8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: [2026] The First Year

Chapter List

  • Undramatic Scapes Branch · Part Two

    I got some flack the other day from someone who (jokingly, mostly, I’m pretty sure—wink, wink) suggested I shouldn’t post so much on Instagram. This followed an afternoon walk of marathon posting where I took about fifty pictures of the colour splotches of the turning autumn leaves, a kind of abstraction in organic oranges, greens, reds, and browns—then proceeded to post at least a dozen of them one-at-a-time into my feed.

    I shrugged.

    If you don’t like it, don’t follow me, I joked back.

    It was a momentary delve into the undramatically mundane.

    There is nothing wrong with taking glorious photos of magnificent landscapes, but life isn’t all spectacle. Sometimes it’s the dull moments in between, and we’re far too used to only highlighting the best of the best, and forgetting to tap into the everyday. Sometimes we need to seek out the abstractions of colour and shape from normal things and stop getting tangled up in perfection.

    There is beauty in undramatic scapes, or at least I think so: patterns in the autumn leaves, yes, but too footprints in snow or whorls in the clouds or shapes in the bark of a tree or the geometric curiosities of clashing architectural styles. The list is infinite.

    If you aren’t looking at the normal things and seeing beauty, you are missing something in the everyday that can bring you immense joy and creative success.

    Just shoot me, but I want to share some of that vibe.

  • Permission Trap Branch · Part Two

    We’re all frustrated with social media these days, and sometimes the only recourse seems to be to point at anyone even tangentially involved and yell “Stop!”

    That friend who posts a little too much: STOP!

    That coworker who is oversharing: STOP!

    The relative who can’t seem to look at a comment box and walk away: STOP!

    As someone who posts routinely I get my fair share of real life people questioning my participation: it’s not directly telling me I shouldn’t, but it is a subtle dig and a semi-revocation of permission.

    Once, long ago, we all joined these networks and connected to each other in this giant circle of digital trust. I’ll connect to you, we said, but you need to be respectful of that.

    Then the algorithms filled those feeds with advertising and slop and rage bait and memes, and we shrugged and said, well, I can’t yell at Zuckerberg or Musk or any of those assholes, so—

    —so we started revoking permission from our friends. And we almost do it unconsciously: we scroll past the stuff from people we know just like it was part of the rest of the mess, not recalling that the photos and words and stories and messages from the people we connected to were the whole damn reason we downloaded the app to begin with. We ignore them, just the same.

    The result is a great big gap where there was once celebration. There is a quiet rule that social media sucks, but a rule the neglects to differentiate between content from people we know and like, and content that is overwhelmingly corporate, influencer, or algorithmically generated.  

    We lump it all together and shout STOP! But we keep loading the apps—to find only our friends heeded the request. All that is left is the slop. All that is left is the ads. All that is left is the manufactured reality that doesn’t care if you want it or not, and shrugs when you push back. 

    We scolded the wrong creators.

  • Creative Positive Branch · Part Three

    I continue to remind myself that, as a creative, refraining from posting positive things into social spaces not only is a kind of self-censorship but it leaves gaps that are quickly filled by negative things.

    I was more active online in the weeks leading up to the unity referendum that happened here in Alberta, Canada in October.  It was not necessarily about joining into the fray and shouting partisan slogans or reposting dubious information.  I did my share to “get out the vote” and sent numerous reminders to friends and offers of free babysitting (which no one took me up on) but mostly I just posted non-political stuff.

    I kept sending links to my running website.

    I took dozens of autumn photos and shared them everywhere.

    I fired up the frequency of my back posting from this and the other writing project I’m doing about algorithms and technology topics.

    I shared positive thoughts and whimsical aphorisms about all sorts of things that popped into my head.

    And I just tried to fill the space: not necessarily to interfere with the conversation, but because that’s my role. My job, unpaid and often thankless, is to clutter up your social media feed with the mundane. It is to drop art into your apps, pack your photo scrolling with pics from nature, and remind you that real life is bigger than political bullshit, that it continues even when the mouths of politicians stop aren’t flapping and hucksters of every stripe aren’t trying to needle a bit more power.

    Rare moments, but they exist. They need to exist. They need to continue to exist.

    Despite the evidence to contrary, life is bigger than all that.

    Art. Thought. Story. Music. Colour. Trails. Sunsets. All of it must keep going no matter what. When they stop, when we stop being creative positive, then the negative wins and what is there left worth fighting for.

  • Fail Flail

    I’ve been thinking a lot about flailing about in the throes of a personal project lately.

    I’ve spent a lot of years seeking some kind of creative destination. In my head it has always been a place I was going and, blah blah blah we all know the real lesson in life is that the journey is often more important. It’s a cliché by this point, print it on a wooden board and hang it in your kitchen.

    We’re a little less clear on what that journey looks like, and if you were to ask an average person what such a creative adventure might look like I suspect you would get an answer that was romantic and filled with joyous struggle and teetering on the edge of cinematic.

    The creative journey is rarely that: it’s more often stumbling through an unmarked trail, sloshing through the muck, swatting mosquitoes and not just losing your map but realizing you were following the wrong one from the outset. It is rife with zero bars of cell coverage. It is forgetting the sunscreen and an umbrella and needing both. It is hearing the rustle of wild animals just out of sight and never quite knowing if it is a harmless squirrel or a hungry bear.

    Creativity is flailing and failing over and over, and possibly never reaching a destination, but experiencing the adventure—and loving that you set out upon it. I am lost out here with you all and under the category of Fail & Flail I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Rule Breaking

    I started this writing project with a lot of rules, and I’ve broken pretty much all of them.

    Yes, there are good rules. There are the laws of the country you live in, and provided they are fair and just then following them makes your home a better place for all. There are ethical rules, standards we’ve decided make us better humans for following them. And there is the social contract, a set of largely unwritten rules and social norms of which following ensure you are less of an asshole when you interact with other people. Good rules all round.

    There are also a lot of dumb rules. These are rules I think of that often can be summarized by the idea of one person or group of people trying to control another person or group of people. These rules should be wriggled out of whenever possible.

    The third set of rules is the personal kinds of rules we make for ourselves, often little more than mental traps and barriers, and I think it happens to all of us but I find to be especially distinctive personally around creative practice.

    For example, I made a bunch of rules for this writing project: these include topics that I write on, posting frequency, length of posts, how many words I use in the titles of my posts, the colours of imagery I use, the placement of imagery, the time of day I share new writing on both the site and on social media… the list goes on, and frankly, they are all pretty dumb rules when it comes right down to it.

    Now look, admittedly those rules have kept me focused. I am over two hundred posts into this project as I write this. I have not missed a single weekday post. And while I’m not flooded with traffic I can definitely tell that a few of you have discovered this site and are reading along… thanks.

    But those rules have also left me privately agonizing over little tweaks and fine tuning efforts I’ve had to make as I go along. At the outset I had a clear vision of what I wanted to do with all these words I was writing and—bluntly—that has evolved. Some of the new ideas about how I want to shape a project like this have run up against the original project plan.

    …and that’s okay.

    You’re allowed to break rules. In fact, I would almost encourage you to pause whatever creative activity you are doing (or even just thinking about doing) and visualize that list of rules you’ve made about it. Don’t pretend now: you’ve made rules. You’ve set up tripwires all over that idea you had and you’re following them. They may have come from your head, or they may have come from social expectations or they may just be something you figured would be a smart idea, but you have rules that you are following. I would bet on it.

    We’re all allowed to strike stuff from that list that no longer moves things forward. 

    I’m allowed to toss plans out the window if they don’t suit the project anymore—and I’m not just thinking of the little formatting and posting rules, either but the big things, too. All of it. Heck, months ago I was writing navel-gazing posts about how this project was about fitting inside a two-hundred word box, and I’m already well over six hundred words on this piece… and the message is better for it, I think.

    Rule breaking is not just allowed, it’s vital.

    It’s adaptation from learning. I’m not tossing rules for the fun of it, I’m binning plans that after ten months of writing are no longer good plans to help the project. It’s not quitting or failing, it’s learning and adapting. That’s what rule breaking really is after all, understanding that we can change and get better and move past the walls, step out of the box, and navigate a maze of barriers that were originally there to guide us but which are now tripping us up.