It’s not often we are driven to express our thoughts and feelings in their purest form.

By nature, we tend to take pause, analyze, assess the risk, to carefully massage our words so as not to offend. You’re far less likely to step on toes if you tiptoe, after all.

I’ve always been fascinated by dreams—their veiled layers of significance, certainly, but also their innate ability to remove all concept of time.

Before films like Inception made such musings and their pseudo-scientific explanations public fodder, we were simply left to contemplate on our own the fantastical notion that we could somehow be transported into another world devoid of structure... one in which anything could happen.

Sitting in my car waiting for the torrential downpour to subside, it seemed as good a time as any to collect my thoughts into a column of sorts.

As I approach the one-year anniversary of my making the fairly steep transition from the world of weekly newspapers to that of corporate marketing, it strikes me how very much things have changed in my life over the course of the last 12 months.

 It is with great sadness I share the news that my little Spudley, also affectionately known as Norty, passed on to the little aquarium in the sky this morning. Although he wasn’t as well known as his predecessor—only penning one “column” through the years—I felt it only fitting to put a few words together in his honor . . .