s when the good stuff flows.

    We’re all increasingly distracted by entertainment and technology is a garden of distraction.

    What hope does boredom have in the face of unlimited options to consume our minds. What hope does human creativity have at the loss of true boredom.

    This is a cross post from Of Poets & Processors.

  • Travel Journal Branched · Part One

    Of course you keep a journal when you travel.

    Okay, maybe I’m leaping to a conclusion about you and your interest in methodically logging adventure into a sheath of paper, but heck even my spouse who only writes business documents every other day of the year pulls out pen and paper back in the hotel room each night.

    It’s taken me most of my life to settle into a format that I like, but I have written travel journals for as long as I can remember.

    I have gone the old fashioned route, a crisp clean lined notebook full of rambling recollections of the adventure-filled days.

    I have dabbled in sketchbook travel journalling, penning a simple bit of art, watercolour or ink drawings surrounded by notes and labels and bite-sized anecdotes.

    I once took a novel on long vacation and wrote travel memories in the margins.

    To this day I almost always bring along a keyboard and type posts into a personal blog with photos, and yes, I fully count this as a travel journal.

    And lately I’ve taken to a form of travel-adapted bullet journalling where I record point form collections of experiences, travel modes, food notes and little hand-drawn maps.

    But why do it? Well, I think it’s a key part of the experience: Writing can be many things—therapeutic, expressive, creative, and communicative to name a few—but travel writing can help us process a new place and remember when our brains can’t quite keep up with the adventure.

  • Race Day

    I’m a distance runner. I’ve noted this on numerous occasions, and suggested on every one of those occasions that running has been a great metaphor for many life lessons.

    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.