8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: [2026] The First Year

Chapter List

  • Health Full, two

    (Continued from Health Full)

    I haven’t quite worked up the mental energy to call myself retired at this point. I’m not, really. Folks who have escaped the waged-employee chains and can work optionally or casually but who are still not of some societally agreed upon age of actual retirement we tend to use the word semi-retired. It’s code for I finished the capitalism main game storyline and now I’m going back for fun to play the parts I may have missed. 

    My experience though has often been one of adaptation, and while my brain may repeatedly tell me that I’m way too young to be calling myself retired, my body has had other ideas.

    I’m not twenty anymore.

    I strain my back sleeping wrong. My eyes get sore from looking at a screen for longer than an hour. I really need a comfortable chair when I sit at the piano. I probably shouldn’t lift too many heavy objects anymore if I can avoid it. Sitting in the grass to sketch means my knees are going to hurt when I try to stand up again. 

    Creativity is slower, more purposeful, and needs to account for mobility, agility and maybe even time to squeeze in an afternoon nap.

    It’s not weakness to acknowledge aging at any stage of the process. Knowing yourself and your limitations—and importantly, accepting it— as you work towards anything is a superpower, not a submission, even if it often seems precisely the opposite.

  • Tools Troubles

    Fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan told the world that the medium is the message[1], and I have long taken that to mean that it is as valuable to study the tools and techniques as the final product if we are ever to understand the whole.

    The artist can easily get lost in the tools, though. Photographers can bang on about their camera specs. Writers can wax poetic about their favourite keyboards. And musicians these days it seems are just as apt to post content about the subtle tonality differences between brands of violin strings as share their music.

    Yet, creativity is and always be an intimacy with the tools and techniques. The art and the mechanisms that enable it are inseparable and interwoven as two things can be. 

    Maybe that’s why we get hung up on the medium and the message and often confuse the effort to concentrate on them both with the attention they deserve. 

    Or maybe I just like writing about my toys and I am going to devote some space on this blog to share my thoughts about keyboards, cameras and violin strings. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all.

    Under the category of Tools & Troubles, I’lll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Anything New

    I never really learned to play the piano.

    That is, sure, I could jab the keys and grind out a mean Chopsticks as well as the next ten year old, and sure, we had a little keyboard propped up in our living room when I was growing up, and sure, I could poke a key or two at a time to feel out a song. But I never took lessons, never practiced scales, never learned chords, and never did anything besides fumble at the ivories.

    I have been trying to remedy that in 2026, and my days are incomplete if I haven’t sat down at the keys for at least half an hour each day.

    I recommend learning something new. Anything, really.

    Acquiring new skills can sometimes unlock a powerful ability that you never knew you were missing until you found it. A new perspective, a new way of looking at old problems, or a new bit of insight into the otherwise mundane.

    And you never really know what that will be until you try to acquire those skills.

    When I took up running I started to see the world from the perspective of footpaths and interconnected trails.

    When I learned watercolour paints I suddenly saw colours in a different way.

    Now when I get my head around the piano and chords I listen to music differently, hear the shapes of things when I watch movies, and get a bigger sense of sounds that dance around genres of music.

    Your experience will vary.  But you will experience.

  • Oughta Should

    When did we force play to become learning?

    And I’m not just talking about the kids. I mean, all of us? Why can’t we just play?

    Oh, I admit, this is probably a personal observational bias, but it seems more and more from what I read, and talking to other people—parents, friends and creative contemporaries—over the years the idea that anyone can just play for the raw enjoyment of something has turned into a pariah. 

    All too often I fall into the trap myself. 

    I feel like I can’t just sketch, but rather I need to be making something for my online portfolio.

    I shouldn’t be playing music, instead I ought to be practicing repertoire or logging my progress.

    Even just sitting here at a keyboard writing I am thinking not about the joy and fun that I get out of typing words, but rather my mind is always drifting over to content and audience and something bigger that I should be seeking from this act.

    Of course, these invasive thoughts are at my own control, and maybe—lucky you—you are able to ignore them and just enjoy doing things for the sake of it. But then if you are the type of person to be reading a blog post that started with such a question maybe too you are like me and feel guilt from directionless creativity.

    So I ask again: When did we force play to become learning? And how can we snap out of it?

  • Yes And

    As I write these words I am contemplating an opportunity.

    I don’t write about it much here but the fact is that I don’t work full time. We saved. We picked hobbies and interests that are relatively inexpensive. We cook at home. We budget. And as a result we can live on a single income, our savings and a pretty modest pay that comes from my sporadic and occasional work. It’s a dash of privilege with a dose of planning. And I’m not apologizing.

    But it does mean that sometimes that occasional work comes in the form of something strange and interesting that throws a wrench into the simple routine. Like: I got a call asking if I would like to go travel for a week to do some contract work.

    Of course I would, I replied. 

    And so as I write this it seems pretty likely I’ll be packing my bags and going on a long trip to do some real work, shake some hands, and bumble around a place I’ve never been before. It would certainly be a change from my usual drudge of local cafes and my home office. 

    One of the rules I gave myself when I scaled back from full time work was to always keep myself in a state of yes. That is, if an opportunity (such as this one) presented itself, to start from the word yes and allow it to take me where it would.  

    Because here’s the the thing: not only would it be easy as a guy spending his days in pursuit of a creative second career to say no a lot, to hunker down and shut out the world while he pounded away on his keyboard as I pushed forward on a project, but it could almost certainly become the default.

    And yet, there is something inspiring, motivating, and genuinely creatively reinvigorating about a change of scenery and meeting new people.