Just A Re-introduction

The Cast Iron Guy was my pandemic project.

I needed an optimistic moment in every day, something thru with to look out onto a crazy world and find something solid and reliable.

If you’ve come here looking for in depth cast iron cooking advice, or one of those guys who uses electrolysis to do amazing things restoring cast iron pans, or somebody who builds a raging bonfire in his backyard and slays a piece of meat to perfection… well, you might be a bit disappointed.

If you’ve come here looking for a guy who is a little disillusioned by technology and writes about some of the simpler things in life like exploring the outdoors, finding spaces in local nature, cooking real food, and trying to be a good citizen of planet Earth… well, you might be closer to the right place.

At the time I started this I was incredibly cautious about using my real name because of my job and my role supervising people and the fact that I’d been burned in the past by people twisting the things that I’d written against me, words that were genuinely innocent and largely apolitical, but honest and real and left me a bit exposed to people who use those things to their every advantage. I’ve kept my real name off this site for that reason and I write under the moniker of Bardo. The name has a couple meanings and you can look up the eastern spiritual meaning yourself, but it was also the name of a character in a book I read decades ago that stuck with me for his personal philosophy and the struggles he had abiding it. It worked for me then, and it still does now.

I haven’t written here in a while because life has been full of chaos and change.

Most notably, I burnt out my professional soul to a deep fried crisp and voluntarily left the job that had done the burning out. As I write these words I’ve been on a “career break” for almost exactly four months, in which time I’ve been on three international trips, trained for and run a marathon, started a personal journey of pursing the creative life I abandoned when I was young for more practical and “paying” jobs, and generally tried to heal that aforementioned burnt out soul.

I logged into this site again this morning and noted that while I’ve been off exploring the woods, travelling the world, and making art, people have been reading what I wrote here during those pandemic-writing years. Some of the posts, I kid you not, have over a hundred thousand clicks, and if I had comments turned on I’m sure would be filled with neglected interactions.

So, what’s a cast iron guy to do with a mature blog in which he’s not sure what to write anymore? I suppose, this reintroduction is a start, but maybe a promise that I’ll try to come back here, while not daily, routinely to post more stuff. I still cook. I still explore. I still take excellent care of a respectable cast iron collection.

If that’s worth anything, stay tuned.

-Bardo

Fire Smoke

We’ve been routinely waking up to the smell of campfire, and not in a good way.

Last year I had this idea of creating a video series to accompany this site, and I actually produced a couple early episodes, where I would have a sit around a campfire — maybe in my backyard, maybe in the woods, or maybe in a park somewhere where you can do that sort of thing — crack a beverage, cook some food, and enjoy the mood.

That channel would have been on hiatus this month because there is a number of cascading fire bans in place all around me. No open flames. No solid fuel fires. No burning of any kind.

Why?

The hot and dry conditions, strange for May, have resulted in an early and angry wildfire season.

My phone pings with alerts routinely noting local evacuation watches for small zones just outside of the city, people being told to be ready to run because a fire is looming close enough to their rural homes that they may be in danger at the whim of the wind direction.

Inside the city we’re relatively safe, though there have been a couple of major house & yard fires that have resulted in multiple adjacent properties in our suburbs burning out of control.

So. Fire ban.

Don’t burn anything.

Yet, as relatively protected as we are here, there is one aspect to wildfires that won’t be stopped by meandering rivers or highways breaking the burn. The smokey air goes where it pleases, and so as the atmosphere fills with particulate carbon, ash, and who knows what other dangerous chemicals (formerly trees) that poof into the sky as wildfires rage, that smoke swirls into and descends on the whole province, city, town, and rural land alike, and makes for a gloomy (as my kid would put it, post-apocalyptic) atmosphere… literally.

Small beans, I know, compared to the loss of property and ecology that is happening just over the horizon, but I’ve been attempting to train for a marathon these last few months. My runs have been getting longer and more intense. The volume of air I need to suck into my still recovering-from-COVID lungs is increasing by the workout. This becomes a ridiculously frustrating calculation as the days press on and I skip a few sessions here and there citing air quality and the inverse effects of training in smoke. Again, small beans in the grand schemes, but it does make me think about the impact on anyone who isn’t a mostly healthy middle aged man, someone with compromised health, asthma or whatever. If it’s too bad for me, it’s really bad for many more.

The weather spirits need to summon us a week of rain to quench the fires and wash the smoke out of the air, and no one is too sure if that will happen.

daily

December 31 of 31 December-ish posts

Oh, rich. Coming from the guy who couldn’t manage a daily post in December, huh?

Daily?

One word that sums up your theme for 2023.

Daily.

Yes. That’s it.

It’s New Years Eve. Again. And rolling into 2023 leaving 2022 behind I got to thinking of how I want to spend the year.

As it turns out (I find as I have two weeks off work and have time to think about these things) I’m happiest when I’m creating, y’know, anything.

Oh, maybe I won’t be posting a blog article every day, or whatever, but my mind was churning on what it means to be creative and productive for every single day of a whole year.

Writing. Drawing. Photographing. Video…ing.

And not only the net results of daily effort but the meta-results: creative output about daily creativity. Like, making posts or videos about “How I Painted One Picture Daily for a Month!” or “What Daily Cycling did for My Mental and Physical Health” and sharing those.

Daily.

Daily stuff.

Daily reflections.

Daily.

Tomorrow morning will be the two-year anniversary of this website. I set out on January first of 2021 to start writing a daily blog. We were in the middle of a pandemic (arguably we still are) and I had no idea that we would spend two more years slowly getting back to normal. I had assumed (like most of you) that 2021 was our year to climb back out of it and by, say, mid-summer we’d be camping and hiking and cooking on firepits with our friends. I was going to document that. Daily was my theme for 2021. And I almost did it.

My perspective was wrong, though.

I wanted to bring you all into this adventure and create a wonderful site full of amazing ideas. What it turned into was a journal of a guy trying to do that.

If you’re still reading, or just recently joined, you may be a bit disappointed with my effort in 2022.

I wrote about some of that yesterday and how I’ve been in a bit of a funk because of a knee injury. It sucks. And I know it. And I think I can will myself to do better.

I keep telling myself that (a) since I’m not trying to make money off this blog then (b) I don’t need to follow any particular set of rules from all those pro-bloggers out there with their tips for maximizing traffic, so (c) this site can be whatever I want it to be.

In 2021, it tried to be a daily blog about outdoor life, cast iron cooking, and running adventure.

In 2022, it was a journal of healing and reflecting on a tough year.

In 2023, I think I want it to be about that idea of daily. Creating daily. Living in the day. Being present and enjoying the moment each and every day, even if just long enough to capture a bit of it as art or photos or video. You’ll see more of that starting tomorrow. If you come along for the ride, or if you’ve been along the whole time, thanks. We’ll see you on the next day… and the day after… and the day after that.

Happy New Year.

long ago, and far from now

December 27 of 31 December-ish posts

What do you want the world to look like in the future?

The past is behind us. The present is fleeting. The future is what you make it.

What do you think the world will be like 25 years in the future?

Every day I get up and think about my day.

No, really…

I’ve been journaling in the mornings.

I keep what most would call a bullet journal, which by any standard is just point form writing and notetaking that is mostly about making lists that are about three things: the past, the present and the future.

I make point form notes about things that already happened, blurbs about how much I slept, exercised, or stressed about things. I write about what I read with brevity. I comment on the movies we watched last night or the food we ate yesterday.

I build lists of stuff I’m thinking about right now. I note how I’m feeling in the present and comment with a few quick words on my place in the flow of the moment. I put myself into the now and capture the instant with an insight or two to remind myself that it happened at all.

I plan ahead for tomorrow, next week and next year. I plot out projects and jot down to do lists of how I want to accomplish things in the future.

I do all these things to ground myself in the universe.

All that said, I haven’t written about anything so far in the future as twenty five years away.

What do you want the world to look like in 25 years?

Do you even think about it. Do you plan for tomorrow? Next week? Or maybe next year?

Have you thought about what the world will be like a quarter of a century from now?

I do, sometimes. Maybe I should start a bullet list for that.