Holy crap has it really been nearly three months since I was on here? I need to start trying to form coherent thoughts that take more than 140 characters to elucidate.

There’s a thought that’s been rattling around in my head for a while and I need to get it out. I don’t want to, because it’s depressing and unhealthy and generally something on which I don’t like focusing, but at this point it’s become like holding in a fart on a crowded bus.

I’m 33 as I write this. Let’s say, for the sake of simple math, I live to be 93. As well, for simplicity’s sake and a touch of optimism, let us assume I am able to travel and function and enjoy my faculties right up to the end. That gives me 60 years. 720 months. A little less than 22,000 days. Most people would say that sounds like a lot. To me, it is a terrifyingly, infinitesimally small amount of time.

There is something like 195 countries in the world. I used to consider myself fairly well-traveled, fortunate enough to grow up in a family with the means and desire to see the world. But when I really think about it, I’ve maybe visited 8 actual different independent nations (E.g., Canada, USA) . Some for only a day, which can hardly be considered a true experience of the culture. That leaves 187 countries in which I’ve never set foot. If I want to see them all, that means I need to average just over 3 new countries a year, for the rest of my life. This year, our big travel plans are Vancouver. Maybe, if we have a really good year, Mexico in the winter. Those will be great trips, but I still haven’t eaten a-ping in Cambodia or wrestled a zebu in Madagascar. It is a 100% impossibility for any one person to experience every culture the world has to offer, or will offer. And some days it genuinely pisses me off.

Here is Wikipedia’s list of best-selling books.

Here’s Time’s ALL TIME 100 best English-language novels.

Here are 100 Must-Read Books for the Essential Man’s Library.

Here are the 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written.

Here are 1001 books you MUST READ BEFORE YOU DIE.

I love to read. Most books take me a long time to get through; I usually only read a few pages at a time before going to sleep. Let’s say I read 6 books a year (which is probably optimistic). That means I will likely read approximately 360 more books before I die. Even if I double, or triple my reading rate, how many books is that? If I just decide to read all 1001 books (BEFORE I DIE), I’ll need to average about 16 a year. More than one per month. Just for those “classics” that “everyone” “should” read. No room for small-time, self-published books that I might love, that I might connect with on a deep personal level. No cult-y, off-beat stuff that no critic would ever consider essential reading, but that I might thoroughly enjoy. Comics? I’ve read Watchmen, the only one that ever seems to show up on these lists. I just finished re-reading the whole Transmetropolitan series; one of my absolute favourite stories and characters from any media. Which “best” novel must I give up so I can finish reading The Walking Dead? Or the next Dark Tower novel? Again, it is a 100% impossibility for any one person to experience every piece of literature the world has to offer, or will offer. And some days it genuinely pisses me off.

(This is becoming a very negative post, and I apologize for that, but for some reason these thoughts of mortality and lost experiences have been stuck in my head for a while, and I’m really hoping that this will exercise those demons.)

I often share this personal maxim with friends: “You haven’t had your favourite meal yet.” I mean it in the sense of “You don’t know if you’ll like it until you try it.” I believe that in a broad sense, also more literally there is so much food out there to try in the world, that (statistically speaking), you probably never will get to try what would be your favourite meal. That upsets me. There is more music and movies and games and art that has been created and will be created than can ever be heard or watched or played or experienced. That upsets me. But it also motivates me.

I crave new experiences. When I visit a new restaurant, and there is something on the menu that I don’t already know what it will taste like, I have to try it. If I’m going somewhere new, I’m going to seek out things unique to that place, experiences to have that I haven’t had before, or won’t be able to have elsewhere. This is a vital part of my life. At least I want it to be. But like so many people, so much of my life is safe and sedate, rote and routine. This is a conscious and accepted choice; I want financial and familial success, stability at the core of my life, and a future certain enough for me to take greater risks along the fringes. I live where I live and work where I work because I believe it likely to lead me to a place of financial means and flexible time enough to do many of those adventures that I crave, and to do them with people I love and a family to grow with. There are people who make different choices, and I am grateful to know of them. I may not be able to experience everything the world has to offer, but I can experience so much more vicariously through the sharing of others’.

OK, thank you Internet, for letting me get this off my chest. Writing it did what I hoped it would: get me to break the mental feedback loop of focusing on all the things I won’t get to enjoy in this world, and instead fire me up once again about all the things that I will! One final extra-nerdy thought: we level up by gaining EXPERIENCE; don’t let your life become a grind.

(TL;DR – Try the special.)

Well, that was a year…

Top Music in 2010

(play count of the last 12 months according to last.fm)

Artists

Tracks

Twitter

I see "mountain", "awesome", and "happy". Good sign.

Facebook

"awesome", "beer", "happy"... "hurts"

Top words (in order) were awesome, happy, may (?), time, morning, hurts, weekend, snow, halloween, facebook, find, mountain, anyone, room, really, mountains (plural should count together IMO). Not sure if the word cloud or that list includes captions on posted links/pics/videos, comments, or just straight status updates.

Bookmark Tags

I tag a lot of videos

Not feeling like writing a heck of a lot right now, so I’ll just end with a sentiment I agree with whole-heartedly:

Last night at just after midnight (technically this morning I guess) someone came up to my front door, rang my doorbell 4 or 5 times rapidly, and ran away. By the time I pulled on some track pants and got downstairs there was no sign of him/her/them.

I had just dropped off to sleep after a very long and physically exhausting day. Really looking forward to a peaceful sleep in Sunday morning. Now my adrenaline is pumping and every home invasion horror and vigilante beatdown movie scene is running through my head.

In the light of day this is nothing more than an innocent and silly prank by some kids goofing around on a Saturday night. Laying in bed and staring at the ceiling, at one in the morning… this is justification for great and terrible vengeance. Since my brain gets locked in a feedback loop on whatever it’s last focus was on, I laid there for two hours going through increasingly violent and outlandish scenarios in my mind as I tried desperately to regain my lost slumber.

I am waiting by the door when he rings the bell, jump out and scare him good.

I am waiting by the door when he rings the bell, jump out and catch him, smack him around.

I hear them approach the door, I run down the stairs, throw open the door, catch him and beat the crap out of him.

… and his friends.

The doorbell rings, I come down the stairs as they kick in the door. I surprise them, beat the crap out of them and throw them out.

The doorbell rings, I come down the stairs as they kick in the door. I catch them, beat the crap out of them, take their wallets, tell them I can call their parents or the cops, which one do they want.

They kick in the door, I jump down the stairs onto the first one. I turn and tackle the second, knocking him out and tying them both up for the police.

They kick in the door. I jump over the half-wall between the second landing and the front door. I land behind the first invader, dropping my elbow on his clavicle, breaking my fall and his collarbone. Crouching to absorb the impact of the landing, I turn and leap with full force driving the heel of my palm into the nose of the second invader, then my knee into his solar plexus. I grab the bat out of his hand, twisting his wrist back hard enough to hear tendons snap as I swing it backwards through the jaw of the first thug. A second time I spin back around, following the swing through as I bring the bat down on the top of it’s previous owner’s head. I thrust the bat like a spear to the chest of the third attacker, still in the door frame. He stumbles backwards off the steps, I am following through the air, bat raised in both hands above my head like a woodsman’s axe. Bat meets forehead at the same time as skull meets concrete. Bursts like a rotten jack-o-lantern.

These little fantasy scenes don’t bring me rest; instead each one gives my brain a little micro-burst of adrenaline that keeps me awake and angry. This is exactly why I need to read a good and engrossing book before sleeping. I need to take my mind off of whatever I was thinking about before coming to bed, or I will lay there, unable to sleep, going over and over every detail of the game I was playing, show I was watching, work I was doing, or whatever else was going on. This is also why I am and always have been a very poor choice of person to bother late at night for anything less than a dire emergency.

(As an annoying side note, there is a pack of asshole teenagers that hang out in our neighbourhood. All summer they spend their nights getting drunk in the playground park across the street from our house, where we get to enjoy listening to their mindless blather and stoned howling. And, should they feel particularly energetic, we get to wake up to a street littered with broken planters, scratched and dented cars, trashed gardens, and other evidence of their adventures. Of course, a couple of them have their little souped-up Civics that they love to race up and down our residential streets. Basically, a bunch of ignorant bullshit that I really would love to enact violence upon. And before anyone gives me the “they’re just kids being kids” crap: stupid is stupid, you don’t need to be any age to know that. Even as a teenager, I hated pricks that acted like this.)

OK, here’s the deal. I need you to go away for a while.

From here. From the BLOG.

I need you to stop reading. Stop following. Unsubscribe. Delete feed. Forget.

It’s not you. It’s me.

I’ve hit a wall. I just can’t seem to complete an idea. Barely a sentence. I share links and comments and thoughts and updates on Facebook and Twitter, but the immediacy and brevity of those mediums discourages deeper discussion-inspection-reflection.

That last sentence is 176 characters. I couldn’t even fit it in a tweet.

I like using big words and run-on sentences. I like to ramble, pontificate, blather, spew, and let my consciousness flow.

But lately I’m not. Not enough. With the words.

I’ve got lots of ideas. Dozens of “drafts” waving their dicks at me whenever I log into my WordPress dashboard. But I just can’t seem to pull the trigger. Can’t finish them. I read these half-formed blobs of fetal composition and can recognize the tiny ember of inspiration that made me want to expand or explore or just throw into the sky to see what happened… but that’s it. I can’t wind my brain up to continue.

And that’s where you come in.

I need this to be a blank slate again. I need to clear the expectations I’ve built up in my own head about what I should be posting. Who I’m posting for.

Like I said: It’s not you. It’s me. This is in my own head.

I don’t know if this will help, but I think it will.

I’m going to try and pretend that no body reads this thing. Not a big stretch, I know, but stay with me (or don’t… you know what I mean). This site isn’t for marketing my business, or showing off my photography, or giving soapbox speeches about the latest political travesty. I’ve used it for all these things in the past, but it never felt right. I don’t know what I have this thing for. But I do know that I enjoyed writing on here the most when I was writing purely for myself. Not worried about who was reading it or what anyone else thought, just using it as a bucket to catch the mental overflow; an open field for me to bury my kill.

So that’s it. No apologies for not posting. No explanations. No whining. No promises of future content. Just whatever the heck comes out of my head. Intentionally indecipherable. This isn’t a school project. This is MY ISLAND. My piece of Internet. To do with as I will.

/M

PS – I’m still out there. If you want to know what I’m up to: Twitter. Or, if we’ve actually met at some point: Facebook. If you want to know to what I’m listening: Last.fm. What I’m reading online: Delicious. If you want to see pictures from my adventures: Flickr. Work: The Financial Benefits Group. I’ve got a LinkedIn page too, but haven’t really got around to using it much. Aren’t I just the little social-media butterfly?

GAAHHHHH!!!!

AARRGGHHHH!!!!

AAAAAAAA!!!

WAAAAAAA!!!

AAAAAAHHHHH!!!!

AAAAAAHH!!!

AAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!

AAAAAAHHHH!!!!

*whew*, that’s better.

Sorry, just needed to get that off my chest.

Unnecessary and unexcused AWOL writing hiatus over.

Back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

What an awesome year.  Even though by some measures it wasn’t quite the year I had hoped for, there’s never a bad time in the world of Mike.

One unfortunate thing that I allowed to affect almost everything in ’08 was my shoulder injury.  In February I had what seemed like a very minor fall while snowboarding that ended up dislocating my shoulder and tearing my rotator cuff.  I have NEVER had any kind of injury take so long to fully heal!  I’m still not at 100%.  The toll this took on my usual fun and games was catastrophic: couldn’t go snowboarding for the rest of the winter, couldn’t golf at all during the summer, had to drop out of a marathon training program (still managed to run a 1/2 marathon), couldn’t wear a backpack with any weight so no overnight hiking, couldn’t do any of the normal physical activities that I usually enjoy (weightlifting, rollerblading, squash, swimming, etc.) and, as important, that keep me in any kind of healthy condition.  End result is me being in the absolute worst shape of my life: fat, weak, and pretty dang pathetic.

Enough!  That’s the other thing I let that injury do for me all year: gave me an excuse to be a whiny lazy bitch, eat badly, not do the exercise I could do, etc.  Starting TODAY, I’m back to eating well and working my a$$ off.

One goal I thoroughly enjoyed surpassing was writing at least one blog post a week.  I managed to put up 62 posts in 2008, some of which actually involved original thought!

The big highlight vacation was a roadtrip through BC.  Chrystal had never seen BC outside of Vancouver and our West Coast Trail hiking trip, so I resolved to show her as much of the rest of this incredible slice of paradise as I could.  We did a whirlwind tour of the southern interior, wine country, up the Sunshine Coast, across the island, a week (SUR-fing) in Tofino, then up through the central-BC backroads to Jasper. Tenting the whole way, enjoying some incredible local produce, grilling fresh fish over a campfire, drinking amazing wine every night… awesome.  A trip every Canadian needs to do at least once in their life.

I got all fired up about the proposed copyright legislation some twisted, ignorant, bought-and-paid-for, miserable excuse for a public servant tried to force down our throats and wallets.  Not that I have an opinion about it or anything…

In May I moved this humble little blog from Blogger to my own WordPress site.  Also started Twittering, because I really don’t have enough ways to waste time online.

Dreamgirl (who I think should start her own blog) had a huge year as well: running her first marathon in Edmonton at the end of the summer, on one of the hottest days of the year!  Also, to the joy of us both, she took a part time job at Mountain Equipment Co-Op.  Just for the extra money, of course.  Nothing to do with the staff discount, amazing trips, cool people, or any of that stuff.  Really.

A big personal achievement in the work world was finally building and launching our new website and blog.  I’m pretty dang proud of this, and I hope you will swing by every once in a while and let me know how I’m doing!

It gladdens my heart and embiggens my soul to see people celebrating my birthday (aka: “Mike Day”) in the appropriate fashion:

No Pants Day!
On Saturday, January 12, an estimated 900 New Yorkers dropped their drawers on the train. The question wasn’t modesty—it was, ‘Boxers, briefs, or bikinis?’

New York has always been so kind to me.

Willamette Week| “Pants. Off. Now.”

Mary Allison Tadina wants to take off your pants. The 22-year-old Portland-born flight instructor is the instigator behind the city’s first ever No Pants on MAX event. In a feat of nonironic titling, the event is exactly what it sounds like: Participants meet at the Lloyd Center MAX station on Saturday, Jan. 12, and take off their pants. They get on the westbound MAX train. They attempt to act normal. “Well, you can to wear a winter coat and [hats and gloves],” Tadina explains, with a nod to the weather. “Just no pants.”

I never knew I was so popular in Portland…

Neighborhoods of the traveling pantless
Some thought it was art. Others thought maybe an advertisement. And many were simply bewildered as throngs of people in their tighty-whiteys, flannel boxers, and floral briefs made their way through the T yesterday.

Boston is such an amazing city, I love you all!

No pants the better way for a day

Even my old home town of Toronto came out in force to celebrate with me!

Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, even my friends down in Australia got in on the action. I tell you, it feels so good to have made an impact on the world like this. To see my message of “No Pants” being taken far and wide, thousands of people loudly proclaiming their love and appreciation by dropping trou.

I just… I can’t say how much it means to me…

excuse me, I’ve got something in my eye…

HUGE year for The Mike.

Moved from Ontario back to the Homeland, the Wild West, Prairie Paradise, River City, City of Champions and Festivals, a.k.a. Edmonton, Alberta. Brought the girl of my dreams with me of course!

Joined the family business, finally started building a real career like a big boy.

Now it’s time to actually start building a life.

I’ve been horrible about staying in touch with my friends here while I’ve been out East, so now I really want to reconnect with everybody. Facebook’s been a great start, but once my office blocked it I dropped out again. No more.

I also want to get a serious grip on my health and finances. I make these goals every year, but this year I’m putting a serious plan together, something measurable, something that I can track and hopefully stick to.

So without further ado, let me now present the first step of my plan, publicly listing my goals, to maximize all the wonderful benefits of shame and peer pressure:

1 – Body weight of 225 pounds (I’m a soft 210 right now, gotta lose about 10 pounds of flab and add 25 of decent muscle)
2 – Bodyfat %… (to be updated when I figure out what my current bodyfat is, and what it should be)
3 – Run 1/2 marathon (we loved it last year, might even go for a full this summer!)
4 – Zero credit card debt (one massive monkey I need off my back)
5 – $100 per month into my RRSP (to start anyway, gotta practice what I preach)
6 – At least one blog post per week

Challenging, but achievable. I’m looking forward to seeing how the year goes!

May the lessons of the past carry you forward to a new world of inspiration and amazement. In the words of one of the smartest and funniest people on teh webs: “You know how some people consider “may you have an interesting life” to be a curse? F#^% those people. Wanna have an adventure?”