works of wanderlust

unrebellious

Rebels, huh? To me, if you’re asking, three guys sitting on their deck smoking weed seems like conformity.

Again. If you’re asking.

I mean never mind that it’s legal now. Never mind that you can more easily buy a mind-altering substance in a neatly packed plastic sleeve right there at the corner store than you can buy a box of chocolate chip cookies. It just seems so much like conformity now. Everyone is doing it. What’s counter about blurring your thoughts and losing yourself into a cloud of smoke?

We’ve mistaken substance abuse for rebellion, but it’s actually, to me at least, all kinda sorta just a different layer of the economy now, isn’t it?

Me, if I wanted to conform I’d buy a brown suit and a bible and go to church on Sundays and pray for my neighbour’s soul.

Or, if I wanted to conform, I’d sit at a desk job and attend meetings day after day after day, file some reports and then dutifuly die at my desk on a Thursday afternoon with a cold cup of coffee by my side.

Of course, if I wanted to conform I could also do just that by dropping a gummy in the backyard while my ass warmed a lawnchair and the dog slept at my feet and me there falling into a nap of my own and dreaming of speeding a noisy motorcycle down the freeway.

These are all basically the same damn things, aren’t they?

You disagree? Nah.

They feel different, but only just feel different. They aren’t really. That’s the illusion. That’s the trick. They used to be fresh and strange and counter, but if someone is earning money on your back—collecting a tithe, collecting a profit, collecting a tax—that’s just conformity after all, isn’t it?

If I wanted to rebel I’d quit my job and learn to cook my own food so I don’t need to tip a delivery guy for handing me a cardboard box or even the cute waitress just because she said some nice things to us sitting there at a table in her part time job. I’d make terrible art, spattering paint onto paper and pretending it had meaning when art has no meaning but what someone else wants it to mean and I’d keep it to myself for no one to see but me and hide it away to make people wonder how I spent all my free time. I’d write long novels that wandered through time and space and invented mindblowing ideas without care for purpose or practicality and then I’d promise to let everyone read them but secretly I would just keep writing them until I ran out of caring anymore and wrote something else instead. If I wanted to rebel, to go out on the road of modern counter culture I’d find a trail that no one else was running and run on that even though there aren’t many of those left and the ones yet to be explored are often scorned for how foolhardy they are, how loose the footing, how vague the orientation. I’d run it anyways, and people would ask me if I was crazy and I would tell them that no, I just wanted to see something different and unexpected and that joining in the smoke up wasn’t my idea of a mind opening experience anyways.

And that’s how I would rebel because there ain’t nothing rebellious in much of anything these days, not even the things we got used to thinking of that way.

May 28, 2025
searching for theatre style
Salt, oil and popping corn.

Can you imagine how many iterations and combinations of that trio I’ve gone through over the years in search of the perfect pop-at-home theatre-style popcorn?

I lost count long ago.

I’ll try not to bury the lede here.

Theatre Style Popcorn
```
2 tablespoons of beta carotene infused coconut oil
2 teaspoons of flavacol salt
1 cup of popping corn
```
That’s it. Heat the oil over a medium heat, testing the readiness with a few kernels. When they pop, add the corn and the salt.

Stir.

Mix.

Pop.

Eat.

My personal pursuit for this particular combination is either the best kept secret behind the eleven herbs and spices …or I’ve just failed to run in the right corn popping circles for the last few decades.

You can, after all, order all of these ingredients from your favourite online retailer’s website for prime next day delivery… though you really need to first know what to buy, I suppose.

We grew up eating popcorn as a snack at home.

We had an air popper, and we would melt (I want to say butter, but it was probably) margarine over it and then sprinkle table salt into the mix. It had a vibe. It was what I knew. And yet, by the time I was about fourteen I was already going to the movie theatre with some regularity and had figured out that my parent’s secret popcorn recipe was not a thing like the bag of deliciousness we scored when we went out.

Was it a trade secret?

I would occasional glimpse the theatre employees filling the popping machines and my takeaway from witnessing this sacred act was that whatever magic concoction they were keeping on the hush behind the counter, it was emerging pre-mixed from unmarked brown pouches. I suspected not even the teenagers making the good stuff knew what was in the blend.

Over the years I fumbled into various online rabbit holes of perfect popcorn speculation. I mean, who hasn’t? While you were researching celebrity sightings and video game rumours, I was poking around forums suggesting that the secret was in using clarified butter or finely tuned temperatures or the stirring mechanism.

I mean, now that I’ve figured it out theatre popcorn is actually just so simple, it almost seems that all those other theories are so much witch-craftery that they are barely worth mentioning. But seriously… that is the path upon which I strolled trying to figure this out.

Theatre popcorn just has this, I dunno, an undefinable quality. The blur of the yellow salt and the chemistry-experiment butter-ness. I think what I had stumbled upon over and over and over and over during those years searching was people acknowledging that theatre popcorn is not necessarily great popcorn. There are definitely better ways to make popcorn. Of course. Undoubtably, the quest for good popcorn and the quest for theatre popcorn are probably not the same adventures into flavour town. There are superior popping recipes, yes. But theatre popcorn has something that is as much soul snacking nostalgia as it is food quality.

I had figured out the Flavacol aspect about a year or two ago. Some of that online research stirred that brand name out of the digital depths and sure enough I could order it online. I popped dozens of batches and cross-mixed the fine yellow salt with all manner of methodology and popping oils. I could tell that it was close. There were hints of the theatre in whatever Flavacol was bringing to the party… but still it wasn’t quite hitting the mark.

One night I was sitting on the couch flipping through some or other social media dreck and the second part of the clue scrolled into my feed like so much serendipitous fortune: coconut oil. But then not just any coconut oil. Of course I had already tried plain old coconut oil and it was close, but not quite right either. (Luckily it is great for seasoning cast iron!)

Instead, there existed a coconut oil product out there specifically for popping popcorn. Dyed bright yellow by beta carotene and blended with a bit of that chemical romance of fake buttery goodness, this was the missing ingredient.

And that’s it. Three ingredients.

I have dabbled in variations of the trio for a couple months now, making myself a big bowl of theatre-style popcorn every other week or so, hunkering down to watch a movie at home.

That’s the recipe. Stupidly simple, but deceptively specific.

I mean, don’t look at the nutrition information, but Cineplex eat your heart out.
May 27, 2025
six years of sourdough

Well, I have just spent the last few days working on the migration of a bunch of old blog content and… I apologize. if you clicked on this expecting a more “bready” opening paragraph, well, sorry. Nerdy things beget nerdy things, and sourdough bread and blogging are both pretty nerdy things walking hand-in-hand through this house.

My blog archives are stuffed to the rafters with foodie content.

That was even more evident when I realized that I had accumulated over thirty posts on the subject of sourdough while I was writing the Cast Iron Guy blog a few years back.

My starter, the same starter I pulled out of the fridge today in what has become part of my regular routine of warming it up to start the bread-making process later this evening, turned six last month.

No cheating. No fudging. No malarky. It’s legitimately six years old.

And I’ve not gone longer than three weeks without making bread (and even that was just the once because we toddled off to Europe for a summer vacation in 2023 and of course I wasn’t baking bread!)

As I moved and cleaned up all those old sourdough posts, tho, it struck me that compared to the early days of my baking I have not been nearly as experimental as I was back in 2021 through 2023. The last couple of years, in fact, have seen but a single innovation in my loaf approach and that is the acquisition of a large covered Emile Henri loaf pan (not cast iron!) which has become my exclusive go to bread baking vessel.

Shape and pan aside, I used to experiment a lot more.

I dabbled in flours.

I attempted hydration with beer.

I tried sweet breads and savoury loaves.

Lately, tho? White bread, sandwich loaf style, ready for my breakfast toast with butter and strawberry jam. Simple, staple, and kinda boring… at least in as much as it makes for interesting blog posts.

So I guess if you came here looking for sourdough ideas you should know that there are quite a few scattered through the archives of this site, neatly filed under “sourdough” … but you should also know that while I’ve stopped writing as the Cast Iron Guy, I am still quite a bit of a nerdy sourdough bread guy. (I’m making a batch tonight!) And I will be looking for, thinking about, and scheming up interesting ways to expand that thirty posts to a much longer list as this updated blogging effort continues.

May 27, 2025
weekend wrap five

It may not be summer, but tell that to the weather. It was a weekend for wide open windows trying to keep the house cool enough to sleep at night. I may need to drag out the air conditioner unit soon.

All that said, I barely pulled myself far from the house this whole weekend, studious pupil that I am.

It was the calm before the storm. The next couple of weekends are going to be filled with activity and socializing and concerts and grad activities and getting ready for summer. This was busy enough, I suppose, but whatever.

This weekend was spent doing…

School. Mostly school. And not much else. I wrote a few words and few days back all about the final weekend of coursework for my professional development program through the university. I spent the best parts of both days sitting huddled under a fleece blanket in the chilly basement staring into a pair of eight-hour long video class sessions. There were only five people silly enough to be taking business courses in May, though, so I found myself needing to stay very engaged. No hiding behind the crowd. And at the end of it I was actually pretty tired. It did, however, mark the final module of classwork and all I have left in the program is a single homework assignment.

We did find the energy to go out for ice cream on Satuday evening.

And on Sunday evening, after searching the whole house for the second lawnmower battery, I found it hidden under a pile of jackets and then I was able to cut the grass which seemed to have grown six inches while I was hiding in the basement all weekend. I practically could have baled it. And the dog was creeping around the yard like she was an intrepid jungle explorer, what with the grass up to her literal eyeballs.

While I was out in the yard I also did some adjustments to my garden irrigation system, plucked about a thousand dandilions, and spent a fruitless half hour trying to figure out if there was a wasp nest nearby that would explain the unseeming swarms.

In the gaps I read. I did a lot of reading, actually. I splurged on a digital copy of the Hyperion Cantos, a four volume compendium of a thirty-year old science fiction series that I have read a half dozen times but is on my list of comfort reads. I curled up on the couch and read and read and read and pushed through like half of the first book. More on that later, I suppose, when I post a book review.

And on we go.

May 26, 2025
did I mention vancouver?

It has actually been a couple months since we took a spring trip out to the west coast and spent a five day long weekend in Vancouver. It wasn’t so much that I forgot to write about it, only that I wasn’t blogging much back even two months ago (having not yet rebooted this site) and tho I had posted a few pics elsewhere, none have made their way here.

It was mere hours away from a monumental spring snowfall back home when we lifted out of the airport on a short flight to the coast. We would watch the city-stalling blizzard through our doorbell camera while sitting in the hotel later that evening, but like old times when we lived out here, whatever the hell was going on back in Alberta was out of sight and out of mind.

There are a million great reasons to visit Vancouver. The climate. The ocean. The food. The bustle of the city. Us? We were avoiding California. No, really. We had a trip down to Los Angeles planned for spring break and cancelled it in the wake of political uncertainty down south and the elbows up vibe around US travel. Everything was refundable except the flight credits which we spun around into a flight to Vancouver instead.

We visited old haunts from our days living out there.

We ate some amazing food, inexpensive and wonderful sushi, burned our faces off with hot pot, and gobbled a whole pizza on robson.

We took a trip out to the university campus. The Kid was still considering schooling there at the time and we had a friend who gave us a little tour.

We took in an improv show on Granville Island.

We scored tickets to the Juno awards.

On our Sunday morning there I woke up and did something I had never done, even in the three years living out on the coast: I ran the ten klick loop around the Stanley Park seawall. Heck, I wasn’t much of a runner back then, but I had always regretted missing out on that little adventure.

Pangs of regret filled the weekend. We like our life back here on the praries, filled with adventure and friends and affordable housing, but I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if we had stuck it out. Twenty-one years after bailing on Vancouver we might have made it work somehow. Owned a house, maybe? A condo, at least. Spent our days immersed in a place like that which is so much more nuanced than the suburbs of this sprawling prairie city where we are now. Life would have been something else entirely. Who can really say, but I walked through familiar streets and pondered it nonetheless.

Noting that going back to New York or Chicago is off the table for us for the foreseeable future, I couldn’t help but feel one morning, sitting in a cafe in downtown that it wasn’t that I was missing those particular cities as much as I was missing the feel of urban life. I am a guy who is comfortable in the wilderness, unreachable and alone, but I also am a bit of a city dude, soaking in the crowds and the crunch and architecture of tall building pressing in around me. Vancouver would have fit both those bills, and I spent a few hours over that weekend wondering if I missed Vancouver because that’s who I am or if Vancouver caught me at some formative moment in my life and what I’m really yearning for is my long lost twenties. Maybe a bit of both.

There was nothing to complain about on the trip. The flights were on time. The food was cheap. The sights were accomodating. The celebrities were spotted. The rain was gone before it could be anything more than a reminder that Vancouver is less a tropical paradise than a city at the edge of a northern rainforest.

We need to go back more often, I realize. It may not be our next trip, but I can already see another one soon.

May 26, 2025

about

Welcome. I’m one of those weirdos who still writes a personal blog. In fact, I’ve been writing meandering drivel online for decades, and here you’ll find all my recent posts on writing, technology, art, food, adventure, running, travel, and overthinking just about anything and everything …since early 2021.

I write regularly from here in the Canadian Prairies about just about anything that interest me. Enjoy!

There are currently 449,420 words in 589 posts.

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