I’ve heard a lot of good things said about Montreal

I’m sure that some of them are even true.  The music is good (except when it’s bad), the people are artistic (except when they’re not) and all the permanent solutions/repairs/medical treatments are temporary (there are no exceptions to this).

The floors are slanty, the food is (mostly) not as good as most people here seem to think it is(Seriously?  Why can’t I find a quality face-melting red curry, even in Chinatown?), and Crescent Street is to be avoided (except Hatter’s, on a good night).

I’ve lived here for almost six years now.  Somebody once said that if you’ve lived somewhere for five years, you can say you’re from there.  I’m not from here.  I’m not from anywhere.

I’m a base brat (the middle child of five, son of an Air Force officer and a feminist lawyer), so I was born, of all places, in Nova Scotia, a province that has claim to no more than two of the earliest years of my life and a single trip in 1998 to the part of the province I didn’t live in.  Beyond that, I’ve lived just about everywhere else in Canada.  Cities I’ve spent large amounts of time in include Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, the Niagara Peninsula (which is where most of my family lives), Regina and good ol’ Saskatoon (never lived, just visited a lot) Sept Illes, QC, and somewhere I’m forgetting.  Outside of Canada, I’ve been around Europe a bit, and into the states a bit, and yeah, it was all fun, and all the people were real nice.

So now I’m a ‘Montreal-based artist/musician/Canadian Author,’ which I’ve often been told has a certain cachet.  I don’t know if it does, because I know a lot of other people here who call themselves all of those things, and whatever they mean by cachet, it isn’t what I mean.  If I ever do, I figure I’ll probably only have that when some photographer comes over to my apartment to get gritty black-and-whites of me in my ‘natural environment’ (which would probably be on a boat, to be truthful, but the last thing I need is for someone to take arty pictures of me while I’m wearing what I wear when I’m on boats.) 

There’s nothing edgy and arty and urban about a pair of Topsiders.

I’ve run out of things to say about myself.  Even though this is my website, and if there ever was a place for self-indulgence, it woud be here, I’m getting a bit annoyed at myself.  If anybody really cares, they can email me, ask their burning questions, and I’ll put my answers up here.  Don’t hold your breath.

One of those pictures people have as their facebook profile pic when they want to appear ‘professional’

A dark, brooding, sentimental ‘author pic’ taken by Jodie McNamara.  Yeah, I think it looks like I’m just barely holding in all those complex and inexplicable ideas that make writing bizarre mindbending novels possible.  Yup.  That face—that man  is a brimming cauldron of barely-suppressed madness.  Watch out.

Yeah.