Round One. Intro.

Graham Michaelson here.

For starters, I will be 23 this spring. Gemini all the way. I'm a West-Coast Kid, but not born and raised. I'm originally from Ontario and my move to the West was inevitable. Vancouver specifically.

Realistically, (optimism here folks) I have no idea who will read this, but we will see how it plays out. I figured that I was sorting through my browser favorites yesterday and happened to realize that pretty much every site I frequent these days is or has a blog of some sort. Blogs are in a sense becoming part of our daily culture, for much of our generation they seem to be like personal newspaper. While I do have a life, I spend waaay to much time on my computer. Its a problem.

Anyway, I guess, I am starting a blog to chronicle not necessarily my trials and tribulations out here, but rather many of my daily interests and happenings. By that I mean everything from music to clothes, to snowboarding and cycling, to parties and bars or my general hatred of statistics.

I will try and post up photos as well showing the beauty of my daily surroundings. In regards to music, I will try and update with new tracks and links as often as possible. We will see what happens.

On that note, here is the first music link. Little Boots - New in Town (Fred Falke Vocal Mix)

Lastly, I am certainly not a poet or always the most eloquent of writers, but I wrote this at one point last year for a mandatory English class. While it is over written in a few areas, it gives a gist of me and why I am in Vancouver in the first place.


Just as with much of our population of young adults, sport is rooted deeply in my psyche. To call it just a passion, would be unfitting of the grasp it actually has on me. Instead, to me, sport is an obsession.

I remember when I was young and dreamt of being that sports hero who could make or break the dreams of thousands of people in a single instant. But I was six. Yet, whether I was managing to stride ineloquently across the local hockey rink or stampede down the soccer pitch in behind my school, I always had an announcer in my head proclaiming my small victories.

However, the time came when I no longer felt that rush when playing these team sports. Truth be told, I was an only child, and the day soon came when I realized that I was not made for team sports. Quite simply, I hated sitting on the bench and even more, I hated leaving the fate of my mood up to fellow teammates.

After all of these years, I still undoubtedly have fond memories of playing hockey and soccer. Except, it took only one sudden avalanche of discovery to transform me into the obsessed athlete that I am today. Thinking back, my obsession was quickly derived from the dramatic conjunction of freedom and speed working in unison, and showing me for the first time, what the hills had to offer. It was almost without warning for those around me, to see me now wanting to spend every waking moment of my winters on ski slopes rather than ice rinks and bike trails in place of green grass and goal posts.

For the past decade, I have based all my significant decisions about my life around these two new loves. I truly believe that I can still call them new, year after year, because of what I both learn from and achieve from them.

Even today, instigation of my obsessive-compulsive behaviour happens like clockwork. Twice a year, I get an itch, one that is deep inside my psyche, and refuses to go away. It first happens during the spring when the ground first shows its colours and again it always happens again during the fall when the trees become bare. To me, the change of seasons is much more than just a change of scenery.

Up until two years ago, my bikes and my snowboards had controlled my social life, my finances and much of my derived pleasure from life. It was that serious of an obsession. Just as many other teenagers choose cars, I chose bicycles. Unfortunately they even had the same monetary value.

Yet, the fact remained that no matter how much I invested in my obsessions, I still lived in Ontario. It is flat, very flat, and the sports I loved needed mountains.

Certainly, the hardest part about my move to the small mountain town of Vancouver has been tearing down 20 years of life at home. Thinking of Vancouver as a small mountain town helps me to feel it is possible to build a life here while conquering the isolation of feeling alone in a new city. Clearly, the city also looks much smaller when you spend much of your time above 6000 feet.

The days which make every sacrifice worth it are always spent moving swiftly through the glades or thundering down the trail, spraying snow and slashing rocks far and wide. The underlying theme of my obsession has been finding those serene places amongst the mountains that no hockey rink or field of green could ever have given me.

When I am up high, I still always glance eastward as to not forget where my obsession began and where it has taken me to, today.



G'nite.