8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: [2026] The First Year

Chapter List

  • Play Time Updated · v2

    In my continuing efforts to learn to properly make use of the eclectic collection of music equipment that has arrived in tiny boxes to my front door since the year began, I have been playing.

    Literally. Figuratively. Philosophically.

    Playing.

    Isn’t it funny how we use the word “play” to describe the art of making music… and then we also use the same word to describe the act of having fun un-driven by specific goal or focused purpose? Play. I have been playing in both senses, making music in my office-turned-music-studio and also having fun generating soundscapes and beats and little songs un-driven by any specific timeline or objective save learning the tools themselves. It is both kinds of play because I am playing music but I am also just playing, dabbling, engrossed in a pointless, unfocused effort.

    Kids play and we smile and say that’s just what kids are supposed to do.

    Musicians play and we queue up to buy expensive tickets to listen.

    Average people sitting in their basement play and we, all too often, ask why.

    Or worse, we frame it up as part of something with a goal or attached to an effort to better ourselves. We try to justify it. We try to make it into personal growth or an abstraction set within the structure of a bigger learning plan. We rake ourselves across the coals with value-based evaluation of the time, log minutes, write articles on obscure websites about how “playing the piano for twenty minutes a day made me better at business-to-business marketing, blah, blah…”

    At some point as we turned from children into adults play became a pejorative.

    Real men don’t play, they strategize, practice, gamble, or hone their skills, right? I’ve heard that one before. There’s serious work to be done, money to be made, networks to build and projects to milestone.

    Nearly every day, for at least the duration that it takes to lay down a three minute track on my recorder I just play, I string together all the pieces with all their snaking wired connections, and dive in without a plan. It usually takes me a few tries, but often I get a respectable starter loop going on the looper pedal, I lean into an effect, and I start adding layers and layers and layers. Each day I come up with something new and interesting, and each day I record it because… well, why not? 

    Look, my point isn’t some secret layer here. Playing doesn’t make you a better person any more than it makes you a worse one. It makes you just a person to flit and flounder through curiosity-driven noodling. It makes you simply human to dabble without structured goals. 

    But it is all nothing more than play. Just play.

    Not always. Not for everything.

    Maybe now and then, or even once a day.

    And that’s okay.

  • MIDI Controller Updated · v2

    I bought a dedicated MIDI controller. I capitulated to the lure, the artists yearning, the insatiable feeling deep down in one’s gut that nudges us all towards the black hole of equipment investment. 

    It was the itch.

    Look, the keyboard was not an expensive purchase. But neither is it a toy. It is merely a very basic and simple twenty-five key plug-and-play input device that has piano ivories (instead of numbers and letters.) MIDI controllers make no sound of their own, rather sending electronic signals to another device like my laptop and act as if I was typing musical notes. It’s a musical instrument-shaped interface for a computer, and a kind of soft synthesizer.

    Creativity is sometimes about logically unjustifiable exploration and investment.

    I am far from an expert on keyboard technology.

    If you had asked me a year ago what I knew about musical keyboards I would have told you there were, um, pianos …and electronic pianos …and—I am reluctantly admitting here that I hadn’t been paying much attention after that point. 

    Also, I quite enjoy synth music.

    Growing up we didn’t have a real piano or a fancy digital one and we definitely did not have a synth. We had a bog standard department store brand electronic keyboard with a couple dozen built in digital instruments. In our house now, my wife has (because it is hers from before we were married) a pretty nice digital piano in her office, and then a little over a decade ago we acquired a small upright piano, too, which sits in our kitchen and serves little other purpose than to remind the family of a decade of The Kid doing her piano lessons. In other words, the concept of a bed of black and white keys that makes sounds? That was pretty clear in my head. But I’m no expert.

    What I was, rather, was curious.

    For myself, those pianos were never quite what I wanted… what I was craving, musically speaking. I would noodle and try to learn the basics, of course, but it the tools I had access to never scratched the itch that I was feeling in my musical soul.

    Curiosity untethered to practicalities can lead to expensive places. It is the aforementioned equipment black hole. I have seen countless videos online where the recording studio is a room overflowing with more tools and toys than I could hope to accumulate if I were to work at it for the rest of my life as a full time job. These people are not wrong in chasing new investments in their hobby, of course. It is curiosity that brought most of them there. It is that itch to find the next thing that is going to satisfy the creative urge.

    We all do it, too. Photographers buy lenses. Artists buy brushes. You should see my mother-in-law’s quilt fabric collection. 

    I recently came across the example of Trigger[1], Willie Nelson’s famous guitar. “There are instruments older than Trigger, but few guitars have logged as many playing hours in a lifetime, and Nelson plays hard.” That is to say, there are a lucky few who find their tool and cling to it without variation. I’m sure Mr. Nelson owns more curious equipment add-ons and eclectic musical do-dahs than most, but famously he is a one-instrument musician. But now the important question: Did he get there on the first try? Or did it take him experimentally buying and upgrading and testing and tossing?

    I first went down the synthesizer rabbit hole in early 2025. A proper synth is more than a piano keyboard that makes funny sounds. And it is arguably better than a MIDI controller plugged into the software on my laptop. Rather it is a dedicated instrument engineered to generate and manipulate sounds with electrical hardware, and for which a piano-style keyboard is merely a comfortable and familiar user interface. The one I bought one rainy day that spring was my first synth, and I’d be lying if I told you that I’ll settle for it as my last…well for any other reason than budget. I’d love to buy a selection of them and dabble and poke and play and experiment. I’d love to fall into that equipment black hole until I find my Trigger. 

    The new MIDI controller is another step around that circle. I own a small keyboard controller to interface with the synth software on my computers, and I am learning more about how it all works with each visit to this world of music and sound …and most importantly, a new personal exploration of audio creativity. I am searching for something that I won’t know until I find it. It is a search for the scratch for that itch.

  • Attention Economy

    I admit I have been hung up on the idea of toiling in obscurity lately. 

    We live in this era where unless you have millions of followers the general consensus is that it’s not worth it to even try.

    As I write this I have hundreds of followers, many of whom are probably bots, and yet here I am—trying. Call me crazy for going in against the grain of common sense.

    The attention economy has warped our perception of what it means to do valuable work. I can sit here and write tens of thousands of words and to many—perhaps even to the opinion of most—that is all wasted effort unless I’m simultaneously hustling and selling and going viral and changing the whole damn world.

    Rather, I sit here writing, toiling in obscurity, and trying not to internalize any of that. Were I to let those feelings seep into my heart they would manifest as nothing more than a shard of failure stabbing me right through.

    Of course, I have given myself a double challenge. Climbing out of the hole of obscurity is hard enough, and deeply more so is climbing out weighted down by a less popular media format like—ugh—the written word.

    It’s a small thing but I try to look at each of these entries, each word and sentence and thought and idea, as something vital in a long game to make something bigger. I try to focus on making a thing that I would like to discover, not looking for a hole to fill and trying to fill it but rather making a mark and making it bigger and bigger until maybe, perhaps, possibly it gets noticed.

    That is the opposite of embracing failure. 

  • Space Silence

    I recently rewatched Alien[1] with the Kid who was doing a critical film analysis for school.  The tagline of the flick is “in space no one can hear you scream” and my first thought was, geeze, that kind of silence would sure help me get some solid writing in.

    Unlike the Kid, who immediately plugged in her headphones and put some video on in the background to “help her focus” as she wrote her essay about xenomorphs and horror science fiction, I usually find I’m the kind of guy who needs as few distractions as possible to get shit done.

    Neither of us are wrong.

    Silence has many meanings, and maybe for you silence is as much about using blaring heavy metal thrasher tunes to silence the inner critic that keeps you from writing. Maybe solitude for you is the negative space of anonymity left behind by a corner table in a crowded cafe. Maybe the conditions that help you find your voice are nothing like mine, or anyone else’s and it would make anyone you explained it to cringe at the very thought.

    The space to create is personal, deep, and often ineffable.

    In the right space no one can hear you scream—or write or yearn for clarity or connect the dots on some great abiding inspiration. Either way, under the category of Space & Silence I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Political Abnormal

    I need to remind myself almost every day lately that there is more to making the world a good place than overtly fighting evil.

    We live in complex political times. As I write and publish this initially in late-2026 the political landscape of my home in Western Canada is undergoing a nationalistic push to secede from the Canadian confederation. We are in the midst of a referendum… and this post is not about that, but it is about something parallel: that being someone who makes stuff, writes stories, draws pictures, and posts introspective daily essays on navel-gazing topics can feel monumentally inadequate to the moment.

    Look no further than social media. The click rate on my posts are trivial for my creative works compared to when I go online and start engaging politically. And it can feel like a kick to the chest to try to rationalize that the attention of the population is nearly entirely consumed by a tidal wave of political rhetoric and partisan conversation.

    Particularly right now it feels like the last thing anyone wants is a short story by an amateur science fiction author.

    …or some autumn photography.

    …or screenshots from a video game I’m working on.

    …or a sketch of a funky tree in the park.

    …or—hell, the list could go on forever.

    How do creative people stand up in the undertow of the ebbing and flowing tide and find a role in all this that is more than just another screaming voice.

    But like I said, there is more to making the world a good place than overtly fighting evil.

    A picture of a beautiful autumn scene, or a clip from the latest build of my indie game, or some simple sketch-work passed into someone’s social feed is not a distraction from something good, it is a diversion from the darkness. It is a reminder that among the so-called important conversation there still remains people holding a beacon light for humanity to navigate it’s way back to normality.