Return to the blogosphere

My glorious return is nigh thanks to the extreme labour that has gone into building this site myself and now migrating and reformatting 10 years of atrociously self coded blogs from blogspot, so nigh it is that this foray into procrastination (writing this) is probably the actual return, so really its not nigh, its now.  If you’ve followed any of this, especially since the hiatus commenced in ~2017, you’ll know that producing stuff for this purposeless blog was became increasingly challenging, but the desire to post was what got me through the editing phase, my least favourite bit, but it was enough to edit – these days I pretty much just shoot (except work stuff, that requires editing) and put them in a folder I forget about.  Mb I need to reproach my current editing style in lieu of something more exciting, which’ll be tough to find cuz I kinda have issues with the very nature of editing.

Over the hiatus (which I may still be in, only time will tell) I searched for answers as to where my desire went and why, or I guess how, and while working through the blog migration process I noted a particular point in my timeline, and it was not when I stopped posting with any keen-ness, but was when I finally gave in and set up an instagram for my Photography – actually the worst thing I ever did for my photography – not only was the ‘work’ it provided the worst, and from typically horrible people, but the platform itself cares nothing for photos and works to quantify social proof through tools that don’t rank – the fact that photographers post selfies, let along get more likes is really all I need to say, but there’s more, mainly that to do well on IG you need to stick to a single subject, and to a lesser extent style, which is the absolute last thing I want to do with my photos.   I’ve always had qualms with photo-viewing in the digital realm, combine that with tiny phone screens and the masses and photos became more of a social credit than they did art, or a medium of expression, or anything worth worrying about. Instagram destroyed purity and visual splendour, instead opting for a platform designed to assig caliber to one’s ability to garner likes and to shoot the same thing over and over again.  Don’t get me wrong, the first few months were fun….

Camosun Bog, a 2000+ year old ecosystem that was almost entirely destroyed in 75 years of population, dumping and invasive species pressures – oh and they cut a powerline trail right through the middle of it…  The Sphagnum Moss found in these types of bogs is quite the organism and was used in applications from insulation to stuffing wounds – it’s like the polyester of the pre-petroleum world.

What I really enjoy, and enjoyed, about this blog is that it isn’t socials, you have to come here (these days probably from socials……….), you made the choice to engage, you weren’t forced to engage by the act of scrolling or the mechanism predicting your behaviour.  The amount of freedom of expression this enables me is immense and something I’m only wrangling with now.  I was posting on my blogspot before FB was a thing, let alone IG, so back then it was easy to stay the course but as these social apparatus invaded our culture and my psyche I got even further away from the core of my passion.

Looking west towards the Granville St Bridge with downtown on the left – shot from the lil park that Mary and I were v. hard lurkers, rain rain or rain before moving away from the Fairview Slopes… what a name.

I think another mechanism in my retreat from the blog was that I started aiming for too much, for eg, I’d go over seas for a month and then sit down and be like okay here’s 10000 photos to go through for work, and by the time I was done with editing, I was kinda done with the photos themselves – let alone sitting at my computer editing shit.  And on top of that, writing about a month tour is a gargantuan task and really the project of getting it onto blogspot was too gargantuan, and not really what I wanted this blog for.  I fell in love with this for the misc and for the micro adventures but now that I’ve got this website and the means to control it all I can now do both. CHEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Pitt Meadow Marsh Dyke Trail – bird watching was through the roof, as were the gravel trails.  This kind of view is pretty standard in & around Vancouver but the wild thing is there’s pretty much nothing behind those mountains and this is pretty much the case all the way to the North Pole. 

This rant is serving a few purposes: procrastinating grinding through and reformatting old blogs, a marker for the blog’s transition from google’s platform to my own and to help rationalise what it is about this that is important – which is the journal nature of it.  I think my next post will be vast in time but brief in that it’ll overview my timeline over the last 2 years for my future self, before diving into journalling the lil adventures and times that make life great.  

Really it all boils down to me wanting to spend time in photoshop that i’m not getting paid for – I say this because in migration I found about 35 blogs, all with thousands of words, that are drafted.  Most of them are from the dark times, and I kinda wanna train a NLP bot on it – and another on the happy times, and see what they have to say to each other.  

Superfluousness of Purpose

 

Years of not realising, or possibly accepting, that I was most certainly no longer putting in the effort that I did during cherished times of photo-making is something I’ve been spending my recent times quite concerned with and the bliss that has ensued is wild, albeit totally expected. Whether I like it or not, and maybe photo-thinking has influenced my mind's tending towards abstraction.  In the early stages of taking my foot off the pedal I recall being troubled by purpose, which quickly lead to being troubled by the very nature of purpose.  It was challenging to learn and eventually completely differentiate the idea of purpose and goals. Just because something serves a purpose doesn't mean it has purpose. 

Southport Seaway Tanks - my happy place for a number of years.  Very few things have rivalled the joy of flipping the fear that was solidified from paddling on top of these shark (mellow ones for the most part) infested waters for half a decade.  To go under the surface and hang with those very same sharks was a mind bender.

I’m not sure if it’s born out of desire or a result of my general, but the idea of purpose has been an increasing factor in decision making - but my truth is that just because something servers a purpose, doesn’t mean it has purpose.  I don’t believe that a lack of purpose is a bad thing by any means, I think a lack of purpose enforces a move towards greater understanding of surround and self, macro causality and in-turn actual purpose; round and round.

I think what is important about purpose is ensuring I am breaking some action, idea or thing to get to it’s core elements, as with culture and one’s growth within it is so heavily shrouded in emotion and social bias, it’s hard to confidently reach an understanding of purpose. In today's world its increasingly challenging, as we're pumped with comparison, but I honestly believe that our cave-dwelling self’s suffered the same unnecessary emotional trauma - Ugbog is real good at breaking rocks.  But in saying that, perhaps current culture and our entrenchment in the most persuasive mediums, ever possibly, may be thickening the veil and pushing us further away from real purpose by forcing us into the pursuit of fickle goals that are derived from comparison.

my last animal, not ever, just the most recent: Ron.  His efficacy in murdering native animals has been something that has troubled me since he left us.

I feel like we humans are either fed, or perhaps more likely just enjoy feeding off of, the desire to add notions of purpose to an action, feeling or idea that doesn’t seem to have any real purpose. I guess one could think of this as optimism but I think that’s a shallow consideration of optimism, I believe optimism exists in even the most pessimistic thoughts.  It’s not about looking on the bright side, it’s about accepting the polarized nature of the two and the fact that pessimism necessitates optimism. 

On the other hand, I love the more functional idea of everything serving a purpose, in the sense of things on a boat, or spaceship for eg.  One can’t laden these vehicles in superfluousness, and I love the idea of carrying that thinking into the every day.  These are true cases of everything serving a purpose, regardless of one's opinion of the necessity of landing on the moon.  However, It’s probably very much worth my while to be wary of stripping back all of the unnecessary stuff that bring so much joy to my life, like lenses of the same focal length. 

Queen of my Dreams

Confer my Experientialism

So it's been a little over a year since I moved to Vancouver and it's been a ride of tumultuousness, bliss and introspection.  Relocating has its challenges, certainly in the day to day existence but the majority of my intrigue has concerned itself with the self, perhaps because relocating to Canada is more of a geographical exercise than it is a cultural upheaval.  Sure the culture is different, in more ways than I ever understood from my tourist-visa haunts up here over the last decade, but finding a groove here is certainly easy thanks, probably, to the Commonwealth.

However, the nuances of the daily are something I had in Brisbane (or anywhere), it's just easier to focus on them under the guise of a foreigner.  When I was touring, I felt like a tourist even when I was in Brisbane, seeing every thing and everyone progressing along their path in time yet somehow removed - therein perhaps lies the temporal bliss I drew from my home time, also, I never worked while home, instead opting to burn my tour pay on partying and skating.  Why did I ever think those emotions were something to expect? 

Bliss is never deserved. I honestly thought that the wave of bliss I was riding derived from my decisions, my train of thought and not at all the fact I was living in a perpetual state of holiday while barely dipping my toes in what I now consider to be reality - it was rad, surely one of my life's greatest times, but clearly I did not anticipate that the bliss was relevant to my timeline.  

If I was doing that stuff now, I wonder if I'd be as stoked? I'd say not as much, based on my evolution into adulthood, something that the perpetual holiday didn't just enforce but over time has shown me I was desperately ignorant to maturation.  Kids don't just have fun, they have naivety - something my older self wishes to shed, but something my future self will tell me that I never understood as well as I do then, as if in some paradoxical game with no end.

I finally drew the mustard to force my hand to reach into the dark in search of the aforementioned bliss and in doing so slowly realised, and will forever realise, that the bliss was a fruit of my labour but came easy as I never actually went to work, or dealt with the reality of paying rent, putting effort in with people I loved etc.  This state of drifting upwards had a profound effect on every day, including this one, as I feel like the inevitable down that I experienced was the greatest learning experience I've had in my adult life.  

Battling my psyche, the ability to work for work's sake, withdrawal and growing repulsion from life were certainly a ride!  A tough one for sure, superbly supported by the tolerant people close to me.  It kinda took moving up here to realise this and the futility of not addressing what surrounded/s me, for I've put myself there, and have not regretted the ride of the place - only I failed to commit to a better psyche through effort.  

Nothing worth doing comes for free, and that's cliche because it's cliche - things are that way for a damn good reason.  I slaved over the camera for years before it started working out; I want to slave over mental betterment and it's ensured pleasantries.  Deal with it.

I'm excited by new things, but also getting back in touch with the psyche I preferred basking in.  I think doing so will illuminate new paths and I wholly feel that my happiness derives from the new, but the notion of new is self-defined and I know it's possible to get a of pleasure out of small things as it's all I used to concern myself with (probs cuz I was turning my back on anything big).  One thing I want to do is make this blog responsive, which is quite a task, because I opted to code this thing with my ground-floor html skills back in 2009 and a few things have changed in web-world since then, like mobiles.

 

Blonde Redhead - Misery is a Butterfly (I've decided to write the titles because looking back I've noticed that many of the youtube embeds I've made over the year are gone, with no clear reference to what they were)