Is the word "ass" a swear word? Is it actually profanity? It's funny, the things I am still unclear about at my advanced age.

My upbringing was pretty conservative. The worst strong language I remember hearing in my house as a kid was when my father would yell bloody hell. That doesn't sound very strong now, but back then when that was what was yelled in the worst situations, like that time he ran his thumb through the electric garage door opener chain, it can seem pretty powerful.

"Bloody hell!" he bellowed, clutching his shredded thumb and bleeding all over the side of our yellow station wagon. "Grab a tea towel or something!"

I remember wandering off to get a towel to staunch the blood flow and mentally filing bloody hell away for a time when I wanted to sound like I really meant something.

So, when I say Bloody hell! Shanan is a kicker of many asses!, you know that I mean it.



She is the first person outside of my apartment whom I told about my new quitting drinking thing. I kind of wedged it in between paying for our restaurant bill and walking to the car, because I was nervous about it and was subconsciously trying to make it look smaller by sticking it in the middle of our bustling around with coats and bags and whatnot.

She looked a little shocked but behaved exactly as I thought she might, which was with a measure of positive matter-of-factness. I needed positive matter-of-factness. It helps to have swollen, turbulent-seeming things laid more plain.



Also, when I ask her if I can put stupid pictures like the one above on the internet, she says yes.

Bloody hell! Shanan is a kicker of many asses!

----------------------------

PS. My father's thumb is much like any other thumb now, to ease the minds of those who were worried. I know that the state of my father's thumb is of great import.

1. behind doors


2. under the pile of blankets and pillows in the makeshift cupboard under the stairs in my maternal grandmother's house, because it was nice to be in the middle of everything and yet so securely alone


3. in several of my bedrooms' closets


4. behind the curtains in my grade two classroom to avoid being caught stealing my teacher's happy feet homework stamp


5. in the bed of a half-ton truck, pressed up against the closed tailgate, because I really didn't want my new friend's jealous girlfriend to find me with him


6. behind the chimney on the roof of my parents' house while I waited for my Venusian parents to retrieve me


7. down in the old cold cellar at my paternal grandparents' farm, because the day was so hot and dry, and the cellar's damp cold made me shiver


8. inside a beige cubicle


9. behind a large fan on the roof of my elementary school when a bully came a-knocking


10. around corners


11. inside over-sized pants and sweaters to keep people from looking at me


12. inside more public bathroom stalls than I can count


13. under a canoe at summer camp to avoid taking part in some team-oriented sporting event


14. inside the bench seating in a Scamper camper


15. behind the curtains at the front of a Catholic church I did not belong to while some kind of meeting was being conducted


16. in my apartment


17. on top of a pile of grain under an old wool blanket in a granary with my cousin


18. in a stranger's robust garden while thieving carrots


19. behind the secretary's desk at my parents' church when I was nearly caught abusing the photocopier


20. inside the middles of clothing racks at Woolco


21. on the floor of a Volkswagen Rabbit


22. under many different beds


23. up inside a poplar tree in my childhood backyard to get some respite from my little brother, who could not get enough of me when he was four


24. in the back of an old fort that had been abandoned by my father and his brother some time back in the 1950s


25. behind, under, and inside substance abuse

This is the man behind the Schmutzie: the Palinode.


the iPhone Hipstamatic app with the John S lens, BlacKeys B+W film, and no flash

Without him, I wouldn't be here,


the iPhone PictureShow app

and here is pretty phenomenal.


the iPhone Hipstamatic app with the John S lens, BlacKeys B+W film, and no flash

Thank you.

I am an alcoholic. The mojo I have been working since 1988 isn't working for me anymore, and I must live a life I can love if I am going to survive.



I didn't want to start there, not with that first sentence, because it feels shameful to say something out loud that I have already known for more than ten years. I wanted to lead you through a bit of a story, ease into it, make us all feel a little more comfortable. In the end, though, that felt deceptive, especially when I feel like the emperor who didn't know he was naked for the whole town to see the entire time. Surely, my alcoholism can't be news to everyone.

So, this is about honesty and truth. This is about coming clean.

----------------------------

Being of Mennonite ancestry, I come from a long history of conservative drinkers. Technically, Mennonites are supposed to be teetotallers, but, if the story I am remembering is true, this level of alcoholic conservatism was new to my mother's side of the family when they arrived in Canada from the rather grim shores of the then Russian portion of the Dnieper River. Nowadays, you can take pleasure cruises along the Dnieper out of Kiev, but back in the 1920s it was a little too full of gunfire, thievery, murder, and rape for my family's tastes.

Again, I might have the story wrong, but I think it was my great grandfather, an ordained minister, who brewed the beer for the community's dances back in the old country. Mennonites are also supposed to be against dancing, but the town got around dancing's sexual implications by enforcing same-sex partnerships, which, as a queer kid who wouldn't have minded a little more leniency when it came to alcohol consumption, kind of made me long for the good old days when the straight kids were the ones who had to sneak out behind the barn to shake it down with their partners.

When my maternal ancestors moved to Canada, though, they found a more conservative Mennonite culture. There was no more beer-brewing and no more dancing, and so I ended up being raised in a climate in which my mother was moved by guilt to cry when she allowed me to go to my first school dance and my grandfather tactfully referred to the finger of rye whiskey he drank with my father as "medicine". We didn't cut out the drinking and the dancing altogether, but both were tinged with the element of sin.

At fifteen, I decided that I needed to break the mould one weekend when my parents were out of town. I had always been seen as the fresh-faced kid, the smart kid, the good kid, and I wanted to stake a claim to an identity without good, without God, and without a tie to pleasing anyone other than myself. I wanted to do what any fifteen-year-old wants to do: I yearned to declare my autonomy from the moorings of childhood.

A friend and I employed this skater dude with fake ID to score some alcohol for us and a few of our friends. None of us were drinkers, so we pressed forty dollars into his hands and told him to get us stuff that tasted good. We waited on the curb until we heard the crunch of his skateboard wheels against the asphalt, and then we rushed him into the house surrounded by a flurry of our arms and hands in an attempt to obscure him from the neighbours. Apparently, he took "tasty" to mean "grape-flavoured wine coolers", because he unpacked a couple dozen bottles filled with fizzy, lavender liquid. We had been thinking of something with a little more grit to usher in our first drunk, but alcohol was alcohol, especially since we weren't the ones with the fake ID.

My social group was generally into clean living. They mocked the stoners who hung out behind the cafeteria smoking cigarettes during lunch and the kids who bragged about falling down on front lawns over the weekend. I harboured a secret jealousy of those who didn't care what people like my friends thought, though, and I nodded along while saying nothing. Clean living was boring the hell out of me. I wanted to shake shit up, and, if you can call throwing a handful of fifteen-year-olds into a suburban basement with grape-flavoured wine coolers "shaking shit up", that's exactly what I was attempting to do.

It didn't take much when my entire life had been centered around being safe and good and responsible and smart. I had already looked ahead at the long suburban road of more safe and good and responsible and smart that was being charted for me, and I was horrified by it. I wanted to hang a sharp left and outrun that life like a hunted rabbit dodging the jaws of some terrible, beige wolf. It was not a place I could go and still maintain my heart.

Our friends started to arrive, and we handed out the bottles of what amounted to alcoholic pop. It was terrible, but our curiosity about its effects inspired us to down most of the small supply. While everyone else lay about in sickly stupors, though, complaining of headaches and queasy stomachs, I felt a fire within, a burning in my belly that arose from more than just the cheap drink. This was new, and I knew that I was going to do this again as soon as I could, because nothing like that sweeping heat and power had ever come over me in quite that way before. I lay on the floor of that bungalow's basement and felt good, really good, for the first time in years.

With those first two drinks, I had christened myself into the slow swell that would become the ocean upon which I built my life. I had found my mojo.

----------------------------

Twenty-two years later and ten days ago, a switch went off inside my head while I dove into my fourth pint of draft beer for another night in a row of several. The switch felt identical to the switch that went off inside my head nearly a year ago when I faced my nicotine addiction of the same duration and quit smoking, the switch that made me feel settled and terrified and right and so terribly fucked up. The switch that changed my life and turned me inside out and set me right again after living in fear for my health and the despair over my own seeming inability to make life changes for the better.

A deepened understanding sank into my brain without warning, the depth of which understanding I have been avoiding for over a decade:

I am an alcoholic.

It was a command for action, a life or death demand, be the death physical, spiritual, or psychological. Change or die, it said, change or die.

That was ten days ago, and now I have just completed the longest stretch of sobriety I have experienced in probably well over ten years. I feel settled and terrified and right and so terribly fucked up again, and it feels so good to feel this fucked up, because it's me I'm fighting for, the me I fought for when I quit smoking, the me that can think clearly when I am not obsessing over the next inhale or drink, the one whose days are not governed by a constant revolution of chemical intake, managing my addictions for the sake of little else but appearances and the bare ability to make rent.

Cancer was hard. The Palinode's broken back was hard. My nervous breakdown was hard. Quitting smoking after twenty-one years was hard, (and it still is at times). Admitting to my alcoholism and maintaining the act of will to not drink is also hard, but after going through all of the above and having found only more love and more kindness both within myself and out in the greater world on the other side of terrible things, I know that, barring a graceful pirouette, I can at least stumble toward sobriety.

I don't know how to live sober yet, and almost none of my habits lead down the road to sober living, but I am going to learn. I can't not learn how if I am going to live any kind of life I can love. The mojo I found both through smoking and alcohol was little more than bravado born from physical and chemical remove. They are straw men that have left me hollow.

I am an alcoholic. The mojo I have been working since 1988 isn't working for me anymore, and I must live a life I can love if I am going to survive.

----------------------------

* The title is a quote by Bertrand Russell from The Conquest of Happiness.

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Writing a good how-to article is harder than most people think. I know this, because most of the how-to articles I come across on the internet are down-right terrible. They often assume a level of expertise that the reader does not possess or neglect to mention entire steps that would get the reader from step three to step four without causing them to rip out handfuls of hair. My how-tos, though, are quite fantastic, and I am here to tell you how to do it, so that when you decide to share your knowledge with the world, you can do it better than everyone else.