I started playing hockey when I was six years old. There was an amateur kids hockey league started by some local parents in my town. Our coach was a local real estate agent who named his son after a hockey stick. Long after I finished playing hockey, I learned he got divorced. Not much of a surprise. I remember his kid was a shitty kid. His other kid, the younger brother of hockey stick, became somewhat of a friend of my brother and me, but he was so ill-behaved that I don’t think my parents wanted him around much. I remember he scratched up the ceiling in our house and pissed in a box on two separate occasions. He was the kid that joined my brother and me to going to the science centre when my brother slapped the kid. The funny thing is, I remember hating hockey stick, but I don’t remember why. I remember somebody reminded my dad about hockey stick years later and he agreed that he was a shitty kid, which leads me to believe he was, in fact, a shitty kid, but still I don’t recall the specifics. I remember one time we had hockey practice and we were all skating around before the practice and hockey stick said something to me, to which I responded,

“Shut up, hockey stick”.

I saw my mom in the bleachers in the corner of my eye as I said that, and for the rest of the lesson, I was afraid of being yelled at for telling another kid to shut up. I was certain I was going to get it on the drive home. But we drove home afterwards, and it never came up. I figured she must have not heard. If she did, she knew hockey stick was a kid that needed it.

This hockey program went on for many years. I would’ve been 12 years old when I stopped doing it. I didn’t enjoy it that much most of the time, I didn’t like the kids in it, and I didn’t like the long drives to the games. We had to drive to neighbouring towns for pretty much every game which I thought was ridiculous. We hardly had any games in our town, we were always driving an hour or more away. So every kid on our team was exhausted from the long drive and the other team could get off the couch 10 minutes before the game started. But the game was a good thing for kids, especially boys, to be involved in. That’s why I did it, and why my dad didn’t let me and my brother quit.

I also played soccer and basketball. I don’t remember for how long. Soccer didn’t last long at all. Basketball lasted for one year, or one season, however long that was. I didn’t do it afterwards. I would’ve been really young when I played soccer. My brother played it a little bit after I did as well. I think he did it more than I did.

Children learn by observation more than I think most people understand.

If you constantly yell at a child, you are telling that child that yelling is acceptable behaviour. And that child, if he cannot correct himself, will carry that behaviour into adulthood. He will yell at people in his life. I think everyone has met people like that: people who yell without reason, or when their point would be just as (if not more) powerful without yelling. When somebody else, whether that’s a child, a spouse, an employee, or a stranger on the street engages in some behaviour that this person does not like, he will resort to yelling as a form of correction and to most people, that makes him look like a child himself. I believe it is infantile to yell as a form of argument. It is persuasion by intimidation, whether they know it or not.

I do not yell. I am also not one of those people who claims “I don’t yell, I’ll raise my voice if I don’t feel heard or want to get my point across.” Those people are yellers in denial. No, I never raise my voice unless I am literally in a situation in which the environment dictates that I would not physically be heard if I did not raise my voice. The kitchen where I work is such a place. Anybody with an impossibly intimate knowledge of my childhood would be absolutely shocked to hear that I do not yell. Because, really, I should. It would only make sense. If a child is yelled at every time he does something wrong for years of his life such that he begins to physically recoil at loud noises, then you ought to expect that child to yell in his adulthood. It only makes sense. It’s what he’s been taught. But somehow I don’t do that.

I did when I was very young though. My mother used to yell at me all the time, especially when I was very young. She yelled at me all the way up until I moved out, and even did it once after. This obviously affected me when I was very young.

I remember my childhood friend Eric came over one day to play. We were both about six or seven years old. We played dinosaurs and also watched Spiderman. I remember he said something about Spiderman being an adult, to which I yelled at him.

“No he’s not! Spiderman is a TEENAGER!”

To be fair, I can’t blame him for the mistake, as the movies did cast a 40 year-old Tobey Maguire. But as a child, I found that a valid reason to yell.

Another thing that children learn, perhaps more than people understand, is violence.

If a young child is physically abused as a corrective behaviour, then guess what? That child will learn that hitting others is an appropriate response when others engage in behaviours he does not like.

Yesterday, I wrote about a poor girl who brought me into a cult. I hold no ill feelings towards her, to be honest. But regardless of being raised in a cult or not, people ought to know better. At some point in your life, yes, it is your fault. That’s really the core of how I feel about all those people: It is sad that you have wasted a life (and a HUMAN life at that) but ultimately it is your choice, your loss, your fault, and if it weren’t for the fact that you subject your children to it, I would pity you. But I have absolutely no pity for those that abuse children. That said, I can’t be sure any of them would’ve amounted to anything had they not been in the cult.

Here’s a curious thought. If you ever find a cultist spanking their child for something they said, go up to their face and call them a cunt or a faggot (whatever applies better) and really lay into them. If they’re fat, bully them for it; if they’re stupid, call them retarded. See if they spank you. I’ll bet they won’t. Because you’re a relatively even match. One of the reasons these people take it out on children is because children can’t fight back. When you become aware of that, you might understand why I have no pity.

Anyways, since she had been raised being physically abused much more than I had, she had a stronger propensity to it. She hit me before and to be completely honest, I don’t remember what it was about. But that’s exactly what she had been taught. Though she and the rest of those people can and should be blamed for a LOT, the physical abuse is something I would dismiss as an entirely learned behaviour. It would be very difficult for them to correct that in themselves.

When I was a very young child, I remember being in some sort of after-school program. I went to a lot of after school programs when I was homeschooled which might sound kind of ironic. For me, playing video games was an after-school program. Anyways, I was in some sort of after school program, I don’t remember what, and I went to a water fountain to drink.

Being that I had not yet gone to public school, the water fountain was alien technology to me. So I pursed my lips, touched them to the actual fountain, pushed the button, and started to drink. When I finished, a kid behind me told me that I wasn’t supposed to put my lips to the fountain. He had an older friend or brother with him. One of them might’ve laughed. Regardless, I didn’t like that he pointed out my mistake and I grabbed his cheeks and pulled them. Then I rejoined the group to go do whatever was going on.

Eventually they tracked me down with a supervisor or teacher of some sort. The older kid told the supervisor and pointed to me. The supervisor came to me and asked me to clarify if I did what I did to that other kid. I lied and said I didn’t.

I wish I could resolve the story somehow, but that’s all I remember. I’m pretty sure my mom had to come and pick me up, which definitely wouldn’t’ve ended well for me.

I remember another time separate to this incident where I went to a science centre with my brother and a kid in our hockey program (which I will expand on another time) I would’ve been a little older, my brother was probably roughly the age that I was during the water fountain incident.

There was a room in the science centre where you could build a Rube Goldberg type machine by sticking half-pipes to the wall and pressing a button. A ball would roll down the pipes and you would watch it and it would be awesome. My brother, the other kid from our hockey program, and I were playing this thing when another unrelated kid came along. I don’t remember what he did, but I’m pretty sure he was fucking with my brother, so my brother walloped him in the face. That cut the whole day short. My mom drove us all back with my brother crying the whole hour plus car ride home.

I don’t remember if it’s accurate, but I recall having the thought that my mom was being a little too courteous and that the other parents should’ve apologized for their shitty kids behaviour. But it seemed to me, even as a child, me and my brother were always held to a higher standard than other kids. I had the impression that other kids could get away with more than we did. That might not sound like a bad thing, kids need to learn discipline, but it is a bad thing when that means the other kids can walk over you a little bit.

If somebody is physical with you, they might not realize it, but they are inviting you to do the same thing. It’s an unspoken communication just like when someone scrunches their nose when they see or hear of something that disgusts them. When someone hits you, there’s that moment afterwards where there’s one very obvious thing that sometimes needs to be done. After all, you can’t just hit someone in the face and stare at them after. That would take some balls. Unless of course, you’re a full grown ape who knows that children can’t fend for themselves. In that case, you can abuse your children all you want.

Which is an interesting thought, at least for me. There’s a lot of responsibility to having children. You can beat them, abuse them, ridicule them, molest them, and just be an absolute inhumane monster towards them, and you might just get away with it. Because they’re little kids and they can’t fight back, and when they’re really really little, they can’t even tell anyone. It’s actually easier than we might like to admit for these types of people to get away with it. It’s hard to think about.

There was a huge child sex abuse scandal in the cult I used to be in. Pastors in the church went to jail for it, but most of them were covered up and swept under the rug. A lot of them would do it when they lived in the houses of the cult members. When the stories broke loose, the church would simply move them to another province where nobody knew them so they could continue living in houses with children.

I’ll probably talk about that later. Really my thought about that now is how sad it is that the people in the cult didn’t even give a shit. They didn’t think about it. They knew, some of them, but they didn’t allow themselves to feel moral disgust.

That’s something I think is a huge problem. People these days, from what I can tell, are manipulated into thinking that it is wrong to feel moral disgust or contempt for anothers choices in how they live their life.

The contemporary philosophy seems to be that if somebody decides to sit down and watch TV and play video games and drink wine with a needle of heroin in their arm all day for the rest of their life, “Hey man, that’s just, like how they want to live, man, just let them live.”

I find that to be a lazy approach that displays a negligent attitude towards humanity.

I say it often. You should never feel shame in being human. It sounds like something that doesn’t need to be said, but I think a lot of problems have this in their roots.

A corollary to this is that you should expect something from humanity. Humanity is separate from the animals. If a bear decides to sit around eating honey and blueberries all day for the rest of it’s life, nobody cares because that’s literally what bears do. But humans have the capacity for much more.

So, if you refuse to let yourself feel contempt when you see the wasted potential of a human life, you are admitting to your Self that you see humanity (and therefore your Self) as no better than the animals. I think that is one of the vilest evils there is.

Some things I want to do with this project.

I will post some of the fiction that I wrote in my senior year of high school in Mr. Forrest’s English class. I look at that particular class fondly. His idea was that we had to write a minimum of ten sentences every week and each week had to demonstrate a different writing skill.

One week, we had to start every sentence with a different word. Another week, we needed to demonstrate the proper use of a semicolon. Another, we needed to begin with a quote. I remember that doing these weekly “memo’s” was good for my head and helped develop my writing skills. I can say pretty confidently that I was a better writer at age 17 than I am now, though I hope to replenish my skills with this project.

I will add tags to every post eventually, so that the fiction can be separated from my usual ramblings. I think that even fiction will give insight into the writers mind, and the main purpose of this project is to be intimate, so I will finally digitize my weekly memos from years ago. Perhaps I’ll even try my hand at new fiction.

Today, I am going to consider the idea that not everything that goes into this project needs to be a deep examination of my Self. I don’t always need to delve into my head and write about the ugly truths I find. Sometimes, it’s good enough to just write.

I may write more later today, as I need to go to work soon. This morning I made two pulled pork sandwiches. I find my Self very fortunate to be able to make more than one meal in the morning, mostly for the fact that one of those meals goes to some one else. I tried to write earlier today, as Possum took the dog out, but my laptop here had issues connecting. Instead, I tried to teach my Self Russian, which I have been doing for about 200 days now.

I have been trying harder than usual the past couple of days not to be so prone to negative emotion. I have found it very challenging, but I see improvement in my Self. I hope that others can see it as well. Part of my process is that it will help me to easier connect with others if I can connect with my Self. I think that is obvious.

I have not allowed myself to think in depth about the purpose of my writing. There’s multiple facets to it, some of which are simple, some of which will require deep searching within myself to comprehend.

I think one reason I have started doing this is that I find that people are rarely very open. They are closed off, even from those they are close to. A lot of people sugarcoat their feelings, brush them under the rug, or pretend they don’t exist. Often, I think they do this completely subconsciously. I think a lot of people don’t even know what they think most of the time, or they don’t care enough to think about things. But, I think if someone is sad, depressed, or feels unfulfilled in some sense, that they have no right to sulk if they are deceiving themselves. Emotional turmoil is rooted in self-deception.

That’s part of why I wanted to start this “project”, if you will. To put something into the world that I believe it lacks.

Another reason is that I can’t sit still. I have learned this recently. They say idle hands are the devils playground, or something like that, I don’t remember. But personally, if I do things that I know do not matter for long enough, I will get antsy. I will forget what to do with my hands, and I will seek cheap escapism usually in the physical form of alcohol or nicotine or the emotional form of getting lost in a deep dark crevice of my imagination, overthinking, and believing the worst thoughts imaginable. There have been many solutions I have found to this. Most of the time, I created these solutions unwittingly. I did not know that I was creating a solution because I couldn’t even name the problem back then. This writing is one of those solutions. Playing and writing music is another solution. That one is interesting, because when I started playing guitar and bass and (restarting) piano, I did not know that I was solving a problem within my head. When I started writing and producing my own music, I was similarly oblivious. With hindsight, I know now exactly what I was doing.

Providing I stick with this project, and continue writing as much as I can for as long as I can, maybe I can have something to pass onto my children or their children. I often think about how little I know about my parents. I asked my special Possum today (whom I will be writing more about in the future) if she ever wished that she knew her parents more intimately.

“Sometimes” she said.

I think sometimes is enough to justify this effort. I wish that I knew my parents better as well. I wish I knew my grandparents better too. But from my experience, the past couple generations are just as fucked as we are, but in wildly different ways. My parents, for example, cannot show weakness. I don’t think my grandparents can either. That’s probably why they don’t talk much about their life, beliefs, or traumas. On the other hand, they might not show emotion for my sake. They might think that if they were to show these feelings, that I might go through a crisis realizing that my parents are human too, and perhaps just as clueless as I am. I have thought a lot about that the past few months.

On my birthday late last year, my dad came down to visit. He helped me get some groceries and he brought me and my Possum out for lunch. It was the first time one of my parents was able to really talk with Possum and it made me very happy how we got along. We dropped Possum off at work and my dad brought me home and helped unload the groceries. We ended up talking for a little bit, which we rarely do.

I told him about the type of people I met in university, specifically in philosophy class. They concern me for the future. They are wannabe revolutionaries with absurd and prejudiced ideas about ethics and a regressive and totalitarian ideology. Had I stopped thinking at 16 years old, I perhaps would’ve ended up just like them. But that’s not the part of the conversation that stuck with me.

In talking about philosophy class with my dad, I mentioned the group project I did. It was a presentation on James Rachel’s Active & Passive Euthanasia. I can genuinely say that I had a lot of fun doing that presentation. I got to hone my public speaking skills, I got to read and become intimately familiar with a hugely influential philosophical paper, and I got to tell my peers about it. They watched me intently, their eyes followed my hands, they sat quiet and still, and they laughed when I wanted them to. It was something I might like to do in the future again one day. Anyways, I told my dad about the presentation and he told me that he believes, without a doubt, that when his father was in the hospital and about to die, that the doctor illegally administered him a lethal dose of morphine. Opa was days away from certain death, he would’ve drowned in his lung fluid, or something like that. And my dad told me that he’s certain that he received euthanasia. I’m glad. I think that was the right decision. It was, however, interesting that it took 17 years for me to hear that part of his death.

My dad also told me something that stuck with me a little more. My great grandmother on my mom’s side is still alive. She’s 106 years old as of writing this. Her eyesight and her hearing is going, and she applied for euthanasia.

“Living to my age,” she apparently said “Is a curse.”

She was, however, denied euthanasia. The psychologist who saw her told her that he can’t recommend euthanasia for constipation, since the only real health issue she has is constipation.

I think the doctor that likely administered my dying grandfather euthanasia made the right decision. I do not think it was right to refuse my great grandmother euthanasia. Human beings have complete autonomy over their own body and their own mind and nobody can tell them what to do with it. Sure, one might argue, but that does not give her the right to the euthanasia needle as that does not belong to her. I would say that’s a good counterargument, but that there is a bigger picture. The euthanasia program in the country where I live exists to help end the suffering of people who are mentally sound and declare that they no longer wish to live in the painful circumstances in which they live. I believe that if tinnitus is an acceptable condition for euthanasia (which it has been administered for) then being 106 years old ought to be an acceptable condition as well.

I guess something I was going to say before I got sidetracked was that I don’t mean to be hard on my parents or my grandparents. After all, I haven’t put that much effort into speaking to them regarding their beliefs, feelings, and the things that they lived through. I plan on driving about 5 hours North eventually to see my paternal grandmother for what will likely be the last time. My dad has said that she is losing her marbles and that she fell and hurt her hip not long ago. I remember when he told me that she hurt her hip. I was playing a bar show he came out to see. During intermission I went and talked to him about family things when he told me she’s not doing to good. I thought his eyes welled a little bit with tears when he said that, but I couldn’t believe it. I have never seen my dad cry. Even though the evidence of my eyes dictates that I saw it, I still don’t think I can believe it.

A lot of information goes missing throughout generations. I wish to preserve some of that in a very selfish manner. I want to preserve myself, my thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings. Maybe my children, when they are old enough, or my children’s children will be able to read this and maybe it could help them.

Because the fact is that I’m going to keep this going for a long time. I’m going to write a lot and I’m going to do it honestly and openly. Like a patient etherized upon a table. Because if I were to tell a lie, then this whole project would be worthless. That means I’m probably going to have to share some ugly things about myself. There are a lot of ugly things about myself that I had to come to terms with.

When I was just graduating high school, I spent a lot of time with unambitious, unprincipled people. Granted, we were barely adults, but I spent years with them and they never seemed to change.

There was about seven of us when we were still in high-school. Eventually that turned to six which in turn became five, then four, then they all became strictly online friends despite living in the same town, then I stopped speaking with them completely.

One of these people in high school was a girl who I believed, at the time, was pretty. In hindsight I believe she just did her hair and wore the right dresses, otherwise she was as plain as religious girls often are. But that didn’t stop me. At that age, I was incredibly insecure and so desperate for connection that I would’ve sacrificed myself for a shred of it; to speak honestly with someone, I would’ve deceived myself.

Nothing good can come from contradiction.

She was friends with the other girl in our group, and she started hanging with us more often as she didn’t have any other friends in the school. Growing up sheltered and religious will do that to you. It’s not like I can’t understand that. I would not say I was sheltered, but I absolutely was in the primary stages of development where it mattered. I had friends back then, yes, but hardly any of them actually felt like friends. I was just as lonely as she was.

Eventually, we started spending time with each other alone. Sometimes we walked at lunch, or skipped class. Sometimes we’d go to the thrift store after school. I knew she was religious from what our friends said, I just didn’t want to think about it. I asked her out once, she told me:

“I’m not really looking to date right now.”

Again, somehow, that didn’t stop me. That just meant I needed to learn more about her religion. Maybe you can see now what I meant when I said there were ugly parts of me.

At some point, she started talking to me more about the Bible. I started reading it. We would read it together and she would bring me to her home in order to have a bible study, just the two of us.

I remember the last day of school we walked to a bench shrouded in trees and we read the Bible. She talked to me about a “convention” that she would go to in a couple of weeks, after she went to another “convention” in a neighbouring province. I didn’t hesitate to say yes. I knew that this meant I’d get to see her after graduation. I stayed in touch with her over messages until two weeks later she picked me up to drive to the “convention”. It took place on a farm about an hour drive away.

I am unsure at this point how to proceed as there is a lot to be said.

The time was probably 8:45AM. After driving the highway we took an exit and followed the road for just a few minutes. The road was surrounded by fields of wheat. There really wasn’t much out here, which made it the perfect place for the “convention”. We turned off the road onto a long driveway to a farm. Standing on the gravel road was one of the church’s pastors.

This particular church called their pastors “Workers”, which was ironic as part of being a “worker” meant that you didn’t have an actual job. The workers in fact, were worshipped in the group for having little possessions and travelling with only their suitcase and the clothes on their back. They would stay at the houses of the church-goers where they would be given food, a bed, and hundreds of dollars every month. They travelled in groups of two of the same sex, one elder, and one who learned from the elder. They also never married or had children. This all comes from a very ironic misunderstanding of the Bible. These people, who claimed to believe in the Bible above all else, believed that the manner in which the apostles were sent out in Chapter 10 of the Gospel of Matthew was a commandment which must continue to be observed. In that part of the gospel, Christ tells the disciples to leave behind their belongings as they preach to Israel. Later on, he tells them to take up their belongings as they preach to the world over. But this group ignored that part.

The worker who stood on the gravel road welcoming the cars that drove in introduced himself as Dennis and showed everyone were to park. The farm was a Spruce farm, which gave ample coverage from the roads nearby. There were a lot of buildings on the site.

There was a secret building where all the “workers” would stay. Nobody was allowed in here. There was a giant building where the workers would deliver sermons, and a bigger building where everyone would sit down to eat. There was yet another building where people would sleep on the site if they so desired.

Here’s how the days were structured:

From 9:00AM to about 12:00PM there were sermons. Everyone remained seated giving their full attention to the withered old kooks at the front of the building. In between every sermon was a hymm or two that everyone would sing together without any instruments. At some point an old lady would get up to the front and start her sermon.

“That’s Mildred” the girl who brought me there would tell me. “She’s our worker.”

When lunch time came church members who volunteered to serve the food would do just that to every one. There was probably a good few hundred people there. Everyone would sit down and eat. Young girls would walk around asking if anyone wanted juice and they would pour it if you affirmed their request. Most of the people there were sad and fat. They obviously had not enjoyed their life. They felt shame and disguised it with food. Gluttony is a sin, but these people believed what they wanted to believe, and nothing more.

After lunch, there were sermons until dinner. Hours and hours of old dementia-ridden kooks badly preaching about a poor interpretation of the Bible. If a baby cried during the sermons, their old saggy mothers would waddle them outside the barn and beat them. If that only made them cry harder (and it always did) they would take them farther away and probably do the same thing. Like an ape that couldn’t figure out how to put the shape in the right hole, they would resort to violence. I remember I went to the washrooms during a sermon and sat in the cubicle so that I could vape. Then I heard a man and his child come in. I forget what the child said but they said something followed by a loud smack and some scolding.

The child was standing, which meant that this man hit the kid in the face. I remembered being hit in the face once by my mother. I was very small, and I still remember it. That’s the kind of thing that sticks with you. I imagined myself leaving the cubicle and beating the shit out of this man. But I didn’t. I could not act on principle the whole time I was here.

I was asked by the girl who brought me there if I was spanked as a kid. I told her my parents did it for a bit but then stopped because they figured it was barbaric. She disagreed because that’s what she was told to do. As far as I’m aware, she could not think for herself. Every thing she said was utter drivel implanted into her from the workers and from her weak-willed parents.

After dinner, there was another hour or so of sermons, followed by dessert. After dessert people would leave. Only to return the next day.

The convention went on for a week. In case you haven’t figured it out, the long sermons, the food control, the farm out in the middle of no where, were all brainwashing tactics. This was a cult. They only referred to themselves as “The truth” claiming to have no name. But everyone else calls them the “Two by Twos”.

The last day of the convention, however, differed from the other days.

After dessert, there was one more sermon followed by three hymns. If you wanted to “profess”, then you would stand up as you sang the third hymn. To profess, meant that you would be a part of the church and would be required to speak in meetings. It was seen as a great Godly commitment to profess. After the professing, everyone would walk out to the lake and people would be baptized by the workers. If you had professed the year before, you could choose to get baptized if you believed you were ready.

I ended up professing. I didn’t believe in the cult but I reckoned that I liked the girl and that maybe I could believe in the Bible in a metaphorical sense. I no longer believe the Bible teaches good lessons, even the metaphors, but that is what I tried to believe at the time. After professing, workers would congratulate you, people would hug you, and you would almost feel as if you belonged to a family. But it was all fake. Being in a large group of people singing can feel that way. It’s magical, and that’s why it works.

On the last day of convention, it was my turn to drive. That meant I was to drop the girl off at home. When I did, she asked if I wanted water. I said yes for two reasons. The first reason was that it meant I got to hang out with her. The second reason was that I actually was very fucking thirsty because there was hardly any water at that fucking cult retreat. So I came in for water and we drank water and she wanted to look outside at the stars, so we did. And she kissed me.

I was so desperate for human connection; I was so lost and confused; I wanted to be heard, understood, cared for. I was looking for the affection that I felt my parents never gave me. I wanted to feel like I was a part of a family in the way that my family never gave me. I wanted admiration, attention, and the love that I could never give myself.

It didn’t matter whether I believed in it or not. She was giving me the connection I yearned for, and I was in the cult for the next year of my life.

After the convention, we were together. We weren’t dating, as these people don’t like to do things, we were together in the sense that old bitter married couples are together and they sit around watching TV and being angry at each other. We hardly got any time alone, because almost every day I would come to her house and watch movies with her entire family. If I was lucky, it would just be her two younger brothers and very young sister, but often it involved her parents too. If we had time to the two of us, it wasn’t very pleasant. I was living a contradiction of my values and everything I believed in. And I was not born, bred, and brainwashed in a cult, so she would often be frustrated with my average intelligence.

Shortly after the conventions, we went on a weeklong camping trip with her family and her friends family. Of course, her friend was also in the cult. All of her friends were in the cult. I was there for a week, but she stayed for an extra week. This was one of the two weeks in five years that I was sober. Most of what I remember about that trip was the makeshift meeting we had by the campfire. I’ll talk about the meetings in the future, but essentially everyone reads the same Bible verse and stands up and gives their thoughts and sings a few hymns. I also remember playing guitar by the campfire. One of the families friends was a boy from another province. He was about the age of her younger brothers and they seemed to be good friends. I let him play my guitar as well. He played “In the House of the Rising Sun” by The Doors, I believe. It’s not a hard song but I remember it was nice to see one of the cultists do something artistic. I wish he believed that there was value in the music he played because I don’t think he believed that.

Anyways, at the end of the summer I began working full time. I also began drinking full time as soon as I turned 18. Before hand, I had to rely on friends to get me booze, and they weren’t always keen on it as they knew I drank a lot and almost always alone. They felt like they were complicit in my self-destruction and often refused my requests.

I would drive about an hour to work. I would leave early so that I could pick up a bottle of vodka or rum before work. I would drink it throughout the day. Usually I’d keep on in the car and one in my backpack at work. If someone wasn’t looking, it was easy to slip a thinner bottle into my pants or jacket and sneak off to the bathroom. At lunch, I would go to the car to drink. I drank and drove a lot. I think that was part of wanting some risk in my life and being unable to control my drinking. I was only ever caught once on a day I didn’t have TOO much to drink. So I escaped with a license suspension for a month and no DUI.

This was when the engineering firm I worked at was located in another city. It was still about the same distance as it was when we moved. The day that we moved was a bad day. It had nothing to do with work, but for some reason I drank way too much. The new offices had nicer cubicles where it was easier to hide bottles of liquor, and I didn’t have much to move, so I had a lot of time to myself. I drank until I blacked out by the end of the day. I was not forming new memories. I drove to the girls house because we had to go to a special youth meeting with the church. I was very good at hiding my intoxication. If somebody noticed my drunkenness, then that meant I was absolutely fucking wasted. Today I was absolutely wasted, but somehow they didn’t know what was going on.

I drove the girl and her brothers an hour away to the city, which meant that I drove for four hours that day. Four hours drunk. Mind you, these people never once thanked me for driving them to their cult meetings. I guess they were under the impression that it was good for me.

I feel unjustified anger as I write this. Why should I be angry? I was the one driving people while blackout drunk. If anyone gets to be angry, it’s the cultists at me.

Anyways, I’m going to keep it short and expand in the future. I drove them to the meeting and acted odd throughout. On the drive back I was angry and lashed out at people. The girl forced me to park at a McDonalds and she brought her brothers inside and called her parents and they all brought me to a hospital where the nurses obviously knew I was drunk and everyone knew. Everyone was mad and disappointed at me. Still though, I didn’t quit drinking. Even the morning after when I felt like shit and was profusely apologizing over text.

It is 9:45 AM right now. Today is a Friday, which means I don’t have any classes. Instead, I go to work. I’m a line cook, for now. I don’t hate it, but sometimes I don’t like it either. It’s easy to understand how I’m doing something worthwhile when I’m cooking. When I’m working with computers, it takes a little more brain power. I enjoyed my time at the engineering firm in Calgary, even though it usually felt like my work didn’t make a difference, and of course, I was drunk most of the time. I remember when I sat and would write firmware to the circuit boards, essentially testing them to make sure they were functional before they were shipped to another company in America. If a board failed one of the tests, I would bring it to the software guy and tell him what it failed. Sometimes, I would learn how to fix them myself. Sometimes that involved soldering or removing a component, and sometimes that involved wiping the firmware and starting again.

When I look back to my work at that company, I feel a sense of shame. I did my work, and I should feel some pride from that, but mostly what I remember is smuggling bottles of rum and beer into my cubicle from the office, sneaking them into the bathroom, drinking, wrapping them in toilet paper, and disposing of them in the garbage. I was also smoking a lot of pot and smoking/vaping at this time.

There was a day I drove into work high, and I was met with the hardware guy. He was from El Salvador. A very funny guy, I remember, and very fun to work with. He told me that he needed to pick up one of our contractors from a bus stop, but had ridden his bike into work, so he asked that we drive to pick him up. I obliged.

Opening the passenger side door, there’s no way the hardware guy didn’t know that I was smoking pot. My eyes were red, and even I was aware of the smell. I felt pathetic during the whole drive. He even asked me if I was alright and told me that my eyes were red.

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m just tired.”

I don’t think he bought it.

There was one particularly bad day when I drank way too much. It was just past 4:00PM and I knew that I’d overindulged. I was sitting at my desk writing a bit of not terribly important code. I felt tired. Next thing I remember, I opened my eyes at 5:00PM having slept for nearly an hour sitting at my desk. I had pissed my pants. You might think that would be shameful enough for me to understand my alcohol problem, but it wasn’t. I picked up a six-pack on the drive home.

This was less than four years ago. The first day I remember having alcohol free was November 14th, 2022 after drinking every day, minus two separate weeks, for five years. I slipped up and drank on January 22nd of this year, but otherwise have been sober. Falling off the wagon is something that might happen in the future. I understand that. The important part for me is that, if I fall off, I hop right back on. In sobriety, I have learned ugly things about myself. That’s something I plan to talk about soon.

Quitting nicotine was very different than quitting alcohol. I needed a different sort of motivation to quit but once I had that, it was easier for me. Eventually I’ll tell the story of my quitting nicotine, but it requires a lot more background information, I think, to properly tell it. Now, I have to go to work.

I moved away from home when I was 21. After graduating high school I started working full time at an engineering firm in the city. I knew I wanted to go to university for Computer Science, but I didn’t know where. The only thing I knew, was that I did not want to live where I had been living my whole life. I look back fondly at the town I grew up in. It’s a beautiful place with a rich history I wish I knew more about. Sometimes I think of living there when I’m a true adult, but I don’t know if that’s a good idea.

There’s a disjunct in my head regarding my Self as an adult. I do not see myself as an adult yet. To be an adult, I must first be graduated from university. Then, I must have a real career. Then, I should have a wife and a child. I do not know how long this list is. I wonder if so-called “real” adults feel the same way. As if they never really grew up, but became old through a process they couldn’t even perceive.

I do not think I fear death. I think I could welcome it providing the circumstances were correct. But I want to create something to live on; I wish to concoct something of value in my mind to put into the world, something that speaks about the miraculous beauty of humanity because that is something so often forgotten today. Perhaps it was forgotten forever, but I don’t think it’s ever been as bad as it is now. People are down, depressed, confused, they feel that life has no meaning. They crave human connection but often feel unsatisfied with the friendships they forge. I know this because I am people. I feel down, depressed, confused, etc, all the time. I know I’m not the only one, it’s a human condition.

Life is suffering no matter which way you cut it, but that doesn’t mean there’s no purpose to it. The most beautiful thing about life (maybe…this is a stream of consciousness after all) is that you can choose, at least that’s how we view it. You can create purpose and use your mind to invent things that others (and most importantly your Self) can look at and say “this has value”. You can make life valuable because you are a human being and you have the capacity to reason. That’s why I think feeling shame in being a human being is one of the vilest evils there is. And I will not hold back because these words belong to me and to no one else. I include religion in that sense, and all forms of rejecting your capacity to reason for an easy out. But when the smirking atheist reads that, I say, you will fall victim to the exact same problem. Let me reiterate, you are human.

There’s a lot of things you can do when faced with the problem of the human condition, namely, the problem that life is suffering. Many people (including myself most of my life) will turn to some escapism. Drugs, booze, nicotine, video games, social media. These things do not decrease suffering, not in the long run. Addiction will seep the joy out of your entire life leaving you as a shell of your former self, even without the resulting health issues. The issues of the mind tend to precede those, and even if your not hacking up your lungs, or drowning in their fluid, or passed dead drunk, you might just feel like you are. My tale of addictions is for another time, however. That should be all for now.

I grew up in what was, at the time, a small town. I aim, at least for now, to leave names, dates, and places out of these words, though I have no doubts that I will eventually grow tired of holding back, and will let detail by detail slip through. I plan to be writing this for a very long time, perhaps a lifetime. My aim now is to write a lot, and I don’t think that will change. Any reader will probably gleam from these first few sentences, that I have no strictly-defined purpose for what I am writing now, that I will swiftly bounce between ideas, and that I will be hard to follow, at times. This might be explained in the future. But for now, I do not have all the answers. I was born in a hospital in a big city next to the small town I grew up in. I spent the first little-more-than-a-year of my life there. When my younger brother was born, my mother, father, younger brother, and I moved to the town. That is where I spent the next 20 years. Suffice to say, I do not remember much of these earlier years. I remember the first house I lived in only from photographs. There are a lot of photographs.

I can be more specific about the time I grew up than I can about the places. I was born in 2000. I wonder if it was an isolating time to grow up in. I think it is today, at least. I at least was afforded a childhood I can remember. I used to ride my bike to the various playgrounds in and surrounding the neighbourhood. I would do this with my brother. We would play with the kids, a little bit, but we were and always have been, poorly socialized. The psychologists say that if a child is not properly socialized before age four, he likely never will be. I don’t know what I think of that, I don’t know if anyone can be so certain. But I do know that I had little friends growing up and that interacting with others was always difficult for me. Rejection from other potential play-mates at an early age seemed to affect me more than it did others. To top that off, every friend I did have from when I was very young, ended up moving far away. I sometimes wonder if that truly is the case, or if it was something my mother told me to harbour me from the truth: that I was a terrible play-mate.

I remember one boy that I ended up being friends with at around age seven. Eric. Eric came from Czechoslovakia. He actually came from the Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia dissolved into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992) but this is just one of those things I say for my own amusement. Anyways, Eric came from Czechoslovakia and ended up being in a homeschooling group that I was a part of. I don’t recall the specifics as our mothers were the ones who made us friends, but Eric became a childhood friend nonetheless. The reason I think about this specific part of my life so often, is because I was old enough to remember bits and pieces, and young enough to have a malleable brain. These are the ages, I think, when the negative emotions you experience, can easily affect you well into your adult life.

My homeschooling years lasted until I was 11 years old at which point my mother put me into public school. I do not know how I feel about this. On one hand, I believe I have achieved somewhat academic successes in part due to my homeschooling. On the other hand, I was thrust into public school with the lessons ingrained inside of me that I should be polite above all else, I should only speak when spoken to, and I should sit down, shut up, and learn. One might argue that these are all good lessons, and I do not disagree; however, sometimes the pendulum can swing too far.

I was once in an after school tennis program. I can’t be certain of how old I was, but I reckon it would have been the same time I knew Eric: I would have been about seven years old. At seven years old, I did not have the social reservations that consumed me at 11. I was not fearful or anxious. I misbehaved, as kids do. The stark contrast of my Self at seven years old versus 11 years old, is something I often think about. A couple girls in the after school tennis program found a stinkbug on the tennis court one day. It was a big green plump stinkbug. Of course, young children would be fascinated by such a bug, and they should be. I don’t think I’ve seen a bug like that since. Anyways, in a turn of events that might’ve intrigued Carl Jung, I wanted to squish the stinkbug; the girls wanted to protect it.

I recall looking down at the gray velcro shoes and baggy jeans of a homeschooled kid. Nearly a foot away from my toes was the stinkbug, and on top of it was one of the girls tennis rackets shielding the innocent life from my destructive tendencies. That is where my memory of the event ends. I have an inkling of a feeling that the instructor intervened and took the bug to the grass never to be seen again. At least, I hope that’s what happened. That’s probably the last time I talked to girls my age for a few years.

I can’t even remember if it was the same day or not, but during one of these tennis lessons, my mom showed up just outside the chain-linked court. I did not see her at first until the instructor pointed her out to me. I approached her and asked:

“Do you have any apple juice”

I was thirsty. I don’t remember her response, but she led me to the white Dodge Caravan, still thinking she had apple juice for me.

As soon as I sat in back seat right behind her, she shut her door and screamed.

“I can’t believe my son is a bully. I can’t believe I raised a bully.”

She repeated this on the four minute drive home, sounding like she was on the verge of tears. To hear your mother screaming on the verge of tears is more than enough to make a seven year old child immediately start bawling his eyes out. I profusely apologized with all the wit and grace of a child my age, and she threatened me with the fabled wooden spoon that her father used to use on her.

I don’t remember if she ever actually ended up using the wooden spoon or not, but I at least got a good spanking that day. That wasn’t the worst part though, the worst was always being abandoned in your room with your bed and the lights off for an unspecified amount of time. My parents gave up spanking. I was probably only spanked a handful of times, less than my brother, I think. But being told to “go to your room” persisted right up until it would’ve stopped working on me. There have been times in my adult life where I would be laying in bed with the lights off crying and feeling exactly like I did at seven years old. Most of those times, I wasn’t sure why I felt the way I did. I just know I felt it and that I had felt it the same as a child.

My paternal grandfather, Opa, is someone I know very little about. He died when I was six, he liked pickled herring, he was a smoker and a drinker for a long time, and he was in Germany during World War II. My father does not speak to me about anything that can be construed as an emotion, that’s why I think it’s hard for him to speak about his dad. He told me once that Opa spent some time in a Soviet work camp after World War II and that the Soviets starved him until his teeth fell out. The only reason he told me that was because I was 16 and flirting with the ideals of communism. My father still has some sort of family in Germany. Rick and Patty are married and have some relation to my dad. They live in Germany, but visited us twice. The first time they visited, I was too young to remember anything. The only thing I remember, in fact, is that the day after they left, me and my brother were forced to spend the entire day in our room. This did not have the consequence I think it intended, because the next time Rick and Patty visited, I was terrified to act out of line. They tried to give me and my brother $50 and we seriously declined until they insisted. I remember being afraid that my mother would hear that they gave us $50 and notice that we failed to show the correct amount of gratitude.

My mothers side of the family seemed easier to get along with when I was a child, granted, that’s probably got more to do with my cousin on that side of the family. I’ve talked to him rarely since we were kids, but he and I once both reminisced on the phone. The times we had together as kids were some of the best childhood memories.

We would’ve been 11 years old when his mom and my aunt died of cancer. I wish I remembered more about her because I don’t need to remember much to remember that she was always kind and that everyone loved her. Most of what I remember, unfortunately, is her pale, frail frame, sunken-in eyes, her hairless scalp that once held hair down to her waist. I remember her being tired and spending what felt like forever in the bathroom because she needed to work with the colostomy bag. I remember my hardy redneck uncle crying at her funeral, and I remember the small object that held her remains. That a real human life could be reduced to something so small and unobtrusive.

Which then reminds of when my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and somehow I don’t remember what I felt. I think I was escaping into video games during that time and eventually going to school. I remember my mom telling my brother and I how the doctors caught on early enough that it wasn’t really a worry. I wonder if that was entirely true or not. It must have been difficult for her to see her brothers wife succumb to the same disease that she was fighting. Eventually, though, after the radiation, the durag, the sick days sleeping, she was cancer free.

I would’ve been in the seventh grade at this time and just starting real school. If I was in any preceding decade, I would have been completely out of my element. But in 2012, it seemed I was only an outcast in small ways and that there were plenty of similarly maladjusted kids who recognized my social incompetence, but did not find it so off-putting that they wanted nothing to do with me. Noah was one of these kids. But perhaps this is something I will continue later.