Thirteen years. A strange, uneven number too jagged to be poetic, too stubborn to be ignored. WordPress tossed me that little digital badge today like a bartender sliding over a whiskey I didn’t remember ordering. Thirteen years since you started this thing. Thirteen years since I first crawled into this corner of the internet trying to outrun my own thoughts.

Back then it wasn’t “Nerdy Viking,” or photography adventures across Oregon’s wild edges, or Gonzo-style dispatches from the brink. It was just me, single dad, pockets full of stress, brain scrambled, trying to write my way toward sanity. A few paragraphs here and there about parenting, life, the weird tremors of adulthood. Nothing fancy. No grand audience. Just a place to spill the internal static.

Then it mutated, like all good things do. 

The Nerdy Life of Mine era rolled in, loud and caffeinated. DIY nerd projects cluttering the kitchen table. Comic cons. Cosplayers. Media badges somehow falling into my hands. Interviews with creators who lived on caffeine and creative chaos. Podcasts recorded at absurd hours. A whole universe I tumbled into without looking for the exits. That little blog transformed into a breathing thing, a beast of cables and convention lights, and I held on like a man riding a shopping cart down a hill.

And then naturally, inevitably it evolved again. The writing sharpened, the lens came out, and suddenly it was Nerdy Viking Photography. The storytelling shifted from the living room to the Pacific Northwest: the forests, the coastlines, the high desert, the ghost towns, the mountain roads where the stars feel close enough to touch. It became gonzo with a camera, a chronicle of hiking boots, weather-beaten landscapes, personal ghosts, long-exposure experiments, and all the unfiltered thoughts that come with standing alone on a ridge at 2 a.m. wondering what the hell you’re doing but loving every second of it.

Thirteen years is enough time to lose yourself, reinvent yourself, and rebuild everything from the ground up a couple times. Enough time to meet friends who stick, to shed things that drag you down, to realize that the road doesn’t straighten out. It just keeps going, and you either walk it or you don’t.

Through the highs and the lows, the late-night writing binges, the camera gear failures, the hiking blisters, the interviews, the adventures, the loss, the triumph, the whole damn spectrum, I’m still here. Still posting. Still chasing the next story, the next photo, the next strange and beautiful corner of this life.

Lucky 13, indeed.

Here’s to every year behind me and every untamed, unpredictable year ahead.