January 2026

Monthly newsletter and photo sequence.

First things first; thank you to all my new subscribers for signing up to my newsletter. I treat this space much more like an early 00s blog spot, so you will receive frequent and infrequent emails from me as I have bursts of energy and periods of no connection with the universe; you are welcome to see me through both if you dare!

Most importantly I want to thank all of you for being here as we start another year, and if you are new here or you have been here for a while, this post is “to long for email” due to the amount of images shared in this post (well almost all of my posts for that matter), so please click on the title of this post in your email to open it up on your web browser of choice or on the Substack app of course if you have an account.

Enjoy!

I feel like I’m going a little mad. The winter, the walls, my back, my brain; I feel like I’m in the back of a garbage truck being crushed like cheap Swedish furniture. Time, body, and mind feel like they are compressing.

I’ve tried fighting back with books, lots of books, so many books that my apartment has become an orphanage for wayward lost titles needing to get out of the harsh Canadian cold.

Somebody put the sign up on my door; I swear it wasn’t me. I tried hanging a knockoff Walker Evans on the wall and nearly collapsed from the pain in my lower back; so you see, it couldn’t have been me who put that sign up.

Well, it doesn’t matter now. The sign is there, and like some soap opera script or water cooler legend, these books keep showing up on my doorstep like babies at a convent.

I found homes for them where I can. I’ve even added another shelf to give everybody some breathing room. But books seem okay with a multigenerational living situation stacked one on top of the other.

I know what you are thinking, and the answer is no; things aren’t feeling compressed because there’s not enough room at the inn. Running out of physical space is simply a symptom of expanding one’s mental space, you know, your brain.

No, the compression isn’t because of my herniated disc causing me to hunch and hobble around crooked to one side like a middle-aged Igor either.

Nor is it from the snow building up on my balcony (I knew you were going to say that). And no; there is simply no way it is because the white walls of my apartment are looking like an endless Antartica horizon.

The cause of this compression; this madness, this rupture of space-time itself is that I can hardly walk for over ten minutes now when I used to walk for ten hours.

You see, I don’t do well when I’m not in control. Play the laugh track now; we both know damn well that no one is ever actually in control, but hey, why have an imagination if we can’t use it? Am I right? Can I get a hell yeah or amen?!

Anyway; that was a little weird. Let’s move on, shall we? The thing is; I think best through a viewfinder. I can write a line or two, but I can gather a basket of pictures much faster than I can type out an essay on the evolution of the crucifixion, resurrection, or the Easter bunny.

Get to the point, man! Ok, ok, I hear you in the back, Jesus. I think to walk. Wait. No, I walk to think. I think through the camera. My pictures are my thoughts. If I’m not walking and clicking, I ain’t thinking. If I ain’t thinking, then I’m ruminating. And if I am ruminating, I ain’t no good to nobody, because walking is like the antidote for a mind that dwells.

Geez, you would think for a guy who dwells as much as I do, I sure would love spelunking, right? Fucking dead wrong. I loathe the idea of caves, these hollows in the earth, and I find people willing to go inside them to be demons.

I hate depth, well, literal physical depth that is. You know the sort: oceans, caves, black holes. I prefer to stay on the surface and go deep within. Who knows, maybe those cave-diving nut jobs are afraid of what’s in their hearts and see me as a demon or mind troll.

The problem with deep rumination is that you always find yourself up against the final boss of “remember when you stole Adam’s pocket knife in 5^th grade, and he was the only nice kid who didn’t bully you, so you stole his knife to whittle sticks into spears, and he caught you trying to sneak the knife back into his bookbag in class, and then he said he would never speak to you again, and you felt so stupid and lonely afterwards.”

Go ahead, grab the controller. I’ve tried a million times to beat this asshole, and he always wins. Cheat codes? Tried ‘em, they don’t do shit. Vodka and sleeping pills, cocaine and MDMA, dancing in my underwear at 5 AM to dad rock with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth and warm beer in my hand. Trust me, kid, I tried the entire book of cheat codes, and this fucker just won’t die.

So I walk. No, I don’t run. What’s the point? The next final boss catches up with you when you’ve stopped to catch your breath, anyway. So I walk instead, and keep Mr and Mrs “remember when” cautiously where “memories in the mirror may be more dramatic than they appear.”

Walking is like taking a restraining order out on an ex-lover from whom you want a lawful distance, but don’t want to use binoculars to keep tabs on. It’s kind of like going to the zoo and walking on a treadmill in front of the lion’s den.

You don’t want to lose sight of your demons because that would be even scarier. So horror films had it all figured out: the killer would just walk, and the idiot victim would run, and when you run, you fall down, and when you fall down, you die.

If they would just walk like Jason, then they would keep even pace and no one would die, but that would be pretty boring, and we all have to go sometime, though I am not ready to run just yet.

Boy, if it wasn’t clear I’m going a little mad, well, it is now! For someone who doesn’t like caves, I’ve sure dragged you down into one, eh?

Sorry about that, friends, but you see I’ve been stuck inside fighting final bosses while walking in circles for ten minutes at a time, and if you’ve seen Friday the 13^th, well you know I’m not faring too well on keeping pace with emotional death.

Funny thing about becoming a book parent is that you fool yourself into thinking you can write and raise one of these little paper bundles of joy yourself, and you find yourself with too much time on your hands, making love to blank sheet after blank sheet trying to impregnate it with something meaningful.

The problem is, I’m shooting blanks and posting the dribble online to cure my insanity, to stop the garbage compressor from reducing me to a Swedish pressed wood mess that no replacement instruction sheet would ever fix.

Well, actually, I respect you enough to not give you my half-mast, so I can say with some ego, and a lack of a waltz around my living room, that I’m feeling like a parent to the blank page in my halfway house for lost books today.

Oh, come to me, Spring of Springs; bring me your blossoming bloom, yellow, dead grass, grey skies, melting snow, puddles filled with hope, air for me to smell that doesn’t confine, air that stretches forth beyond death, breezes that speak of summer, colours that allude to fall, time that is yet unknown, healing that will come, and walking for days ten hours long.

Shit, I almost fooled you into thinking I was some kind of poet! Read the fine print, lad, I ain’t nothing but foster dad. A surrogate. A pill instead of the real deal. It’s okay, you didn’t know. Whitman, Elliot, Crane, Ginsberg, and the other metaphorical ghosts of poetic greatness past forgive you. I’ll deal with them and get my metered lashing for misguiding you the way I did.

I can’t help it, you see, I’ve gone a little… mad.

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