A Freshly Pressed Recap - Survival Guide

First of all I must give thanks once again to my amazing followers and WP friends for your support long before the de-facto lottery win last week. Without you I would never have been in a position to have been chosen to be Freshly Pressed.

I also want to welcome again all new followers to The Blissful Adventurer and thank you for your curiosity and interest in this work that I call a career. I hope you will stay with our journey here as we are going to exciting places and sharing the inner workings of Sicily, Bandol in France, Cambodia, Thailand, and more of the wondrous state of Colorado in the coming calendar year. In addition to real life experiences I will always be penning some edgy fiction from each of our destinations including the series on Piedmont, Italy which continues tomorrow.

In almost every sense the posting of my blog on FP was a boon; however, I want to tell a little bit about the process as I am confident those of you who have not yet been FPed will be.

1. I learned that I had been FPed at around noon last Thursday from that point until about 3PM yesterday all things I had planned, all responsibility to my own established routine, and all detailed bits of writing I had expected to pen completely ceased.

2. My email inbox on Thursday and Friday swelled by 10-15 notifications every 10 minutes. Of course I could have ignored this and pushed forward as planned but I knew this was a rare opportunity to gain support. My long-term goals for this blog are to assist me to being published and establish a base of wonderful friends and connections around the world. This was what I wanted and therefore I had to diligently respond to every single like, follow, comment, and/or query.

3. What surprised me the most was that in all of this over 4 full days there was only 1 comment I could not publish as I deemed it combative and out-of-place with our constructive forum. I assumed there would be many along these lines and was pleasantly surprised there were not.

4. In all I believe over the 4 days if my email serves me well that I received close to 2500 notes in my inbox and through 9pm last night I had addressed all but a few stragglers left for this morning. In essence, I slept little, ate when I had to, and lived here at the desk. This is why I am writing to you all today. If you wish for this (and I sure as hell did) know that it will come with preparation and life altering akin to a colonoscopy. By yesterday I had it in mind that my 4 month streak of continuous posts might end, and by the grace of God and the support of my wife I mustered a post I had planned to use while I was in Italy. Being Freshly Pressed will be exhausting. I would not trade it, and at the same time it was much more work than I anticipated. When this happens to you, take a deep breath, clear your schedule, and get ready to receive so many wonderful new people on your blogs.

5. In the end I want and hope this little exposure bonus happens to all of my readers who want it. My work in no way was deserving of this fortune more than any of you. In many ways I have felt a little guilt for this gift from WP. This blog was before and continues to be a humbling exercise in the presence of wonderfully talented writers, travelers, photographers, craft makers, and cooks. We are all in this together and I cheer for each of you in my comments and my actions. You are the reasons The Blissful Adventurer is growing much more than anything I am doing.

My love and gratitude to you all. This is truly a blessed community.

Vi abbraccio,

Michael

Easter Images

I had hoped to bring you part 2 of Mike's story in Piedmont, Italy today. This was before the fire alarm sent everyone in our building into the streets at 1 this morning. Of course it was a false alarm but that did not prevent us from losing over 2 hours of precious sleep. Nevertheless here are some shots from our Easter event yesterday which was great success.

We feel so fortunate to have a community of friends in our life and from all over the world. It can be lonely out on the roads of planet Earth and friends like ours make life so much more enjoyable.

Cheers to great friends today!

Camaraderie

I dreamed this morning about a friend that was very dear to me. In my dream he had taken the form of two people and all three of us were wearing ROCKMOUNT shirts.

My friend told me that half of the fun of getting a Rockmount was the cool box in which it arrived. I explained that I got my Rockmount at the original store in Denver and there was no cool shipping box.

This little fact seemed to dampen my friend's spirit and in just a moment I was awake. 

As I lay there thinking about the meaning of my morning dream I like to believe it suggests something about the transitory nature of friendship and how much I do not like this. This same friend from my dream once told me years ago that he is what he likes to call a "proximity friend". When I asked him to elaborate on that topic he said that he really only maintains friendships with people he sees and speaks to on a nearly daily basis.

This floored me. I went to Europe with this guy and showed him my soul across the continent. I thought I was building one of those life enduring buddies that get together at VFW halls and celebrate war wounds and feminine conquests disguised as medals.

I had chosen to leave a job that was mentally unsatisfying to me and my friend would continue to work at this same institution. However, never in my wildest dreams did I consider changing jobs would effectually end a friendship.

Facebook, Wordpress, text messages, and even old-fashioned phone calls have allowed me the ability to maintain friendships, grow new ones, and rediscover friends long-lost. However, none of these methods provides camaraderie. My "proximity friend" had a point and even after being terribly hurt and confused all those years ago, I can still see what he meant.

I have many friends whom I adore. I have very little camaraderie in my life. We move around so often, travel for so long, and lead a very unstructured existence all by choice. In turn I have created my own awkward syllogism: all camaraderie is proximity, and I do not have proximity to any of my dear colleagues, therefore I have no camaraderie. Yes, I do see some wonderful friends on occasion and the experiences are enriching. However, on a daily basis I am basically a one man show. Just last week when Juliet and I went to a wine dinner. It had been exactly one week since I had spoken to another human being in person besides my wife and a cashier at Whole Foods whom I told to donate my bag credit. I am not kidding.

While I am certainly better now than I year ago at working towards my own personal goals and endeavors, the absence of human interaction is creating a bit of madness within me. I find myself watching shows on televisions like Mad Men and Downton Abbey and longing for some trivial human emotional dysfunction just to feel a bit more alive. I was already a bit anti-social so removing me from day-to-day interaction with other humans has imbued me with even greater disconnection with the planet.

Have I really sought this? Or have I simply wanted to find the right group of kids to play in my world? I walked through Washington Park here in Denver the other day and saw so many groups of young people 35 and under playing sports, throwing frisbees, hanging out with dogs, and simply finding the joy in togetherness. I didn't attempt to join because as one of my favorite bloggers said to me the other day "you are not a joiner."

I am not, and I am also not a proximity friend. I will always be loyal to the efforts I, and another person have made to be friends; time or distance be damned. Yes, I want the camaraderie I miss desperately, yet I will not turn off my responsibility as a friend if such a distance arises between us. I won't simply join any old group just to have a group. I tried this once in high school when my closest friends got girlfriends I joined in some less than stellar company and received less than stellar experiences.

Today, I will plug away at my work dreaming of one day having an office again with wonderful colleagues working towards some project with high hopes and heady humor. I choose my friends very carefully and perhaps now more than ever. I ask friends to dinner parties or to events because I like them very much. If you are my friend you are someone I admire, and derive joy from knowing.

My proximity will continue to change frequently in the foreseeable future but my desire for genuine camaraderie shall not wane.

Photographer, Chef, Winemaker, and Friend

No, I am not talking about myself (this time). I am referring to a renaissance man and one of my very best friends Loren J Root. I met Loren on my first day of a new job in San Francisco in 2004. I noticed Loren immediately as he was in strikingly good shape, seemed confident and calm (traits I did not possess at all at the time), and his shoes were much cooler than  anything I would have seen in Austin only a week earlier. What I did not know about Loren at the time and have come to learn over the years is that the man is incredibly talented and one of the fastest learners I have ever met.

In our 7 years of friendship we have counted (and tasted) some of the finest bottles of wine on earth, traveled all over the USA in search of great food and great company, and even both sat in a Fiat 500 just outside of Panzano in Chianti laughing at the lack of space while still enjoying the great fortune of hanging out in Italia; even if Katy Perry never stopped playing on the radio.

Loren and I have worked together on numerous projects and at times he was cussed out by his boss and at times I cussed out mine. In 2005 Loren hosted Thanksgiving dinner at his home in SF and it was simply one of the most fun holidays I have ever had. Never will there be another rendition of Country boy can Survive quite like that one and I look forward to our meals and time in the kitchen as much as any social gatherings in my life.

Why is this a blog post today? Because Loren is now doing some incredible work behind the camera and I want the world to hire him. Loren is the only person in my life that I can be certain without a doubt, that if he agrees to take on a project it will always, and I mean always, exceed my expectations.

I want to share a couple of links with you to Loren's work and if you have the need for a photographer for any occasion and want world-class work with a very particular artistic vision of your goals, then Loren J Root is your man. Of course if you need your wine cellar organized and your collection managed or you would like to prepare a fresh seafood dinner in your home for 8 discerning friends Loren can manage all of these as well. This guy has talent and he will share it with you because bringing joy to people's lives is what keeps him learning.

Cheers to creativity and following the path my friends!

Loren's Company Page - Glass Roots Concepts  Loren's Flickr Page  Follow Loren on Twitter @theleftoverchef