words.

I think the web matters more than ever.

Maybe I am just trying to feel self-important as a lil’ web-dev goblin, but it feels like something that once felt infinite is being boiled down to a few mobile apps with half-assed web-apps that I constantly refresh.

Ya’ll remember Stumble Upon?

If you don’t it was a website that would take you to a random, often funny, sometimes boring, sometimes interesting website for you to browse. It was like Google without a query. Just a series of results that might tickle your little fancy.

Not my idea, but it seems like that kind of website only existed when the internet was a place you visited and hung around in). Like you were online, at home, waiting for your crush to log on to MSN Messenger anyway so might as well checkout what the hell was on the internet today.

The curation was chaos and during it’s death rattle it got algorithm-ed and enshit-ified to hell like everything fun online, but for a while there, it was a portal through the dark forest of the internet.

It was a line on a random campfire to cozy up next to before moving on to another obsessed nerds personal passion project.

Money and the internet have always been at odds though. The web exists because a nerd gave it away for free. Tim Berners-Lee literally gave the technology (that most of our life runs on) away to the public domain. Since then he has advocated for a free and open web and been building tools that allow users to have better control of their own data.

So basically, the dude who built it… gave it away, took up advocacy, and believed in universal access. This was anti-capitalist as hell. Like by the definition of the term. It’s such a punk move. I have something that has the potential to change the world forever? Give it away. Everyone gets it.

God, I love a soapbox. I love screaming into the void.

We, as people who use the internet, the web, whatever, every day have a responsibility to care for it and uphold our rights and the rights of others online. The internet will suck if we let it. If we allow our reward centres to be mined, then they will be minded relentlessly for profit, regardless of the effect on well being.

Side note: Mark Zuckerberg believes there is no link between the decline in teen mental health and social media. How. How is that is his take? This has massive “Big oil denies climate change” energy.

The end result is an connected network where we have no clue if the people we spend time with (or fuck, or fall in love with), the music we like, or choices we make in life were really because we wanted them, or was it because a corporation decided that it’s the content we would spend the most time with.

There is a real key difference there. Just because we spend time with something doesn’t mean it’s fulfilling. It’s not necessarily what we want. It’s just want is easy to do, feels good, and at least correlated with something we give the smallest amount of a shit about.

After resting with our buds in Victoria and eating our weight in hot dogs and ice cream we headed off on the second leg or our trip. First up was Galiano, which may a competitor of the best gulf island for bike camping?

We ripped up the lochside trail from Victoria with little issue. It’s wild how over time I could used to how beautiful that ride is. Car separated and off the highway (for most of it), it goes through dirt trails where the trees create an arch, shading us as we rode in the morning heat. A bless and a curse, it made for a hot but beautiful ride.

We had plenty of time before the ferry and saw local legend Tyrone and his partner Kristy on the way back from their own trip. Makes my day every time I see a friend at the ferry. It’s like we are part of this secret club.

Coming off the ferry on Galiano there is a grocery store directly to the left. It is definitely the cheaper of the two options on the island, but if you are looking for healthier and fresher options the small grocery story before Montague is your best bet.

You can get a sneaky cold Asahi there, so points for that.

About 5 minutes off the ferry there is a small bakery/cafe called Oxeye that is definitely worth the stop before having to deal with Galiano’s many hills (the Neutrino and I definitely did our fair share of suffering).

Oxeye has wildly good pastries, donuts, and fresh sandwiches. Prepare to wait a good 45 minutes though, worth it, but not for anyone in a rush. Granted we did come just before a long weekend so maybe it was already busier than usual.

There are two campgrounds on Galiano and they each have their advantages. Montague has unreal sunsets a bus that will take you to pub. The bus also has a drum kit the driver plays as he drives. Oh, and he’ll also pick you up. So if cold pints and pub food are your focus. It’s your best bet.

Dionisio is further out and requires you to cross the island (aka over a small mountain) and you are pretty far out (and requires a small amount of trespassing), but it is worth the trip. There are beautiful well separated campsites, pit toilets, potable water and super kind camp care taker. Dionisio is technically a marine access only campground, so their is a calm cove, sand beach and decent swimming.

Since it’s a bit of a challenge to get to, there is also far less of a chance of hooligans keeping you up like there is any time there are car campers or you are in Maple Ridge (looking at you Alouette Lake).

The sunsets are pretty good at Dionisio too.

We got in in the late afternoon and had enough time to setup, checkout the beach, and see the sunset before making out way back to the tent for some reading.

The next day, after leisurely coffee, some exploring of the old campground and it’s lookouts, our friend Aubree met up with us. She claimed the hills aren’t that bad. I claim she’s a fucking machine. And a hero, because she brought us still cold beer to the campsite. Aubree generally rules and it was nice to visit with her for the night.

Oh, and her Surly Long Haul Trucker is gorgeous and Cass from Loop Hole Bags guided her in making her own frame back with a lil window. Seriously impressive. If you’ve never checked out Cass’ stuff, ya should. It’s mostly made from reclaimed outdoor gear.

Anyway, off topic, the next morning we packed up and Aubree stayed as she shares a studio w/ Cass and Cass was joining her the day after we left for Saturna. We said our goodbyes and I spent most of the definitely very hilly ride back to the ferry thinking about how nice it is to have friends that are into the same dumb hobby I am.

We had another obligatory stop at Oxeye before meeting our Buds Sam & Gordon to join us to Saturna.

But, again, that’s another story

It’s august, although you couldn’t tell by the weather. The day we left for Pender, we were kitted up to the neck in rain gear and our camp crew dropped from nine to three. there is something about being the only ones to decide to do what everyone knows is likely a terrible decision that really brings people together.

Pender requires a ferry booking as even bike spots are limited. While we had time to ride the whole way from van, the rain was soaking through our gear and we bailed on riding the whole way and took the 900 all the way from River Rock. The bike bus generally rules, aside from a shitty weekends only schedule (and the hellish apocalypse of trying to get a spot as the ferries dock and everyone knows there isn’t enough spots on the bus). Even so, I think I may be giving up on the mad dash to the Massey Tunnel bike shuttle from here on out.

Anyways, had plenty of time for half-baked-super-doughy-and-overpriced ferry pizza before boarding.

The rain continued pretty heavily as sailed, I took the time to read a bit and break in the x100vi on the ferry. Still feeling super intimidated by the new camera, but about halfway through the trip, I think I made the full switch from the zv1. Might keep it around as an action camera.

There is something cozy about the ferries, I know there a lot people that kinda hate them here, but a coffee that taste like motor oil and mist over the islands calms me down and I love the liminal energy of some time in between here and there.

We filled up the water bottles and packable water containers we brought with us. About 8 liters was more than enough. Shingle bay is beautiful and definitely the preferred campground, but the catch is some gnarly hills and you have to bring your own water.

If there is a single bike-camping “hack” I can recommend it’s if you ever need water for your campsite, just fill up on the ferry, and if you want really cold water or ice for camp cocktails, use the ice machine.

After boarding we rode under a banner that said “Fall Fair – August 24” which seems absurdly early to me, but the weather said fall, so who knows. We put it on the list. If there is anything that can help me with my perpetual search for ~cozy~ it’s a small down fall fair.

There is a pretty great overflow spot for bikecampers at Shingle Bay, highly recommend. The rain had slowed considerably. So I offered to pick up some brews/cideys at the local liquor store while the crew (sat around and ate plantain chips) finished setting everyone up.

I quickly figured out that I had made two key mistakes. One, the rain immediately picked up and my short-twenty-minute-max ride to the liquor store took about ninety minutes. Turns out elevation and twenty-inch wheels are the the best of friends.

I was able to pick-up a bunch of ciders from Twin Island Cider at the local liquor store. Last year we had their piquet and it slapped, so it was an easy choice mixed with one Dark Matter to match the weather. I usually run on a seasonal beer rotation. Radlers in the summer and dark beers in the winter. Maybe the fall fair flag was right and we are transitioning into the fall.

We were able to get camp set up before the rain really rolled in. Drank the ciders under the tarp we put up above the tent, using a headlamp and Nalgene to give us some light to gather around. Stayed dry though. Our bud in a hammock was a little less lucky, needing to re-trap at 3:30 am. Maybe this my second bike-camping hack. Not so much mine, but Sam & Gordon’s, stole by me like the goblin I am.

Take a headlamp or camp light and shine it directly into the bottom of a Nalgene, the result is a nice glow that will provide something to gather around when the sun goes down. Fires are always banned in BC in the summer, so sometimes you have to make do with what you got. Gives enough light to play a little crib.

Thankfully the rain cleared after an extended breakfast and coffee.

The fall fair was classic small-town honky-tonk cute-core. Donkey shows, jam contests complete with kids categories and super nice lady that let us recycle our empties at her zero waste tent with detailed boards describing exactly how to separate your wast. Picture a quintessential fall fair with a cut-throat tea-cup flower arrangement category in a tiny little barn and chances are you close to it.

Next, we checked Twin Sails (the cidery I mentioned eariler), with my recent obsession with cozy, this place was ~perfect~. The set up is a small shed with about a 6 foot bar and a fridge on the back patio connected to the back of the shed.

In this case though, cozy did not mean simple. The cider and service was great. Our bartender guided us through each of their current ciders and we nodded along as we pretended to even know about 20% of what the hell he was talking about.

After a tasting we got some glasses and went to the “lounge?” area I guess? It’s a field seperated from the rest of the field by a fence. The seats are stumps that all surround little campfires. While a cushion might have been nice for my minor saddle sores (google it or don’t, you’ve been warned), it was super relaxing and perfect place for a couple of buds (my partner included in the mentioned buds) to lament about dating apps and challenges of ENM (Ethical Non-Monogamy).

Sidebar: Turns out the hard part in ENM is not actually having your partner date other people (not to diminish the challenges there, but once you do the work that moves from extremely hard to manageably sticky to even something you celebrate with them), but it’s finding people who want to invest in you have a nesting partner.

After we gossip-girl’d our way through a few glasses we rode back the brutal hill to Shingle Bay, had a few more sneaky ciders by the ocean over dinner and just spend time connecting.

I love this part of camping. You spend enough time with folks that connecting can mean encouraging each other up insane hills, reading silently together, sharing water, or sharing in the misery of having to use the same disgusting outhouse (Pender’s was okay, Galiano’s on the other hand, holy hell, you can tell it’s been a busy summer). I feel close to myself, my friends and the earth whenever I am bike-camping. It’s a nice feeling.

The next morning was hot and sunny, so we enjoyed a slow morning drinking a lot of coffee and chatting while packing up. Before we parted ways towards Vancouver and Victoria, we grabbed eggers out a little trailer called The Stand. Incredible. Super cheap. Super cheesy. Super greasy.

Anyways… Galiano and Saturna are another story that we can get to later.

Is it good for me to spill my guts to the static of the internet? Is this freedom and catharsis? Or am I further dividing the parts of myself that I can’t make fit together.

Who am I creating all these xeroxed copies of myself for? Every time I do, does the print get a little more fractured? Blurred and broken down in the process. If I look in the mirror will that static look back if I look too long?

Or should have I let this side of me get lost to time on the corrupt MySpace servers that held my first lines of CSS?

I so desperately want to be cozy. Maybe it’s the heat or working in tech where things are sleek and the love of minimalism bridges on obsession, but I want to held by my environment.

I want to feel simple joy. I want to feel aimless happiness against the breeze of a warm afternoon in the summer where I forgotten what day of the week it is.

I’ve gotten ahead of myself.

Cozy is easy in the fall. A sweater that’s a little too large in front of a fire. A hot chocolate. Holding someone’s hand in your pocket to keep it warm.

Easy.

Cozy is harder in the summer. It’s too hot to wear wool. I mean it’s currently BRAT summer and that’s super fun, but kind of the opposite of cozy. In a season where our bodies are on display and there is such pressure to carpe our diems, how do we find the slowness necessary for cozy?

I don’t have an answer, but I do have ideas.

Going to a movie in the middle of the day that’s too hot to be outside in a city feels summer cozy. Reading by a river with your feet dangling in the water feels summer cozy. Campfires and whisky for two poured into camp cups feels summer cozy. Smores. Bike rides. Park beers. All summer cozy.

So it may not come easy, but it’s out there. It may not fall into your lap like it does in the fall, but it’s out there.

Like the lingering heat in the evening, summer cozy is found in the ways the season forces us to slow down. To stay a while. To enjoy where we are.

Or maybe I’m trying to find a way to cope with my bout of summertime sadness. Or just normal run of the mill depression that pops up for a few weeks after I drink too much.

Maybe both are true. For my sake, I hope summer cozy exists. Maybe I need it to exist. I need slowness and safety to soothe my anxious brain and self loathing. Cozy, to me, is the permission to exhale and sink into something, even for a time.

I think for something to be cozy, you have to make it cozy. You have to slow it down, enjoy the simple pleasures of something, and that has to exist outside of a Starbucks marketing campaign right?

I am little slut for consumption.

Give me a deal. Give me a haul. Give me a 20% off and a countdown timer. Give me minor upgrades for over two-grand, packed full of precious metals.

Make me hate myself, corporate zaddy.

Fill my closet so full it vomits t-shirts made from oppression and the tears of children on a 12-hour shift.

aka how to feel shame & save money.

My bag was slipping away from me like bad bladder control. A little at a time. To patch the leak, I found the gaps in the seams by peeling back the curtain and combing through my credit card statements.

I built a database to air my dirty laundry.

Butchered and filed, I massacred my future pay and stored it’s tiny limbs in little Tupperware budgets. A big thick slab for groceries and rent, and little slice left over for weekends.

Now every morning I open up the cadaver and take a look inside. Admiring the quality of my cuts. Remembering that after the light fades from Prime Day, there are endless nights of violence for those who collapse on sweatshop floors or piss in bottles under the assembly line praying to Bezos they can survive endless overnight shipping.

I used to fill this room with sound so loud it would steal my hearing from my future self.

I used to to eviscerate myself of stage until my white pick guard went red and my strings began to rust.

I used to collapse, wet with sweat, hoping this spectacle would fill the cracks in my mental health with gold strong enough to hold me together a little longer. That I would be able withstand the joy and pain of life and hold all of those I loved inside me without losing a drop of them.

In this room I used to heal wounds.

In this room I inhaled black mold.

In this room I picked at scabs until they scarred.

I spend way too much fucking time thinking about the internet. About technology. About what it all means. Like, what does re-blogging a sexy anime panel say about me personally. Is this misogyny? Is this sexual freedom? Why do I only want do that if the pic is in black and white? Is this a pathetic action for a man in his thirties?

Also, how in holy hell has the internet been used to turned some of my family from folks that loved oil money and jet-skis to anti-vaccine, anti-trans, anti-climate-action zealots doing research on YouTube?

Yes, I did just finish reading Naomi Klein-o-Wolf’s Dogglerganer. Thanks for asking.

I feel like there’s two main schools of thought here:

1. They were always secretly like this and now they can go mask-off about it.
2. They got radicalized during Deep Covid™️.

I think the truth is probably leans towards number two, here. I mean they were always kind of cruel and shitty about how I dressed (elder emo, big surprise), and that has a straight line to reinforcing the gender binary to the benefit of patriarchy, but they honestly didn’t think about it that much.

I am pretty sure the only thought they had about was “haha Goblin looks gay. I should tell him that.” before moving on to crushing their fourth Bud Heavy. They thought politics was dumb, boring, and there hottest take was “Taxes are bad and I don’t like them”.

They also had some worse takes, for sure. I doubt the hardest right of them ever supported gay marriage because they were grossed out by queer folks, but by no means were they picking up picket signs and protesting drag or running in local elections.

This was supposed to about why I care about the internet and look where we are now. I guess that’s where we are at. This blog was supposed to about bikes, but that’s not really happening, either. Here lies tallgoblin (the liar).

I think I care so much about the internet because I believe it’s real. It’s a layer of capabilities that rests on top of our tangible, organic world. It’s not separate. Augmented Reality (AR) is already here, we just have a shitty UI that’s giving back problems and carpal tunnel.

I think the majority of the people I’ve fallen in love with have been people I’ve met online. In high school, I fell in love with hotties on MySpace and Nexopia. I was Emo (well, Scene, but let’s not split hairs here, it was just another name for the same thing, be honest). I only wanted to date Emo/Scene girls and in a town of 10,000, the pool was real fucking small. So I went online.

Did I project my idea of who I wanted onto these people in gaps between their MSN messages and Top 8? Definitely. I am pretty sure they did the same to me. Their #BoyfriendinCanada™️. Not the healthiest choice, but let’s cut everyone some slack, we were teenagers on the internet.

Where the hell I am going with this?

The internet means so god damn much to me and I have this insatiable lust to over-analyze everything and I want to believe the internet could be a nice place to hang out.

Why do I love records and tapes so much?

Because the crackle of a dirty record warms me in the same way a wool blanket in front a fire does? Is it because in the digital silent gaps between songs, when I become keenly aware of my tinnitus and the deep dread of both being alive and the crushing thought of my own death?

Von Dutch by Charli XCX. Sweet reprieve, best not to dwell.

Is it because my distracted brain can’t stay focused for more than 20 minutes without having to jump to a new task and flipping the record takes just enough effort to scratch that itch?

Is it because everything in the world feels like it’s asking me to be anywhere but where I am and pay attention to anything other that what’s in front of me?

Because we figured out how to monetize every fucking moment of every fucking day.

Or are tapes just really cute and that makes they get some likes on the gram?

I have this terrible habit of needing everything in my life to have a deep and Important ™ meaning. Like I am on this sysphisian quest to just be alive and a without a reason for all this struggle I feel truly fucked. Loving tapes can’t just be because, i dunno, they are cool. It has to mean something.

Or else why would I insist on the headache.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve felt like there was a cannonball sized hole missing in the center of my gut. Like behind my ribcage and gut is just a hollow void of wanting. A black hole sucking every positive affirmation or CBT workbook I throw at it. (Ironically, digesting Zoloft has helped significantly).

Sometimes feeling like if I have a purpose, a meaning, it makes the hole feel a little smaller. Or at least directs it’s hunger at something other than my wellbeing for a while.

Hilarious to me that I can give that much meaning to a lo-fi beat tape to chill to. But I do.

I think your early 30s are about realizing progress isn’t always progress and maybe the kids should get off your lawn.

A joke, but … the kids are not doing okay and definitely not touching grass (I also cannot afford a lawn to this is a moot point and bad analogy), and it has nothing to do with my metaphorical lawn. Like misogyny isn’t going to end if MRA podcast hosts just listed to a few slowed down golden-age beats with with a Ghibli quotes thrown in for good measure.

Maybe if they just really listened to J-Dilla, though. Like felt it, man.

I am constantly searching for way to feel soft enough for a good cathartic cry. I watched the first three seasons of This is Us for exactly this reason. I cried hard and alone. I might never be able to live in a cabin napping next to a crackling fire, but sometimes I can trick my body into thinking I am in the euphoric afterglow of felt-body loss.

That’s what records and tapes do to me. In their softness I begin to escape inward, towards softness. Towards tenderness. Towards myself.

On social media, I quickly leave my body, I leave the literal fucking concept of time, and find myself both rewatching my own stories and hating myself. Holy hell, there is such a need to be seen.

Listening to tapes and records is the opposite.

Lost in time? Time to flip the record.

Left your body for a digital-liminal-ghost-self comprised of stress-sweat, auto-correct, and a lack of impulse control? Your gonna have use your hands for something useful and flip the cassette to side B.