Being a photographer and loving light, it’s going to be a long time before I get over the regret of missing the sunset-lightning-fireworks for the ages experienced by Vancouver on Saturday night, all for more work on the home, but I will get over it, and then I’ll get to live with the results generated by that loss.
Deep down inside, I know I’m shit company when I’m distracted by things I feel I need to be doing. I get obsessive and focused, and conversation isn’t very conducive to making me on anyone’s top 10 to-hang-around list anytime soon when I’m in that mode.
Which is sort of where I’m at. I know I wouldn’t have been “present” wherever I was on Saturday, I know the price I’ve paid will ultimately reward me more than the regret will haunt me. Continue reading
Category Archives: Specifically Steff
Writing: The Art of Digging In?
I fall out of love with writing.
It’s a love/hate relationship. I can’t live without it. I wish I could.
It’s a near-pathological need to dig, writing. For some of us. For me. Dig, dig, dig. I feel like I’m taking a stab at digging my way to China in my back yard. I’ll never finish. I’ll never even get halfway where I’m going. I know this. Thank god it’s a free passage. Taxes would kill me. And, unlike digging to China, the scenery’s interesting. Continue reading
Everything In Its Place
I sometimes forget I’m a writer. I get out of practice, and then it doesn’t occur to me that, to be true to who I am on any given day, I should be playing with a few words. Sometimes I forget that wrestling hands-on with my experiences and my past is what makes me the person I am, and it’s best undertaken in writing.
But it doesn’t always need to just happen on the page. My Sunday was an infinitely illuminating day, and just the beginning to what I think will be a strange but profoundly fulfilling experience.
I’m undertaking a MASSIVE restructuring of my home. Continue reading
Unraveling the Headfuck
All these insecurities
That have held me down for so long
I can’t say I’ve found a cure for these
But at least I know them
So they’re not so strong
-George Michael
In my mind, there are two lives. The life I’ve lived, and the life I might’ve lived if all my insecurities hadn’t held me back for as long as they have.
For someone who doesn’t give a fuck what others think, I sure let it prevent me from living out loud. Continue reading
Why I (Love to) Hate Facebook
There I am, second-last day of vacation, scouring my deck and cleaning my deck chairs. I bought the chairs about eight years ago now. As I scoured them down, a flood of old memories came back — drinks drunk as planes soared in across the southern horizon, headed for the airport’s runways, conversations nattered until wee morning hours with faces that still bring a smile to mine, silent moments spent alone or with others, like one sunny perfect beautiful morning spent with a coffee and a flawless and strangely-quiet empty horizon before finding out a couple planes had earlier crashed into a building and changed America’s future.
It’s just a chair. A measley little chair I see out my window every day, and yet when I really crunch the memories as I scour it down from up-close, a world I’ve lived through in eight years come washing over me. It’s just a chair. Wow.
Imagine if everything had that kind of conjuring power? But then I log into Facebook. Continue reading
Because Every Adventure Needs a Story
Every vacation comes with that one day when Nothing Really Goes As Planned.
For me, that day was Thursday.
I got up early, psyched and ready for a great day. The plan? Throw my bike on a bus and do an extensive cycling tour of Kelowna for my last day in town. I’d pick up some ingredients to make a good dinner, and would have some Me Time around the water. Good stuff, I figgered. Easily done!
Or was it? Continue reading
What I Learned on My Summer Vacation
Sometimes I just post a smattering of thoughts. This is such a time.
——-
- Time evaporates. Make use of what you have.
- It’s a big world out there. Get lost in it sometimes.
- When I grow up, I want to be carefree. And aware. Always.
- Alone is good, but so are people. When meeting them, it’s easier to find flaws than positives, but more rewarding to make the effort for the latter. Continue reading
Vacation: Getting My Bearings
Away.
Being in the interior, here in Wine Country, feels like my summer living in the Yukon. Hills abound. And dust.
I found myself in the North, though. A version of myself. A version that complicated She Who Lived Before. I’m hoping this little trip does the same for me now, but this time decomplicates me. Continue reading
Fuzzy
Bill Russell, the NBA superstar of old, was on the Daily Show.
Russell said he’d had a chat with the Dalai Lama one day and asked him, “You have a combination of spirituality and reality. When did it come together? Did it come all at once, or was it that some came gradually?”
So the guru replied that it had taken over 30 years. 30 years!
A man who is said to have been born into his religious prominence, 30 years to get to that necessary plateau!
Well, us mere mortals can take a breath then, can’t we? Continue reading
A Smattering of Happenings
I’m not very comfortable posting this because there are areas in here I’m not ready to be sharing, but this is what’s going on RIGHT NOW, and sometimes accounts of these things after-the-fact are overly sanitized. But what the fuck, I’ll share.
This is turning into a monumental week for me, a week of massive change that I think is laying the groundwork for what’s going to be one hell of an interesting upswing.
There have been a number of things I have been wanting resolution with for a long time, but have only really pursued this year. Among them was finally getting diagnosed as ADD. I never wanted to go there, never thought it applied to me. But I fake it well, right? I delude people into thinking I’ve a better grip on things than I do. Continue reading