Category Archives: writing

I Done Been Bugged: A New Era

We like to think We Get It.
We’re all big-hearted people that grasp other people’s adversities — yada, yada, yada.
The trouble is, a lot of us don’t talk about our adversities, so how could you possibly grasp what you’re not even aware of?
I’ve been really bitchy for a while now, and it’s only in the last couple weeks that some of that has begun to evaporate. The trouble has been a few things, and I’ve sort of been sitting on it more than talking about it, because sometimes talking about it just doesn’t fucking help.
In fact, when it comes to cockroaches, talking about it makes it worse.
I’ve never understood pest problems, or why people lived in shitty buildings, or how you could sit idly by while your situation worsened and worsened.
But then it happened to me.
About five weeks before I blew my back out, in September ’08, I saw my first cockroach. I cleaned everywhere, but they kept appearing here and there as a result of a garbage-collecting Dumpster-diver on the first floor (fucker). Then I blew my back out and had to live on the floor for about six weeks as they escalated in numbers.
The last 22 months were an endless battle.
Honestly, I’m not sure I would have moved had I had the money. After all, once you get a cockroach infestation, I mean, geez — have eggs, will travel. You’re best to stay put once you get people working on the problem.
Right around then was when my bathtub faucet started to malfunction too. Naturally, having a hot bath’s a bit of a necessity when you have a back problem brought on by fucked-up overtense muscles.
For the last year, I’ve been running a bath by using the shower.
Then there’s the decaying kitchen floor.
It’s been a really fucking long two years — just on the “around home” front.
See, I don’t write about money and shit very often. It’s not really your business how I live. But here’s the thing: I’m pretty smart about how to live The Appears-Good Life on a budget. I buy cheap wine that isn’t lighter fluid, I know how to make little pieces of meat go far in tasty brilliance, and I buy a few “quality” ingredients to give me the impression I’m living it up.
But what I’m really doing is living very cheaply in an expensive city. I don’t buy clothes, go to fancy salons, or any of that jazz. Life hasn’t made income very disposable for me. When I eat out, it’s usually because others are treating me or because I’ve budgetted two weeks ahead to afford that dinner-and-a-beer.
And that’s the way it goes. It’ll continue that way now that I’ll be returning to school to learn basic business accounting and other self-employment skills for the next year, too, while I journey down the Working-for-Me future.
So when it  comes to “home life”, it’s really important that I like where I live — because I’m financially, & writing-hobby-wise, required to stick around a lot.
This spring, the cockroaches reached the worst point ever.
They began escalating in February.
By the end of May, I’d now had a couple cockroaches in my bed (clutched one under my pillow one night), had them crawl on food, and other horrifying things — all for someone who’s had a lifelong terror of bugs.
Despite 18+ months of persistent problems, I’d never had them outside of the kitchen or in any kind of numbers like they’d now become — and they had full reign of my home, invading every corner in a matter of weeks.
I couldn’t invite people over for shame I’d have a roach run up the wall in front of them.
In my part of the world, cockroaches are NOT common, and there’s a stigma attached to having them. And the fucking people who say, “Why don’t you move?” ARGH!
Like it’s that easy when you don’t like what you’re dealt. Just pick up and go? Not everyone’s reality allows these things, and a little more empathy and less judgey “Well, gee, that seems easy to solve” sanctimony would go a long, long ways.
You want to bankroll what life requires on my behalf? No? Then don’t fucking ask why I didn’t move. Because: Money.
Well, I finally learned the laws and realized I had a very, very easy time to file an official complaint about the state of living. At the end of May, I called City and reported my building, then I called my landlord and informed him that, NOW, I wasn’t working, and NOW I had the time to make his life a living hell if he didn’t stop making mine one, now that he had 6 months to get started on it. I said I had a very, very strong desire to fulfill that threat, and a REAL GOOD way with words when it came to writing letters to politicians and shit.
Unbeknownst to me, because of the cockroaches, an inspection happened immediately (without notifying me of entry, thanks!).
Two days after, pest control was begun throughout the entire building for the first time!
Three weeks later, I saw my last roach. It’s been nearly 2 months after pest control and the last week or two has finally seen me begin to fall asleep without the last thought before I shut my eyes being of all the cockroaches I’ve seen, or of grabbing one as I flopped over and stuck my arm under my pillow in bed.
Yesterday and today, my landlord has begun to repair my complicated bathtub problem.
Next month I get a new kitchen floor.
I wish I’d gone to the city sooner. Thank you, City of Vancouver.
We think the government doesn’t give a shit, or that the system will never help us, but all we’re doing is just removing a possible solution from an otherwise grim outlook where we need ALL possibilities to be explored.
This morning, I was telling a friend about how much life in The Time of the Cockroaches sucked, and I got all emotional and began tearing up and gasping.
I hadn’t realized what a burden it’d been and how cynical it made me of life and people while I fought and fought for resolution to my problems — but I fought in the wrong direction and went to the wrong people.
Fighting the fight isn’t good enough.
Fighting the fight requires it being the right kind of fighting, and against the right opponent. It means knowing where to turn and what you need.
But, mostly, it requires you believing you’re in the right to pursue that goal.
I became outraged at the end of April, flew into a rage on the phone, but with the most calculated and well-thought series of viable threats I’ve ever strung together.
And now I await my landlord’s return with the Final Parts so that I may once again bathe with pleasure. And without hot water dripping from a shower.

___

We do things wrong.
And things go south.
And, if we’re lucky, we learn a lot about ourselves in the process, making a difficult experience not have been in vain.
I’m lucky. I’ve learned a lot. I know what to worry about in life now, I know when life kinda sucks for realz. I also know I’ve only scratched the surface of what others endure. Yeah. I’ve learned a lot.
Don’t think you know what people are living with. You often haven’t got a fucking clue. Lord knows most of my friends didn’t.

Mental Health: In Which Steff Calls a Spade a Spade

A couple months ago, I proposed to talk about writing for therapy, how to kinda “go there”, via blogging.
The conference was yesterday. It was an “unconference” put on by end-patients and people who work on the peripheries of mental care.
Why did I want to get involved?
For a million reasons. I’ll get to most of them shortly.
But, first: I proposed my talk without knowing the conference’s “reputation” or anything like that. I just wanted a forum to talk about depression.
Unbeknownst to me, I stepped into the thick of a controversial “unconference.” It wasn’t until Friday that I really realized just how controversial it was. Whether it’s because ballsy speakers like Steven Schwartz speak in dismissive vernacular, saying edgy-yet-funny adjectives a lot of boring people object to, or because of who was organizing it, or even the press some of us speakers were getting, the reactions were ridiculously sharp and pointed.
Late Friday night, I saw comments some anonymous dumb fuck left on the Mental Health Camp’s website, and I got pretty riled up. Since then, all the comments were deleted, which I take serious issue with.
Me, I never would have deleted the comments. We convened the camp to fight stigma against the “idea” of mental illness, so why would you delete, and not fight, that stigma when it stands up and attacks you? Deleting and silencing the attack does nothing to neutralize it. But that’s where I stand and it’s not my blog. So, yeah. Moving on.
The asshat’s comments varied, but the most offensive of them all were that a number of those involved in the Mental Health Camp were doing so only to propel their image and get their allotted moments of Warholian fame. Media whores, basically, all faking their interest to get noticed.
Heh. Yeah, okay. Fucking shrewd, that.
A line in the comment made me wonder if I was one of the people they alluded to, just because I had the audacity to do an interview with CBC about the conference.
Here’s the deal, all right?
I’ll be the first to admit there were organizational issues with the conference. That’s what happens with not-for-profit amateur/volunteer organizers, people who have organized a conference just to have discussion and don’t have experience organizing them.
Oh, well. That’s life. It happens. But it’s not about the organizing.
It’s about the messages explored — mental health, stigma, and the fact the lives are destroyed by mental illness every moment of every day, and the fact that EVERYONE in their lifetime will experience mental illness at some point, and YET we don’t talk about it.
Well, I do, and I have for years.
I’ve been writing about depression, weight issues, self-esteem, lack of confidence, and everything else I’ve battled in life since 2005, and blogging since 2004. I’ve been getting real fuckin’ raw and honest since 2006.
There are a whole lot of things I’m willing to do to have success as a writer. Do you know what the least smart of them would be?
Letting myself in any way be any kind of poster girl for any mental illness.
Let’s see, when was the last time a Hollywood publicist suggested their celebrity client embrace their mental illness for the public as a means of netting better starpower in the press? Um, never.
Know why?
No one wants to be thought of as “nuts”.
Why?
Because people who are strong, intelligent, articulate, engaging, and well-liked don’t come out and admit their mental illnesses. They don’t talk about them. So stigma exists because all we see are the nutty fucks you try to avoid in hallways, or the whackjobs they put on television shows.
But those are extremes.
When assholes like that anonymous commenter attack a conference whose only purpose is to bring the overly-shamed and constantly-silenced issue of mental health to the forefront only because they dislike the people behind it, and they use that opportunity to suggest it’s basically Starfucking by those involved, it’s an insult to the seriousness of the issue.
It also suggests they have no fucking idea what it’s like to have been, in my case, an otherwise strong and intelligent person who took the wrong medication and considered suicide before spending the next year-plus trying to claw my way out of the depths.
It suggests they have no idea what it’s like to live under the clutches of your mind, body, and chemistry’s whimsy on a day-in, day-out, year-by-year basis, never being able to rise above a sick world of fear, chaos, and hopelessness that can’t manifest outwardly, that you hear inside your head every time you wake or lie down to sleep.
It suggests they don’t fathom that mental illness is the most costly and insidious of sicknesses in society — it destroys the fabric of life, of all the lives around the sufferer, not just the body of the afflicted. It ends relationships, destroys marriages, causes debt, and is the largest reason for employee leaves of absence in the modern workforce.
I don’t WANT to talk about depression.
But I need to.
Because what happened to me can happen to anyone.
Because it happened to my mother, and, as a 17-year-old girl, I walked in on her attempting suicide with the very pills that caused her chemically-induced depression — one like I myself would experience 17 years later.
Because doctors will tell you birth control pills don’t cause depression.
Because I know my birth control made me want to kill myself and feel like life could never have hope again.
I need to talk about depression because I’m tired of bi-polars, schizophrenics, and other more acute or rare mental health concerns having the limelight in “mental illness,” when it’s depression that’s most likely to touch, and destroy, the average life.
I feel like their more “stereotyped” afflictions make it less likely for seemingly average Jolenes like myself to come out and say, “I’m not that afflicted, but it still really fucked me up, too, and no one saw any big signs…”
I am a good writer. I’m a really, really good writer. I’m a passionate speaker who will not mince her ideas. I don’t back down from a fight. I’m engaging, funny, and even self-deprecating. I’m a great communicator with friends, family, everyone.
And yet depression almost took me out of the game of life.
But I survived.
I made it to the other side. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been. I’m happy most of the time.
Still, I’m surrounded by people I see who are skating through life with the cool indifference of someone struggling with depression. I see it everywhere. And we’re NOT TALKING ABOUT IT.
You want to attack my IDEAS? Go for it.
But don’t fucking attack ME or any of those people who’ve had the STRENGTH to write about all the things YOU make fun of, that YOU won’t trust, or YOU can’t admit about yourself.
We’re out there only for the reason that we can’t be silent anymore. Society can’t AFFORD our silence anymore. We need to hear our thoughts expressed on the page, we believe our experiences are real and representative of the whole, yet largely ignored by the mainstream.
And we’re not going to be quiet about it.
Not anymore.
Until you’ve lost your job — like I once did — for writing in the public eye about your darker self, until you’ve had the courage to write without tempering your weaker thoughts and fears, until you’ve been able to admit you have an affliction the majority of society can’t understand and doesn’t know how to act around, you have no right to criticize us for the moments of acknowledgement we might finally receive after years of having the courage to tell our stories no matter what the prices have been.
Now it’s easier for me. But where the fuck were you in 2006 when I wanted to commit suicide only 9 days after writing the most harrowing things I’ve ever published? Where were you when my traffic dropped to nothing as I used my blogs to work through my depression? Where were you when I lost a job and nearly my home for having a voice on less acceptable topics? Where were you when I struggled to maintain faith in speaking out? Where were you when I constantly had to lower my voice when I said what I wrote about?
Sure, now you know about me, but I’ve been doing this for a long fucking time and I’ve paid a LOT of steep prices for my honesty.
But I’ve paid ’em and now you can’t shut me up. Just try it, honey. You’ll only wind me up more.
If I finally have an audience and a wider means of getting my message out, you’d have to be a fucking moron to think I’d walk away from that opportunity.
Oh, and being single and getting press for having gone nuts, been suicidal, and longterm depressed? Yeah, that’ll be a fucking brilliant way for me to get laid. I hear men are wild about that shit.
Marketing GENIUS, clearly.
Whoever you were, you anonymous spineless motherfucking commenter: Grow up. You’re a fucking idiot. Open your eyes. See that some battles need to be waged with faces on them.
At least I have the guts to show mine.

In Which Steff Talks About Mental Health

Come Saturday I’ll be giving a talk at Vancouver’s “Mental Health Camp,” where the goal is to get people thinking about stigmas attached to a wide range of mental conditions — from ADHD and depression through to eating disorders and compulsions all the way to harder-core afflictions like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
Me, I’ll be talking specifically on two things — one, I’ll give a 45-minute session on blogging for therapy in my solo “Ripping the Scab Off through Blogging” talk, and two, I’ll be on a panel discussing how each of us 4 panelists have used social media to share our psychological struggles and what it’s meant for us.
This posting is sort of to just touch on both of those, in support of the event, and to let you know what’s going down.

_____

I’ll be honest: Yeah, I’m not particularly wild about talking at something called “Mental Health Camp.” There is stigma, yeah. Damn right there is.
I also know that if there’s anyone who can overcome such stigma, I’m probably at the front of the line.
I’ve spent much of the last five years already writing about myself in very open ways as I take the journey of going from She Who Was Very Unhappy to this much more interesting and fun-to-be-with version of self I’m excavating from under years of neglect.
Writing about myself has been a huge part in how I’ve been able to accept where I was, where I needed to be, and what it would take to get there.
By learning how to write in an open way while still hanging on to details that weren’t really necessary to share, I’ve managed to be open yet keep some of my struggles inside, too. Snapshots, that’s what y’all get.
In homage to one of the great Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, I call the writing technique “surfacing” and it’s pretty simple to do, it’s just a matter of perspective. Shifting that perspective ever so slightly creates a whole new reward from the writing.
I’ll be talking about it in  detail on Saturday, and don’t want to blow my hand by writing all about it here and now.
The talk will include a lot more than that, though.
I’ll look at the differences between journal-writing and blogging, and point out all the pros and cons of turning to the web for an audience. I’ll tell you who should be blogging more openly (almost everyone) and who shouldn’t (and there are some).
I’ll tell you the top 10 reasons I think anyone willing to blog should be willing to be more personal, and why blogging for therapy just makes sense from a societal point of view — both from solidarity and healing perspectives.
I’ll also share the prices I’ve paid while attempting to cash in* on living the revealed life. It’s not something one should enter with the foolish notion that “I’ll write it and they’ll read it.” There’s a lot that can go wrong. There’s a lot that can play out well. There’s much to consider.

____

Later, I’ll be on a panel with three friends — all of whom have had far, far harder mental health journeys than I have — discussing how we’ve been “out” about our lives and the prices/rewards it’s cost/yielded us.
In both situations, I’ll briefly outline the facts: I lived with mild depression for most of my life. I’ve learned that, when it comes to natural depression FOR ME, it’s controlled with diet and exercise. I have indeed been medicated on a few occasions, both for “situational depression” as well as ADHD.
I’m on no meds now. It’s not a prize I’ve won for being a Good Mental Health Patient. It’s just that I’ve found a way to mostly regulate my chemistry.  When I was ON meds and began eating well and exercising, what WAS a good level of meds went sideways fast as I started building my own seratonin and dopamine.
Do NOT fuck with meds just because I’ve been able to get off mine. It’s NOT about the meds, it’s about what’s safe for you. Talk to doctors!
But all this is to say I’ve been to my mental health hell with a chemical depression that took two years of medication to regulate back to normal. I’ve been on the verge of suicidal with a desperate cry for professional help in the past, all while being an intelligent person who felt trapped in this chemical mood I couldn’t shake for months and months.
Before that, I had to overcome a head injury. Since the chemical depression, I’ve had to learn to adjust to an adult-ADHD diagnosis and how it makes me see the world.
So, I’ve had some experiences, and they’re probably more common to the general populace than my colleagues’ are, so I’m happy I can provide a “mental health light” perspective to balance it out.
Being on the other side now, I remember how hard it was to be in the chokehold the disease of depression had on me. I never thought I would escape. Suicide seemed like a smart plan.
Here, now, and looking back, it does shock me how putting my head down and keeping on keeping on, fighting the fight, eventually paid off and has brought me to a better sense of self than I’ve ever known before. Yeah, I’m proud of the stuff I accomplished.
The journey was long and strange, and I feel I’m still on it and I’ll always have to be aware that depression can find me again, but having this kind of self-awareness and openness, as much as it’s been problematic at times, is something I feel that will probably help me navigate whatever stormy waters might one day roll my way again.
The truth shall set you free?
Yeah. Maybe. Let’s talk.

____

People in Vancouver can see these talks, among many other good ones, for a lowly $10 at the door. There are plenty of tickets, and, yes, it’ll be air conditioned in the heatwave. Wahoo. There’s a chance it’ll be streaming live, and if so, I’ll be posting that URL for my followers on Twitter, and you should check there Saturday morning, in case I forget to post it here.
*Figuratively, not literally.

On Capote: Writing is a Dangerous Business

On November 16th, 1959, Truman Capote read a New York Times article with only 300 words that would change his life, and American literature, forever. The article began:

A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged. The father, 48-year-old Herbert W. Clutter, was found in the basement with his son, Kenyon, 15. His wife Bonnie, 45, and a daughter, Nancy, 16, were in their beds. There were no signs of a struggle and nothing had been stolen.

It’s ironic that it’s on American Independence Day that I’m watching Capote, the film of how the book Capote would write transpired.

An early cover from Penguin's release of In Cold Blood.


I’m starting to realize what an important movie it is in my collection, from a million different perspectives, almost all of them to do with writing and what it means to me or what I feel it says about writing.
And in that realization, I found myself at a loss for a brief moment there, “pause” frozen on my screen, pondering what effect Truman Capote’s original book, In Cold Blood, must’ve had on the mindset of America.
The murders themselves, of course, resonated with the country then, but I wonder who, other than Capote, realized what it meant in the adolescence of his country. These days, it would seem he was ahead of the pack in those observations.
In the five decades since the Clutter Killings, one could say we’ve witnessed the death of the American Dream. With a look across the cultural landscape, one can’t ignore the economic strife America’s battling, the crime that has redefined the geography of the land, and the loss of the Here-vs-There that once existed — the “safe”-country-versus-the-“bad”-city mentality.
Where is the America that existed before it all? Gone, like any culture any other place in the world — a victim of modernity and technology?
About In Cold Blood, Wikipedia says:

The book examines the complex psychological relationship between two parolees, who together commit a mass murder, an act they were not capable of individually. Capote’s book also explores the lives of the victims and the effect of the crime on the community where they lived. In Cold Blood is regarded by critics as a pioneering work of the true crime genre.

It’s safe to say that In Cold Blood was one of the first mass killings in which the rest of the country had to say, “My god, if it could happen to them, it could happen to us.”
With that came fear, a fear that’s forever stained the fabric of America.
Anyone who’s paid attention to USA’s politics since 2001 knows just how destructive it can be to adapt to life under a regime of fear.
Well, by 1960, America had inklings of what “fear” was. It was the time of McCarthy and the Cold War, and a decade-plus of post-Holocaust reality that, out there, Evil existed.
And now, with the handiwork of killers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, the fear lived at home, too.
Capote’s true-crime masterwork is a book widely accepted to be a jumping-off point for what fine literature was able to do to real-life on the pages.* In it, a real and tangible look was given into the headspace of these killers — one of whom had very much the same sort of horrible childhood of abandonment and abuse as Capote, offering this brilliant author the opportunity to internally juxtapose the life he’d been able to create for himself despite his tragic beginnings, versus the horror Smith wreaked upon others as a result of his own.
And that, friends, is often what brilliant writing is — the seeking of truth in everything, and the ability to own it within yourself. The inability to do the latter in a lasting way, however, can be devastating to a writer, and Capote’s decline should be a warning to all writers.
Reading In Cold Blood was a defining point in my life as a writer/reader. True life’s tragedies could be rendered in beautiful language that conveyed so much more than just photographic evidence of its horrors.
I doubt it was Capote’s work alone that stirred a new consciousness of the possibility of Evil Within amongst Americans — much of society was headed in that direction at the time, powered by media and politicans.
But Capote did what I love that good writers can do: Through a seemingly miniscule event, he correctly understood the quickening pulse of his country, and that this event — a seemingly small rural tragedy, buried a few pages into the newspaper on his morning read — was something that spoke of a world to come, of changes that loomed in his country’s previously untouchable heartland.

______

As much as this film makes me want to be a writer, it terrifies me — the price it suggests one would pay for being great seems far too high.
Capote, I feel, was destroyed by his subject (and himself).

A young Truman Capote by Irving Penn.


With his book’s success bound to his subject’s journey to the electric chair, and his need to understand the parallels in their lives, Truman Capote slipped into depression and guilt. He almost certainly was traumatized by the reality that he knew Smith’s execution was necessary for his book to be the brilliance it could be.
Deep down inside, I’m sure Capote realized having Smith living would contradict the “truths” the writer would write in the book, that it might be dangerous to his masterwork’s longevity. No one wants to think like that, but I guarantee you the thought would occur to any intelligent writer. What if…
Today, speculation does exist that Capote fictionalized entire passages of what was boasted to be true in every word. Evidence of the fictionalizing has been hard to come by.
Having that “what if” of execution work out in your favour — guaranteeing the “truthfulness” of what would be your masterwork — standing there to bear witness as the noose snaps the neck of the man who is all that’s wedged between you and literary immortality, that must induce some pretty horrific guilt-laden realities for a writer.
In the end, it took him 4 years to write the book, and 18 years to drink himself to death before his 60th birthday in 1984.
The book came out in ’65, and Capote became somewhat a mockery of himself within the next seven years. He would never again write anything considered “great” and, by 1978, was comfortably threatening suicide on national television, the punchline of many a joke.
I believe, ultimately, that his willingness to go as far as he could to write about those murders and to draw parallels between his life and the life of Perry Smith is what drove him into his alcoholic haze that choked the greatness from him.
Writing is a dangerous business.
Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
The choices we make of holes to dig and skeletons to reveal, they define who we writers are in that moment and who we’ll become down the line. Writers must accept that these words they trifle with hold powers they maybe don’t expect, and the journeys taken to weave words can burrow deep into a writer.
Some opened doors will never be closed.
Capote couldn’t close his, so he drank to numb the opened doors away.
One could say he should have truly dived into the abandonment he felt as a child — that he was only comfortable peeling away the truths about others but terrified what doing so might reveal of him.
After all, he was an openly gay Southern man when being gay still meant being “one of them”. He was an outsider, born poor, spent a lonely childhood never belonging anywhere, and found his solace in writing.
When he stopped pushing envelopes and didn’t publish anything of significance beyond In Cold Blood, I would suspect he lost that solace and instead felt as though he had betrayed some part of who he was.
Not having been true in life and now not on the page, I’m certain Capote probably felt like a fraud and found himself seeing life through the eyes of Perry Smith, believing he could never really belong where he socially was perceived to be.
In my lowly opinion, the greatest, most tragic men in “big” American literature in the last 100 years were Hemingway, Capote, and Hunter S. Thompson.**
Each searched for an ideal, a life they felt obliged to enjoy or a dream they held about Their America and what the modern world could be. Each never found what they sought. Each engineered his own demise.
Ironically, though, Capote did achieve what he sought — the execution of a man he fell in love with after identifying with everything that made Smith the monster America believed him to be, a monster Capote possibly wondered if he himself had inside — and it gave him the book he dreamed he could write, solidified his placed as a master of American English literature, and it is, one could argue, that achievement (and guilt for it) which destroyed him.
Writing is a dangerous business.
*Some would argue too that Capote’s take on the killings romanticized and even justified the murders from a sociological point of view, and that the “literary” non-fiction approach may have led to the erosion of facts and journalistic irresponsibility. These aren’t entirely wrong, nor right.
**Without getting into a lengthy debate with hugely relevant but lesser-knowns like David Foster Wallace & John Kennedy Toole. Just of the “big scene” American writers.

RANT: Elite? Who's "Elite"?

Yesterday, someone in the Vancouver social media scene* sort of thought it ironic that I should slag “tweetups” as being elitist and circle-jerky, since I was avoiding the whole worldwide “Social Media Appreciation Day” thing that Mashable sponsored and launched right here in Vancouver.
Apparently the thought is that I am now “elite” in Vancouver.
Yeah, whatever.
I was taken aback a little, to be honest. About being called elite, not that Mashable should say we are the seat of the world’s social media scene right now.
So, about that. Let’s talk about social media in Vancouver and maybe how I do or don’t fit into it, okay?
These days, compared to a lot of people, I don’t have a “huge” Twitter following — it’s about 3,500, but in there are a lot of really notable people in media. I suppose that’s why Klout thinks I’m up there in my influence now. Weird shit.**
Now, you gotta know: I logged onto Twitter back in April of 2008, looked around, and said “This is fuckin’ lame. No way this will ever catch on.”
I didn’t log in again until August, when it sorta started making some sense to me.
Then I found myself liking the challenge of coming up with interesting things that people might get a kick out of, or respond to — I loved the resonance I had when I was creative and/or funny.
For me, Twitter has always been about the thrill of creation. I challenge myself to see the world uniquely, and try to relate it to others in a way that makes them indentify and think, “YEAH, TOTALLY.” I like to make observations most people have only the inclination to think, but seldom to speak.
I try and be to Twitter in lifestyle observations what someone like George Carlin might’ve been — that’s my goal. I’m falling short, sure, but that’s the goal. I’m not fucking there to be all buddy-and-chatty, but I do let myself get social on there, and love the friends it’s brought into my “real” life.
Frankly, being on Twitter has changed and improved my life in EVERY way. I don’t deny that, and it’s why it’s such a valued role / time-focus for me. I do LOVE the opportunities it generates.
When it comes to blogging in Vancouver, I can count on one hand the number of official “blogging” events I’ve attended — and one was as a speaker. I’ve been to less than 10 tweetups in two years. I’m hardly “on the scene” except via what you see online, and that’s how I’d prefer it.
To be truthful, I have social phases, they come and go — usually with the seasons, literally. Winter, I hibernate, but summer, I love to see people more.
As far as celebrities and/or “connected” people on Twitter or in blogging, know whose ass I kiss? No one’s. People I talk to, I talk to because I’ve got something to say or I genuinely like them, or, as is often the case, they’ve said something that springboards into the perfect joke for me to crack.
I think blogging/Twitter celebrities are a fucking laugh, because I’ve “been one” in the past, and I know what my life was like behind the scenes and how hard I had to work to keep that wagon-wheel turning — and how much I personally began to compromise to see that happen.
I know how disposable we “social media stars” all are. Think you’re a creative genius? Yeah, you’re just one of millions — and it can go as quickly as it comes, as I’ve learned myself. Get over yourself, ‘cos pedestals and empires both come tumbling down, my friend.
Online celebrity that your livelihood depends upon not as enviable a position as you might think, so I don’t care to be a professional blogger. If I did, you’d see oodles of ads on here or affiliate sites.
But, you don’t.
Maybe you will one day — I’m not above it; it’s just that I’m not interested in what it takes to keep going successfully. I have NO illusions about how hard it is to keep that success going, and I don’t want to be beholden to my content right now. Advertising can influence content if it becomes too financially integral to you, and I’m on this blogging journey for myself and to create dialogue about things, not to have a livelihood. Priorities, and I know what mine are right now.
As a result, I don’t need to go to tweetups to whore myself for clients, network, or make buddies, since I’m already stretched for making time for people I care about, so I kinda hate tweetups, for the most part.
Why? They’re awkward. A lot of tweetups can be phony, filled with self-puffery and promotion. Every time you shake a hand, you get a resume. It’s often loud and blarey. No “real” communication happens at them. They’re cliquey — I’m forced to pick people to hang out with, and I don’t WANT to pick a table and stick with it; I’d rather meet a wide assortment of people. I’m a mingler, not a “sit and be exclusive” type, and I hate feeling like I have to stick with who I came with. I prefer smaller events with 10 or fewer people, where I can actually make eye-contact with everyone and talk to each person at the table.
In short?
I didn’t fucking ASK to be liked by you, or anyone.
All I sought to do was be real, be myself, have a place to put my voice, and honour my responsibility to deliver the content I know I’m capable of creating.
THAT’s what I do.
THAT’s what I want acclaim for and feel I deserve it for, because I do take risks and put myself out there, and I’ve been judged, and I’ve lost jobs, and I’ve been ostracized, all while I’ve fought to have relevance for my voice and the beliefs I think deserve to get air time with everyone else’s.
I’m a WRITER. I’m a writer who uses the now-accessible modern tools well. That’s ALL.
I’ve paid the real-life price to get noticed and be outspoken, and I did it on my terms the whole goddamned time.
Yes, I think that’s worth saying.
Yes, I’m proud of never compromising who I am.
You think that makes me full of myself? Then I’m sorry you don’t know what it’s like to have pride in what you’ve created. Pride is good, so long as you realize you’re not the only one with skillz.
I deliberately avoid hanging out with those perceived to be “the elite” because I don’t want ANYONE to think that’s all that I’m about.
I’ve worked too hard for this NOT to be about MY CONTENT and ONLY my content.
Am I going to diss the elite? No fucking way. Why not? Because some of them are incredible people doing incredible things, and they deserve every bit of their acclaim, whether you think so or not. A lot of people slam the “elite” out of jealousy or some sense of entitlement that leaves them feeling like they’ve been robbed via others’ success.
It’s bullshit. You get what you work for in life, and if you’re not getting what you want, you’re doing it wrong.
Trust me, this I know. I’ve spent a lot of time fucking it up over the years. I have a doctorate in fucking up, honey.
These days, I’m just riding the wave life brings me, and if being myself and not censoring my thoughts on Twitter somehow has given me cachet with a wide range of people, then that’s great, but it’s not EVER been the motivation behind anything I’ve tweeted or blogged.
I was the unpopular kid in high school so I get how bullshit popularity is, and how, for every person who’s accepted and celebrated, there are a dozen who are isolated and hurt — and that, too, is bullshit.
I am NOT a part of that circle. I am NOT a part of that hurt.
If I fucking cared about the circle-jerk, or thought my social status mattered, I’d probably try to offend fewer people.
I don’t even know what elitism is anymore, because I know I’m sure as hell not guilty of it, yet I get the feeling I’m accused of it.
I’m an anti-social person who comes to hang out some of the time, but would rather have someone over for coffee, not tweet about their visit, and just keep it real. I’m not snubbing anyone, it’s just not my deal.
Walk a decade in my shoes and maybe you’ll see why I like my quiet, anti-social life.
Know who I had over for breakfast this morning? Nope, you don’t. They’re “elite”, according to some people’s skewed perspectives on things, but I don’t give a fuck if you know. Why? Because I don’t need your approval, I don’t need the reputation-crutch of name-dropping, and I just generally don’t care.
The only time I do care is when people think I’m mean or a jerk, because I’m not, and it’s plain wrong to think so.
Find a time I’ve used cruelty against a person or group for humour. Give me an example. You can’t. Tell me about the time that I publicly ostracized someone who did something inconsequential, making an mockery of them in an attempt to belittle them. Right, you can’t. Tell me about the time that I snubbed people who approached me at an event. Yeah, you can’t do that either.
Because that’s not who I am.
I’m a scattered ADHD chick with strong but fair opinions and a biting sense of humour who’s just doing her shit, and people seem to like it.
Where you think it places me on the social spectrum is all about your deal, it’s not my reality.
It’s like that line in the Breakfast Club opening voiceover — “You see us how you want to see us.”
But I’m the chick that wakes up knowing I live with a bug problem and have to struggle to pay the rent.
I’m not on the A-list, I’m not hobnobbing, I’m not well-to-do, and I’m not who you fucking think I am.
Just because I give you this strategic view on my world doesn’t mean you really know jack shit about my life, so don’t kid yourself. You know EXACTLY what I want you to know, and not a fucking bit more — because I’m anti-social and things about my life don’t just “slip” into the public knowledge. It’s very much under my thumb. All of it.
You think I’m the ultimate oversharer? Heh. Right. I’m pulling the puppet-strings — I’m a content creator, I’m not a diarrhetic flood with no censure. Trust me, there’s a master plan, but it doesn’t involve hobnobbing with “the scene”.
It’s time to get over what we think other people are, and just take them exactly for what they say and do.
Because, you know, if you actually judge me on my words and actions, I’ll be goddamned proud to stand behind them.
And that’s who I am.
*This person meant it in a casual observation way and I didn’t take offense but it was the first time someone really put into words what I’ve sort of had people suggesting for a while now, and now that it’s out and said, I thought I’d write about it. As I started writing, I got worked up. Thus the cookie crumbles.
**Maybe being interested in Klout seems hypocritical after this rant, but why would I create content if I didn’t want it read or absorbed? I’m absolutely interested in knowing my resonance, I want to be read, I just don’t care about getting on “the list” socially.

Interdimensional Limbo

When I transition through phases in life, I tend to find myself sort of mentally overwhelmed, and my response to it is that I find one thing to focus on, to just get somewhere, then I can take a look at the larger picture from a better place.
Or, you know, something.
I’m onto a “me” phase out of necessity. Things are in the works, big change is afoot for this here writer.
Coming up on July 1st, I’m officially un(der)employed.
Happy Canadian independence (repatriation, if yer picky) day, indeed.
The Canadian system allows us to earn about 25% of our working salary on top of unemployment benefits, legally and without financial penalty. It makes life much, much easier — puts the food on the table when benefits only cover my basic costs of living, not even food.
I’m lucky, I’ve got that 25% worktime on my hands. My present/former employers do love me and I get work when I need it / they have it. So, you know, I eat. I like this.
Do I want to go back there full-time long-term?
Well, I’m faced with knowing I’ve given the last 10 years of my life to an industry that is at the mercy of international currencies, cultural trends, taxation policies, and government legislation.
Time and time again, I’ve gotten the ax. It’s unpredictable.
“Well, why do it,” you ask? Working in film is a lifestyle choice. The people are hip, fun, cool. The jobs are plentiful in variety and come in waves. It’s creative but structured. It’s an industry you work in because you’re a fan — anything you can do to be a part of film? Yeah, diggit. You contributed. You’re a part of art immortal, a member of a creation team.
But I’m too old for this shit.
Being Canadian, there’s lots of great options available. As a worker in a long-tenured position, I can return to school — which I’d have to pay for — and receive unemployment benefits for up to 2 years. I’ll be looking into some options in the coming weeks, but sort of know what I’d like to pursue.
What a time of change, though.
Never coulda seen this coming last year. What a wild ride the last three months have been. I already know some of what’s coming for the next three, too, and it’s just more of a wild ride.
When I lost my job, my attitude was “Well, I can’t change that, but I can be open to what this time brings.”
I see some people resisting the change life’s thrown at them of late, acting from a place of fear instead of empowerment. I ain’t judging. I’ve been there before.
There’s a certain salty confidence one gains from hard times. Lord knows I done seen mine.
I’ve never been as confident in myself as I am now, but I’m also at an absolute loss to tell you what my life will entail. I know aspects of it, sure — writing, speaking, doing comedy, losing weight, looking for clients, et al… but where it’ll lead? Who knows.
It’s the mystery that makes it fun. It’s the intrigue that makes my eyes sparkle with curiosity. I’ve loved the weird detours I’ve had so far, and can’t wait for whatever unexpected discoveries come my way.
As long as I’m eating month to month? Well, hey, man. Let’s see.
If you’ve never read Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, it’s one of those books that’s in that crowd everyone should read in college — Siddhartha, Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, etc. It’s a book about a young shepherd boy who dreams of achieving his goal one night, and sets off in search of treasures in far away lands. It’s a fable, and it’s a wonderful little novella.
Along the way he is frequently told “Maktub,” which apparently translates from the Arabic to mean “It is written.”
Beautiful thought but I’m not so sure I agree. I can’t believe the strangeness I’ve endured year in, year out is written.
Life seems like a game of celestial pick-up sticks to me, my friends. Throw what you can, get what you can, and see what you can make of it.
Perhaps, though, life is written. Perhaps I just need to have a sly smile and know my life will take me the right places, because I know myself and I know my dreams. Perhaps, in that way, it really is written.
Life really is a gorgeous mystery sometimes. It’s nice to believe in the mystical, to think there’s some cosmic puppeteer helping to orchestrate incredible happenings of rich experiences, if you’re willing to play the role and follow the program.
The last time my life began moving in strange and mythical ways, I landed my ass in the Yukon for a year — living in the land of the Midnight Sun, reading dead writers, learning about writing, and experiencing my dream of seeing Northern Lights night after night.
There’s a lot to be said for sitting back and telling life to take the wheel for a while. Who knows where it feels like goin’?
It ain’t the destination, it’s the journey. If you’re always fucking with the navigation and the “right” way to go, there’s some amazing unexpected happenings you’re liable to miss.
Chill, Winston. Enjoy the ride. Have a destination in mind but be open to detours. It’s the best way to travel.

Getting Schooled by Miles Davis

Music is powerfully emotive.
The right piece at the right time can be a spiritual moment like no other, for some of us.
There are specific times I can remember some songs that blew my mind — songs I’d heard in the background time and time again, but a moment presents itself and the head explodes in all the aural rightness.
Like when it’d been a 14-hour day of stupidity in Whitehorse, Yukon, and The Tragically Hip’s “Cordelia” began playing as I pulled my car into my driveway, me ready to snap or sigh, whatever came first. Suddenly slow rising guitars just matched the coursing muted anger and frustration I felt after such a futile day. I sat there and listened to it twice.
Then I turned the car over, and drove the fuck out of town for an hour, listening to that song over and over.
I’d probably heard it 20 times before that night, but just never when it mattered.
Same deal with The Doors’s “The End.” Until I heard it play in Apocalypse Now, it never really registered on my radar. But a midnight viewing of the Vietnam classic in a dusty old theatre with that track bleeding out of crackling speakers, it just blew my fucking mind.
The creative process, for me, is all about timing, so it’s not really a surprise, then, that ingesting creativity should also require good timing.
Miles Davis is giving me an old-school edumacation today about how foolishly exclusive our tastes can be sometimes, and how much our narrow-mindedness can deny us when we wrongfully judge a genre via a single example of it.
For years and years and years, I was decidedly Not A Jazz Fan. And I ain’t talkin’ Utah, okay? Although…
But I mean jazz-jazz. Crazy trombones, pounding pianos, all that jazz-jazz, man.
It’s really the Story of Two Matriarchs. My aunt tried to get me into jazz when I was 8 and spending the summer with her in Toronto. I sort of got it, but let’s face it — I was eight. I wrote stories about pretend animals on “Garfield” note paper and slept with a teddy bear. What’s there to get? Are The Muppet Babies on TV yet? Miles who?
My mother, though, laughed at this fledgling interest in jazz when I returned to Vancouver. It was just noise, she opined. Aunt Pat was pretty nutty and sure liked to get silly with alcohol, what with that wobbly-walk of hers’n’all, so maybe Mom was right.
I slowly got the whole “it’s just noise” opinion myself from hearing the really experimental stuff, and just wrote the rest off.
Over the years, as I got older, I tried Miles Davis in a not-really-trying-because-I-secretly-know-it’s-just-crap kind of way, and stuck to my taste guns: Jazz was crap.
So, a few weeks ago, I finally got around to playing Miles’s A Kind of Blue, which had been in my iPhone for a while, under the thinking that one day the mood might strike. Well, nothing else was making my musical heart respond as I toggled through artist after artist on my phone, and then I saw Miles.
Hmm. Hey, you know, I’m kind of blue. Maybe I should listen to A Kind of Blue.
So, I did. And I liked it, and this feeling niggled its way into me while I scrubbed my dirty dishes at the kitchen sink. A jazzy kind of blue, kind of niggling thing.
Today I’m diving into The Cellar Door Sessions. And it’s working all too well. A half-hour ago or so, my feet were cold and socks loomed. I’ve been toe-tapping since and flip-flops remain in place with warm-blooded happy feets.
I’m glad I’ve tried again and again to get that appreciation of jazz working for me. I know better than most people, I guess, how quickly we can grow and change. I’m all about change.
It all comes back to the adage, “there’s a time and a place.”
It’s true of tastes, too.
From food to sex to music, it’s too easy to sample something once and think it’s representative of the whole. Maybe it’s THAT salmon you don’t like, not all salmon. Maybe they were a lousy lover and you should rethink your thoughts on sex in X-position with X-prop. And, hey, maybe you were listening to the wrong jazz.
Know who I learned that from?
A two-year-old boy named Jack.
He’d try every food a minimum — seriously, EVERY food — of three times. Three times! It could be rancid but he’d take three bites before he decided his opinion. THEN, he knew passionately which side of the opinion he sat on.
Here I was, 35, and always lived on old opinions, and opinions taken in a single sampling. A bite, a listen, a trial of some sort.
“No, I didn’t like that kind of seafood when I tried it 18 years ago, therefore…”
Now I accept that I’m narrow-minded and given to stupidity with a tendency to default my most obsolete opinions.
Everything’s worth trying again. I now make sure it’s a good example of that thing before I judge it. I’ll talk to others, rethink things. It’s a big world of experiences.
Methinks it’d be terrible to miss out on any because of foolishness and poor decisions.
So, here I am. Tapping my toes as the first disc fades out in applause and disc two of Miles Davis’s Cellar Door Sessions swings into a new groove.
Liking what I thought for 25-plus years I could never like.
This growing-up thing’s all right, man.
How about you? What’s something you did a total 180 on, and why? How’d opening your mind to trying it again change you?

From Hair to There

I’ve been adrift in a thought-sea for days now.
Just lost in waves and waves of thought.
About me, my future, what next, why now, where to go, who to see, and a million other things.
I can’t write during those times. I get a little discombobulated and things don’t really happen linearly for me. Writing tends to start, then stop, languishing in the land of Unfinished.
There’s probably a dozen drafts I’ve conjured in the last week for this blog, for me. All starting and then hitting a mental dead-end. But they sit there in the hopes of one day getting cranked into reality.
I don’t really feel into writing today, either, but it’s one of those times that needs to be noted. I’ve spent a lot of time lately working out — turning a lot of lost-muscle-flab back into strength and tone. It’s been a hard, hard, full couple of weeks. I’ve made it past the initiation, though.
The returned-to-it pain that comes from going all Olivia Newton-John on my ass and getting physical is finally settling into a full-body strength and intensity that tells me things are changing, and how. Doesn’t hurt anymore, it’s just a new normal of feeling like I can kick all your asses with ease. I kinda like that. Throwdown Steff, yo.
Today’s a pay-off day, too.
Haircut time.
I’ve been slowly growing my hair out since Christmas. In less than two hours, I’ll be under the scissors as someone turns me into a hair model. I get an experienced stylist hacking my overgrown mushroom cloud of a haircut into something fierce and sexy — because my getting-longer thick mane’s made for fierce-sexy — for free. Why? Because I’m a genius and know where to look for such things.
Adversity isn’t something you need to bend over and take like some listless doll. It requires creative thinking, a smiling face, and a willingness to seize chance as it comes. Me, just because I’m unemployed doesn’t mean I can’t be resourceful about how to enjoy elements of life.
Soon, haircut.
There’s really nothing like a new hairstyle for defining who you feel like at any point in time. I don’t know who I’ll look like in 3 hours, but I’ll know that girl really earned that new look.
I need to feel differently when I look in the mirror. There’s something I’m wanting to see looking back at me, and it’s not there yet. I don’t mean a size 4. I don’t mean something hot. It’s not that. There’s just a sparkle in my eye I want to find every time I catch my own gaze.
I want my amusement back. I want my perennial grin.
I have this card on my bookshelf:

I find that smiling makes people wonder what you’re up to.

It’s that going-through-life equivalent of When Harry Met Sally, after Meg Ryan fakes her orgasm in the deli and the old woman (Rob Reiner’s mom) tells the waitress, “I’ll have what she’s having.”
There’s something fun about BEING the person who LOOKS like they’re always having fun. Other people vibe off of that in really interesting ways, and life gets more entertaining and unpredictable as a result of their reactions.
It’s probably something to do with the law of attraction. Look fun, feel fun, and fun finds you.
For me, that starts with a haircut I can really own, something that, when I look in the mirror, I know for realz that that ain’t the girl who was stuck in neutral for a long, long time — just reacting to life rather than shaping it (for a short while, anyhow).
A makeover doesn’t take much, but it sure has a massive impact when your biggest goal is a different you.
My desire to change myself shouldn’t come across as some “Wow, I sure hate ME, so I’m gonna do something about it!” because it’s actually quite the opposite.
I think I’m awesome. I think I’m funny and entertaining as hell when I’m in the right mood. I can be electric. I know what I’m capable of, what I exude, what I can be.
But most of the time I get in my own way.
Because of stupid, stupid insecurities that have taken a lifetime to develop and need to be undone one at a time, in slow and lasting ways.
As time progresses, more and more of those insecurities fall away. Since my weight’s increased and not been lost in the last year, it ain’t recently about weight or my size.
It’s something internal that’s shifting. That’s how it should be.
A nebulous growth of a new self or worldview, a seedling — small and blooming. That’s real change. It sprouts where you don’t expect it, and it gets along just fine by itself for a while — some inadvertent sun, rain, and away it goes. Then, one day, it needs more and you have to be ready to train it, support it, and give it something to hold to, then it grows taller, and stronger.
That’s kinda where my change is. I’ve sort of got it started, and now I need to define it, make it taller, stronger.
Which is where my head’s been for so long of late.
And today my head gets a new look. My inner self gets a new perspective on its outer self. And change becomes obvious and defined for the first time in a year or two.
All because I get to have a haircut.
For free.
Long hair! Sexy hair. It’ll be awesome. I haven’t had bob-length hair in eight or ten years. Oh, yeah.
So what do you want to change?
Look around.
See what little opportunities for harnessing your life and taking it in a new direction might be waiting for you to discover. If you’re not looking, you won’t see. Pretty simple. Life Through Remedial Math 101.
So, today? This week? Open your eyes. See what you’re missing. Go where it takes you. Enjoy the ride.
I know I am.

The Creativity Conundrum

“Either it’ll move me
or it’ll move right through me.”

– Gordon Downie

Lately, life dictates that I consider my creative avenues and where my priorities lie, like anyone who choses a creative life to pursue.

By DAVE DONALD from THIS Magazine


The “money” route is easier. Always is. Paying rent’s so rewarding, never mind buying food.
But I was raised Catholic. Religious allusions are never far from mind, especially where the proverbial root of all evil is concerned.
The devil I know — that of paying rent, taking an easy way out with a “Yes, master, and how low should I bend?” kind of agreeability — is hardly shameful. Better writers than me have sold their soul and ink blotter just to make it through another dry period.
Then there are pompous but admirable asshats who never figured out how to sell out, like James Joyce and his times sleeping on a cot in the back of the Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Co. Poverty’s a suit a lot of writers have worn with pride.
I don’t know.
I really struggle with this, even though I’m pretty sure I know where I want to go, where I need to go — where I will go.
In my long and storied past, I’ve made the mistake of trying to sell out and capitalize on my writing, the bad way. I fucked that up. It messed with me creatively, it robbed me of excellent chances, and left me with creative scarring and a bruised ego.
As this opportunity approaches, I’m left considering my options. I’ve also got risky big projects in mind for proposing, but I need to wrap my head around each. And develop serious guts, say no to other things, and believe in my outcome.
I don’t think my creative dilemma comes down to a matter of soul or integrity, though. It’s not such a high-minded ideal, though artists over the centuries have made it seem as such.
I think it’s a really matter of pragmatism and/or individual work methods.
If you want to do something to the best of your ability, you must do it with the entirety of your focus. Spreading yourself thin and making yourself a jack of all trades is great if you’re content to be well-spread over life, but for those of us who have ONE goal, ONE dream, doesn’t it make more sense to pursue it 100%, rather than diverting efforts?
I don’t want to live out my days writing ad copy or jingles. I have a journalism degree. I have a vision.
You may scoff at the idea of “journalism” today, but I sought my degree out of worship for everyone from HL Mencken to Samuel Clemens,  all the way through Barry Farrell, Lester Bangs, Hunter Thompson, on up to Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, and anyone else who threw their voice into the social fabric that built our world.
I went to school out of belief that a single story or photo can change the world, like when the photo of a head on a stake in the Congo in 1880s became the catalyst for the first-ever worldwide human rights movement as the beginning of the Congo’s Rubber Genocide was establishing itself. (See Adam Hochschild’s brilliant King Leopold’s Ghosts to learn about this under-discussed attrocity.)
Fuck TMZ and every other site that denigrates that which I studied out of my own foolishly naive and youthful reasons.
I still believe in truth. My truth, your truth — whatever, so long as authenticity defines it.
The heart wants what the heart wants, and I know what I want to do now.
I just hope financial necessity doesn’t force my hand. At this point, it’s not.
In the end, I don’t have to prove or explain myself to anyone. I need to respect myself in the morning and feel like my life has a clear direction. That’s it. You want my shortlist for basic emotional needs? That’s where mine starts.
There is limit of compromise for anyone. You have yours, I have mine.
Creatively speaking, Gord Downie’s nailed it for me in The Tragically Hip’s song lyrics that opens this piece.
If it doesn’t move me, it will move right through me.
Creatively, I need to care. I can phone it in, I just find it hard to live with myself when I do.

Jumping. No Parachute.

So, that thing I wrote yesterday about quality? Pfft, fuhgeddaboutit.
Today, I had nothing to eat for 9 hours and thought it’d be wise to drink wine. Now, writing for you (because I love you so) seems brilliant.
This, or I piss off Twitter. Every now and then it’s fun to memorialize stupidity as a whole, so, uh, HI.
You know what I did today?
I sent a Not-a-Book-Proposal to a literary agent. Apparently it’s impossible to get a literary agent in Vancouver, so I’m totally comfortable with failing in Mission: Get A Literary Agent. Like, t-o-t-a-l-l-y.
But then again? I feel pretty good. I do! I do. It wasn’t a book proposal, but it was proposal about a book I proposed; just, you know, done my way.
Even if it’s rejected, just hitting “send” was a major accomplishment. Huge.
I packaged up my dream into a little box, tied it with a bow, and sent it into the great unknown, to a pretty not-insignificant agent I’d be lucky to land. THAT deserves celebrating.
I jumped, man. I jumped MY way. Cue Sinatra!
I don’t want success and fame if it comes at the price of bending over and taking it before I kiss every ass in sight, okay? I want to be myself. Be nice, but not pull punches. I wanna do whatever whimsy hits me. I don’t want to worry about consequences or overthink moves.
I can’t be a sell-out, I don’t roll that way. My friends would die laughing at the proposition of me trying to sell shit I don’t believe in. You have no idea.
For years, I’ve been told there was a “process” to success in writing. People you had to please, things you had to do.
Well, a few years ago all I did was write well for a few months, with no apologies, and it did me wonders. Somewhere deep inside I think craft matters more than promotion, and so do integrity and individuality, and seeking success the “tried and true” way ain’t individual and isn’t a ringing endorsement of one’s integrity.
But, you know, have at it, if that’s how you go.
Whatever happens, I know it’s ALL on me and I won’t have to wonder what woulda happened if I followed my instincts.
That’s its own reward. If you’re me, anyhow.
I was terrified today because I know nothing about book proposals.
Know what I had down in my calendar to do THIS week? “Read about Larsen’s book about book proposals.” I was gonna START that today. Know what I finished and hit send on today at 3:30? Right, a totally winged, improvised, “well, that looks right” version of a book proposal I sorta hashed out in an email with the agent then went rogue on.
If, by some intergalactic long-shot, I should happen to land the agent, you know what probably would be the reason? That it was completely against type. I dunno. Whatever. I did the best *I* know how to do, and I’m half-drunk tonight out of contentment and satisfaction with myself, not stress and worry.
Fuck it, man. You do what you can, and if you fail, you plan “B” it. That’s life lived the fun way.
I’m 36. I’ve wanted to write a book since I was 15. The closest I came was in ’96, when I did a novel-writing workshop and really got somewhere with a basic idea, but never figured out the endgame of my plot.
My then-writing teacher, Maureen Medved, who’s had a movie made of her novel Tracey Fragments, said I wrote stories like Denis Johnson, the awesome author behind Jesus’s Son — the book/movie. Which is to say my fiction is really dark and harrowing, with a cruel psychological bent and scarcity of language and edgy vernacular. Or something.
I haven’t written fiction since, aside from a few stories. But I’ll go back there. Someplace real, real dark. Someday. Likely sooner than later, too. I think the drama needs to end in my life first before I turn to creating more of it at will.
I digress.
The last 10 days have been monumental for me.
Huge. Monster. Unparalleled.
I’ve spent so long just trying to survive in life that I forgot how to get ahead.
I don’t want to try and explain that right now, but know that when I hit that last period, my eyes were overcome with tears. It has been many, many very long, very hard years. Any successes or moments of awesomeness I have had of late, I’ve earned the hard way.
But, no, I don’t want to explain that right now. I’ve spent five years writing about it.
The last 10 days, though? That’s new.  Luck, fortune, validation, proving things to myself, conquering lifetime fears, being completely myself without apologies? Um, yeah. New.
Sending a book proposal today was the single most optimistic, hopeful act I have ever committed in my life. Ever.
It’s the biggest stamp of faith I’ve ever put on myself. Ever.
It is absolutely monstrous. Schwing.
The book?
100% about me. E-e-k.
It makes me laugh, really. My entire life has been governed by my insecurities. Others would probably think I’m cocky or arrogant, because I write so much about myself or tweet constantly. And that makes me laugh really hard.
It’s a strange paradox. Yeah, I think I’m amusing. But there’s only so far I think that gets me, and there’s only so good that I think am. It’s one thing to have an idea of what you might be capable of, but a whole ‘nother one to go there in reality.
I consider my wit to be kind of like a localized weather phenomenon. Think of it as that storm that blows over your neighbourhood. For a moment: Relevant. Then, poof, gone.
That’s not running myself down, that’s just acknowledging that it’s a big, big world filled with much to be fascinated by.
Still.
I took that big chance and tonight I get to enjoy the intrigue. Was it good? Did he like it? Do I get a lollipop? Stay tuned.
I jumped.
Tonight, that’s all that counts. I took the leap, the one I’ve been avoiding for 15 years.
About motherfucking time.
Photo from Skydive Virginia.