In 2001, having recently finished university and found my first “real job” I packed up and moved to the west coast of Canada to a city called Vancouver.

I had no car. I had few friends. I had a lot of free time. And I had the hulking desktop computer that had seen me through my school work.  

So I wrote a blog. It was a new toy, a new platform, and no expectations. A way to communicate to the world, to my friends back in Alberta, and to chronicle this life I was living.

I’ve posted millions of words online since I penned the first journal entry into the early blogosphere back in 2001, scattered across countless platforms and dozens of websites with various lifespans.  I have wrung the dish cloth of the printed word so throughly that is sometimes seems not but a drop is left in it to squeeze out.

Of course, there always is more to write. More to type. More to post.  These words are the very example of that, but I write like I breath these days, it’s just what I do every single day.

The spark of creativity that I once felt in creating new and exciting websites has become just another buzz in the background of my creative life, rarely the end result and often more of a necessary foundation to the rest of it.

Enter audio.

I have been a consumer of audio for decades, from music to audiobooks to podcasts to soundtracks. I listen therefore I am.

Yet, I have had so little experience recording, producing and sharing audio that on a graph comparing my written word output to my audio file output, the latter would likely not even register as anything more than an approximation error.

In 2024 I decided to remedy that.

I bought a digital audio field recorder, a tool with which I can step away from the keyboard and focus on the sounds of the world and my own spoken voice.  I bought a podcasting microphone. And I have come up with multiple plans for multiple podcasts.

Like everyone I cringe at the sound of my own voice coming through my headphones as I’m editing, but after hours and hours of recording, retakes, production, mixing, and generally just playing around I sort of feel the same way I felt back in 2001: like a guy with a new toy, a new platform and no expectations.  A new way to communicate and chronicle about this creative life I’m living.

And who knows, maybe in ten or twenty years, recording audio will be just as much a part of my daily routine as writing.  You can check out my podcasting at squwetchy.art/podcasts