This is the first time I have put this rather sordid story online since doing a first draft back in 2008. The intent is a synthesis of the narrative style of Franklin W. Dixon, the nom de plume of the committee responsible for the Hardy Boys books, with the misanthropy of French novelist Michel Houellebecq.

Frank and Joe Hardy, two teenagers living in the United States of America in the mid-part of the twentieth century, approached the seaside town of Bayport, their home since childhood. They were rolling along in their bright yellow convertible and enjoying the view of Barmet Bay. Suddenly Frank spotted several homeless men, most of them in their elder years, down by the wharf.

“That fellow looks like he’s lost all will to live,” he remarked.

Joe turned to look at where Frank was pointing. He saw a figure resembling an old sailor, wearing tattered clothing and sporting a menacing grimace. Suddenly, the sailor set upon a younger homeless person with a knife.

“Frank, look!” Joe cried, impetuously. “We must do something!”

Frank shook his head.

“I’m not so sure about that,” he said. “Given the entrenchment of American laissez-faire capitalism, intervening in this case would accomplish practically nothing. I would recommend we turn a blind eye to the sufferings of the lower social orders, whose status is immutable, and distract ourselves with hedonistic pursuits. Look, there’s a brothel down by the bay.”

Joe nodded his head, conceding that Frank was probably correct.  Their convertible came to halt outside the brothel. Lurching out of the ramshackle door was saw their friend Chet Morton. He was clutching a jelly donut.

“Hey guys,” he cried out. “I had a whale of a time in there, and what’s best about it, they gave me a free donut!”

Frank and Joe laughed at jolly old Chet. As a boy, the Hardys’ affable friend had been repeatedly beaten by his father and made to clean the toilet bowl with his tongue. Chet’s father had instilled in his son intense feelings of shame and inadequacy. Food, compulsive eating, and masturbating were his only consolations now he was an adult.

“How much for half an hour in there?” inquired Joe eagerly, pointing inside the brothel.

“Only five bucks!” exclaimed Chet, excitedly. “It’s a steal.”

The boys bid Chet farewell and then entered the brothel. They only had a total of four dollars and twenty cents left after a weekend of camping in the Fortress Mountains (investigating a lumberjack who had kidnapped his sister) and so the boys were obliged to forcefully negotiate a discount for the services of a whore. At one point, Frank even threatened to have his father shut the brothel down.

“Alright, alright!” said the monkey-faced man at the front desk. “Four bucks it is, but you’ll have to share.”

Frank and Joe ascended to a dimly lit and dusty room where a whore awaited them on a bed. She laughed when she saw them.

“You two look like brothers,” she said.

“We are brothers,” Frank retorted. “I’m Frank and this is Joe. We’re the Hardy Boys.”

Suddenly the whore turned white, as if she’d seen a ghost.

“I don’t know nothing about that little boy that went missing,” she protested. “I was out of town when it happened.”

Frank turned aside and whispered furtively to Joe. “I suspect foul play here. I don’t believe for one second that she doesn’t know anything about this alleged little boy. Let’s just proceed as if we suspect nothing and see if she inadvertently lets slip a clue or two.”

“Clever sleuthing,” Joe agreed.

The two boys proceeded to strip naked and took it in turns thrusting into the whore, who groaned with pleasure. The noise was loud enough to wake up somebody who was stashed away in the nearby closet. This person banged on the door loudly. “Hold on a minute,” said Frank. He investigated the mysterious locked closet door, kicking it open. Inside he found… a little boy!

“I don’t know nothing about him!” shrieked the whore.

“Likely story,” said Joe. “That must be the little boy who disappeared on the night of April seventeenth after his tricycle was found at the bottom of Bullsblood Gulch. What are you doing with him?”

“OK, OK… I’ll confess everything,” said the whore. “The truth is, he’s my illegitimate son. I had to hide him to protect myself from the wrath of my father.”

Frank nodded. “I knew it,” he said to Joe. “Also, notice how centuries of Catholicism have instilled oppressive feelings of guilt in this young woman.” He pointed to the crucifix on the wall. He continued, “She feels unclean to have given birth to a bastard, and yet in only one decade, she will have nothing to worry about, because all vestiges of sexual morality will be eradicated by the Sexual Revolution, as well as the intensification of the commodity culture.”

“You’re right,” said Joe.

“Mommy!” cried out the little boy. He ran to the whore and threw his little arms around her neck.

Frank and Joe laughed.

“Well, Joe, it looks like we’ve solved the Mystery of the Missing Bastard Son.”

“You’re right,” said Joe. “Now where’s that donut Chet promised?”

M.o.M.

n+1 and Jacobin were established in, respectively, 2003 and 2009. Both are based in New York City. I occasionally rave about how great these magazines are to friends, co-workers, and anyone else that will listen, and am often surprised when people don’t know what I am talking about. These magazines have a cultural reach that extends far beyond their home city. Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be? was supported early on by n+1, and to some extent because of that nod, is now rightly feted all over the world, not just here in her  mother country. As for Jacobin, a profile of its founding editor in The New York Times and a guest column in The Guardian still haven’t made the magazine a household name like Harper’s, The New Yorker, or Atlantic, but I am hopeful one day that will change.

In my opinion, those left-leaning magazines of our parents’  generation aren’t working hard enough for our subscription money. Harper’s is written by curmudgeons who care about the right issues but don’t offer any real hope that the world will get any better; The New Yorker is written by folks who can’t decide if they care about the world just so long as their impressive cultural capital is acknowledged; and Atlantic is written by folks who flat out don’t care about the world just so long as as they can provoke some controversy and keep people reading. (For a scathing indictment of Harper’s and Atlantic‘s track record pertaining to women and feminist issues in particular, read n+1‘s Intellectual Situation from Issue 15.)

I’m not arguing here that everyone subscribed to the previously-mentioned liberal magazines should feel deep shame and switch their subscriptions forthwith to n+1 or Jacobin.  I’m arguing that if you want to show some solidarity with young people striving to ensure that the mostly barren North American cultural landscape offers at least a few oases of solace, and if you want literature and criticism that provokes chatter that matters, the priority spending in your magazine budget should be with n+1 or Jacobin. (And a subscription to Canada’s very own maisonneuve or Walrus would be a jolly good idea too. Be a big spender!)

Recently, Jacobin posted almost all of  its latest issue online as a sort of experiment, hoping that despite giving away free content, readers would financially support the magazine anyway.  I, for one, “rushed” to the subscription webpage and forked out my $30 immediately, having already enjoyed Jacobin for free for several years. And boy, was I glad I did! Issue 10 contains an excellent analysis of the American car industry after the bail-out, a look at the successful Chicago teachers’ strike versus the not-so-successful strike by New York school bus drivers, and so much more, all in erudite but accessible prose. Articles of this sort offer many advantages over the daily grind of world atrocities that you get through the newspapers. They give a “big picture” view of the various ills of our times  (i.e. the ongoing collapse of the manufacturing sector); they offer useful insights into political strategy; and most importantly (to my mind anyway) they help leftists to not feel so alone. These magazines understand the economy and society that we inhabit in a way that older magazines do not. They understand the uneasy compromises so many of us make, wanting to work on projects that are personally fulfilling, but needing also to make money, wanting to make a difference in the world, but needing not to be thrown into prison for the cause of the season. In a nutshell, these magazines understand the constraints we operate under, and rather than throw up their hands with despair, they offer hope that a growing cohort of organized people might support each others’ progress in this world and thereby eventually change things.

n+1 gave the Occupy movement a broadsheet to read while agitating in the streets of New York. Jacobin organized a panel discussion at the same time and incurred the wrath of Fox News.

As I approach my middle years, trying in my own way to answer Sheila Heti’s question How Should a Person Be?, I am certain of few things, but here is one. Good projects deserve support. As a cultural producer myself, albeit a very novice one, I cannot accept that “Free Culture” means that people spend money on hair cuts or on organic meals in family-owned restaurants but will get their “content” without spending a dime. YouTube evenings are fun, and I’ve enjoyed my fair share of cultural events organized via Facebook, but someone eventually will have to pay the “content producers,” and I think that somebody should be, insofar as I’m capable, me. And others like me. If we don’t pay them, who will? Apple? Google? PBS? The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation?

Furthermore, a desire for a  bigger audience for a new magazine is not tantamount to “selling out” or compromising the message. In the 1920′s and 1930′s, “Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, an atheist-Jew, socialist, and newspaper publisher, and his wife, Marcet, set out to publish small low price paperback pocketbooks that were intended to sweep the ranks of the working class as well as the ‘educated’ class. Their goal was to get works of literature, a wide range of ideas, common sense knowledge and various points of view out to as large an audience as possible.” [Source, ahem, Wikipedia!]

This project became known as Little Blue Books, a series of classics in literature, philosophy as well as feminist and socialist tracts that reached millions. I don’t think it can be entirely coincidental that the 1920′s and 30′s were also decades of considerable socialist ferment and unrest.

I am going to end this blog with a lengthy quote from the latest Intellectual Situation in n+1, entitled “Cultural Revolution,” which provides a fairly succinct guide to three possible futures in the face of  “the mounting economic insecurity of intellectuals and ‘culture producers’ amid a general population scoured by the same blast…”

One possibility, and the worst, would be to see the next decades exacerbate the class character of culture. In this scenario, since very few people not already wealthy would risk careers as writers or artists, certain vital strains of culture would become, more exclusively than today, the expression of an upper-class stratum. A basic relegation of literature, art, and philosophy to pastimes of the idly rich (as, say, in pre-revolutionary France) doesn’t seem impossible.

A second possibility, closer to realization today, would be the confinement of important varieties of culture not to a single socioeconomic stratum but to demographic archipelagos amid rising seas of mass corporate product. Young people might give up hopes of gainful employment through art or serious writing — without giving up the production or consumption of those things. Holding down uninspiring and ill-paid day-jobs, they would huddle together in select neighborhoods of big cities and devote their evenings and weekends to culture (and laundry, shopping, and cleaning). This doesn’t sound so bad; it sounds in fact like the cozily disappointed existence, streaked with fear of unemployment, of half the people we know.

A more optimistic third possibility glimpses, in the dark cloud already raining on us, a silver lining of cultural revolution — of rapprochement, that is, between intellectuals and nonintellectuals, the intellectuals becoming more like workers and the workers more like intellectuals without the broadening of cultural life diminishing its liveliness or highest achievements.

My parents recently moved out of the house at 11125-23b Avenue, Edmonton Alberta and returned to England. I spent 1989 to 1993 at this address, as well as six months in 2005-2006, when I was unemployed. Well before my parents’ departure, I boxed up all the stuff I wanted from the basement and shipped it here to Montreal. There was a box of books and a box of my own writing. Everything else went to Goodwill. You can’t afford to be too sentimental about material possessions when shipping is priced according to weight.

Today I looked at a binder of my writing from the year 2000, when I would have been 25. I can see myself struggling in one story to write like my hero, Dostoevsky, and totally failing. I can see myself in another story affecting a hardscrabble tone, describing the life of people living in a trailer park. That one seems more promising, except it is clear I don’t know how such people talk.

Excerpt from “Hijackers of Desperate Hearts”

“I’ll get a nice cool one, Charlie.”

“Not until you clear up your tab.”

“Goddamit! Just one more, Charlie. You know I’m good for it.”

There is one long poem in which I have found a stanza that encapsulates a lot of the fascination I had at the time about the (possible) connection between religion and insanity.

Excerpt from a juvenile poem

Paradise is
a mind that’s come unstuck
from the pull of this heavy planet
and refuses to be bounded.
It lives in absolutes and eternals
every light turns on and it’s a sign from God
to walk his way
yet his way is everywhere
and you can only walk so far
before your blistered feet give up on you
and you collapse in a ditch like a derelict.
People mistake you for a bum that drank too much.

Mostly, my writing from this time reads like a plea for a girlfriend and to get laid more often. So much yearning! If I had to re-live my early twenties, I would read and write a little less and live a little more. But thankfully, I don’t have to go back to that time of life.  I can use my writing more competently now as a way of embarrassing myself.

I started writing Blind Spot in 2005 after a brief stint of unemployment. The unemployment is significant insofar as it gave me the time to help a friend of mine paint the exterior of a house located just off 99th street in Edmonton. That house was the inspiration for the somewhat smaller house that is the main setting for Blind Spot.

A first draft of the book was finished quite quickly but it then took a very long time to finally get the manuscript into a form that might be acceptable. In the winter of 2008, I pitched the book to four different editors at the Pitch & Shop Conference in New York City. One of the editors agreed to read it. In 2009, we met up at a cafe on Bergen Street in Brooklyn for lunch. She said she loved the book, but pronounced the main character, Luke, to be rather unlikeable, which would make the book difficult to market.  I thought about this for a while. I concluded that to make Luke a different person would tear apart the whole project. And so the Luke that appears in the version that NeWest will publish is the very same Luke that I always wanted him to be: tough, lonely, manipulative, deceitful, angstful, but with a certain charm. However, thanks to that editor’s advice, Luke does have a better back story. He’s not likeable, but I think he’s more understandable.

I did a lot of revising of the manuscript, of course (and there is still more editing to be done), one of the chief results of which is a lengthy section that takes place in Montreal. In the summer of 2012, I did some polishing and then mailed the manuscript to NeWest. And now six months later, in the darkest days of winter, I have received news that is like a warm sunbeam in my heart!

There are a lot of people to thank for their help and support along the way. Chief among them is Thomas Wharton, author of Icefields, which is also a NeWest Press publication. Thomas has given me wise counsel for over a decade. Todd Babiak, author of Choke Hold, The Garneau Block, and other fine books, read an early draft and was enormously encouraging. Teena Apeles, my friend and another published author, heartily supported the project and was an eagle-eyed observer of the problematic details that I often miss.

I am very grateful, above all, to my loving wife and to all my friends and family in Edmonton, Montreal, Toronto and beyond. It’s a cliché of the writing business to say it’s lonely, and in my case, the cliché is mostly an empty one. The longer I’ve kept writing, the more wonderful people I have met. I don’t think the correlation here is false.

More news on Blind Spot once the book is imminently or currently available!

It’s rather a stroke of good luck (for my purposes here, anyway) that when I typed “Zadie Smith” and “internet-blocking” and “freedom” into Google, it was The Daily Mail story that came up toward the top. The Mail is among the most popular news sites in the world, and by reading the Zadie Smith article, you get a rather depressing idea why. On the right-hand side of the site, you are treated to the spectacle of “FEMAIL” – a feature consisting of thumbnails and tantalizing blurbs. “Kourtney, Kim and Khloe Kardashian sport bouffants and bikinis in one of their first photo shoots,” “Working that baby bump! The Saturdays’ Rochelle Humes shows off her growing pregnancy in a skin-tight dress for New York show,” “’That not my butt’: Jennifer Lawrence disowns her ’90-year-old’ derriere.”

It used to be said that the news was a delivery mechanism for advertising. Nowadays, news is also a delivery mechanism for soft PORN, or another category of content that gets a lot of hits, a category I will call DESPERATION – i.e. ads for products that promise rapid weight loss, acquisition of a new language in 10 days, or a larger penis. Why not try all three, and in a fortnight become a donkey-dicked svelte fluent Spanish speaker, just in time for your trip to Cuba?

Rare is the human who has never followed a ridiculous rabbit hole into one of the darker regions of the Net, even if just by mistake. We are impulsive beings. Which is why another one of the Internet-blocking applications calls itself “Self Control.” I wonder if maybe freedom and self control are more closely related than they immediately appear. One of the things the Internet rather prides itself on is serving up whatever you want. “I like guns!” “I like massive tits!” “I like my Marxist beliefs reaffirmed!” “I like kittens!” You can choose whatever you want and get a lot of it.

Reading even a fraction of the literature about human impulses and drives, i.e. Nietzsche, Freud, Dostoyevsky, and a host of more recent thinkers, as well as, of course, MARKETERS, reveals free choice to be somewhat of an illusory concept. Sometimes we feel almost powerless up against the compelling drive to look at that GIANT COCK or those PERFECTLY-FORMED TITS because, well, maybe we want to feel big and powerful, and we want to be ravishingly appealing to the opposite or the same gender, and a tiny childlike voice inside us says that another kind of life might be just a click away, and we, in our gullibility or naiveté want to believe that voice, we want to discover the secret key into the Promised Land, where a sense of belonging will envelope us and we’ll be unconditionally loved and all our wants and needs will be fulfilled.

But in reality, it is three in the morning, and we cannot get to sleep, and in time, we know that new feelings are going to supersede the ones of desire and yearning – these new feelings will be regret, self-doubt, and possibly disgust and self-loathing. We will be conscious of the enormous amount of time and human potential we have WASTED! At those times, it feels as though the Internet has coagulated in our veins.

A few years ago, a widely-cited article by Nicolas Carr appeared in The Atlantic called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?  The author talked about the difficulties he experienced in trying to read anything long form. It’s still a question for extensive investigation whether the Internet makes Carr or Zadie Smith, or indeed, any of us, struggle to focus on specific things for protracted periods of time. After all, people were randomly clicking through channels on television a good decade or two before they were clicking from website to website. Similarly, shop windows can exert an irresistible draw to those trying to pass by WITHOUT SPENDING ANOTHER DOLLAR – NO, NOT A PENNY!

I’m pretty sure that the job of any individual who wants to have a degree of independence or success in this world is to limit, for a while, his or her choices to ONE THING. It’s the task of reminding ourselves that freedom is not just the freedom to choose, but the freedom to not choose, or perhaps even more to the point, the freedom to sometimes not want anything.

Now I get up each weekday morning and I turn on Freedom and permit myself one option: to write for one hour. It has helped me better organize the time I call my own. That means a lot to me.

We wait on the tarmac
for the de-icing of the plane
The man from Newfoundland and I
have seats by the emergency exit
His bad legs need the extra room.
I make a mental note:
Do not rely on him to save us.

He will see his boy for the first time in three years
he pauses to steady his voice,
his boy was in Afghanistan.
“Served with honour.”

Meanwhile, Shame has the seat on my left,
my child
has never served honourably;
he is following me to Edmonton to see if he can ambush Christmas
I wish I could flush him out over Thunder Bay.

Back in Harbour Grace
The pastor had promised
when the soldier comes back, the church will throw a party
for the whole town to attend.

I can scarcely picture such a town,
and father-son stories are fraught with danger
I attempt to steer the conversation to
the cost of groceries.

Like anyone, Shame has a life story
he was conceived in suicide
grew up to love filth and darkness
would stand at a window, exposed, seeking judgement
if I let him.
Now I block his way
he can’t see a thing.

Flying is almost always
perfectly safe,
except for the candour of companions
from which, for a certain time
there is no escape.

Photo stolen from United Airlines

Sometimes I am nostalgic for life in the suburbs
after the ticket police drop another ticket on my windshield
when everyone says all the daycares are full
and to get a doctor you need to know somebody who knows somebody.

Life in the suburbs is egalitarian
you better not think you’re better than anybody else
don’t turn up your nose at the simple pleasures
grilling steaks and kids dancing through lawn sprinklers
everybody’s grass is equally green on all sides.

At Christmas, when we gather in the basement
It fills me with joy to burn all that fuel
to cuddle close
and see the snow dunes on rooftops.
When we get back from our walk in the ravine, our noses are like Rudolph’s
and it’s time to eat again.

It’s bliss to watch the action movies
and not give a damn about their critical merit
I think I stopped thinking for five minutes
I didn’t miss Montreal
You fell asleep in my arms
When you woke up, Bruce Willis had saved everyone
and for my part, I fetched you some tea.

When I get back to Montreal people want to speak fast in a difficult language
neighbours are shouting from one balcony to the next
the old man pissed on his own wall on St Patrick’s Day
the girl down the road looks twelve but pushes a stroller
on our block they leave garbage out for days and nobody complains
a cat decomposed on the street, a skunk sprayed the intersection
there was a dead rat floating in the Lachine Canal.

The Polish lady seems cross we didn’t buy a condo
—all nice young couples buy condos—
her croissants aren’t as good as the French lady’s
but when her doughnuts are fresh they’re the best.

After clocking out there’s a walk that takes me down
to the new development in Griffintown
if there’s time I’ll stop to stare at the sign for Farine Five Roses
then listen to the water splashing through the locks
You have to be careful of the cyclists swerving
and of the joggers spitting.
In the presbytery there are always two lamps framed in the windows
—light throws complicated shadows on stone and brick—
and the trees droop in the heat.

From our home, we watch the man release his dogs in the yard
they bounce around, bark, get shouted at, are ordered back inside.
A family of skunks, the mother and her young
cautiously cross the lawn,
I get out the shot glasses for a night in.
Tonight in Montreal it is the humid kind of chilly
the city sneaks under the door and into our room
in its insistent way,
We have to be insistent too.

Top image: Pierre-Luc Daoust, Photographe

In celebration of National Novel Writing Month, I am writing about a novel that changed my life.

I first read Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles in 2004 when I was nearing the end of my twenties. The notorious misanthropist’s novel of big ideas had already provoked huge controversy in France; his follow-up, Platform, even more so. Houellebecq ended up in court, accused of hate crimes, of which he was eventually exonerated. So before reading him I had some notion of what to expect. Houellebecq’s major literary innovation had been to mount a sustained critique of advanced capitalism in the form of fiction, and in particular, to expose the sexual relations that arise in a society based on relentless competition and glaring inequities.

I was in France at the time of my Houellebecq revelation. One night I went to a nightclub in La Bourboule, a tiny town in the heart of the Auvergne. I was alone; I was a single man. Nightclubs are designed to frustrate the will of people like me. But no matter, there was a pleasant enough fellow, clearly learning impaired, sitting at the bar, and I had the chance to practice my French with him, while occasionally casting lascivious glances at the girls on the dance floor. An hour or so passed and a group of rugby players approached us and for a while made vicious jokes at the expense of my bar companion. When the rugby players turned their attention to me it was to ask if I was a homosexual who was sleeping with the learning-impaired man. They tittered at their own idiotic innuendo. When they left, my bar companion gave me the saddest and most defeated look I ever saw, as if this kind of thing happened to him every day, and announced he was leaving.

I thereupon started to drink heavily, and I approached a couple of girls to ask them to dance, but I was shot down unceremoniously each time. With a sense of rage building in my heart, I decided I’d have to at least do something reckless with my night, so I switched from asking for dances to asking for drugs, approaching the most gangsterish looking men I could find. After only five minutes I had “scored.” I left the club with a young guy who had driven up that night with a small posse from Marseille. He said he had cocaine for me. The cost would be eighty euro. I didn’t have that much on me, having left my wallet in my car.

“Go get the money, then,” he urged me.

I started walking toward my car.

“Run!” he yelled.

When I returned to the club with the eighty euro, people were spilling out onto the street and it was chaotic. It took me a while to find my drug dealer. When eventually I did so, he seemed agitated.

“There are police, let’s go over here,” he said. “Let’s make this quick.”

Sure enough, there was a squad car around the corner, its blue lights pulsing against the outside walls of the club. My heart racing at the prospect of closing this deal, I pressed eighty euro into the drug dealer’s hand, he pressed a white ball into mine, and then urged me, again, to “Run!”

Back at my car, I opened my clenched fist. Inside was a ball of Kleenex in cling wrap. This was an outrage! I marched directly back to the club. By this point, my drug dealer was locked in a passionate embrace with the most beautiful girl in the village. I called out, “Hey! You ripped me off!” The drug dealer glanced over his shoulder like I was a speck of dandruff, and then turned his attention back to the girl.

Of course, with police, gangsters and beautiful girls everywhere, I had no chance of winning my case. I went back to my car defeated.

So after having lived this very Houellebecquian moment, the following night I found The Elementary Particles, and suddenly saw all the most seemingly important themes in life – including my own life – laid bare in the most precise, funny, touching, poignant and daring prose. Here was a story that talked in a disarmingly frank tone about sexual frustration, about solitude, about shame, but also about the thrill in your chest of finally meeting somebody you care about – and about so, so much more.

The Elementary Particles follows the travails of two brothers, Bruno and Michel, abandoned by their hedonistic mother. Bruno grows up to be a moderate success materially but is perennially lonely. His attempt to find pleasure and meaning at a sort of hippy commune ranks among the most hilarious plot-lines of any novel ever written. Michel, meanwhile, is a molecular biologist, who is solving the sex problem in an entirely novel way, by developing ideas that will give rise to a race of post-humans – a perfectly harmonious new species whose members are of no gender but instead have erogenous zones all over their bodies.

The two brothers launch into protracted soliloquies about Aldous Huxley, the human genome project and consumer society. You get great memorable quotations, like, “If life is an illusion it’s a pretty painful one,” or “Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so hard to give up hope.”

I dispatched the entirety of The Elementary Particles within 24 hours. To me it remains the most unputdownable book. It is a novel that has most definitely changed my life, teaching me that fiction isn’t simply entertainment or self-expression but a stage for dramatizing the most important ideas in the world.

 Top image: Still from the 2006 German film adaptation of The Elementary Particles

It took me a while to get around to writing about turning 37. Slowing down with old age. Chortle chortle! I was reminded that I wanted to write about this, appropriately enough, during this week’s writing class, when my instructor said that according to some psychologists, adolescence lasts until you are 35. From a very cursory Google search, I cannot immediately find a reference to this. However, I do find plenty of evidence of it in my own life.

One of the adolescent things I remember doing when I was 19 was packing up all my worldly possessions at frantic speed, running out the front door and piling everything into a jalopy and then hightailing it down Edmonton’s 99th Street because I wanted to skip out on my basement suite lease and go live with my girlfriend instead. This operation had the feel of a heist, except that the items I was stealing were my own. While I did this, my landlord was out back in the yard, watering the garden. He never saw me.

A few months later, in the dead of winter, my arguments with my now-roommate and girlfriend had reached a very testing frequency. But, as often happens during such periods of life, we had some great make-up sex. One night, while basking in the afterglow, I asked her if she would marry me. She said yes.

Three months passed and finally my girlfriend’s patience wore thin. She asked me why I hadn’t told my parents that we were, you know, engaged. The truth was, the prospect terrified me. I wasn’t ready. So I broke the whole thing off. And I found myself moving again. One of the few consolations of my new solitude was going back to the jewelry store, where I was paying for a ring on the installment plan, and asking for my money back. A nest egg of six hundred dollars!

When, at 29, I first met the woman who became my true love and eventual wife, I was still very much living for the weekend. I had a Friday night habit wherein I would get blinding drunk at Remedy Café on 109th Street, leave, and dial Pizza 73 from my cell phone. Then I would walk along Saskatchewan Drive and gaze at the blurry lights of downtown. Arriving home, I’d lie down on my couch and listen to my favourite music and then pass out.

Moments later the doorbell would ring. Startled out of my drunken doze, I would run to the door and count out the twenty-five dollars and a tip. “Thank you, thank you!” I’d half-shout to the pizza man, because I’m always so courageously loud when I’m drunk at three in the morning. I would assemble the pizza-and-wings deal on top of my coffee table; always marveling at the little plastic jigger in the shape of a table that separates the top layer (greasy wings) from the bottom layer (greasy pizza).

Around this general period of time, I had a Whiskey Night with a few friends of mine. I don’t know about my friends, but that night got me as pickled as a gherkin. Dave and I departed after midnight in a taxi-van. The driver dropped Dave off at his apartment tower and then headed to Blue Quill where I was temporarily living with my parents due to some fiscal problems. As the taxi-van lurched around the corner of 23rd Avenue, I felt my tummy wobble ominously. When the van jerked to a halt in the drive way, a hot wave of puke cascaded from my lips. My reflexes were too slow to open the van door more than a few inches. Most of my belly-effluent ended up inside the taxi-van and only a few token chunks made their way out into the snow.

Clearly I had not acquitted myself very well. But still being of an adolescent frame of mind, I had to try and make things worse.

“Extra fifty dollars charge for me to clean that up,” said the poor, disgusted cabbie.

“Outrageous!” I shouted. “I am not paying fifty dollars!”

“No sir, you make a mess, you pay.”

“No way!” I insisted. “I will pay you the full fare, and a generous tip, but I won’t be paying a cleaning charge because I will be cleaning this puke with my own bare hands.”

I thereupon handed him all the money I felt I owed him. I hauled open the van door and watched a few more dribs and drabs of my alcohol artshow drip onto the icy driveway. Suddenly I was moving very quickly. I ran to the house, fought with the key in the lock, won that battle decisively, and trooped through to the kitchen where I filled a bucket with piping hot water and some Mister Clean.

Back outside, I began my cleaning operation.

“Your van is going to be as good as new!” I called out to the cabbie.

I always enjoy a bit of manual work.

“There, see?” I called out, a minute later.

The van and the driveway were steaming from the hot water that I had poured liberally all over the place. I doubt the cabbie could actually see my handiwork. He probably wanted to get back to his wife and children.

What a spoilt, suburban shit muncher I must have seemed to him.

Two weekends ago, Monika sprung my surprise birthday present on me – a night at a bed & breakfast in the Eastern Townships – and we departed on a perfect, cloudless autumn day, arriving at the head of a trail called Le Diable Vert at 3pm, and we hiked into the trees, surrounded on all sides by mountains, and after a respectful rest to take in the sound of nothing more than the mooing of a cow, we drove into Sutton and went for dinner at Bistro Beaux Lieux. I got overconfident with my French and ordered Rognons de Veau, thinking Rognons were medallions, and so I ended up eating calf kidneys, which taste how I imagine eyeballs tasting, and the old Bohemian Saint-Emilion-quaffer next to us had a full-throated laugh at my expense, but I didn’t mind, because I knew I’d learned a word I’d never forget. I get off on that kind of thing. Our bottle of wine was very good, and because I was feeling decadent, I ordered a cheese plate. I knew that another bottle of wine was waiting back at the B&B, and not only that – a sauna, a clawfoot tub, a sumptuous bed, and – I’m just warming up to the best part – a night with somebody I want to share my whole life with.

It would be a boring and predictable conclusion if I talked about anything I’ve learned. Mostly I just feel very grateful to have made it this far and to have not exhausted the patience of the many people I care about. I like being 37. I like it a lot. I don’t miss adolescence. The adolescent is alive and well in me. He’s just not puking in cabs any more.

What will today bring in Montreal?

a flash flood, a pots-and-pans-brigade, a humid heat, a temporary truce, a tweet to arms, a ralentissement de service on the Ligne Orange

a soggy map, an article on spoiled brats, sheet lightning, a no-news news conference, a swimming rat, a ralentissement de service on the Ligne Bleue

a kettling, an emergency evacuation, two red squares on two white breasts, a dead cat on the pavement, a ralentissement de service on the Ligne Verte

a sudden darkness, falling bricks, another injunction, a dismembered human torso, a ralentissement everywhere
a siren before bed.