2012 Year in Review Haiku

Here is The Blissful Adventurer 2012 Year in Review Haiku. Haiku was one of my most successful creative expressions here in the blog world in 2012 I want to share some of the best of the best with you all today for my final blog of 2012; easily the most successful year I have a had as a storyteller.

The cheese had no origin

but its Cheesy-ness

was undeniable

He saw his way out

of the cold and he knew the

evidence would melt

Joy is frequently

defined by images of life

although they can lie

The lazy girls talked
at length while stirring the cups
of their past short joy

just when he thought he

can't go any further she poured

herself into him

cutting corners was

not the way he liked to live

his life under the bridge

The source of our pain

is often the thing that makes

us the most happy

the only truth was

he had been wronged and someone was

going to pay for it

An ever swirling

breeze brushed the open window

while animals stared

So much madness

in the streets of life and only

so little solace

(Photo by Juliet Housewright from her upcoming blog SCHMEE JOURNEYS)

her final hope clung

to her clutching hands as the

tornado touched down

eyes have a way of

telling stories that perhaps

even the mind does not

She smiles on the walk
to deliver a simple
message of sure pain

Spaghetti with Clams - Le Marche

filled with old workers

this fluorescent spot of life

cooks food as god wants

Photo by Schmee

Feet seem happiest

when dappled lights and warmth find

a place to alight

here he comes riding

lands that were once his now not

because he is now dead

goaty goaty goaty
standing on the rocky slope
needing sunglasses

For final thoughts on 2012 I want to share a Facebook chat I had with George Weaver Yesterday. George is the author of the beautiful "She Kept a Parrot" and the photography blog "The Fuzzy Foto" This chat is why I am here and why I love this work.

George L Weaver Michael, it is people like you who unite us all in a world community. I never dreamed that neurosurgeons, artists, photographers, world travelers, and professional writers like you would visit an old woman from a provincial little town in Texas. People from India, Turkey, Japan, Germany, South Africa, Ghana, Colombia, Israel, Canada, Australia, and many other countries. And, they sound just like neighbors and friends from down the street! Some of my best blogging friends are down-the-street Americans too.

You folks are sophisticated world travelers and all are phenomenally talented and informed ... but all of you talk to ME. Can you imagine? Through your continual encouragement, I have come to know these people who have taught me about the world, and in the process, they've taught me something more important ... that we all belong to one human family. We are all the same. 

My life as a hermit has been limitless this year. The world is literally at my fingertips as trite as that may sound. I was always shameless, but you made me fearless, Michael. And I thank you. 

I am "blissfully" looking forward to 2013 and all of the discoveries the new year brings! 

Happy New Year to you and Schmee!

Michael Housewright Travel in all forms has been since the beginning of man the way in which we know what makes us so alike even though at middle distances we seem so far apart. In 2012 I learned for the first time in my life how small the differences are and how vain it has been of me to consider that some place where I was born makes me deserving of such privilege.

Your travel in this blog-world is the most enlightened way in which to experience the internet as it allows the distances to be shrunk and people to be reduced to their common archetypes.

Connecting: that is what I do and try as I may at times to hide in a closet, or on an island, or simply to exist selfishly, I simply cannot. I said to myself some 20 years ago in college that my life's work would not limit me in my constant pursuit of experience, adventure, and human connection. I have at times failed to remain on this path and the pursuits of other things seemingly more comfortable, attractive, or exciting have hindered my course.

I want more than anything for 2013 to be a time of greater embrace and attention to these parts of me that I know only increase my scope and especially my reach. I without thinking of it always want the best for my connections. I love stories of friends successes and of introductions that lead to lifelong friendships. This kind of thing happens with some pretty amazing frequency and I hope that never changes. So long as I can travel, I will. So long as I can write, I will do my best. So long as there is breath in my body I will love my connections and tell their stories.

Here is the annual report on The Blissful Adventurer WordPress blog - I am reluctant to share this as I do not think blogs are the place for perceptions of competition. At the same time I want to share with those who are new at this how much success one can have in only 1 full year of serious blogging. January 1 of 2012 I had less than 50 followers.

Friuli - Friday Photos Finale

Trieste Canal

Friuli Friday Photos Finale is my final Friday blog of 2012. These shots are from an extraordinary spring adventure in Friuli-Venezia-Giulia and one from the Veneto just next door. We are in Northeast Italy here, in a land still seeking an identity after changing hands frequently in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I never would have thought I would have eaten the best sauerkraut of my life in Italy, and I did. Tall people, Fascist art, pork  in a dozen ways on one plate, my kind of weirdness shared with friends. Nicolas Emery, the famous Rubicon explorer, his fiancée Giulia Laveto (aka juujee), and of course The Schmee were all present and on board for wine, food, and Friuli.

The gang posed around the statue of the immensely accessible James Joyce (sarcasm intended)

These kinds of statues are all over Friuli. I imagine Mussolini placed these carefully about the country so he could have masturbation fodder in every town he visited.

"My pants are falling down and I am missing my diaper. Let go of my head damn bird!"

We discovered Giulia loves bright green and so this classic Fiat 500 was just the ticket. We could have carried this car in our packs.

I love street scenes. I see beauty in the edges of things. I find myself happiest in a place when I know I see something most people simply pass by and rarely notice.

This shot is only about 1 thing. Do you see it? If you comment on this post I want to hear your guess

I love these terraced vineyards. We were not far from the Slovenian border here. After all this time traveling I am never bored seeing a vineyard.

This winemaker in the Veneto outside of Verona was showing us where he buried a bull horn full of manure in the natural wine tradition. I am not kidding, all the growers do it around the world. He made killer pizza, good wines, and was pretty damn funny. This was my first time in the Veneto countryside and the first time I heard the Veneto Italian accent. It sounded like someone from Cuba speaking Italian. Quick, with a rising cadence, and quite lovely to hear.

Every year I return to Italy I find many reasons to return to Italy.

Auguri di buone feste e di un buon anno in arrivo

Final Haiku Sunday (Christmas in LA) of the Year is Next!

The Blissful Adventurer - 2012 Blog of the Year

The Blissful Adventurer - 2012 Blog of the Year

Imagine my surprise when I clicked on the link from Cara Olsen to her outstanding blog This Little Light and saw she had selected me among a few of her very talented peers as Blog of the Year for 2012. Cara herself had received the honor and as the protocol dictates shared her love and recognition with other writers she admires in the same vein. Cara, as many of my readers already know, is a novelist/blogger of exceptional mettle and integrity. Her work proves one can have faith and a firm grasp of the human condition and that they are not mutually exclusive. To be chosen by such a talented scribe is truly a blessing in these end of 2012 days. Thank you Cara Olsen. You are blessed and blessed with good taste :-)

If I owe my blogging success of 2012 to anything (besides my wife) I owe it to photography. As a storyteller by nature I have always been equipped with the capacity to recount some snippet of day-to-day usually with a modicum of entertaining banter. When blogging grabbed me by the sack in late January of 2012 it was my images that kept the story alive on the days when I simply had nothing clever to pen. The picture worth the 600-800 words blog became my staple. From photos I derived Haiku, Photo Essays, and the most beautiful breaks and chapter shifts in my fiction.

Photos also have brought Juliet and me even closer to one another. As evidenced by the many images we have shared together on the blog, my wife has quite the eye for photos. Juliet aka Schmee is a painter and designer naturally inclined to aesthetics. She embodies the beautifully feminine as a counter to my lumbering masculinity. Juliet is a daily blissful adventure for me. In these difficult days for our nation I cannot help but feel closer to my talented wife than perhaps I ever have.

This journey in 2012 was the most isolating of my life. I am and have always been a very social creature. 7-10 hours a day alone at a desk expecting to create is new to me still. My fellow bloggers assuaged many of my loneliest days with their comments, questions, and simple likes. I love attention, gratification, and applause. I was a theater major and an actor for most of my formative years. Now, I create in a different capacity and the discipline to do it wanes and waxes. My fellow bloggers are the keys to my waxing. I grow because this community embraced my work, told me where I was going astray, and mostly just let me be the me I am without the pretense of a common work environment. 2012 was the year of the blogger.

Travel, eating, and telling stories. Texas, Italy, Colorado, and California were the primary subjects of 2012. However, it was Asia and Hong Kong that got me freshly pressed! If there is any award more gratifying and ultimately more damning than being freshly pressed I do not know what is in this sphere of endeavor. I would welcome the opportunity again of being featured and I would hope this time I would not get my hopes up to remain so popular and to judge each of my posts on whether or not they received 600 or 800 views.

I went to Italy in the midst of my Freshly Pressed frenzy and the frenzy faded. When I launched my new blog above, the frenzy simply died. It damn near killed me and my spirit to believe my work was simply a quid pro quo entity. I started to consider for a bit the idea of giving up my goal of being a writer because clearly my work was a flash in the pan. My new website which is rarely seen remains my hope for this blog. At the same time I began to post again here on Wordpress because I missed the audience. I missed the daily interaction with friends. I missed the life I had leading up to being Freshly Pressed. Now I am hopeful I can rekindle some of the blogging spirit and energy that got me out of bed each day. I hope my work will once again be appreciated by new friends and shared across the web.

So here I am, Blogger of the Year. I accept this as truth because it is the best year of blogging of my life. My best work as a blogger, writer, photographer, and husband has been in 2012. I am so very proud of the over 150 posts I crafted in 2012. I am proud of the life I lead and the stories I tell.

As usual, I am going to deviate a bit from the rules of the blog. Know if you select me for a blog award I may take it, but I am always going to do with it as I see fit. Rather than issuing my own "Blog of the Year" award. I am going to post tomorrow with my blogs and people of the year and how they make me and this world better.

If you are a Wordpress blogger you do not want to miss tomorrow (which happens to be my birthday)

Huge thanks to all of you for reading me in 2012!

Michael

Hipstamatic - Fun Photo Friday

Rodin Sculpture Garden - Stanford University

Hipstamatic fun photo Friday is a joyful exploration of the depths in iPhone photography that help me to document The Blissful Adventurer. These images represent my particular vision of the images I see and are intended to alter mood and shift perspective. Hipstamatic is an application for mobile phone cameras that has inspired me since its inception and I hope very much it remains a fixture in the app world.

Crossing a fabled monkey bridge to the shore. This was what I wanted Vietnam to be

Nothing embodies and embraces the slow modifications of life in Italy like the Tobacconist. What once was the place to buy coveted salt is now home to recharge cell phones and play the lottery. The shop owners endure and their demeanor rarely changes.

Rome is a place where grunge images are all around. Trash cans, scooters, awnings all play integral parts in the swooning banality varnishing something very alive and volatile.

Right outside the Apple store in downtown Denver. I never gave a rat's about Apple until Hipstamatic.These were better than I remembered and I remembered loving them.

One of San Francisco's best coffee roasters in action.

Gorgeous macerated wine from the Republic of Georgia served in traditional clay bowl (piala). These wines can be enjoyed at the wonderful new Wine Salon Et Al in San Francisco's historic Russian Hill hood.

The Blissful Adventurer - Phu Quoc Island, Vietnam (photo by Schmee)

I long to get back to sticky new sand on my arms, clear water, crabs over rice serenity. Hipstamatic will be with me and I will find guidance and share what I find.