8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: [2026] The First Year

Chapter List

  • Every Day

    Routinely, I drop myself headfirst into a daily challenge.

    There is an art to it.

    There is a goal embedded within.

    There is a entrenched motivation.

    Why? Well…

    As an example, imagine you want to be better at drawing hands. Hands are notoriously difficult to sketch. They are both familiar and complex. They are easy to draw poorly. So, what you opt to do is practice every day: each day, you tell yourself, you will draw hands. They will never be the same hands. The hands will be drawn from different perspectives in different poses and perhaps even in different media or styles.  But you will draw at least one hand every single day. Period.

    You’ve just crafted a simple daily challenge for yourself.

    No spreadsheets. No written reports. No accountability to anyone but yourself. You simply know that sometime each day you need to set aside a small chunk of time to sketch hands.

    And you’ll do this challenge for a month. Or maybe two months. Or, if you’re incredibly dedicated to learning to draw hands, you’ll challenge yourself for a whole year.

    At the end of the challenge what do you think the result will be? Yeah, you’ll be happy to take a few days off from drawing hands, but I can almost guarantee that the daily practice, the grind, the iterative epic learning will have improved your skills by a measurable amount.

    Challenge yourself to do something every day.  And then give yourself a hand.

  • Start Writing

    At the heart of this website, the core of this little creative project I’ve been working on here, there is but a single message burning with the inner heat that drives the whole damn thing: it is one piece of advice. Start writing.

    Oh, I get it. You don’t have the passion or the time or the urge or the patience. 

    That device in your hands is so great at capturing your attention and entertaining you with the ideas and thoughts of other people—or maybe now I should include algorithms and slop—that you can’t be bothered to use it to make something.

    But writing is at the core of creativity. It is the uber-skill that shapes and refines all the others. 

    Writing is the materialization of thoughts—reflective and critical, personal and communicative, coherent and scattered—upon the page.

    Writing makes you better at evaluating yourself and whatever you do. 

    Writing closes the loop and fills the gap and bridges the points of something you cannot articulate is missing in your soul until you start writing.

    It’s not difficult.

    Open any app that takes text: your notes, your word-processor, hell, write yourself an email… but write something. And then write some more. And keep writing after that. It will improve you in ways you cannot fathom until you’ve written enough to see it for yourself.

  • Photographic Oddity

    I’ve written a few times about the black and white photography that accompanies the posts on this project.  What I haven’t mentioned as often is the shades of vulnerability I encounter in that act of taking such non-traditional photos in public.

    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.

  • Rights Wrongs

    This project of introspective writing is coming at you from nowhere. It says so, right in the title. Dispatches from Nowhere. And sometimes it literally feels that way.

    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.

  • Worth It

    We’ve all done it. We all should do it, at least occasionally. I do it ever few months, in fact.

    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.