Ode to a Lifelong Love

“Can I get this toy?” I would ask my mother while holding the action figure in front of me, my best ‘good son’ expression on full display.

“No, but you can get a book” she would answer from behind a cart full of groceries.

I’d groan and head back into the book section of the grocery store, in search of a cover that caught my eye. A book wasn’t a toy, but it was something. Something new to bring home. Something new to experience. In retrospect, it was a bit sadistic for a grocery store to mix in the coolest, latest toys with books, but perhaps that was the objective: lure them in with toys, stick them with books.

This was back in 1994 when parents felt comfortable leaving their prepubescent children unattended for hours on end while they ran important errands. In my case, my mom was a single mother and had to either contend with two hyperactive children while sifting through stacks of coupons, trying to complete her grocery list within an ever-constricting budget, or leave us in the book section and hope for the best. The book section became a second home.

Yes, the pre-internet era. When stories of missing children felt a world apart from our own. They were faces on laundromat cork boards and milk cartons. Something to look at while you ate your cereal or folded your underwear. This wasn’t our world. That didn’t happen here. People who grew up during that era in British Columbia will remember Michael Dunahee: the mythical boy who vanished into thin air one summer afternoon. His family spent over twenty years searching for him. His face stared out at us from posters in shop windows and in the back pages of newspapers. He was an unfinished story; a parable without resolve, but in our minds he stood as nothing more. Michael Dunahee was an exception, not the rule.

Now you can spend all day tracking child abductions on Twitter. Elite pedophile rings, satanic ritual sacrifice, children held prisoner in dungeons under pizza shops; you can follow an endless stream of links into a winding pit of depravity. I myself have fallen victim once or twice.

At first it was Goosebumps then Christopher Pike. I was never much of a fan of R.L. Stein because the blood and guts crescendos he promised always took a hard turn into some goofy Scooby Doo ending. I suspect it had something to do with publishers and worry about criticisms the Goosebumps series would receive from parents if Stein actually delivered on what his readership wanted. Pike, who was a more young adult themed horror writer, did deliver the necessary gore, but he also included a healthy dose of sex, which even as an eleven year old reader made me uncomfortable since it seemed like Pike was writing about his own teen sex fantasies.

Then in my eighth grade English class we read Animal Farm. My teacher introduced the book by saying, “If you understand the words in these pages, this will be the most important book you’ll ever read.”

At first I didn’t get it. What’s the big deal about dictatorial pigs? Why should I care about this? We discussed the first chapter in class and I asked that very question. My teacher responded, “Because this has happened in human societies in the past, is happening now, and will happen again.”

That’s when the figurative lightbulb illuminated over my head. It was an allegory. Not just a political one either. It was an allegory for human nature.

I devoured that book in less than a week. Then I read it again.

Animal Farm led to 1984, which then led to Huxley, then Hemingway, then Dante, then Chaucer, then Milton.

Then later it was Hunter Thompson, more Orwell, Naomi Klein, Glenn Greenwald, Russell Means, Huey Newton, Graham Hancock, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky.

Now it’s Orwell (still), Rex Murphy, William Shirer, Jon Halliday, Jordan Peterson and others.

My own journey into writing began the year after my introduction to Animal Farm. I wrote a report on some forgettable book I half-read and my teacher kept me after class. When she sat me down at her desk I thought she wanted to discuss my lack of having actually read the book, but instead she looked me square in the eyes and said, “You can really, really write. I mean it. You have a talent for it.”

That conversation led to my experimentation with music. At the risk of sounding pompous, regular writing was too easy for me. It was bland, basic, uninteresting. Writing in rhyme form and to the rhythm of a drum beat was a real challenge. To send a message in metaphors and similes; to paint a picture through music; to illustrate the world not through what’s being said, but what’s not being said directly; that became my core passion.

In my early twenties I was driven to start writing blogs on my MySpace page. I don’t know why. What could I possibly have to say that hasn’t been said better by Orwell or Thompson or Murphy? I’m certain I was, and still am, a lowly ant crawling in the shadows of these literary masters, but I was compelled to do it, and in a matter of months my blogs were being read by tens of thousands of people.

Anyone else would have been proud to have accomplished such an incredible feat, but my success as an essayist frightened me. My essays, which I could spin up in less than half an hour, vastly overshadowed my music. People didn’t want to hear my songs, they wanted to read my thoughts- the result being the exact opposite of the one I was trying to produce.

I didn’t want to be a novelist, or an essayist, or a writer of any sort. I wanted to be an artist.

I was picked up by a popular music and culture website and given my own weekly column: This Is My Rifle. I wrote as a means of promoting my music, and just as luck would have it, once again my column overshadowed my albums. I couldn’t understand why. These articles I wrote, these fifteen hundred or so words, were something I did with my eyes closed. It took no effort, no real commitment. I would write them on a bus or in my head even. The real energy was in the music. That was where I poured all of my talent. That was where I worked endlessly to weave my masterpieces. But they didn’t want that. They wanted my throwaway thoughts.

It wasn’t until recently that I realized this is my one true gift. It came easily because I was born to do it. I’m good, but not great, and the reason for that is because I treated it as a secondary tool- one that I went to when all else failed. It’s a fire that never grew beyond smoldering coals because I was too busy looking at the stars to notice it.

I’m devoting myself to it now because I finally understand what the first half of my life was building into. It wasn’t artistic fame and stardom. It was the dream of a tired single mother standing in a grocery store making a crucial decision: who do I want my oldest son to become?

Don’t buy the toy. Offer a book. I can’t afford it but maybe it will take him somewhere.

This is the result of a broke single mother who would rather feed her son’s mind than feed herself. That’s what this is.

Thanks mom. I didn’t understand until now. I love you forever and ever.