8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

DispatCHes
FROM
NOWHERE

  • Permission Trap

    I fell deep into the permission trap while on vacation recently. 

    We went on a summer trip. It was exciting. It was picturesque. It was the city of lights and every turn seemed like a new reason to point my camera and click the shutter. I took a lot of photos.

    So of course… I posted a few of the best pics on Instagram so that my collection of friends and fam who follow on my private account could enjoy those same photos.  And, genuinely, the first day that I posted the response was overwhelmingly positive. 

    But… well. I posted more pics on the second day, and a couple more on the third… 

    The following days were less positive. People had tuned out.

    Fair enough, I suppose. Vacation photos while everyone is back home getting ready another work day. The patience for that is limited. I get it.

    But we are funny to each other this way, aren’t we?

    I’m not saying this to dive into a pit of self-pity about my social engagement. There are an array subtle social cues that are conveyed by modern interactions on social media platforms, and being shrugged off by one’s own friends and family, and I would suggest that a big one is the subconscious permission structure around sharing.

    People are online. People are on these apps. People are scrolling, looking at advertisements and AI slop and influencer drivel, so in my own mind I am considering that I can offer something better by sharing: Me, a real person that the people on my private account all personally know, travelling the world and sharing his photos.

    But then the permission trap emerges from the inaction of the masses: a fraction of the likes and indifferent shrugs and my anxious, approval-seeking artist’s mind reads that right to the thought of least resistance: people don’t want to see it. I’m oversharing. I’m boasting. I’m swamping the feeds of friends with a reality that breaks their comfortable slop-ridden, algorithmic vibe and I don’t have their permission to break into that for more than a single post.

    I’m overthinking it, of course. Because that’s the trap.

  • Show Tell

    The Kid is a natural performer. She comes to life when attention turns her way and she is at her creative best when she is in the spotlight.

    Me, not so much.

    I prefer the quiet toil of fingers on a keyboard in a dimly lit cafe or sketching a scene from a vantage where no one can peek over my shoulder and ask pesky questions.

    But for either of us, and all of us, there is vulnerability interlocked with the act of creative expression. We all need to turn on, activate, be our best selves and show up to tell the story we are trying to communicate through whatever form we choose.

    I would love to tell you that creativity is an easy or a comfortable thing, but I really do believe that the best of what we makes comes from opening our hearts, souls and selves to the universe.

    I type away in peace and quiet rarely seeing the people who read the words I write, but despite my shyness I still post them and send them out into the universe for anonymous adjudication. Just by reading these words you have transformed into the second half of a mysterious equation that I know exists when I write but I’ll never know much about. That is my personal vulnerability.

    Creativity comes from everything we are clashed against everything we are not.

    Under the category of Show & Tell I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Drift Works

    Is your creative space a refuge? 

    I’ve been thinking a lot about disappearing our minds away into imaginary spaces. 

    We all do this, I think. Maybe we don’t always think of it like this, but letting our minds wander through crafted scenarios, daydreaming, thinking over problems and relationships, pondering strange ideas and realities… it all adds up to a kind of mental drift work.

    It feels foundational to creativity, to me at least.

    I had a quirky childhood—we all do I suppose—and my imagination was a place I could sneak away to when I needed to get away from reality. Oops. A bit of personal insight there—maybe, but I think there are likely a lot of us who use imagination as a kind of escape from the here and now.

    I’m certainly no therapist, but it does lead me to ponder how much creative expression is intertwined with exploration of our own mental realms—and how much of it happens because we are cleaning out the cobwebs of our own consciousness while we’re biding time hiding out from real world problems.

    As an adult I escape into meditative spaces when I run or write or just sitting back in a comfortable chair, and some of the best ideas I have are not things I’m chasing down but rather explorations I’m making through this mental space I’ve built for myself over a lifetime.

    I thought maybe that was weird… but perhaps it’s just human.

  • Significance Gap

    I am as bad as anyone when it comes to looking for meaning in what I do.

    I spend my days working towards significance.

    Oh sure, I write for the sake of writing, make art without care for anyone ever seeing it, and play music with my headphones on so that no one ever hears the sounds but me—but nearly all of it is in service to some future significance, I wager.

    We practice to improve.

    We groom our skills towards a purpose.

    We reach out for significance—which is something that cannot reliably be measured.

    What is significance? What is purpose? What is meaning?

    In a way it might be something parallel to the idea of wealth. Wealth is the acquisition of money in search of a tipping point from insufficient to more than enough. Wealth is relative. It’s a marketing term for banks. It’s an ineffable concept. For some wealth might simply be financial stability. For others wealth is riches beyond imagination. Wealth comes in a variety as diverse as there are people on Earth.

    Purpose is similar, I think. Meaning and significance are intangible and indefinable, and likely they mean something different for everyone who utters the syllables. There is a gap in communicating what my definition of significance is to you and vice versa. For some it might mean something personal or linked to a small community, while for others nothing short of worldwide fame and history shifting effort would suffice.

    My only advice then: define it for yourself.

  • Blog Lore, Part Three

    I’ve been on holiday, I’m jet-lagged, and yeah: I need a few days to recover, so…

    I was digging through my archives which are stuffed away on a cloud drive where only I can see them and I found this blog advice thing I wrote in 2008.

    Enjoy.

    The Seven Sins of Blogging

    Original Published Date : Friday, June 13, 2008

    I was thinking of writing an entry explaining two things: (1) my motivation for writing and posting as much as I do and (2) the apparent arrogance and self-importance that tends to come across in this blog. First, I write because I am as compelled to write as I am to breathe. And second, that WOULD be arrogance did sin number seven not apply. I am mindful of that, and my explanation — not directed at ANYONE at all but me, really — evolved into the following:

    Do you have a blog? Thinking of starting one? Seven years, multiple blogs, thousands of entries, and encyclopedic quantities of text later, I have the following advice… of how you can completely screw up.

    Those seven sins of blogging are:

    Lust
    It’s not what you think. And unless maybe you are writing a sex-advice column, literally detailing your lust is a very sketchy idea for any blog (as you never know when your mother-in-law is reading.) However, if we take a similar approach as Dante, defining lust as the “excessive love of others,” you may be lustful if you are peppering your readers with (a) too many links, (b) opinions that are not your own, or worse (c) more quotes than content, and thus you should not expect your sad little blog to amount to much of anything. Your own opinion may be completely wrong and suck, but at least it’s yours — so don’t lust after someone else’s ideas: it’s just uninspired and lame.

    Gluttony
    In blogging, gluttony is measured in units of your reader’s time. Your sad little blog commits gluttony if it eats too much of that irreplaceable resource: the pages may take too long to download, your spelling and grammar might suck thus consuming all of our time with abandon as readers try to decipher your thoughts. It may drone on—and on and on and on and on—about nothing of significance and thus consume our time merely looking for the point of your ramblings. Or it might simply be horridly designed and force the consumption of our time purging the pain of viewing it from ours eyes and brains with hot pokers. As attributed to Kurt Vonnegut: “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted” — or you suck.

    Greed
    If your readers can’t find your content for the barrage of advertisements on your sad little blog, guess what: you’re a greedy ass. Do we think you have something valuable to say, or are you simple a shill for Google? Don’t tell us it generates revenue. Don’t tell us it pays your hosting fees. If you expect anyone to believe blogging is how you earn your grocery money—or that targeted ads are the only way you can afford to pay for something that costs less than a pint of beer—do you really expect readers to believe anything else you write? One or two ads: cool. More, get over yourself.

    Sloth
    Commitment. Do you have it? If you are going to write a blog, then do it: pull up to a keyboard and go. The alternative is finding the delete button. Many would argue: but blogs are media. And most of us recycle our old newspapers and delete anything older than a few weeks past from our PVRs. If your sad little blog is stagnating because the gap between entries is measured in months, you have committed sloth and you need to make a decision. Chances are if two months have gone by without an update (the unofficial statute of limitations on this particular time line) no one will even notice if “whatilikeaboutcheese.randomfreeblogs.ru” suddenly disappears from their feed.

    Wrath
    We get it. Blog spam sucks. Scrapers suck. Flamers suck. But if you are going to run a blog, dealing with any and all of these is like dealing with commuters on your drive to work; It’s just part of the traffic. In that particular analogy, wrath would be represented by driving to work in a Hummer: sure, being involved in a collision equals multiple fatalities and you get to drive away, but your gas mileage sucks, and every other commuter thinks you’re an arrogant ass. The same goes for your sad little blog. Wrath comes in the form of you implementing overly cumbersome or restrictive tools to fight and prevent spam, scrapping, or unwelcome comments. Sure, easy for you to manage on the back end, but grow a pair and don’t make your readers suffer for your fear and anger.

    Envy
    Green shades are so unbecoming on a blog. We all know that envy is defined as wanting something that someone else has and you currently do not. Envy is stealing. Envy is pilfering content. Envy is filling your blog with snippets of content from other sites prefixed by the words “Check this out!” Your sad little blog has committed the sin of envy if you are simply writing your blog to “keep up with the Joneses” as it were. Don’t blog to fill space and seek to mimic the apparent notoriety of someone else’s efforts, or your blog will truly suck. Blogging for the sake of blogging means you have absolutely nothing of consequence to say and thus you should not be allowed access to a keyboard. Blogging itself is not cool, but entertaining and informing people in a meaningful way via a blog might be.

    Pride
    “What! Only five hundred hits this year?” And four hundred and ninety of them are likely your own clicks. No one cares what you have to say. No one cares, even if what you are writing is wise and insightful. No one cares what you thought of that movie. No one cares that you ate pizza for dinner in April 1997. No one cares: really. So if you are writing your sad little blog for an audience, forget it. Humble yourself and write for only you because in five years when you are paging through your archives (if they both still exist and you even care enough to do so) we can almost guarantee it won’t be for the purposes of submitting them to so great historical archive. You earn hits. And even those you earn are hits for which you are undeserving.