“You allright dude?” said my buddy Sam, smiling broadly through his moustache, adorned in a Toronto Blue Jays t-shirt and a black cap emblazoned with a scull, from the city morgue.

“Sorry. Give me five minutes” I replied, standing there in my underwear.

Earlier that week Sam had asked me if I was up for a mission. It’s generally known that I appreciate some objectives, so I asked him to tell me the score.

For the past 11 or so years Sam and a coterie of his friends from high school and uni, known to each other as The Sharks, had done a hike-in camping trip to Gambier lake, on Gambier Island in the Howe Sound, just off the coast of Vancouver. The Island is the biggest in the Sound and is untouched by commercial development. There used to be a general store and a restaurant, but now those places are just closed up buildings for sale. It has plentiful flora and fauna including wolf packs and even cougars. I had never been there, but Sam explained to me that he wanted to go up the weekend before he and his pal’s other camping trip to bury some beer - It’s pretty far out there to be carrying that much.

Honestly in the moment I thought ugh, I don’t wanna go on some stupid fucking hike. The idea of it seemed laborious for my Saturday. But when a fellow traveler and friend of over 10 years asks you to go on a mission, you feel inclined to oblige. I did tell Sam that someone who would like to join us was our mutual friend Devon. Sam contacted Devon and he and his girlfriend Heather and their two dogs Kitty, a golden saluki, and Maul, a fierce chihuahua, would be accompanying us. A fine fellowship indeed.

I had everything prepared the night before. Snacks, 2 bottles of water, canned coffee in the fridge, Sam was making me a hoagie, hiking boots out, clothes chosen, Leatherman in my bag.

I texted Sam: What island is this again? As I had totally forgotten the details lost in a phone call. I re-read our texts and realized it was Gambier, responding: Gambier got it. To which he responded: I love how little info you need. You are such a boss. Generally I am reliable, punctual and very prepared for what I’m about to encounter, which is why it was quite hilarious that at 7:30, 15 minutes after the agreed upon departure time, I was standing there in my undies gawking at Sam standing at my doorway. I had woken up, set a timer and then passed out missing it go off. I hurried myself, throwing on my boots and not even lacing them up, grabbing my coffees and beverages out of the fridge, tossing them in my bag, which was already packed with anything that didn’t need to be in the fridge, then I dummy checked for keys, wallet, watch, phone - and was out the door.

“Fahkin’ know what an alarm clock is there bud?” Yelled the bearded face of Devon from the driver’s seat and I just shook my head and sped up, jumping in the back seat of his grey 4-Runner. Heather smiled and waved from the front seat with Maul, while Kitty arranged herself between Sam and I in the back seat. I gave Sam one of the canned iced coffees the other two having stopped at Starby’s on the way to my place. After an obligatory 15 minutes of roasting my ass for being late we were over the Second Narrows Bridge and on our way to the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal in West Vancouver. We started doing parodies of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. We were early enough on the road that even traffic for the ferry wasn’t that bad, and we pulled into the village and then a parking garage.

We locked up and then went out to the main parking lot where Devon and I smoked a bone and then mosied our way into the ferry terminal buying tickets to Langdale and continuing up the pedestrian gangway. We were directed down to a ground level access where pedestrians and cyclists would board in advance of the cars. The whole area had the pleasant industrial marine quality I’ve grown accustomed to and as we marched forward into the ferry I turned to Sam and we almost simultaneously opined that this really felt like a James Cameron moment, and with me flush on THC it felt doubly surreal.

The ferry ride was mostly inconsequential. I forwent the ferry breakfast, instead purchasing a protein enriched chocolate milk that I didn’t really care for. We sat out on the deck of the boat with the dogs and appreciated that it was clear skies. It was supposed to have been a rainy day, but the skies above proved to be mostly clear, the sunshine polishing off a few of the grumpier looking water formations. When the ferry arrived in Langdale we were ushered back down below where we’d exit the boat the same way we entered. I was out ahead of everyone and as I approached the crowd of people waiting I watched the maw of the ferry docking with the boarding platform and the frothing primal churning of water juxtaposed with the industrial nature of the boat increased my heart rate and I grinned way. I turned around to see the rest of the crew laughing at me but I just shrugged.

Once on land we made our way down another gangplank to the water taxi station that would take us to Gambier Island. We had a good 25 minute wait. Devon, Heather and I had attempted to go use the bathrooms at that terminal, but we would have gotten cut off while the cars boarded and missed the water taxi, so we went back to Sam and the dogs, who were getting along famously. Sam asked us if we wanted to go in by the route he knew, or by the knew route he’d scouted and had a map of on his phone. We reasoned that the new way going in would be best, as it could take more time than anticipated, and then take the way he knew out and there would be less obstacles. From this decision forward the clock was ticking, in my mind at least. There were a few Gambier locals that waited with us for the boat and there was an air of invisible eye rolling at our city slicker ways.

The boat eventually departed and I remembered that, despite Sam telling me to bring cash, I only had a 10 spot on me. We all managed to pay for our way there easily, but it left us scrambling and wondering if we had enough cash on hand for our journey home. We did but it would involve pooling all our collective change. The ride only took 10 minutes and as we came up on the dock on the other side we all took note that the young pilot was coming in hot , but he turned and reversed hard in the last moment, the boat rocking and idling right up to the dock, a maneuver I’d seen expanded upon and mastered by tug boat operators. We jumped off the boat at 10:40 sharp, passing a big line of people waiting to board and made our way up from the boats to the long dock that jutted out into the water looking directly at the Langdale ferry terminal. We all took note of a small boat named There and Back Again…

We walked up our first of many hills, admiring the properties along the water and continuing up to a parking area filled with all manner of trucks and cars, as well as sport buggies and a few quads. Behind us in the bay was a large barge with a loading ramp used to transport vehicles over to the island. I found myself wondering who owned it and how much they made on it. As we continued past this parking lot, directed by Sam, we started to encounter different types of heavy duty equipment along the road side and in private lots. No one was running off with one of those things. Varieties of homesteading sites and construction were found along the path of this main road. According to Sam logging was done over here and we came across several of the big log handling machines. We ended up on a road with an infestation of blackberry bushes lining our way and we soon found ourselves picking berries and loudly commenting on their bright delicious nature. Along this first leg we passed a couple locals and greeted them with friendly hellos and they gave us the same in return. Eventually we got to the point where we’d move off the main road and onto a trail, although not the official trailhead of the real hike to Gambier Lake. This initial stretch was mostly relaxed with a couple sections of hills. Sam told us that this was pretty smooth going compared to his other way in, which felt like an endless ascent. By the time we’d reached the remote lake at the center of the island we would have risen 400 meters in elevation, we did not understand that at this point.

Eventually we reached a fence that was locked and featured a sign telling us that we shouldn’t go through there. Sam insisted it was fine and we all ducked under the fence and made our way along what was an emergency fire road for circumnavigating the island. If there was an emergency we could get off the road, but it made sense you wouldn’t want vehicles on there. Once we exited the other side of the gated section we didn’t have long before we reached a shaded area of large tree’s that made a gate out onto a rocky beach. There was with an outhouse, that Sam used. We all made our way out there for a break and Sam informed us that shortly after this we’d be embarking on the true trail to our objective. Devon and I sparked another one, on the beach, well away from the forest where it was verboten to smoke, and Maul wandered along the rocks . Is she ok ? asked Heather. Well, there are a lot of eagles around here, responded Sam and Devon ran up and grabbed Maul taking her back to Heather. Heather had been carrying Maul on a babushka satchel for most of the walk, although her and Devon had been allowing her to walk on the trailed sections. It had, however, become clear that there was no way that she was going to be walking this whole hike, even though her attitude and spirit said she wanted to. Kitty on the other hand was our monitor, our up and down the line person. She didn’t run into the woods, she didn’t run ahead as I’d seen her do on other more recreational hikes. It was as if her animal instincts knew that there was something more foreign about this land and as such to be sharp as she escorted all of us along. On the other side of the gate Devon and Heather took the opportunity to change into something more breathable as the sun was now upon us and even under the canopy of trees we were about to enter, it was going to be warm. Everything that has happened up until this moment feels like a prologue to the greater journey that we would experience as we moved forward.

It started with a hill. A long, rocky hill leading into the mouth of a forest that enveloped us as we sweat and passed into it. Towering trees stood around us as we first passed the foyer of the forest, and caught the beat of our own hearts and heaving of breath until we transcended that entry level of exertion. Were you are sweating and panting and pushing yourself, wondering how long you’re gonna last - but then your body hits the rhythm where it says just keep putting one foot in front of the other and you do. It didn’t take long for us to remark that it felt like we were in Lord of the Rings, or a Redwall novel. Along the way the path was marked with orange tree tape with the phrase beware of killer trees emblazoned on it. Once we finally made our way to level ground we were immediately hit with the green of it all. The forest around us, despite the trees bodies being that grey brown, everything seemed to glow in an emerald light projected down from the canopy. Dense carpets of moss rose from the ground, so bright and beautiful that we didn’t want to walk across them. Devon threw himself onto one of them and rolled across that brilliant emerald green all natural shag carpeting laughing like a maniac as we continued on. The multi textural layers and colors of the forest danced across each as we reached a heart rate that drove our senses into something almost psychedelic as we journeyed through this untouched world. We wondered if we would bump into anyone else on this remote journey and though probably not. I found myself taking point and I began running into never ending strands of abandoned spiderwebs stretched across the path. At first I waved my arms in front of myself to try to stop them, but it was only marginally effective. Eventually I picked up a long lean forked stick and waved it out in front of me to clear the way. Devon started laughing at me, calling me Harry Potter, but when it came to be both his and Heather’s turn, they didn’t like those spiderwebs any more than I did. Eventually the escalating path came back and we once more found ourselves fighting our way up another gnarly incline. At a downed log in our way we needed to take our bags off and hand them over to each other and when Sam handed me his bag, with 2 cases of cans, not to mention his other requisites, I was astonished at how heavy it was. My bag was not light, but Sam was undoubtedly carrying the heaviest load of all of us. Still at time Devon and Heather were trading back and forth the satchel of Maul, especially at the moments of greater elevation gain. Devon remarked on the nature of the trees all having no limbs above a certain height and he was right, it was haunting and eerie in a way to have so much open space above us, while still having the sky covered. At a certain point we hit an incline so immense and rocky that Sam picked up a stick and began using it to leverage his way up the hill, a walking stick. I followed suit shortly after and was hammering my way up the hill when the rest of the crew called for a pause. I used my knife to cut down the handle of my stick so I wasn’t gripping onto raw bark. Sam also took this pause to check the map and informed us: We’re about halfway there……..hm no wait, actually it looks like we’re about a third of the way there. We would confide to each other later that in this moment, Devon, Heather and I were internally thinking: Holy Shit. We had already been hiking for about 3 hours since we’d gotten off the water taxi. Devon loudly proclaimed that he didn’t give a fuck, that this was what he lived for, we were on an adventure, lets get lost, lets go there. I admired my friend’s spunk. As we made our way from this last pause I caught sight of a stick that would be perfect and snapped it off, offering it to Heather. I think I’ll take that one - she said looking at the one I had made a handle for. She was right though, the new stick was more attenuated to my height and already had the bark broken off for a good handle. I’d carry it with me the rest of the day. Something so beautifully childlike and adventurous to have such value in a stick. As we passed out of what I would call the green zone I thought to myself how the zoetrope of trees was so eerily familiar to that found in Nolan’s The Odyssey, particularly in the moment where the Laestrygonians appear and decimate Odysseus’ crew.

From here we met a descent, to a weak riverbed that lined the edge of the path. Sam noted that in years previous, despite not having taken this path before, the riverbeds in the island were much more active and it being a dry year there just wasn’t that much there. We continued through this space which had a much darker lighting scheme. We were so far down that the light from the canopy couldn’t penetrate and we remarked to ourselves that the quest had taken on a decidedly more spooky vibe. There was not the same clear open sound as the forest, it was a muted and dense world of shadow. We continued on and at some point someone said that I should go first because I had the knife. As much as that was a joke, I still took point. Then we came upon it; a pile of bones picked clean and left perfectly arranged on the edge of the path. It was clearly a coyote. We marveled for a moment but then a collective chill ran up our spines as I asked what kind of animal lives on this island that could easily take down a Coyote and Sam responded: A cougar. Moments after this I caught scent, only for a moment of the pungent, sour and foul odor of predator shit. Maybe it was a sense memory from childhood memory. Maybe it was real. But in that moment I didn’t feel safe. The carcass of the coyote had ben picked so efficiently clean by the eagles, hawks and ravens that existed around here, but it made sense that the apex predator cougar had finished off this mongrel. Wolves would have just ripped it apart. I didn’t say any of this to our crew as Devon used a stick to hang the coyote skull warningly on a tree close to the path. I kept us moving and attempted to be as aware as Kitty as we moved through this darkened section of our journey. In the distance trees began to creak on and off, making us wonder if we were going to have one of them fall unpredictably. I took notice of some wide scratch marks about a meter and a half up a tree, and again didn’t say anything. There’s something awesome about being put back in that primal mindset. It wasn’t just me, we were all hyper aware as we moved through this section of the journey, a dark spot of thrilling uncertainty while we scanned the perimeter and muscled forward. I struggled thinking about how I would actually attack a cougar with the knife on a multi tool and reasoned I’d be better off picking up a rock to bludgeon it, remembering that the best way to attack an apex predator is to smash it in the nose with anything, as hard as you can. At this point, after many required breaks, we took note of how we were cutting through our water supply at an accelerated rate, and with no places to re-fill, we needed to start rationing. This dark zone shifted our mindsets, we weren’t even half way there and we needed to start making concessions for the rest of our journey. This was no longer a leisure hike, that was over long ago, this was, as Sam had promised me: a mission.

Coming out of the darkness required, you guessed it another hill. An impossibly long grade that was as rocky as it was littered with fallen trees and other debris. We wondered if the trees had been felled on purpose. We continued on, long difficult strides, our walking sticks thumping into the ground with every step. Eventually we were treated to another long path of moss and a beautiful kaleidoscope of trees. We savored this path a respite from the incline. We took a pause and Sam told us that we had another serious incline before we’d eventually descend to the lake. I found myself talking about what I was going to drink when we got back, that practical and inevitable fantasy that is a byproduct of a journey such as this. I want a Sprite, then a water, then a real Coke. We continued on and battled another ass kicking hill before we started to make a bit of a decline and Sam said this is it we’re almost there! But then that path leveled out and we made our way out a bay of trees to turn and see our next obstacle. A 75 meter vertical climb made of intensely steep switchbacks. It looked like something out of a video game, this dense wall of foliage and trees that rose up out of this basin. While we had faced no enemies, no monsters, or demons - gravity in this mystical land had become our enemy. We all cursed it, looked at each other, tapped our sticks and said there was nothing else for it before we gradually climbed the immense set of switchbacks. We took a break midway through the climb and Devon, who had been offering to carry Sam’s load most of the trip, was finally gifted with Sam’s bag and said: oh shit this is really fucking heavy, while he was still carrying Maul. We paused then again at the top when we realized that ahead of us was just one more long rocky straightaway. We laughed. We Cursed. Fuck hills. But we banded together and continued on. It should be noted now that at no point in our entire journey did anyone actually complain, we all bitched about the hills, the strain on our bodies and commented on the blisters forming - but no one was a sad sack complainer, we were all there to complete the quest. After we made it up that last incline we found ourselves in a place Sam recognized, heavily walked paths, some garbage from less courteous campers, a path and a place where Sam informed us that mud hornets had gathered one year - and then we were there. Gambier Lake. A gorgeous and untouched high elevation lake. There was a clear campsite that Sam confirmed was the site he and the Sharks returned to.

Out in front of us were a series of half submerged logs tangled together to form a sort of gangplank and boat launch with a blue plastic rowboat that Sam informed was was named The Frigate Diplomacy, not to be confused with The SS Minnow Johnson, which had sunk some years before. Sam gifted Devon and I a beer from his payload, Heather doesn’t drink, and we cracked the lukewarm barley water. Didn’t matter, tasted great. We all took note of the fact that we only had about 45 minutes before we’d need to head out if we were going to make the 5:30 water taxi and the 6:00 Ferry back to Vancouver. Devon was somehow almost instantaneously in his swimming trunks and marching down to the water like Kid Rock walking down the beach. There was a narrow and wobbly wooden walkway that lead out to the first set of logs, which were mostly submerged and quite slippery. Sam instructed Devon to just sorta launch off into the greater lake and then swim around to the logs you can walk on. Sam followed behind shortly. Kitty tried to walk out onto the logs, surprising us as she’s not really a big water dog, and as she got the water slicked section all 4 of her legs gave out and she cartoonishly plopped onto the log her tummy now soaked. She wanted to react and jump up but didn’t have much leverage and just sort of lay there stunned for a second while we howled with laughter, before managing to muster herself up and meekly head back to shore. Devon and Sam were out of the water, shouting into the vistal of even higher plateaus that surrounded the lake, their voices echoing off the 400 meter rock wall on the other side of the lake, and around the entire area. I had not planned on swimming, the initial forecast had been rain right, but after the journey I’d just been on I had to get in that water. I stripped down to my undies and made my way out onto the log, launching into the water and swimming around in the big open area. Eventually I hauled myself up and out of the water and made my way down to where the other 2 guys were. The water was pretty nice, not too cold at all. Sam and Dev both shivered for a second as a cool breeze pulled across the lake, and then they kept back into the water. They commented on how much nicer it was in than out. I hung out on the log a while longer and then Devon swam in to hold Maul while Heather took her turn to launch into the water. When she tried to climb up one portion of the dry log she was confronted with a water spider right in her face and screamed and swam back, shuddering in the water though not due to the cold. Can it swim? She asked to which I responded: Well it got out there somehow. I jumped in one more time and then went back to hold Maul so Devon could get another jump in.

Then before you know it we were all back on dry land and slamming down our lunches. Sam had made a very nice hoagie with tomato, provolone and two types of salami but both of us was only able to eat half. We were hungry for sure, but with the exercise and slight dehydration we just didn’t have the stomach to cram the other half down. Devon stripped right down and posed before the lake. I asked Sam to reach into my bag for something having neatly arranged the Smirnoff Ice I’d brought along label sized up and Sam got to perform the classic Millennial humiliation ritual, though in the moment I was a little jealous. Some alcohol and sugar could add some levity to the reality that our journey back was likely to be as intense as the one in. Then in the distance we heard voices, young voices and out of nowhere a pack of seven or eight kids came tearing out of the woods, chattering away to each other. Thankfully Devon was fully clothed by then. The kids could not have seemed less surprised to see us at this remote lake and a number of them very politely and confidently asked if they could pet the dogs. They appeared to be led by the tallest of them a little red head girl in a onesie swimming suit. The kids ran down the gangplank and logs that we’d so slowly and carefully traversed. Some jumped in the water and 3 others pushed off in the Frigate Diplomacy and the rest just just ran wild. I was stunned, I hadn’t seen free range kids like this in a long time. Even myself growing up, sure I was allowed to play outside for hours on my parents 10 acre piece of property, but I sure as hell wasn’t allowed to go swimming without adult supervision. Their presence added to the surreal quality of the day and I just couldn’t help shake my head in admiration at the pure youthful vitality. Eventually the kid’s parents caught up and greeted us warmly as we packed up. There’s another lake up there too, said one of the men pointing to the plateau above and across the lake , been meaning to get to it, but my lovely children keep holding me back. We all thought that was pretty funny, and although they wanted to continue chit chatting, we just didn’t have the time for it.

Sam directed us on the next leg; up the creek bed. Instead of going back the way we came we turned and followed a path that lined the edge of the lake until we hit a Crosspoint where a, currently dry, creek bed would feed into the lake. It was extremely uneven and rocky, though there was a clear path upward and we once more found ourselves climbing an uncooperative hill. Sam told us that this incline was the most serious one of our return trip. We took several breaks on the way up and eventually broke out into a flat path that led us into a little open patch with some of that familiar green moss and Sam remarked that the very first time they’d come to Gambier Lake, they had gotten frustrated with the distance, not to mention carrying too much stuff, and had stopped there the first night before moving forward and down the creek bed the day after. Sam also noted that the new path in was a much more varied and beautiful journey and that it was a real slog to go in the way we were now going out. As we left the forest we could see why, ahead of us was a rocky path with a long steady decline through what was formerly a cut block, but had since grown back enough that it didn’t look as bleak and empty as Sam had said it was in the past. At this point we started to remember how after a long hard day of going up, the long path going down doesn’t feel any better, especially when you’re all on the other side of 35. We all groaned now, our knees jamming with each step forward and my hips in particular creaking away. At some point Devon had come down bad on his ankle and although he wasn’t saying anything, it couldn’t have felt great. The only respite we got from going downhill, was going uphill, as for whatever reason we’d turn the corner after a long descent and be faced with a new path that gave us another long steady hill to battle, only to reach it’s peak, go another short distance before being greeted by another long decline. It was madness. We told Sam that we were much happier to have gone in our cinematic route than this bleak road. We talked about Steven King’s, writing as Richard Bachman, The Long Walk, one of Devon’s favorite books. War would suck I said to Sam and he responded; Yeah it would just be this all day every day. We eventually made a stop in the shade and I could feel my legs starting to cramp up but just stretched it out. I polished off my remaining water and Devon and Heather were down to a bottle, while Sam said he’d share his mostly full one with me. It was about 4:30 and we had to ramble on so we just kept putting one foot in front of the other. On a particular set of decline Heather turned around and started walking backwards, which we all learned does alleviate the pain in your knees, but at the risk of walking backwards down rocky uneven terrain. The return was less spectacular and more grueling, especially with the memory of the inviting lake in our minds. The morning felt like a lifetime away.

After we’d come through the cut block we’d continued on until to reach the longest decline we’d seen since we started our return. Jesus Christ Sam, if I had to come in this way I would have lost my mind, I said. We continued on and were about a 10th of the way down the hill when Sam stopped us and informed us we’d gone the wrong way, we’d missed a turn after the cut block. We all comedically expressed frustrations. At this point I could feel blisters searing across the tops and bottoms of my feet but just let it hurt and kept on going as we muscled our way back up the way we’d come and eventually to where we should have turned. Oh great! More hills! I cheered as our path once more led us up a long meandering incline to another forest section. My hand was starting to feel a little raw from the walking stick but I continued slamming it into the ground with each step. It was 5:00 and we still hadn’t hit the main road. I pushed on up ahead, then paused to let the others catch up a bit. It went like this for a little while, the chain stretching and then pulling together, until we finally hit the dirt road and left the trailhead.

Sam wasn’t sure how far we really had ahead of us and as we trudged downward came across a big open lot, with a field and a big friendly looking building. Sam said it was the community center and main governing body of the island as they didn’t have an official fire department or emergency services. As we started to pass I reckoned that they would have some place where we could fill their water bottles. We stepped onto the property and Sam approached a small group of people sitting on deckchairs at the shady side of the field. When he asked if we could fill our water a friendly dude with ear length hair and a patchy grey t-shirt responded; You want a beer? I sure did, but in this moment we were still thinking we’d make our water taxi. We wouldn’t, but that didn’t matter. A nice lady Carol-Lynn, or a name like that, said she was on the board at the community center and sure she’d let us in, but we’d have to talk our boots off. If my boots come off, they ain’t goin’ back on, said Devon. Sam already had his boots halfway off and we just handed him all of our water receptacles, which at first he groaned at but then just went inside with our host. The rest of us flopped on benches and the stoop of the community center, talking with the man about our journey. Sam returned with the water and we drank deep, noting how good it was and not just on account of our thirst. We acknowledged that we wouldn’t have made the water taxi anyway and were happy to have re-filled the water. Our hosts got into their banged up old Rav-4, we thanked them and they wished us well as they drove off. We passed the now closed general store which was for sale. Devon found himself musing, not for the first time that day, what the hell am I doing? I should be here. But…I don’t want to run the general store. We came across a line of new and old vehicles parked for what looked to have been extended periods. Inhabitants of the island that worked shift work, or in remote locations only returning to the island once their jobs were done. We passed through the same parking lot we had on the way up and one of the islanders who’d come across that morning with us was there, throwing garbage and cans into the back of a truck that he drove down to the dock access. We returned to the dock and sprawled out, popping off our boots to give our piggies some air, and laying back to marvel at our journey. Heather and Sam compared step counts and since we’d set foot on the island we’d done about 20km. We marveled at it. It was easily, for Devon, Heather and I, the most physically demanding thing we had done in years. Maybe our entire adult lives. But we had made it. Devon and I burned the last joint and we just continued to chuckle and decompress. Eventually we saw the water taxi in the distance and began to pack our stuff up. Down on the dock the pilot once more pulled that hot shot maneuver as the deckhand jumped off to open the door I just stepped on. An elder woman looked at me, not impressed and said you actually have to wait, to which I responded oh I’m sorry, and got off to also be admonished by the boat’s pilot you can’t get on yet, and I responded sorry, just didn’t know. We waited for the pilot and the deckhand to help the woman off the boat before we boarded. The pilot said ok I’m losing my deckhand, so you gotta pay me - how much is it? He said gesturing to the deckhand who sweetly rolled her eyes at the young guy and told him the price. We pooled all our cash into his hands and then sat back to enjoy the ride to the Langdale terminal, Devon pointing out that boat There and Back Again…

Once there we realized that missing that 5:30 water taxi had meant we’d missed our Ferry, and despite it being a Saturday there wasn’t a 7:00 boat, and we’d be waiting at the terminal until 8:15 for the next departure. We made the best of it. I broke out some smoked almonds and corn nuts I’d been saving and we paired the salty snacks with the drinks available at the vending machines. I got my Sprite, and Sam paid $14 for a craft lemonade, not realizing what it cost until the payment had processed. Heather settled for a Coke Zero when the only vending machine that had Diet Coke wasn’t working. We wished we had some cards but also laughed that it would have just been added weight. There was this nice Slavic kid walking around, with his dad, asking to pet every dog at the terminal. We snacked and laughed and took a couple pictures. Later on we’d laugh at how we looked at the start of the day versus the end. When the ferry got there we mustered ourselves to our feet once more and boarded the vessel. Crossing that threshold onto the ferry felt like a completion of a tour of duty, a mission accomplished, though there would be more spectacle from the gods to follow our heroic human accomplishment.

On the ferry Devon, Heather and Sam got burgers. I’ve never had a good experience with the White Spot, the BC burger franchise, and they were shocked. I watched them annihilate their dinner and then in the distance we saw it. Shrouded in the smoke of the wildfires up north drifting down, bolts of red lightning raking across the sky, exploding in the distance. The lesser bolts flared up the smoky sky as if bombs were being dropped, while more immense chains of electricity snaked down brighter than I had ever seen before. We all watched transfixed as the power of Zeus rained down in the distance and we stood in awe of the ferocious power of nature that lit up the skies on the horizon. As if the day couldn’t get any more epic. The ferry docked and we left through the bottom as we had come, marching our last steps back to the parking garage and the car.

We left Horseshoe Nay and began our traversal of North Van, to cross the Second Narrows bridge and take Sam home first. But within 10 minutes of leaving the bay we were engulfed in an intense downpour that rendered visibility null, and Devon, one of the most competent drivers I know, finding himself struggling with the traffic and the weather. It was such an intense and sudden bout of rain that the road was almost flooded, perfect hydroplane conditions. This last stretch of brutal traversal lasted fifteen minutes, and then somehow we were past it. By the time we reached the Second Narrows we were out of the rain, but could still see the flashes of lightening in concert with each other in the distance.

Sam was dropped off. I was returned home and thanked Devon and Heather for everything. After a hot shower I flopped on the couch and thought to myself about the day. True, I had not initially wanted to go on the journey; but after the experience I felt something inside myself I hadn’t in many months. A feeling of accomplishment. The simplicity of the experience of just going somewhere and coming back compounded by the difficulty of the journey had given me the gift of a series of memories I’ve created permanence for in this piece. After many months in a fugue state, half asleep as I toiled in front of my black mirror, my work feeling thankless and meaningless; that day I had actually accomplished something. And what’s more I’d done it with some of my best friends, human and canine alike. Despite my aches, and pains, the difficulty of the climbs, and the fervor of discomfort I felt for large durations of the journey, we’d surpassed it all and returned victorious.

I feel an immense gratitude to Sam for giving me one of the most grueling days on my feet I can remember, as it rekindled my sense of adventure and desire for experiences beyond the 9-5, reminding me that such experiences don’t need to be sequestered to long journeys overseas with sanctimonious purpose, or personal meaning. It all stacked together into something bigger than a hike, bigger than a Saturday, bigger than the version of myself who almost didn’t get out of bed. Would I have done that by myself? No way. Which is precisely why Sam had asked me to join.

Sometimes it’s as gratifying and simple as: We made it, and we did it.

I had worked out the Summer at the ill named restauraunt The Hoof and Harness at the golf course, the equally ill named Marmot Ridge, in 100 Mile House, grabbed my last paycheck and packed my things - mostly my meager selection of clothing and boxes of comic books and DVDs - and was ready to leave my hometown behind for as long as I possibly could.

My parents, through friends in their community of hippy farmy co-op’ers - had helped me secure lodging with two artists in their 50’s living in Strathcona. Lenny and Maureen had agreed to let me board in their home. They were incredibly kind and patient people those first two years I lived with them and figured out how to exist in the city as an individual person. There were several moments; like me overloading and breaking the washing machine, and the couple times drunken friends of mine woke them up - where they exercised what I would call just admonishment, while allowing me the grace that I would now afford similiarily to a young person.

I was catching a ride down with my Mom who was working some sort of hospital union conference out in Richmond, and I wouldn’t actually fully move in until a few days after she needed to drive down. In the meantime I’d be crashing with a couple different friends from the Summer camp I worked at then.

Now I can’t say I remember everything from the past 20 years but I will never forget that first weekend in Vancouver.

My Mom parked her champagne Toyota Camry out front Continental Coffee on Commercial Drive and I exited the vehicle with a backpack full of essentials for the next few nights. She eyed me up and down told me to be safe and then I was temporarily free. I was meeting my friends at a place that doesn’t exist anymore but it was called Falconetti’s: East Side Grill and for all the important relationships and moments in life that would come pinwheeling out of it, it now seems like providence that my friends had selected it.

Falc’s, as we would refer to it, had a garage door that was open with two tables outside constituting a makeshift patio, long before such things were approved by the municipality. I stepped inside the long dark room and peered back to see my friends, Dylan, Lee, Chelsea and my best friend from high school, and fellow Camp employee, Cody. They were sitting at a high top table with a pitcher of beer. I was still 18 but this was clearly an all or nothing moment and I turned to the bar. The bartender was a very pretty and very punk young woman with several different colours in her hair, stretched ears, a septum piercing and fierce eye makup. I asked her for a glass and she eyed me up and down. I was wearing a hoodie covered in paint, as at the time I was really into abstract in acrylics and would wipe my brush on the sleeve of this hoodie. I had also sewn the only two band patches - The White Stripes and Sex Pistols - I could get my hands on onto it. After a couple seconds of contemplation she smiled her toothy smile and gave me a sleeve glass.

That waitress is Britni, and although I didn’t know it then she would become like a big sister to me, despite only being 6 months older. A few years after this I would move in with her and her brother Scott in the building that I still live in now. Later in life we’d remember that interaction and laugh as she’d been under-age while she was working there - I remember I gave you the glass because of the White Stripes patch, because you had clearly sewn it on yourself.

I joined my friends at the table and they poured me a glass of bright orange cloudy beer. We cheers and I took a sip. A couple seconds later I interrupted the conversation - Is this supposed to taste like soap? - Dylan explained that it was India Pale Ale, and not like that poser stuff Alexander Keiths. It had been divised by the British army in India where their standard ales would often spoil in the heated travels, and where the solution had been to up the alcohol content by using more hops in the mixture. I hated it, at first. I came to recognize that the distinctive flavour and high alcohol content often dissuaded casuals and most certainly young people, who at the time were still drinking Smirnoff Ice unironically. Ordering an IPA became a shorthand, that has obviously now become an annoying cliche, for being in the know. Having that proto-hipster sensibility that would fully blossom in West Coast culture closer to 2010. I didn’t care, it meant that in the future at Falconetti’s they’d know me as that young guy who ordered IPAs.

Commercial Drive itself already held a lot of relevance to me. In fact given the option it’s where I would have moved first, rather than Strathcona, and it’s clear that I love it here as I’ve never left. The previous Spring-Break I’d house-sat for my friend Tehya’s parents while they were out of town, a house just down Gravely street near Victoria drive. There was also my friend Geordie a corporate leadership consultant and very uniquely cool dude. He had been a camp counselor when I was a participant and we had bonded over comic books, and then he later got me into all the chaos magic psychedelic stuff. A true Jedi to my fledgling padawan. He lived in a co-op on the Drive known as The Red Square, his sister Steph and her daughter Frances also lived there. I’d been invited by Geordie to participate in a think tank style weekend at a retreat on Bowen Island where he’d field tested a bunch of adult workshop ideas. He’d called it Beta Camp as if there were to be an Alpha in the future. Dylan, only 20 or so at the time, had helped facilitate it and I just need to note that Dylan was, probably still is, one of the smartest most sophisticated people I have ever met. He lived just off the Drive farther down by 12th avenue. I was drawn to the rag tag, slightly dangerous, edge and street level nature of Commercial Drive in a way that I just wasn’t to other parts of Vancouver. Eventually, nothing felt more like coming home than reaching the top of Adanac or Venables, or coming off the train or the 99-Bline.

I know we drank at least 3 or 4 pitchers of beer and then moved on to buy some beer, this Brazillian lager called Brava, before going to Chelsea’s house at Fraser and Prince Albert. Prince Albert oh man Cody and I had a field day laughing at that one. On the walk from the Drive to Chelsea’s Cody and I pulled off and pissed on some trees much to the agahst of our urban compatriots. Cody and I may have more sophisticated sensibilities than a lot of our rural bretheren, but we didn’t see the problem with just huckin’ a piss. There weren’t any kids out and it was night time. What was the big deal? Cody and I also possessed a lot more of the Jackass sentiment than anyone else as later that evening, thoroughly, joyfully and youthfully drunk, Cody and I filled empty Brava bottles with our piss and left them neatly arranged on the sidewalk upon departure. Come to think of it maybe Chelsea, Dylan and Lee had something with their reaction to our relationship with piss.

Cody was crashing at Chelsea’s that night and I would be going to Dylan’s. We made the 15 minute walk back to his and then he offered me a nightcap of Glenliviet. I didn’t know how to drink whiskey yet. Had I drunk whiskey? Yes and the last time that happened I had woken up in the bed of my friend Alex’s truck while he drove me into town. Dylan explained to me how to drink whiskey much better than the supposedly sophisticated Owner of the Hoof and Harness ever had, granted he was usually a quater in on an eightball and polishing of Johnny Walker Red like it was water. You breath in through your nose once, you exhale, then you breath in again through your nose and hold it, then you let the whiskey wash over your tongue and swallow and exhale at the same time. It tasted amazing. It was like that moment was the first of many pallate unlocks I would experience over the next few years. Dylan lived in the basement suite of his parents house, so it was like he had his own apartment, but he only had one bed and no couch my 6’2 ass coud sleep on. So, certainly drunk by this point, we lay down in his bed and he opened his macbook and introduced me to this new show; its first season only had 6 episodes and might have gotten cancelled but Danny Devito apparently loved it and wanted to join the cast for season 2. I thought it was hilarious and since then It’s Always Sunny in Philedelphia has remained pretty consistent in my life. Just another moment I remember.

The next day we woke up and met up with everyone from the night before for breakfast at the now defunct Cafe Deux Soleis, plus another good number of people from Camp, although at this point I’m hard pressed to remember exactly who was there - but there were a lot of us. After breakfast we all went our own ways for a little bit although we’d eventually be meeting up at Trout Lake Park, not that I even knew what that was at that point. I remember just walking up and around The Drive, going into the very 90’s shops of nick nackery and imported designs.

There was this store called Urban Empire, ran by this woman named Patricia. It was a delightful store full of high quality kitsch, dirty joke novelties, and those historical action figures long before such thing was commonplace. She of course had tremendous Dame Edna style glasses and short cropped white hair. I would later frequent her store for the colorful novelty notebooks and it was in fact her that introduced me to my potential to self publish books. We’d of course have pithy chit chat when I went to ring up at the till, and eventually she found out I was a writer. She told me I had to go down to Oscar’s Art Books at Granville and Broadway where they had a machine that could print books to order. It completely changed my idea of what I was capable of and thus I began the task of writing the novels that exist today. However that was in 2009.

Back in 2006 we stopped at Dolce Amore for gelato. Cody got like a litre of it and got 3 flavours, one of which I definetly remember being Red Bull. He slowly ate out of the styrofoam insulated container, consuming nearly the entire thing over the course of the afternoon.

At Trout Lake we enjoyed the park and played a favorite game of mine Dual Disc Challenge, which is essentially a game with frisbee’s that operated kinda like tennis. Both sides have a frisbee and you both tossed at the same time and you can’t have both discs held on the same side at one time, and you’re trying to throw to make it hit the opponent’s ground. The size of the field of play can vary based on skill or number of players. Doubles I recall being very fun.

That night I stayed at Chelsea’s, along with a whole host of other people. They was a dance party in her place, something that happened pretty consistently for those first couple years. Camp people love to dance.

The next day my Mom came out from Richmond and met myself, Dylan, Lee and Chelsea at my new digs 812 East Pender. They helped me move all my stuff in and then, took a quick look around and we all went down the street to La Casa de Gelato to look over their insane range of flavours. Ice cream was a lot bigger deal to me back then apparently. My Mom drove back out to Richmond where her conference was still going for the rest of the week.

Then everyone went home and; my life actually started. It was the most unique moment in the entire world to become overwhelmed with a feeling of total responsibility for myself. I no longer had anyone monitoring me or telling me what to do. No one to actually check in with. It felt strange. I’d find myself telling Lenny and Maureen where I was goingto do something and have them look at me quizically, not as if they didn’t care, but as if they laughing that I thought I had to let them know of my comings and goings. I also didn’t have a job and would eventually need to start paying bills as I realized that the meagre $4,000 I’d brought with me would not last long with out some income. Still in that evening I looked out that bedroom window to no real view in particular, but as I listened to Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot it in People, for the first time, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of uncertainty married with joy. The sounds of the East Van alley, and the traffic was an entirely new and surprising sensation. I was of course still a young loudmouth who routinely thought he was the smartist guy in the room, was easily defensive and basically scared that I might look like a rube, or at very least wouldn’t figure it out here in the city. I was sill prone to being accidentally disrespectful while adjusting to the nuances of culture in the city. I wasn’t quite an edgelord, but I had an edge that’s for sure. At Falconetti’s, however, I was on my best behaviour. It behooved me to be an ultra respectful standup guy, lest some of the people there start to wonder about my age. It’s hilarious to think about how meticulous I was with the arrangement of my comic books and DvDs. I guess they were precious to me, they were the stories I had collected and they mattered to me. They were as much a way into the outside world as anything I had growing up.

The next day or so I had to go out to Richmond to say bye to my Mom. I think I had to get something from her? Maybe some cash? She didn’t want to drive into the City, although I think it may have been as much about making sure I knew how to get around the lower mainland. This was long before there was a train out to Richmond so instead I’d taken the 99-Bline to Cambie where I’d then gotten on the 98-Bline to Richmond Centre. For some of our younger, or non-Vancouverite, readers the 98-Bline was an express bus that operated like the 99, doing an express journey down a main lateral vein in the city, but going up and down Cambie instead of all the way down Broadway and back. I looked up the instructions on Google Maps, which was still really new, and wrote down the directions. That makes me laugh thinking about how many times in those days I’d have instructions from Google Maps and people wouldn’t trust them. I remember getting to my Mom’s hotel and then her still needing to be in the conference for like 4 more hours. Good thing I brought a book. The rest of the afternoon I just bummed around the hotel lobby reading. I know I had the DC comic collection Identity Crisis and the novel A Confederacy of Dunces. It was the last true moment of adolescent waiting for a parent. When we did meet up we had dinner, I think Chinese food? And then we went and saw Snakes on a Plane, which was not worth all the hype that had been made about it but was still fun enough. She drove me home, and then I truly was on my own.

The next objective was to get a job. I had of course been working in a restauraunt back in 100 Mile, and my boss there had said that he’d help line me up with a job in Vancouver. Although he became unresponsive at the same time I left town, which might have been because he never really intended to help me in the first place, or the fact that he was selling coke out of the restauraunt onto the golf course, or the bigger truth that those two things were more related than I’d come to understand for a few more years. I handed out a bunch of resumes, but it was fundamentally the wrong time of year for it - the Summer rush was over and most places would be peeling off their temporary staff and locking in their winter players. I wanted a job in a comic shop. Dylan reccomended I go check out The Comic Shop on 4th ave. Golden Age downtown was already staffed to the gills and RX on Main was too small to require more than 3 employees, and I sure as shit wasn’t cool enough to get a job at Lucky’s. So I went out to 4th and Arbutus and loitered hard for an afternoon, doing my best to engage the staff in conversation. I’ve come to learn that loitering is one of the best ways to get a job you want. I had the advantage of already having worked in a comic book enviroment at the best job I’ve ever had: Fascination Street Toys and Games in 100 Mile House, so I knew how weird people who buy that type of stuff can be. I stood out because I had social skills but also a deep knowledge of comic books, much more so than the average person my age. Keith Bickford, total legend and saint of the comic book community in Vancouver, gave me a job. He took a shot on me and inside my first week in Vancouver I already had what, at 18, was my dream job. One of the perks of the job was that you were allowed to take home up to 5 trade paperbacks and read them, provided you were delicate about the process of handling them, as any true comic book store employee would be. Connie’s Cookhouse on 4th had the best $11 lunch special and I would routinely get the hot and sour soup with the black bean green beans and chicken, and holy did that make a fart I can tell you. In my time working at The Comic Shop I read a king’s ransom in comic book value , not to mention the employee discount that funneled much of my meager earnings, that didn’t get spent at Falconetti’s, back into the shop itself.

The job also acclimatized me to the Downtown East Side, as I took either the 10 or the 16 from Pender and Hawks into Kitsalano. Those early years where I was so much skinnier and skittish, and with only a fictional sense of street smarts, I learned a lot about all the different types of people you’ll see and maybe interact with on East Hastings. It simultaneously deepened my empathy while callousing my need to react to such realities. When I eventually moved out of Strathcona I tended to avoid taking the Hastings busses, though I didn’t shy away from the area and generally think it’s important for people to walk it at least a few times a year. It puts your own life into perspective.

The last thing I would remember from these early early days, is that I tried to teach myself how to skateboard and simply got too scared of hurting myself. I put away that idea until some years later, but skateboarding has always been something I wanted to be doing.

And with that, everything started. I was pretty tight with that Camp community. I made a bunch of new friends, honestly mostly through Falconetti’s, and I started to figure out how to not just take care of myself, but engage with this new world around me. I had no idea how many adventures, embarassments, failures, broken bones, triumphs, fights, tears, loves and indellible moments that felt as much like destiny as anything else I would experience over the next 20 years, but it all started in late August 2006. There is nothing like feeling your life truly begin. It’s wild to think of who I am now, and where I came from, and how I ended up here. It’s humbling.

Thanks for reading. I plan on telling more of the stories of the past 20 years.

So what have I been working on?

Primarily; Wolfmen Investigations #2.

It’s been an interesting journey. I can do a lot of talking about how I can do the ass kicking work of just cranking out writing but I just don’t have the same momentum that I’d carried through the more mentally unencumbered months of 2025. 2026 is shaping up to be a humdinger in terms of world history, so my mind is often caught up in thinking about that, not to mention work, but I digress.

The A. plot of the thing is tied up a lot in personal reckonings I’m working on and rather than try to force that I decided to pick up in the middle of the story and work on a section that I know must happen to satisfy the story, but that I can write independently of the rest of the novel. It has been very satisfying, creatively and mentally, to go explore the background of a character that I guess I’d just set up to be a one-dimensional joke at first, but then upon scratching a little bit on the surface discovered an entire life and history of adventures that were well worth exploring. A sense of discovery took over and I was soon thrilled to know that this character had a lot more utility than I’d initially thought. Characters surprise you like that sometimes and end up charming themselves into a bigger role in the story.

The whole thing has also been a reminder that writing something, especially a bigger project like this, is a process. It’s not something you nail in one go, and despite having thought about this story for years it can still be quite the process actually writing the words that get you from point A to Z. I try to remember that this first draft is building the scaffolding upon which to adorn with greater detail later. If the structure is strong enough, I can always make it better. Sometimes it’s not about having the right line at that exact moment but to go back and craft this misshapen piece of steel I’ve been hammering at into something that more generally resembles a real thing. I dunno this is just how I do it. It’s not like writing this where if I make a mistake in grammar or spelling I just brush past it. Obviously.

It’s a big part of why I decided to try to write shorter stories or to keep them more compact. I simply didn’t want to have some unwieldy 400-page behemoth to force myself to revise. As such a lot of my fiction writing has become increasingly compact and moving at an intense pace. Maybe it’s just an evolution of style and understanding of story mechanics. The first Bartender novel, all of them really, are told mostly linearly through the POV of the main character, and it is often an extended unbroken narrative. I thought that I literally had to describe exactly what happened the entire way along and these days I’m much more comfortable with yelling Cut! and moving on to the next scene.

I’m attempting to plan the whole thing out in chunks or sections, or books themselves. Something I experimented with in the 3rd Bartender book was using the head note title banners and subtle shifts in font and typesetting to intercut different stories; flashbacks, asides, dream sequences, as if they were their own book. It’s an approach I’m taking here with each section essentially being its own pulp novel, and that if you were to break it all up you’d be buying 3-4 separate books for each Volume of what I’m working on. In this way the whole becomes a much bigger thing. Wolfmen Investigations: Thrashin’ is like the pilot episode where I introduce all the major characters, themes and general premise of the story and throughout the rest of what I’m working on now it all unfolds.

I like lots of different genres and that’s part of being able to separate this into different sections or books within the book. Say the A. plotline is going to be more of a southern gothic tale that takes place in a pacific northwest set story that will have a lot more of the flourishes of rural horror and folksiness that one might more typically find in Appalachia. The beauty of a fictional world is you can mish mash things that wouldn’t make sense in the real world. It can become a pastiche of different things applied in new ways. The B. plot, or at least the one I’m working on right now is an odd couple setup in an urban turf war scenario, with what I’m feeling like is a Tony Scott (True Romance, Top Gun, Man on Fire) vibe to it. I often find myself drawn to intense and violent subject matter and while in many cases, I’m more than happy to get into the gory details, here I find myself sanding off some of the edges to make it all a little more palatable, and to keep things moving rather than getting hung up on the seasoning. Perhaps it is an economy of words thing too; at this point I think I know when less is more. Ultimately, I think I’m more interested in the story itself than slaving over lavish prose. Of course, that type of detail, as I mentioned only comes with a second, third, fourth pass. Oh, to have all the time in the world.

Then every now and then you’re hit sideways with something that blows open the wall. I was recommended the book The Fort Bragg Cartel, by a podcast and it lit a fire in my brain. It details how the US Special Forces; Delta Force, The SEALS run under JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command), is less an honorable fraternity of warriors and more like if everyone in the Wolf of Wall Street was a trained killer. I’ve always liked that shit. Military hoo-rah, badass special operative stuff. I’ve also known that those people are likely some of the worst people in the world, conditioned through trauma to be without empathy, ruthless killing machines. This book nails down how deeply corrupt, misogynistic, nihilist and often suicidal these guys are as they’re hooked on adrenaline, drugs and the power of getting to live outside of accountability. It metamorphosized one of my plotlines about crooked police into a bigger tale of corruption worldwide. It didn’t exactly make me feel good about the idea that anyone in the military is going to stand up to Trump, he loves and endorses all their psycho stuff, but it sure makes for good story fodder. I highly recommend it!

Ok that should about wrap this up. I just needed to barf up some words and thoughts rather than sitting and pondering what the next steps for this story is going to be. It’s such a thing to have an idea and then need to sit there pondering, cultivating it until it’s what you want it to be.

Oh, and I designed and order a completely ostentatious customized baseball/letterman jacket. My long-term “Mallardville Merchants” jacket is pretty beat up and it was gonna cost a pretty penny to repair it so I figured I’d splurge on something I plan on having until I die.

Axe Out.

Well, I did it. I finally got sick of the sound of my own voice.

Obviously, that can’t really be true but in the past month I found myself, if not struggling, really needing to work to put out the essays that I’ve released. I’m happy with them but I did find that I was stretching for topics upon which to write my grandiose and self-satisfied think pieces. When I started writing again in earnest, during my trip to Japan last year, it was a rediscovery of a talent and passion that was born through having new my experiences and wanting to write about them. Things were changing. I was healing and growing and reclaiming my life. However right now things are starting to feel a little less transformative and a bit more episodic. The status quo of my new job has set in and as such there hasn’t been the same flurry of new experiences to creatively sink my teeth into. Sure, there are personal developments but those feel a little bit too raw for even me to overshare about so soon. So that’s left me scraping at the bottom of the barrel using two of my old favorite standby topics: magic and being pissed off at the cops. I wouldn’t even know where to start with the state of things right now. Ending up here well; I’m afraid to say I’ve run out of anything profound to say for the time being.

In the past couple weeks, I’ve just been spinning the gears without really producing much of anything worthwhile. Just half-finished pieces on things like my first jobs and working with difficult people. But when you find yourself not interested in what you’re writing about it makes it pretty difficult to return to the page. I abandoned those and soldiered on and tried to get another piece off the ground about the story behind a good friend and I’s relationship, but then realized that there were simply too many pre-requisite stories and contributing factors that I’d have to get into; and it wasn’t that I didn’t want to write it, I just didn’t want to write all of it and I didn’t want to write about it right now. I didn’t really have it in me to write another film review or piece of cultural analysis; although that felt good it currently didn’t seem like the best use of my time. But still there is that compulsion to try and release something.

People have noted that over the past year I’ve been willing to share some intensely personal details about my life and experiences. I have taken notice of how people, if not like, are really interested in sipping on that tea. I can see it in the stats. Any time I publish something that’s real juicy I get about 100 more views. I like thinking about my life. I like trying to process all that’s happened and come to a resolution on how I feel about it. Heck I even like doing that in the public square. But since my more recent self-actualizations, healing and focus found fruition I’ve come to know that some of the more ground shaking realizations about myself are complete for the time being. Besides, it feels like it’d be pretty rote and tacky to just keep milling out sanctimonious think pieces based on some of the weird or intense shit that’s happened to me. I think it was really important for a while there for me to do it; get stuff off my chest and reckon with feelings that I’d been avoiding for way too long. But that work is essentially done for now. There is a lot of personal reckoning that will be ongoing within me, but in terms of expressing those stories on some sort of schedule? That’s just foolish. I can’t rush personal development because I need to put out something that only a couple hundred people are going to read. Whatever beliefs or conclusions I come to, they deserve better than a hurried, but still oversized, essay that essentially is just giving me a bit of temporary validation by knowing people are reading it. It’s ok, I like validation just like anyone else does, but its fundamentally time to acknowledge that the past year of short form creative writing was just training to get me back in shape for the heavy lifting I’ve got ahead of me. I write books gawdammit and it’s time to write some new ones.

This past week I was speaking with a very accomplished creative who is now working on their first novel. I was giving them advice and feedback. Although I do think of myself as a writer, I can often forget just how much creative work I’ve put out over the years, and I’m reminded of it when I get to gab about stories for a while. It was such a pleasure to talk with someone about the nuts and bolts of writing fiction and my experiences, mostly flawed, in publishing. I love the way a story can be built. Simple metaphor and simile apply subtextual connotations to our language, and story is a tapestry of such things; drawing out deeper meaning through a lyrical collection of scenes and characters who all convey so much more than just the sum of their idents speaking the point of a thing out lout. The stories I want to tell are built on the feelings and ideas I’ve been working on in my head for the past decade, and I think that they are important enough to me that to just state them literally would be too vulgar an oversimplification.

I think I was scared. I was scared of the commitment that it is to say out loud “I’m going to write book” because, then you actually have to fucking do it. That Family Guy joke where Stewie harps on Brian about “that novel you been workin’ on” is hilarious to me because. Yeah there’s a lot of people who say they’re working on novels but you never see it come to fruition. It doesn’t scare me to do it, it scares me that I won’t do it and be proven a liar. I’ve been lining things up in my head for the better part of the past six months and last night I finally got hit with the inspiration to truly start. I was on my way home from bowling and thinking about a few things that have happened to my friends and I recently and it just hit me between the eyes, the inspiration. I immediately rushed home and sat down to begin carving out the outline I now saw so clearly in my head. I’m not going to start from the beginning of the book; I’m going to start from the middle and focus on an arc 2 characters that have very little to do with the central protagonist and all his baggage to be resolved. I’m looking forward to getting into it. It’s got me excited and that’s how I know that it’s time to move on from trying to come up with a bunch of profound one offs and returning to the methodically isolated practice of writing long form fiction to try and create something really good.

Along the way I’m sure I’ll put out pieces as they come to mind, it’s not like I can shut up forever. I think that it’s worth revising a couple things in my back catalogue. Some of the short stories I put out in my mid-twenties are rather prescient right now. Come to think of it I know that my entire story about going to Japan could use a revision maybe I’ll work on that too. While we’re at it; I did just hire an editor to start give my original novels a pass over so I can re-brand and republish them, but you’ll hear more about that later.

Anyway, you’re totally welcome to stick around, I just put a lasagna in the oven, beers in the fridge. Yeah no, nothing super important to say this time except that I’m going to get to work on a new novel and just kinda try to enjoy things.

I’m sure something will happen eventually and I’ll be spurred to get up off my butt and climb back up on the soapbox for some period of time. It’s just not right now.

I hate to say it, but…things are going to get a whole hell of a lot worse before they get any better.

I implore you to prepare yourself. Because if you don’t, when whatever is going to happen happens; you will be paralyzed by shock and disbelief at the reality that you are now living in. You will be unable to act and in the new world order we’re moving into: action is the imperative. We’re going to need to resist and some of us will be required to fight.

We live in an avoidant culture. We’ve had things so good, for so long that we are collectively allergic to facing the truth of the ills of the world and the cost of privilege we’ve been living in. In my experience people will take almost any measure to avoid facing their fears, demons and themselves. Ourselves. We want to pretend that we live somewhere that would never allow the same evils that are occurring across the globe to happen here, but the fact of the matter is that we are already allowing it, and there are those in our society that salivate and rub their hands together at the very idea of committing the same brand of oppression and bigotry that’s been sanctioned by the United States Government against their own people.

Watching people flail and mew; proposing that any law or order still exists is pathetic. To think that the very system that has propagated more than a century of imperialist occupations, coups, regime changes and bold-faced lies will ever hold those responsible accountable, is naive at best, and delusional in practice. We know about a genocide. We know about a literal supervillain organization of pedophiles and global elites who will never face justice. We know we are obliterating our ecosystem. We know we’ve handed the material collective of human thought over to a bourgeoise class of technocrats who will happily sell out our humanity for their own grand designs of ego, ambition and control. But we’re still just out here, pointing fingers at opposing political ideologies like it isn’t the corporations pulling the strings of everything while we’re maximizing shareholder value and pretending like the world isn’t on fire.

War is here. All the things that I was most afraid of when I was a child are happening right now. When I was little, I was told that those things could never happen. That we were exceptional. I was lied to. You have been lied to. We aren’t exceptional; we’re just lucky. As I grew, I started to see that those awful things were most certainly happening, just not to us. When I tried to talk about it; people told me I was being crazy, or that I was overreacting. I watched people delude themselves by grandstanding and thinking that their political alignment, in either direction, gave them some sort of moral or ethical high ground over each other and it simply doesn’t. Right wing nationalist religious extremist chuds are a particularly disgusting brand of human being but I also find feckless, useless, glad handing impotent neo-liberalism to be as repulsive, if not more so, because of their insidious friendly assurance of ethical superiority. One stabs you in the face and the other in the back. As much as I loath the ignorant shit for brains conservatives who don’t seem to be able to grapple ideas more complex than night and day, I detest those who’ve gaslit themselves into thinking that somehow all this is going to get sorted out at the ballot box and in courts. This won’t end until the people responsible are cremated and the system that allowed their proliferation dismantled. The United States IS going to have a civil war. You cannot vote yourself out of fascism and you cannot reason with those would murder you rather than listen to your argument. Will the United States attempt to annex Canada? That would be pretty fucking hard to do if they’re spread out in multiple active conflicts across the globe, but considering the collective ideological ego and blatant narcissism of those in charge – I wouldn’t put it past them. The status quo is all but completely fractured as western civilization balances on the tip of a knife held by insane people. Stop lying to yourselves and, I fucking beg you, prepare yourselves for anything.

It might seem extreme to you, but I think it would do many people well to strongly consider what you believe, what ideologies you ally yourself with, what your limits are and what you’re willing to die for. If all this seems hyperbolic now know that it will seem mild in comparison to what is actually going to happen.

Hold steady friends.

Spring 2011 – Street Rat

“Fuck you, you East Van Street Rat Piece of shit!” yelled the young man as he was bent over the hood of the police cruiser which was parked just off Grandview and Commercial Drive. He was shoeless and his button-down shirt was open. I was carrying his shoes and glasses. I approached the police cruiser but one of the cops got between me and held up his hand indicating that I had to stop.

Less than twenty minutes earlier this individual and 2 of his friends had attempted a dine-and-dash at the bar I worked at after disputing the amount of chicken wings and beer they’d consumed and just decided to leave. The bill was only $120 something. I’d left, with one of the security guards in tow and was on my cell calling the cops while they walked a block or so ahead of us turning to look back every so often and quickening their gate. The security guard and I had picked up the pace and caught up with them under the Skytrain tracks at Grandview Highway where they turned and confronted us; 2 against 3 and me a scrawny twenty-three-year-old. The main guy was wearing what we’d now call Andrew Tate glasses, an audaciously gaudy purple silk button down and a pair of expensive looking loafers. He kicked his shoes off, tossed his glasses on the ground and ripped his shirt open in a flourish screaming at us to come get him, right before one of his associates started to move towards us and the security guard got in front of me before the shoeless guy lunged forward and sucker-punched the security guard in the side of the head during the split-second he was preoccupied with the two others. The main guy took off running, one of his cronies followed and the other ran in the opposite direction. I watched them run off like the cowards they were and then saw the police cruiser rip up the street, lights on. I made sure the security guard was mostly ok, half helping him to his feet and then telling him to sit down when he could barely stand. He leaned against the Skytrain support pillar and I told him I’d be back before scooping up the shoes and glasses and running down the street where I could see the cops, lights on the cruiser flashing. I approached with the belongings and the guy saw me and started screaming at me before the officer that had cuffed him told him to shut up while they ran his ID. The cop in front of me took the shoes and glasses and I explained to him that this dude and his buddies had ran out on their bill and then assaulted the security guard.

“Where’s the security guard?”

“He’s back there.” I gestured towards the Skytrain line but the cop was barely listening to me.

The cops back at the cruiser convened and appeared to be discussing the identity of the shoeless man and I could see them making groaning expressions. Then the cop who’d been in the cruiser approached me.

“So, what happened?”

I explained the story, again, and the cop just sighed and rolled his eyes at me.

“So, what do you want to do kid, press charges?”

“For theft and assault, yeah I wanna press charges. I want this asshole to pay his fuckin’ bill.”

Then the cop gave me a very somber look as his colleague took the shoes and glasses back to the still frothing at the mouth young man, before he undid his cuffs.

“I really don’t think you want to press charges on this guy.” He said to me.

“What? He just gave my friend a concussion, he could have brain damage.”

The cop just shrugged and then started to walk away from me “Go back to work.”

That was it, to them it was over and I was left with no choice but to walk away as buddy got off scott-free, even feeling bold enough, despite being surrounded by the cops, to yell at me as I went.

“That’s right you fuckin’ street rat piece of shit, walk away you fuckin’ faggot!”

I went back and helped the security guard to his feet and shoulder carried him back to the bar where we he asserted he didn’t want to go to the hospital.

It didn’t take a detective to understand what had happened. The guy was connected, most likely to the low-level organized crime in Burnaby, Coquitlam and Port Moody. Maybe he was someone’s son, maybe he was a mover and shaker himself but one thing was clear the VPD didn’t want anything to do with pressing charges on this guy. I just had to eat it, swallowed my pride, take the injustice. This wasn’t the first time that I’d experienced injustice in my life but it was one of the first times I was faced with the utter fallibility and ineffectuality of a police organization. Sure, I had never really liked cops all that much, but this taste of bitter injustice would sit in my mouth for a long time. I learned a painful lesson that day: bad people will get away with doing bad things, because our institutions let them.

In the years that followed working at that bar I had many more police interactions for things like: theft, assault, threatening behavior, extreme public intoxication, loser guys stalking waitresses – and in every single one of those experiences with the police I was met with such utter disdain and stunning incompetence that it really made me realize that most cops couldn’t find their dick with both hands and a magnifying glass. They seemed entirely disinterested in serving and protecting and they had absolutely zero interest in catching criminals. That I seemingly had a better understanding of low-level criminals and crime groups in East Van than they did was a bitter realization. I’m sure they knew, they know a lot of stuff, they simply didn’t give a fuck.

Summer 2014 – Once you cross Broadway…

There had been a spike in crime in the area, with one of the clerks of the liquor store being assaulted and another literally dragged over the counter. It was the year where there was a roving pack of teenagers armed with crowbars, chains and baseball bats terrorizing aspects of the neighborhood. My friend T had taken to semi-jokingly calling the area, just past Broadway; Little Africa based on the prominent black barbershop Ice-Kol-Kuts and the Caribbean restaurant Jamaican Pizza Jerk, next door to the bar being dominate businesses along that last stretch of Commercial Drive. The area also had such places as an ICBC Licensing office (that’s the DMV if you don’t live in BC), Income Assistance office, Redi-Work - a day labor for cash business, a pawn shop and a discount bread store. This was a low-income neighborhood, with lots of little, and some big, social problems. Located at the crux of Broadway, the Skytrain and 12^th Ave; Little Africa was a perfect place to disappear to, or come to if you were one of the bridge and tunnel crowd who considered the very edge of East Van to be Downtown.

I found myself wondering why we didn’t have beat cops. Like why wasn’t there a couple cops that I knew who worked in the area, who made their presence known. This was one of the weirdest places in the city outside the Downtown East Side and I just couldn’t help but think that if we had a consistent and social police presence on the streets, there’d be a lot less problems. There’d be a visible deterrent from the random acts of crime and violence that seemed to pop up consistently. It wasn’t like this in other parts of the city, you go down to Yaletown and you’ll see more cops than at a 24-hour donut convention. I decided to do something and I signed up to speak at the monthly Vancouver Police Board meeting, an event I’d attended occasionally over the past year. I put my case together, complete with printed handouts detailing the information in the paragraph above this, and including a map of the area where I’d circled the trouble spots and pointed out that the access to Broadway, the Skytrain and 12^th ave made it so easy for people to just disappear.

I went to City Hall and sat in the board room, waiting for things to start with the journalists and City employees that milled about. The agenda started and it seemed like a fairly straightforward presentation of stats from the different departments. During the Sex Crimes divisions super optimistic and rather self-congratulatory presentations on their successes, then Mayor Gregor Robertson entered the room, late, with a sandwich in his mouth and a disposable plate full of chips on it. At this point I saw several of the police in attendance roll their eyes. I’ll never forget this. What followed was a, coincidental presentation of excellence to the Grandview Woodland Community Policing office, essentially Commercial Drive. Those involved were celebrating that the area had been proclaimed of the safest in the city, and there I was about to piss in their cornflakes. I went up and gave my presentation detailing the violent crimes I’d witnessed, the lack of police interest or presence not to mention those escape routes I’ve mentioned earlier. I tried to make my presentation less accusatory and more constructive; offering strategies for deterrents and detailing how much could be learned if there were just a bit more presence and community fellowship from the VPD in the area. My presentation had the entire police board sitting up straight, the journalists’ eyebrows raising up to the top of their heads and the majority of the police present, including then Chief Jim Chu and soon to be Chief Adam Palmer, looking at me with amusement if not annoyance.

“Mr. Matfin I’m going to have to ask you to stop, your time is up-“ piped up Gregor.

“I’m almost done Mr. Mayor.” I replied and continued for another couple minutes before wrapping it up.

After this the Board adjourned and Jim Chu came up to me and thanked me for my feedback before handing me off to a young constable who he instructed to introduce me to Adam Palmer. The young constable’s name was Mackenzie and he gave me his card; he was a very clean-cut young guy who was nearly a foot taller than me but who couldn’t have been more than a few years my senior. He introduced me to the diminutive and tall bald Adam Palmer who greeted me with a smile, he gave me his card, asked for my number, which he jotted down on a notepad and said he’d set up a future conversation with a constable. He also told me that in the future he’d appreciate it if I reached out to them directly, rather than coming to the board to speak. I thanked him for the opportunity.

The next week I was contacted by a constable Lemon who said he’d meet me down by the bar and go for a walk to talk about the issues. What followed was a shockingly honest conversation about the impotence, or rather institutionalized dog fucking, with which the VPD treated street level crimes. Constable Lemon explained to me that there was simply no way the VPD could respond to all the calls it got in a day, and there was no way to actually pursue or prosecute the number of minor crimes that popped up across the city, let alone one neighborhood in East Vancouver. Ok sure that made sense to me even if I didn’t like hearing it, but that’s where I rationalized that having beat cops that lived, or at least consistently worked in the neighborhood would provide a tone of deterrence to the streets by way of them being community figures out pounding the pavement not sitting in their cars. Then he told me that that simply wasn’t possible because A. the shifts they worked didn’t allow for consistent presence anywhere, and B. none of the VPD worked in the same area that they lived. Constable Lemon, for example lived in Abbotsford. I could see how this could make sense in terms of protecting officer’s identities, or their families, but it really chaffed me that the people that were supposed to be protecting our streets seemingly had no real ownership or stake in the communities that they were supposed to be taking care of.

At this time in my life, I had also been working on my major investigation, what I refer to as Casefile 23, involving an interconnected web of poverty profiteering, tax evasion, fraud, misappropriation of government funds and resources, conflicts of interest, using universities as holding pens for dirty money, drug dealing and good old-fashioned cronyism. One day I’ll write about the whole thing in detail but the results for conducting the investigation in the first place caused about as many problems as you might imagine, and the legal consequences weren’t the most severe component that had been promised if I pushed my luck. It was probably this investigation that had spurred me to go kick the tires of the VPD to see if they’d be willing to work with me, and although my experience with constable Lemon had put the bitter taste of injustice back in my mouth, I wasn’t willing to give up on the potential that law enforcement could actually do something when presented with evidence. So, I called up constable Mackenzie.

We sat down at a coffee shop in Coal Harbor and over the course of an hour and a half I presented him with a variety of evidence, showing: illegal campaign contributions, documents proving that a certain group was using multiple other since defunct non-profit’s tax receipt numbers, another group had defrauded the protest movement Occupy Vancouver and sequestered the donated funds in a private account, then there was the connections to the 2011 riots. Then there was the fact that another group was operating an underground nightclub, which I normally wouldn’t give a shit about, except that it was out of a government building and the organization in question was supposed to be supporting the Downtown East Side but in reality had figured out a way around hosting very large unregulated parties where significant amount of drugs were being sold on top of the large quantity of cover charges. This last one really pissed me off because of how so many other independent art groups and non-profits had to jump through hoops to put on events but the police still crawled up their ass, while this particular set of party producers conducted themselves with total impunity and lack of transparency, all while taking a government handout.

“So, uh…what exactly would you like me to do?” constable Mackenzie said in a slightly sheepish voice, his giant frame clad in police body armor, utility belt, gun, his Dodge Charger cruiser parked on the street behind us.

“Like, look into this? Any of it?”

“Well, that’s not really. We don’t really do that type of stuff.”

“What, solve crimes?”

“These things aren’t exactly a priority for – “

But I had basically stopped listening. The remaining respect I had for the police was evaporating, boiled out of me by the rage I felt for the generally lip-dicked failures of a broken institution that gladly placed their boot on the throats of people in the streets, but refused to address the systemic crimes and corrupted instructions that infect our society. The brutal reality was that the people and organizations I had investigated were, on their face: doing good, while in reality, they were exploiting their access to political power, wealth to leverage their commodified good intentions to get away with what I saw as crimes that compromised the integrity of many different people and institutions. And this is to say nothing of other more obviously illegal white-collar crimes that exist under our noses every day. Still, I had evidence of the wrongdoing. What the fuck are the police for if not to ensure a public trust that those who break the law, and not just those related to property values and violence, will be held accountable.

“Thanks for your time constable.”

2015 – Street Justice

For the next year or so whenever there was a serious altercation at the bar, something that couldn’t be de-escalated – I let, and in some cases instructed, the Security at the bar to prove a point. You did not get to step into our house, our neighborhood and cause problems. Choosing these rather dark extrajudicial measures would come to weigh heavily on me over the years, but the results were inarguable. People came to know to not push their luck.

I had seen one of our security guards fight and win against three guys simultaneously.

I had seen another give guys a look that made them shut up and shuffle on.

There was the time a gross old man was yelling and screaming awful things at the waitresses and one of the Security simply picked him up by his belt and carried him outside where he hung him by his belt off a tree limb outside, berating him verbally while the man wailed.

“You want out of the tree!?” yelled the security guard.

“Yeahhhhh, wagghhh!”

“Then I better never fuckin’ see you around here again.”

There were plenty of stupid suburban white boys that thought they could do whatever they wanted, and when push came to shove, whether it was the adjoined liquor store or the bar, those guys learned the hard way what happened when you got out of line on.

Then there were the times where security just wasn’t there but the regulars, of a range of reputations and personality types, would step up instead. Shit for brains tourists didn’t stay loud for long when a crew of concrete workers, who were in the bar nearly every day, started giving them the stank eye.

This was Street Justice.

One time two drunk dipshits were being a nuisance and bothering a variety of women so I had them ejected but they kept on coming back in, so they were removed physically. But they kept on trying to come back in and started mocking me and the security. We got them outside and they were continuing to taunt me and the security guard and then one of the guys slipped, this is not a euphemism he really did slip, and fell down the stairs to the parking garage below and ended up breaking his collar bone and shoulder. Good riddance, you had it coming fucker, I thought.

Most career criminals are smart enough to know that making a scene and causing problems was a surefire way to end up in real trouble. Maybe it wouldn’t be with the cops or the legal system, but if you were part of something more organized and you started to draw heat on yourself you weren’t worth the cheap Laguna Beach knockoff jeans you were wearing.

Sometimes we did have to call the cops and watching their coercive and brutal conduct made me feel marginally better about the deterrent driven violence I was allowing. I never failed to notice that the extremes they went to were typically associated with the gender and color of skin they were policing. Unless they were frothing at the mouth, white guys usually got off with a warning. Indigenous men? Not so lucky. Indigenous women? They were met with a disdain that disgusted me to my very core. In all cases the police were rude, unhelpful and regarded me as a street rat the same way that criminal loser had all those years ago. I watched them bungle simple de-escalations and administer excessive force in almost every scenario. Their attitudes ranging from seemingly rubbing their hands together at the idea of getting to bust some sculls, or absolute indignance that they were being asked to do their jobs. In either case I hated their guts and gradually lost more and more respect I might have had for their position and organization.

There were a couple situations that got away from me, including: The Strange Case of Vern Veneer and Darren the Liar, and White Supremacist Beach. In these instances, the offending parties were smart enough to know how to go just up to the line, without crossing it in the bar itself. Still, they were causing plenty of problems once they left and the detritus of these conflicts had a way of making it inside. In these instances, I had to play month long chess games with these losers, learning how to set traps that would give me the ability to catch them red handed and banish them forever. Though, like many abject losers, when they lost, they didn’t just lose – they came back looking for their pound of flesh, aggrieved that I’d gotten enough on them to kick their ass out. I was faced with death threats. Over the years I’d be treated to surprise appearances of villains I thought I’d long disposed of. I normalized the idea that I was the target of these threats because it prevented other people I knew and cared about from becoming victims. There are some people and some scenarios where violence actually is the only option. For the people who will never relent. The people who cannot view their loss as humbling or a reason to be better, instead to them it becomes an inescapable shame that can only be met with more violence, or revenge and escalation. These types of people, I came to realize, would never stop until someone broke their bones or extinguished their lives. The dark possession that we call that evil paired with misdirected stupidity. Much intentional, systemic and reflectionless evil cannot be rehabilitated. In some cases, those evil people I encountered did die. Sometimes it was drugs. Sometimes it was someone else from their world putting an end to them. In any event it filled me more with a sense of relief than remorse. I know what evil lurks in the hearts of men. The experiences I’ve had with such people are long and sordid enough that they’d make up their own complete stories and maybe I’ll tell them all in detail one day.

Eventually I felt the cost of my so-called Street Justice. It could have been any other night at work. I was working with a very nice young woman who was going to school for social work and was truly a kind person. I remember asking her what are you doing working here? Positing that her kind demeanor was going to get her into trouble working at such a roughneck pace. She didn’t have much of an answer for me and I watched her time and again get roped into caring about these exploitative losers who would just milk her for every last drop of empathy she had before making some lewd pass at her or just saying something gross and weird. It was the end of the night and she and I were the last ones left at the upstairs of the bar and there was this lone, drunk, middle age loser sitting at the far side of the room. I told her she had to go settle up with him and tell him to go downstairs. She clearly didn’t want to but I shrugged and told her that I had her back but it was part of the job. As she approached the man, he started berating her.

“Whaddya want you fucking cunt?”

I saw in the background one of the security guards coming up the stairs and taking notice of the guy verbally assaulting the waitress. I came out from around the bar and started over to them, motioning for the waitress to go in the back.

“Oh yeah, fuck you! You fucking slut. What you want some of this?” He grabbed at his crotch.

As I was approaching the table hands raised and telling the man to calm down the security guard came around and swiftly, between me and the man, punched him in the side of the head so hard his face bounced off the table and his pint glass rattled. In the same motion of the guy’s head bouncing back up the security guard grabbed him by the hair and yanked him out of his seat and directly into a punch in the stomach. It was excessive given this guy was in his mid-forties and could probably barely take a stiff breeze let alone a sledgehammer to the face and guts. The security guard dragged him down the stairs and threw him out into the street. I didn’t even get an adrenaline spike. That’s when I knew that I was now in over my head in something I didn’t really believe in anymore. At what point had the Street Justice I’d subscribed to calloused my empathy to the point where violence was a reasonable default option? When had I been exposed to enough of it that it didn’t really freak me out anymore. There were several other experiences over the course of the next couple years where, despite my best efforts, situations ended in tragic, brutal violence where I had no control and even less ability to make sense of the mess. At some point I had to reckon with the fact that my distribution of what I thought was justice was no better than what the police did daily, and that I had been stupid enough to think that my ability to be a moral arbiter would be the out-cost between justice and thuggery. I was wrong. I was shamed by my descent into allowing violence to become an acceptable recourse to basic wrongdoing. It isn’t. My anger and contempt for the powers at be had mutated my original intention; keeping the people around me safe into a taste for, not justice, but punishment. I was blinded by an anger that allowed me to be seduced by an immoral desire to make sense of the world by simply hammering it into the shape, no matter the hurt it caused. I realized that while a strong deterrent, and sometimes the only action available, violence only begets more violence and that if we accept it as the primary action, we lose ourselves to our baser instincts and are no better than those driven by their predator nature, addiction to control and disregard for each other. Sure, some people really do deserve to get their ass kicked and taught a lesson or two, but that’s not justice, it’s malice. My anger at the failings of the system, the poisoned people in the world, and my own inability to make meaningful societal change had metamorphosized into me thinking that I could actually control the world. And I couldn’t. I was just as impotent and useless and unimaginative as the police I’d criticized.

2017 – Systemic Failure

I’d left that bar to work somewhere more civilized and let the calloused nature of who I was flake off and enable me to be in touch with my own decency again. The anger at the world’s injustices and the failure of law enforcement stuck with me. But what was I really going to do? I was just some fucking bartender. I had taken my investigation into Casefile 23 as far as I could and in the end all it had done was fill me with an obsessive madness and destroyed, or eroded, many of my own personal relationships when those I was investigating slandered my name to a certain subsect of the community. People I had known for years turning their back on me, for some reason easily falling for the lie that I was a neo-conservative with “icky” vibes. I swear to god oversimplified millennial optimism will be the death of us. I was beat. I just wanted out, I’d seen enough.

Then I saw on Facebook that I woman I knew, Catherine, had been assaulted outside her home over six months prior. Awful stuff. What was almost more awful was the fact that in the story she told that besides the trauma of the initial act itself, it was the police who had continued to re-traumatize her over the course of the passing weeks. Showing up at her apartment late at night to ask her questions, with no notice. Not returning her calls. Refusing to give her any consequential information on the case. Fumbling evidence.

I reached out to Catherine for more context and learned that when she went to the station to retrieve the clothing she’d provided to forensics, she was informed that the detective on her case had not actually been a detective, but instead was an injured patrol officer who had been temporarily placed in the sex crimes division. When he went back to his normal job there was no one to pick up her case. On top of that; now no one at the VPD was returning her calls or her emails. Cops don’t use email because then there’d be a paper trail and they’d have to be accountable; they prefer phone calls and face to face conversations because the information in those can disappear on the wind and if they say something stupid, they can just deny it later. She also told me that the VPD had admonished her for speaking out publicly about the case, saying it could jeopardize the results. Later on, she learned that her forensics had been sent to Guelph, Ontario, because the VPD forensics unit was “backed up”. 6 months after the attack the VPD asked her to look at a photo lineup, which resulted in her not being able to make a conclusive identification. They continued to shuffle assigned detectives on her, while ignoring her phone calls and emails.

Catherine, through her own grit and research, came to learn that in the past 10 years there had been 5200 reported sexual assaults in Vancouver and only a quarter of these ever-had charges laid, with an astonishingly small 2.9% of these ever resulting in a conviction. In speaking with a VPD sergeant she learned that a maximum of six officers was staffed to the sex crimes unit and at the time she had been attacked they were down to 2 – which included the patrolman who wasn’t really supposed to be there anyway.

Her entire story, in her words, can be found here.

I advised her to speak on the matter at the Vancouver Police Board meeting, but at the time she didn’t feel that she was ready to speak in such a high-pressure situation; so, I offered to speak at the board on her behalf. Upon submitting the request to speak we were told:

“The matters you wish to speak to are matters that fall within the jurisdiction of the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner (OPCC) and therefore would not be appropriate for the Board…The Board has no authority over specific operational matters or complaints about the conduct of individual officers…. The concerns you raise would be most effectively addressed by filing a complaint against the VPD through the OPCC, an independent office for complaints against the police. The OPCC will review your information and determine whether there are allegations of misconduct against specific officers that should be investigated as a public trust complaint through the VPD’s Professional Standards Section.”

It was apparent that the VPD and the board wished to keep such a complaint as far from the public eye as possible and considering there were always journalists at the meeting; I didn’t see them discussing the complaint there, especially if it was just this single case – even though I knew better that this type of disregard for the public was business as usual. The OPPCC told us that our complaint would be forwarded to the VPD Board to review at their discretion.

I ended up writing our MLA for guidance and two months later got a call from the Solicitor General’s office assuring me that if we submitted another complaint they would do what they could to make sure it was publicly reviewed by the police board. At this point Catherine and I devised a much larger strategy where she created a website sharing her story and encouraging other women with similar experiences with Police incompetence and insensitivity to step forward and share their stories. On this site was a link to a form letter I had drafted that we requested people use for their own complaint submissions to the OPCC that mirrored our complaint. At this point Catherine also went to the media with our cause and things began to take off. Catherine had now found a group of women with similar experiences who stepped forward with her and began to support the position. In the end over 60 women submitted complaints through the OPCC. The VPD Board was then forced to review the complaint and ultimately concluded that the VPD had mishandled her case. Though by the nature of the situation and the accusation the VPD continued to frame the handling of the case as not typical despite the amount of women who had come forward to share their experiences which had been similar to Catherine’s.

Because of the media attention Catherine’s story had received the VPD was practically forced to give a full-scale press conference to apologize. The apology was hollow. Adam Palmer apologized for the handling of the communication of the case, but not the investigation itself or the way the sex crimes unit was understaffed. Fundamentally the police refused to acknowledge that they had done anything wrong, or were doing anything wrong.

“What the issue is here today is not the quality of the investigation,” said Palmer. “It was the amount of contact we had with the victim and keeping her involved with how the investigation progressed and we’re sorry there wasn’t more contact.”

Here’s the news stories

· CBC

· CTV

· Global

At first, I had felt some sort of sense of accomplishment, like maybe we’d helped make a change but the result of all of this? The VPD put the onus for change on the victims. They told Catherine and the other women that had come forward that they needed to workshop ways in which the VPD can improve their approach to communicating with victims of sex crimes. They wanted the women to coordinate, and meet and basically write a report that the VPD would totally listen to. These brave women who had come forward to share their stories of tragedy and trauma; just to be insulted by the institution telling them that they were now responsible for explaining to them how to do a better job. It disgusted me.

2026 - Operating as Intended

Now nearly 10 years later and the VPD has only become more powerful and at the behest of our current Mayor Ken Sim’s unabashedly transparent disdain for the people he’s supposed to represent, the VPD’s budget has reached nearly half a billion dollars. Which is to say nothing of the Task Force Barrage designed by Sim’s ABC party who handed the police an additional $5 million dollars in funding to effectively bully the residents of the Downtown East Side into smaller and smaller spaces while criminalizing their very existence. The money for this so-called barrage wasn’t approved by council and Sim and his ABC party denies any knowledge how it ended up in the VPD coffers. – but it did happen. This while slashing the city budget’s support for social programs down to the bone, reducing service of our libraries and still managing to spend $13.4 million on tickets and luxury hotel suites for the upcoming Fifa world cup.

In 2020 Vancouver City Council voted to freeze the police budget, a decision that was appealed by the VPD and was ultimately overturned by then Provincial Director of Police Services and former RCMP, Wayne Rideout. This position, the Director of Police Services, is the ultimate governing body for the VPD as neither the mayor, nor City Council have the ability to see the VPD’s internal budget nor their strategic plans. While the VPD Board is supposed to govern the police, under Ken Sim’s leadership there has been nothing but bootlicking towards the VPD’s operational independence, something clearly stated, though with a bit less color, by former police board vice-chair Faye Wightman as she resigned in disgust – alleging that Ken Sim has been exerting undue political pressure on board members. It should also be noted that in the 2022 municipal election the Vancouver Police union made the unprecedented move of endorsing Ken Sim as a candidate, clearly aligning their politics with that of a public official with a hard on for austerity and disgust for public service.

So, what is the role of police in our society? To serve and protect? To solve and prevent crimes? Sounds great in theory, but in my experiences these services are a privilege that really only apply to a very small percentage of us and the criteria for being worthy usually has a lot more to do with the size of your house and paycheck than it does anything else.

I think about how many neighborhoods in the city now have private security. Hired by the local business associations these rent-a-cops walk up and down the street decked out in the best army surplus gear they can find. To keep the peace? To deal with our social problems? It just makes me think what the fuck is that half billion dollars going towards? The VPD have been clutching their pearls and claiming that all the protests are what’s jacking up their costs. But, do they really need to have a fleet of Dodge Chargers? Do they really need all those ATVs for hassling people about drinking beers at the beach? Shouldn’t that be enough money to properly staff a sex crimes unit? Maybe buy the ability to process forensic evidence in BC? Commission a research panel on how to treat survivors of trauma? Maybe cut back on the gear and re-invest that money back into community services that would actually prevent the material conditions that produce street crime? I’m not saying anything new here, it just feels so painfully obvious that police are irrelevant in a world where there aren’t support systems in place that to stop things from getting so bad that people turn to crime.

In 1913 Riverview Hospital opened in Coquitlam, starting as a mental health facility and evolving into an addiction treatment facility over the next 100 years. At it’s peak it had over 900 beds. Riverview featured the Industrial Therapy building where addicts and those with severe mental health issues were not only treated for their issues, but given vocational training in a variety of trades to support their transition back to daily life. Starting in the 60’s the facility received less and less funding into the 80’s where control of the hospital was transferred from their board to the province. Following this the Social Credit party (conservative) of British Columbia continued to de-fund the facility until announcing its closure in 1991, stating that they intended to open many smaller mental health facilities across the province, though this never really materialized. Instead, we got the SROs and organizations that while funded by the government operate as non-profits. While I believe these services to be essential in the face of what exists here in Vancouver, they are independently run and without a unilateral mandate as such could be provided by a provincial, and if we’re being serious here, federally designed mission to lower the egregious mental health and addiction crisis in Canada, Vancouver specifically. So why don’t they?

Because the mental health and addiction crisis in Vancouver is our forever war. Like the endless cycle of conflicts that grinds the gears of the military industrial complex for the United States; here in Canada our system ensures an ongoing cycle of trauma, addiction, violence and crime. A self-perpetuating crisis machine. People’s lives, their health, their pain and the treatment of these things have been co-opted into a profitable non-profit industry where the government still largely foots the bill, but bears none of the responsibility or oversight. At this point, how is this not by design? This is what produces the crime in this city. The impoverished, un-housed, addicts and people that our system gave up on, if they ever cared about them in the first place. This is what justifies a half billion dollars for a police army without accountability to the public and beholden to Mayor Bitcoin?

We might not be as absolutely bat shit insane as our neighbors to the south, we don’t have a gestapo just yet, but we are still entirely beholden to trust in the RCMP and our municipal police to do the right thing, even when we’re shown time and again that the type of people we have becoming police are often exactly who I wouldn’t trust with a hall monitor badge and a loaded potato gun. In New York City the famed Serpico whistleblowing led to the Knapp Commission, a major investigation that exposed widespread bribery and corruption resulting in significant reform in 1971. The RCMP has never undergone a large-scale systemic audit for corruption and efficiencies, and it shows. I believe our systems of law enforcement is at very least broken, if not outright corrupt. But what’s to be done?

As a friend of mine said in a recent discussion “So you’re saying nobody should be a cop until corruption and prejudice are eliminated? It’s a great idea but how does that work practically. We do need some crime prevention and authority to detain dirtbags.”

And he’s right. There are bad people in our society. I’ve experienced a lot of them. Yes, a lot of what we view as criminals are people with bad mental health and addiction issues who’ve been abandoned by the system at large – but there are also a lot of people with that pervading strain of evil in their veins who do bad things, because they know they can get away with them. We do need some form of law enforcement. I just don’t believe in it as we have it now.

My response to my friend was: “You don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but there isn’t anything being truly done about police corruption. Slap on the wrist, minor suspensions. They protect their own, it’s in their code and it’s part of what makes them so dangerous to the public.

I think the Federal government could start with an audit of the RCMP and there would immediately be those that were found to be fit and not fit for duty, start there.

But, honestly, they don’t / won’t do this because the police corruption is tied directly into the drugs, which ties into real estate and big business - which drives politics, so it just won’t happen. Because rich people and politicians need their private army of stooges to keep people off their property and squeeze homeless people into increasingly smaller spaces until they go extinct or there’s so few of them that they can chuck them in institutions.

It is only a provincial level office that can conduct actual inquiry into their operations - so first I would remediate that by giving city and council control of the police again, with provincial oversight. Then I’d establish a municipal task force and clean house on those fucking pigs.”

Easier said than done. But that’s why our provincial and municipal elections matter. Not to mention we as citizens pushing our candidates to drive this reform.

Street Justice Reprise

I used to want to be a cop when I was a kid. I wanted to protect people, keep them safe and put away bad guys. I wanted to be a detective. You might have already realized that about me. Yet by the time I was in my late teens I’d come to realize that I didn’t trust or like most of the police I met. I only ever knew 1 RCMP officer I liked and trusted, and that was a friend of my family. Overall I thought the police were arrogant, chiding, cruel and generally considered themselves above reproach. Of course it all depended on who they were talking to. When my friends were in university, I took notice of the general joy I’d witness on the faces of police breaking up house parties, rag dolling twenty somethings like a bully shaking out someone’s lunch money. I was handcuffed and thrown in the back of a squad car once for drinking out of a flask while I walked to a party. They sweat me and let me go, which felt even dumber - what was the point? I started to realize how a corrupt system makes even the best people corrupted and complicit if they do nothing to remedy the infection within their order. The laundry list of corrupt cops that eventually get busted for beating up their girlfriend or coercing someone into sex is matched with an even longer list of good cops who know about this stuff and do nothing. An annoying gift and flaw I possess is that I just endlessly see the ways in which every system I participate in is corrupt to some level and given the failures I’ve experienced trying to change the system within the means it gives us, I had become disillusioned. But today I feel hope.

I look to the people of Minneapolis. In the face of the fascist crackdown of ICE agents unjustly interrogating, kidnapping, assaulting and murdering people; who is showing up to protect the people? The People. I look at the streets of Philadelphia where the Black Panther Party has risen with armed presence to protect protestors and shut down the illiterate pieces of shit cosplaying as patriots that make up ICE. That’s street justice. That’s keeping people safe. As a collective. As a community. Rising up against oppression, or crime, and having each other’s backs is what will keep us all safe. I like to think that that still exists in all of us on the day to day. Even though I’m just a single guy, I like to think that I’m always looking to make people feel safe when I can, making sure no one is fucking with kids, or people smaller and more vulnerable than them. I like to believe most people are like that. When I was but 19 years old, I was being followed by some random crazy intent on kicking my ass and by ducking into my favorite bar I was saved by simply having people that knew me there. It’s through these people and their kindness towards me that my own values as a member of my community came into reality.

I don’t think we need to abolish the police. But I do think that until the system goes through an extensive overhaul, where the standards of conduct, ethics, political awareness, empathy, respect and hiring are raised we can’t truly trust in these people and institutions. There’s a common thought in a lot of industries that to solve problems you just throw bodies at it - the more people you have the better. But in my experience having the right people matters a lot more than just filling the room with whoever you can find. Too many idiots working on anything will screw up the result, I wouldn’t suggest giving them guns and some sort of bullshit authority. Why are we gambling our safety and the integrity of our city on a large quantity of people who couldn’t pass and open book ethics test and who think that the Punisher is a good role model? People are fallible, I get it. I’m fallible. I’ve made mistakes. I understand how it’s possible to lose yourself in a clouded and flawed version of what you think is justice, but if a person, and system, can’t be self-effacing and humble enough to admit its flaws and change for the better? Then what good are they? What are we willing to accept? What are we willing to justify? Until our systems of law enforcement commit to an evolution of ethics, operations and standards? All cops are bastards.

We stay safe by keeping each other safe. By holding our officials to account. By showing up and saying “You work for me, and this? This is not acceptable.” We say this to the cops and anyone else that would use their authority to tell us what to do.

We own this city.

December 31, 2025

I’ve got a coffee and am on my way to transit down to Yaletown where I’ll be doing a one-off bartending shift, just for fun. In the past three months I’d come to miss the freedom of being a bartender, my new industrial writing job having brought me to the same precipice as many others in realizing that the problems the company faces are so much larger than one well intentioned technical writer can take on. I won’t get into that here, but it’s been pretty draining. So, the idea of once more saddling up for a cowboy night of drink slinging felt very appealing. As I walked down Commercial Drive, I bumped into people I knew who gave me smiles and waves as I continued on, listening to my pump-up music and thinking about all the things I’d done in the past year. What a ride. In no particular order I had:

• Travelled to Japan where I

  • Skateboarded across 9 Cities

  • Ate a lot of good food

  • Beat the rare The Punisher Arcade Game

  • Was temporarily abducted into a cult

  • Ended up on Japanese TV

  • Rediscovered my sense of self

• Published, at least digitally, a novel that I’d been sitting on for over 6 years

• Wrote and published 37 personal essays, 11 paid film and culture essays and was paid to release a short story.

• Repaired a broken heart, mostly

• Got one of my best friends back and invested deeply in 2 of my other oldest friendships

• Dislocated my finger and elbow and still went to work

• Bartended in a busy high-end-restaurant

• Skateboarded daily for almost 7 consecutive months

• Started work on a new novel in my series and as well as an autobiographical story of trauma, failure and loss

• Saw the Blue Jays go to the World Series

• Found the inspiration and focus to once more pursue my ultimate goals

• Landed a new job writing for heavy industry

• Overall, got my mojo back

I knew that this year was special because for the first time in a really long time I thought that what I had to say, was worth saying. That who I am was worth being. And by doing so I recaptured that sense of ownership over my own life. Through my expressions of my feelings, actions and experiences I re-discovered who I really was, and not only that, but I realized that I really liked that guy. Maybe for the first time I was really happy with who Axel Matfin had turned out to be. Considering how much time and energy I’d put into building my life, cultivating my personality and excavating my sense of identity over the years, it now stuns me how easily I’d lost so much of myself over the course of 2024. I had actually forgotten the fact that I had superpowers.

There’s a distinct line in my mind between who I was and who I became once I fully self-actualized for the first time. When I started writing The Bartender, my pulp fiction action-adventure mystery novel series, I was still a boy in many ways. I had already been a bartender true, and I had seen behind the curtain of polite society enough times to exist in a twilight world where criminals, cads, camaraderie and the bottom line of cold hard cash was the daily norm, but as I developed the ability to grow facial hair I sat on a precipice of who I was and who I was going to become. When I began writing The Bartender I simply imagined the coolest version of what I thought I wanted that character to be. An investigator. A badass. A righteous dude. Someone who knew how to read people with a glance. An operative and rogue. A notorious, if not well-regarded person. When the books came out people would say Oh so you just wrote about yourself? And it’s really yes and no. I would be lying if I said my transformation into my fictional avatar was unintentional, but it wasn’t something that happened over night. I wrote the book and I explored the character and his mind and, in the end, assimilated him into my consciousness. It worked. Yet it would be disingenuous to suggest that I was capable of understanding the repercussions and consequences for casting this spell over myself until it was far too late to turn back. But to fully understand that we need to go back in time a little bit.

January 2011

Before I started writing The Bartender books a friend, a former mentor of mine, told me that I needed to go find new ideas because my current belief structures and concepts of the world were limiting me. I took this seriously and began to engage with a lot of radical counter culture literature and theory. I had always been attached to the ideas presented in the seminal pull back the curtain online documentary Zeitgeist and I had been introduced to the radical performance piece of comic writer Grant Morrison coming up on drugs and explaining how to use media to hijack reality. I found this type of thing very appealing. It felt like breaking the Matrix type stuff. Hacking consciousness and culture. I had grown up an atheist with a strong interest in history and theology and it was through the internet, esoteric books and comics that I became a searcher looking for answers.

I was really into exploring the ideas of the psychedelic theorist ethnobotanist philosopher Terrence McKenna, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, psychotherapist Carl Jung and fellow writer and self-proclaimed magician Alan Moore. I also managed to obtain a copy of the, then, rarer Book of Lies: The Guide to Magick and the Occult by Richard Metzker and the Disinformation Group. And let’s not forget good old Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse 5. Through the work of these creators, I developed a loose framework for a lot of the beliefs that I still hold onto today including:

• There is no: us and them. We are all the same organism vying for existence within the confines of our delicate ecosystem and that simply where I end the anthesis of who I am begins. To be in opposition to something assists in the definitions of ourselves, but it doesn’t change the nature of our shared existence.

• We have to create our own reality and modify that in which we live. It is the work of artists to transmute the un-real into the real and produce the culture we live in. We are to make our environments a product of us, not us be a victim of our environments.

• People are stagnant in their identity and generally tend to think about themselves in a singular This is just who I am way, unchanging and permanently defined. I believe that we all contain so many more multitudes than we display. I engage with the idea of embracing your multiple personality disorder – to take ownership of the parts of ourselves that embody all of our best and worst traits, mastering them and deploying them as necessary. Without accepting who we are as a whole, we can never really know ourselves or be capable of the humility and empathy required for success in life and more importantly our interpersonal relationships. When you can acknowledge your own multitudes, you can choose when and how to engage with them, and in this way develop a mastery over your entire identity not just a secular ego driven sense of self.

• Our very concept of time as we experience is incongruous with its actual function in reality, and we are but too simple of a biological machine to truly comprehend the magnitude of time’s importance to the hologram of our perceptual reality.

• There is almost no original idea. Every story has been told a million times; it is in the telling that the originality can be revealed. A new method for delivering the lightning of the arcane. The very act of execution is what brings meaning to the creation itself. Things that are created with passion, drive a unique voice and intention have power – and things that are created by committee, AI or as shallow pieces of commerce are ultimately fallible. The war for the unique voice vs the needs of capital is the struggle between good and bad art.

• The collective unconscious, is where we go when we dream, where we draw our ideas from and where we are united as a species in consciousness. It is where we are all connected and is why you see people all over the planet share in similar or parallel stories, culture, folklore and invention. To consciously tap into the collective unconscious is simply to imagine.

All of these have served me well, but in all my learning as a searcher there was one experience that was unique and involved me confronting the very nature of belief and the ever-transforming nature of reality.

Cosmic Trigger

Through the works of the people mentioned above I was guided to the Playboy writer, American futurist, psychologist and self-described agnostic mystic: Robert Anton Wilson. Anton Wilson was a longtime friend of the Professor Timothy Leary who created the Eight-Circuit Model of Consciousness, and was heavily persecuted by the state for his social experimentations with LSD and advocacy for it as medicine. You may recognize him from author Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Anton Wilson’s most popular work is probably The Illumanatus! Trilogy in which he explores occult, magical symbolism, alternative history, the counterculture of the 1960’s as well as the roots of the horror concepts of author HP Lovecraft and the cult of The Order of the Golden Dawn and its leader; occultist, cultural destabilizer and so-called wickedest man in the world, Alister Crowley. The story is also informed by more traditional conspiracy theories such as alien abductions and the Nazi’s claim as the Aryan bloodline was actually the survivors of Atlantis. The book also liberally theorized of the existence of shady government psyops like MK-Ultra. However, I did not read this series to start with, instead focusing my attention on his much more literal, if you can say that, book series Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati. I can practically feel your eyes rolling while I write this.

Cosmic Trigger 1 is an anecdotal exploration of Wilson’s own experiences with what he calls self-induced brain change, as he invites the reader to explore a variety of stories of the late 18^th and early 19^th century history that are well documented in the media and news of their day, but have been lost to esotericism and word of mouth conjecture in the current reality we inhabit. These stories contradict that which we perceive to be true. Everything from seeming telepathic and telekinetic experiences, to extraterrestrial interactions and paranormal contact – Wilson states the existence of such phenomena with a ribald humor that it softens the sincerity with which he discusses such stranger things. It is quite frankly hilarious how Anton Wilson all at once reveals the existence of supernatural phenomenon with a flourish but then almost instantly dismisses it as being passe. A big part of the book is explaining that you can experience the concept and convention of fantastical things without being lost to a committed belief in them, because you understand your perception is limited in your comprehension. He referred to this method of belief as model agnosticism. In his own words:

Model Agnosticism: “consists of never regarding any model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial.”

The other major component of Cosmic Trigger 1 is the exploration of Chapel Perilous. There’s a part about 10 pages into the book where Wilson explains that should you continue on your journey into the unbelievable with him you will be given the option to pass through Chapel Perilous. Chapel Perilous refers to an Arthurian legend where Sir Lancelot enters into the Chapel where the witch Hellawes attempts to seduce him by illusionary means. In psychology the term refers to a psychological state in which an individual is uncertain as to whether some course of events was affected by a supernatural force, or if it was simply a product of that person’s imagination. In the Wilsonian thought experiment sense, it is to enter a conscious state where you’re actively, constantly, engaging in model agnosticism in a way that completely un-anchors your psyche from choosing to believe that things are real or not real. In this state everything is true and everything is false. Everything is a coincidence, until it’s not.

From Cosmic Trigger 1: Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called “I, “ cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed, like the Ego, it is even possible to deny that it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn’t seem to be any way to ever get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Everything you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason and the pentacle of valor, you will find there (the legends say) the Medicine of Metals, the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher’s Stone, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness.

At the time there really only seemed to be one thing to do. The book forewarned that the experience through Chapel Perilous was much like a psylocibin, peyote or LSD experience, except that you were totally sober. I’d had my fair share of the real thing by that point so it was here that I crossed the threshold at page 20 of Cosmic Trigger 1. As I passed into the chapel, I remembered the words of Grant Morrison explaining that all this shit is verifiable – there are many documented cases and examples of people following the instructions and having similar experiences with what is called: ritualistic chaos magic –and I guess this is now me adding to that pile of confirmations. Following this conscious shift into engaging in model agnosticism the book advises you to slow down and take your time with the remaining pages, that the duration of the book is essentially the length of the trip itself. I hadn’t really prepared for the idea that reading Cosmic Trigger would involve a mind-altering thought experiment to go along with it – it had just been another weirdo book I wanted to read. But, perhaps the first coincidence, alongside this was a stack of graphic novels from the series The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison who had guided me to Anton Wilson in the first place. In retrospect they are a perfect pairing for each other.

Nearly a decade earlier a friend and mentor of mine had gifted me the first two volumes of The Invisibles, but I had found it impenetrable. The art was not especially good and the concepts were far beyond what my teenage mind was capable of deeply understanding. Well maybe that’s not true, as The Invisibles was largely mined thematically by The Wachowski siblings as they created The Matrix. And I totally understood The Matrix. The aesthetics of The Invisibles is that of the, upon its publication ultra-modern, late 90’s Rave and underground scenes and it felt foreign and mind boggling to me. The opening volume So you say you want a revolution follows the liberation of Jack Frost, the ostensible though temporary, protagonist of the series as he’s rescued from the oppressive control of the baddies by a team of underground punk anarchists, The Invisbles, with seemingly magical powers and ability to bypass the rules of the social order and even existence itself. Fine straightforward enough. But volume 2, Apocalypstick, had me reeling in a completely different way as it explored the life of Lord Fanny a Brazilian transgender woman who is the Invisible’s de-facto shaman. The story explained the beautiful but often tragic reality of being a modern trans person, as well as how they used to hold great importance in the world for their dualistic identity and increased capacity for understanding of the natural order. Following this the ongoing story introduced the concept of the Moonchild a monstrous being birthed from another realm using ritualistic magic and who would one day sit on the throne of England. Then there were high Archons – demonic entities from a parallel reality who wanted to farm our very existence. So needless to say, it was a bit much for me in 2003 at 16.

Morrison, in many interviews, would claim that by creating the self-surrogate character King Mob in The Invisibles he intentionally began re-writing his own reality. It became an ongoing mirror. He’d have an experience, write about it and then what he wrote would transmute into his life. An ongoing chicken or egg dance where the machine was feeding itself. This was Morrison’s ongoing experience within’ a chapel perilous of his own design, and it nearly resulted in his death. Morrison and his character nearly died from a flesh-eating bacteria and it was only by writing through this and giving his character a fictional escape that Morrison, by his belief, was delivered entirely from the illness. This also manifested in the romantic relationship he developed over this time. Then there was his character’s adoption of guns and martial arts, akin to but preceding the Matrix, resulting in the assassin gods appearing in his, Morrison’s, dreams asking him to swear his allegiance to them with a scorpion tattoo on his spine. Ultimately both Morrison and King Mob renounced violence. Bolstered by Morrison’s experience I felt that it was the right time to read The Invisibles.

The Door to Chapel Perilous

The month and a half that followed for me is undoubtedly one of the stranger experiences I’ve had in my life. Reality became unmoored and it was as if everything around me was floating a half millimeter off every surface. The days and nights became nebulous and disconnected from each other in a way where it made it difficult to tell where one day ended and another began. It being Winter in Vancouver also may have had some influence here. I know I worked. I know I had a girlfriend. I know that I was writing and reading and considering the big questions of the cosmos as I allowed myself to live in this half state where everything was real and simultaneously nothing was real. I started to see the chain reactions of life; watching patrons at the bar and seeing the butterfly effect of their actions rippling through the social order of the five blocks around me. I saw the consequences of actions, mine and others. I also saw many things that I couldn’t explain or understand for there was no definition of their why, just random chance encounters with whirlpools of chaos. I felt exposed.

Then there was Kwesi. Kwesi was a five-foot eight youngish black guy with dreadlocks, circular sunglasses, an army coat, dreads and stained jeans. He appeared one day at the bar I worked at and almost immediately made a nuisance of himself with his overly familiar tone, erratic behavior and seeming lack of social boundaries. He wasn’t a bad guy but he was indeed a kook. The first time I served him he added so much Worcestershire, tabasco and black pepper to his lager that you would have been remiss for thinking it had come from a puddle. The waitresses didn’t like him and my bartending partner Sampson preferred to ignore him. I had, upon stopping at the bar Falconetti’s on the way home from work, prevented him from getting his ass kicked by Guido who found his tone insulting. The following week he came into the bar, looked me in the eye and said I’ll bet you a beer I know what you’re thinking about. I laughed and said sure. And then he perfectly recited to me the thoughts I’d been having about the process of creating the template for your own self actualization through fiction. Now one could reason that he’d seen me reading The Invisibles, or even Cosmic Trigger at Continental Coffee – but what I was thinking didn’t have any direct relation to the books I was reading, unless you knew about Grant Morrison’s experiences – which was about as niche as it got, not to mention Cosmic Trigger itself was a book that you didn’t just accidentally come across. I was shook. I served him his beer and then began to probe him with questions about the ideas I’d been confronting over the past few months and he answered of my questions in a matter-of-fact tone. Yes, you can manipulate reality with your imagination. No, it’s not as simple as thinking it. The results will initially be unpredictable. He arrived in and out of my life at different times even making an appearance at my staff Holiday Party at the end of January. We’d engage in deep intense conversations about the cosmos and then he’d dissapear.

As I continued through Cosmic Trigger, Anton Wilson exposed me to more and more contradictions between the reality we live and the record of what was. Lost to the rapturous thoughts and mind-bending theories Wilson eventually came back to earth after the murder of his daughter. He faced this with great sorrow and bitter irony, for all his searching and exploration of the unknown – there was nothing to be gleaned from the meaningless death of his daughter other than that the sudden and unpredictable tragedies of life will happen and they cannot be manipulated out of existence or transmuted except by sorrow. I was starting to feel crazy. Things were a mess. My conscious stability to grasp reality was unravelling. It was then, reading of Anton Wilson’s tragedy, that the point of the expedition into the chaos of model agnosticism became clear to me: If you don’t choose to believe in something, reality will run roughshod over your entire existence and you will be lost at sea – forever buffeted by the same winds and tides that prevented Odyssus from returning home. A victim of the gods, destined to search forever. You must believe in something or your life will never have meaning. If you don’t choose an altar to pray upon, life will prey upon you.

Intentionally I was also finishing The Invisibles at this time and the closure of that story erases all notion that we must participate in the cosmic scheming and designs of anyone and we have our free will and we have the power to, if not control, then guide and craft our fates and defy those projected upon us. I had to decide what I wanted to believe because it was belief itself that anchors us in reality – it gives meaning in the face of the otherwise unpredictable and unknowable. What I had learned was that belief was transmutable, and by no means permeant. The power of model agnosticism is that it teaches about this lack of permeance; that changing your beliefs gives you the ability to grow, change and modify your power. And that just like the extreme of disbelieving anything will leave you in ruin, believing too hard in any one thing will ultimately leave you wanting when these beliefs are not fulfilled, and this leads a lot of people to a crisis of faith. Which is why your beliefs must be fluid and capable of change.

It was then that I started to define what I believed and who I wanted to be and the ultimate result of that was The Bartender, which as much as it is a crime mystery; was my exploration of class, politics, culture and the corporatization and commodification of the human experience as a designed commodity for the ignorant masses. All of this protected by the fiction armor I had created for myself. This new person who embodied all the best of what I thought I wanted to be at the time. Writing the three books was an experience of creativity that would forever change me, and in the strangest of ways; the world around me.

A month or so later I remember saying to Sampson, “I haven’t seen Kwesi in a while”.

To which he responded, “Who?”

No one else but I had a recollection of the very strange and often disruptive man who had breezed in and out of my life in that strange month and a half inside Chapel Perilous. What’s to actually make of that? I can’t really say. I’ll leave it up to you to ponder.

The Golden Age

The following 15 years of adventures were predicated on me making that very conscious choice to imagine a certain type of person and experience of life and become that. The results? Varied! Let’s say that there were plenty of unforeseen consequences to fictionalizing myself to the point that my very life was caught up in my ability to complete a story spanning three novels and plenty of real-life trial, error and tribulation. The things I wrote about leapt from the page and before long the self-actualization of myself brought with it many of the same problems of my fictional counterpart, and I had to tackle many things head on that I would have preferred stay fiction. The number of days where I couldn’t tell if I’d imagined something into reality or if the truth of the matter had always been there, but I just hadn’t seen the whole picture until I conceived of it in my mind birthed it out in text. Was I really tapping into the secret truths of the universe or, after all, was it just a series of coincidences? One thing was for certain, I felt empowered. Like I had tapped into that lightning of the gods and my actions became more and more self assured.

Over time I tried to get other people to read Cosmic Trigger, but upon describing my experiences in Chapel Perilous even those with psychedelic experience were not eager to crack the esoteric tomb of sardonically self-induced brain change. But I continued to engage with these tenets and practices, birthing other ideas to life with various levels of success.

I created the character Lazlo as a new fiction suit, a character to inhabit and enter into a different world of fiction from The Bartender’s, where Lazlo was suitably powered up to take on the forces of world domination. In this way I was engaging in psychic battle and ongoing war with the ideas in my mind and at least the idea of evil in the world. I feel like across the conception of these stories I’ve lived lifetimes exploring the depths of the collective consciousness, mapping out a path to a realized depiction all these wild ideas in the form of a saga. I lived those stories. They might not be real in the sense that you can touch them, but they were as real as anything else to me.

Eventually my interest in the paranormal and occult reached a point where I found myself reading into everything around me. From the symbols on corporate branding to the meanings behind paintings in the dentist’s office and more obviously architecture. I delved deeply into conspiracy theories involving but not limited to: The Bavarian Illuminati, Knights Templar, Freemasons, Majestic 12, Bilderberg’s, Rothschilds, Windsors, the House of Morgan, the Third Reight, The USA Joint Security & Council on Foreign relations, Saudi Royalty, Zionists, the Catholic Church and the folks out at CERN with that large hadron collider. Eventually I made my way to the Magicks of King Solomon, Old Testament stuff that had been cut from later editions of the bible, not to mention history. These teachings were contained in the grimoire The Lesser Key of Solomon otherwise known as the Lemegeton. These are the types of things that were discovered by Dr. John Dee and his associate Edward Kelley while working for Queen Elizabath as her head mathematician, astronomer and, occultist. Dr. Dee is the one who functionally documented scrying through a black mirror, and other rituals, to contact beings from the other side of existence – from beyond spacetime as we understand it. His story is one of tragedy and madness.

It was also around here that I started to read more accounts of people who had actually done this stuff and it had worked. Yet, it seemed that doing ritualistic magic and summoning beings from another plane was about as risky as it was far-fetched and in the stories of occult practitioners most of the time someone either totally lost their mind, or lost everything else after their world fell apart. Demons, angels, whatever you want to call them I felt fairly assured, based on the alignment of independent magicians’ stories, that this stuff was real in some shape and form, and that despite my supernatural education and calculated psychedelic experiences beyond the veil; I wasn’t going to go down that road. It’s why all the occult language is difficult to read and the texts were near impossible to find, because it’s fucking dangerous. It might not be real but enough people sure believed it was real.

In my experience engaging with such material, conspiracy and the occult, I’ve found that this is the perfect time to deploy model agnosticism. The times where I’ve allowed myself to go a little bit too far down the rabbit hole of believing this stuff, well things do indeed get legitimately weird. The door to Chapel Perilous wide open and calling for me, and at times I haven’t been able to resist running in there for a spell. It would be an absolute blast until I’d start getting paranoid that there were entities around me, watching me, observing me – wondering if I would go for it and chase the ultimate truths or if I was just a pedestrian and hobbyist. I think in the end I realized that I was more than happy to dabble in whatever powers I was tapping into, but from the mostly safe confines of my fiction – a world I created and controlled.

Still enough of my friends had taken notice of the way my life always took another peculiar turn based on whatever esoteric lore I was immersing myself in and writing about, which is to say nothing of my extensive research into aliens, not to mention the fact that my whole life had been upended once the first Bartender book came out and that once imaginary version of myself became permanently grafted to my soul. Aside from my friend T none one wanted anything to do with what I was up to, and over time I’d learn the hard way what can happen when you get busy casting spells involving people in your life. It’s very much a careful what you wish for type situation. It’s something that scared me away from writing for a long time, because the nature of my methods of creation often had real world impacts, I could rarely predict and even rarer control. Not to mention the times where I’d run into some sort of spectral situation, entity or art that would penetrate my mind in ways that I’d only be able to quantify later, and even then with only a vague outcome.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful what we pretend to be.

How does someone almost forget all this?

When I went to go work in corporate, I began to abandon the idea of The Bartender. I was exhausted and just didn’t want to do it anymore. The books were done. It had felt much more like an escape from the service industry than a simple conscious choice to leave. It felt like I didn’t have to be a down and out detective and rogue anymore, and that brought a sense of relief. A relief that I didn’t need to keep re-living this self-fulfilling prophecy where I got in and out of trouble, my life like a tv re-run. Once out from behind bars I truly felt naked for a while. I didn’t belong in corporate; I had been the most anti-corpo, fuck the man, rage against the machine, burn it all down person. So, in the now more civilized world of corporate office work I didn’t exactly have a good foundation upon which to build a new identity. Eventually I landed on some sort of approximation of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character from The Hunt for Red October and Patriot Games, but this was a rental suit and I was used to a custom-tailored personality with lots of extra pockets and special skills.

The superhero version of myself gone, or at least put out to pasture. I fell victim to the tedium and bland crushing weight of terrestrial reality that we all find ourselves involuntarily subscribed to at times. I got lost in believing that I wanted to hang up the cape and live a normal life. It was as if I intentionally lost the magic word that would transform me into something beyond just Axel Matfin, and in doing so I lost myself to the very normal and all too real fate of being pulverized by the impossible evils and bureaucratic dictums of adult life. I let myself slip into the comfort of letting myself think well this is just who I am now. I siloed myself off from any of the other more potent fictional personas I’d been know to wear over the years. I convinced myself that I just wanted to was to get married, have a career and hang it all up. Let go of all that insanity. That’s how you forget.

For a good long time, I was lost, not knowing who I was or even who I could be. All I wanted was to love my partner and build a life, but I was a hollow version of myself – incomplete because I was denying so much of what I was. I was terrified of what might happen if I said that magic word again and I once more transformed into my full potential. The self imposed, self important responsibility of it all. The hope for that normal life ultimately fell apart. I think now in great part due to the fact that I wasn’t being present with myself, honest with myself. I was holding back for fear that my powers would continue to alienate me from the people I cared about. Then I was lost, falling and reeling like a normal person but now I really had forgotten the magic word and there was no escape. It went like this until that reliable old dominant para-persona, The Bartender, took the wheel and brought me back. When I passed out due to psychological blood loss, he showed up again, a backup personality in case my own head and heart started to fail me. Now, many years after his creation I can thank The Bartender one more time for filling my cup and let his service end.

December 31, 2025

I’m standing on the Seawall outside the restaurant smoking a cig and listening to Thunderstruck, just like I have many times over the past 20 years. Dialing in. Becoming the personality that I’d created so long ago, to just go have another rip. Play the greatest hits. Get a taste one more time. It feels good to be that guy. It felt good all Summer. It felt good that night but by the time the ball dropped at midnight and I kissed a beautiful woman, and drank sparkling wine surrounded by some of my favorite colleagues there was something in me that recognized that I had once more found the limitations of this particular persona. He’s powerful and he’s gotten me through so many different times and experiences but that New Years shift just clearly defined for me that I have reached the precipice of what I can do with that identity. I’ve 100% Bartender the game. It was a re-acknowledgement that I was going to have to grow beyond the confines of this particular personal brainwashing and programming. It was time for something new. My experiences this year have validated my decision to keep writing things like this and the fictional stories that contain the metatextual plasma that literally morphs reality. I have my powers back, and this time I won’t forget the magic word.

In the coming months I intend to return to the sacred grove in my imagination and outline the new version of who I am to become before galvanizing it with the lightning of the gods to forge new ways of being, living and creating. It had always been the plan to create an infinite legion of myself, birthed from my own mind in conjunction with the collective unconscious, so there would be at least some fictional guard against the evils of the world. Even if just for myself.

I think it was really important that I allowed myself to come back to earth for a time. To just be human and let Axel Matfin reflect on and engage with everything he’d been through, and I feel pretty good about him as a whole, but now I know it’s time to engage once more with all the varying angles of potential that exist within me and double down on creating the person I aspire to be. In real life and my imagination.

Am I for real? Is this real? Am I crazy? Probably. But like Grant Morrison said to me so long ago all this shit is verifiable. Give it a shot. You don’t have to go to the lengths I did. Chapel Perilous is not for the feeble of mind and faint of heart. But if you’re stuck, if things aren’t going the way you want, or you need some personal direction – I wouldn’t advise against imagining the best version of yourself for the situation you find yourself in and simply becoming that. It just takes belief. I believe in you. What do you believe? Who knows where it will take you?

I was conceived in June 1987. I was born January 23 1988. I never met my biological father until I was 14.

I am, in the most classical of senses, a bastard - born out of wedlock with an absent father. My biological Dad’s name is Bill, he was a heavy duty mechanic working for my maternal grandfather Walter, who owned a company with a gravel pit, cement mixer and a variety of trucks and heavy duty equipment. Bill met my Mom, Barb, when she was home from school working in my grandfather’s shop. Bill is something like 20 years older than my Mom. Bill left shortly after I was born, and my Mom married my adoptive father Mike, before I was two years old. Barb was 25 when I was born.

I didn’t know that Mike wasn’t technically my Dad until I was about 12 and the news was a very disturbing revelation. Not that I had a great sense of self at that point in my life, yet I think this became the original log on the fire of existential dread that seems to have burned in my mind most of my waking days. In some ways my Mom tried to play it off as a bit of a joke, occasionally reminding me that I was technically a bastard, as if it was humorous. But this piece isn’t about my relationship with my Mom; it’s about my relationship, or lack thereof, with Bill.

I didn’t really know much about him except that he wouldn’t have been a good father. He was like a specter, no one really talked about him and on the occasion he was mentioned his presence would evaporate from the conversation as quickly as it had come.

When I was in 7th grade I received a big hardcover photo book about trains from him in the mail.

The first time I met him my Mom and I were on our way back to 100 Mile House from Vancouver, I had a hospital appointment, which is part of a much longer story, and my Mom pointed at a big old house just off the highway between Cache Creek and Clinton.

“That’s where Bill lives. Let’s stop in and see if he’s home.”

I remember I didn’t want to do it, but much like many things in life, what I wanted didn’t really matter much.

Then I met him. He wasn’t taller than 5’7. He was round, clad in dirty double denim, had tattoos on the backs of his hands, circular glasses and a tremendous mustache. He looked like Wilford Brimley. He invited us inside for tea, Red Rose. You have to make sure you pour the hot water over the tea, not drop a teabag in hot water. Stepping inside his house it was as if I had been transported back to a rural building from the 60’s. There was a radio, but the fridge and stove were ancient and there was a draft that ran through the kitchen. This wasn’t a house you took your shoes off in. What did we talk about? We talked about guns. He had a lot of them and he liked shooting them. He’d bought a shit-tload of ammo for all of them before they were required to be registered. He told me that he’d been in the military. That’s where he learned how to be a mechanic. He lived on that property doing one off heavy-duty mechanic and machining work and then was farming the land, alfalfa hay, taking care of a small head of cattle and riding horses. Cowboy shit. We talked about books I liked, which at the time were things like Treasure Island and Robinson Caruso, I knew he wouldn’t give a fuck what an Animorph was so I didn’t bring those books up. He was friendly enough and certainly possessed a gift for conversation, much like myself. He told me about his favorite book of all time: Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. My Mom is smart and literate in the functional sense but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her read a fiction book that wasn’t one of mine or authored by Jane Austen - so the significance of this being Bill’s favorite book was entirely lost on her. The onus would be on me, over the years, to decide how I felt about Objectivist Epistemology and Rand’s philosophies on ownership, rights, governments role in society, individual responsibility and many other tenets of libertarianism. For the record I feel that Atlas Shrugged is a fascinating book and a tremendous novel, but a poor bedrock upon which to build your belief structures. The tea was finished and then we exchanged a desire to spend some time together in the future and Barb and I were back on the road.

Over the next year whenever Bill was driving through he’d take me to go get lunch. I got to know him a bit better. I got to hear some of his stories more than once. I learned about his brothers: his brother John; the ne’er do well, who’d been in and out of jail in between cooking drugs for motorcycle gangs, ripping those same gangs off and then having his extremities broken by the white supremacists motorcycle enthusiasts as a result. John also had a son, Josh, who had unfortunately gotten roped into much of the same troubled life as his father, although I understand he’s rehabilitated now. Then there was Bill’s youngest brother Robert, who was essentially a good guy who worked trade jobs and was starting a Rabbit farm. I didn’t ever learn anything about Bill’s parents, or if I did it was so vague that there was nothing to really hold on to. I never met them. I don’t know their names. Bill had run away from home when he was 16 to join the military because, as he put it “I liked the idea of riding around on a motorcycle with a machinegun.”

Bill was philosophical, but he was also blunt and relatively un-nuanced about anything except machinery, horses, his love of classic country music and his own political beliefs. He generally believed the government should stay out of people’s business, de-regulate a ton of stuff, and put the responsibility of existence back on individuals and away from institutions. I’m no fan of bloated bureaucracy, but Bill’s approach has always felt a bit inconsiderate to me. Indeed it was in these days where he’d ask what type of friend I was and I’d tell him I always had my friend’s back and would show up for them and Bill would practically roll his eyes and assert that I should only be looking out for myself, and that eventually the people in my life would let me down and I’d look and feel like an idiot. By this point he’d given me multiple copies of Atlas Shrugged.

A couple years later I stayed with Bill for a week in the Summer, to help with haying the fields and generally be around each other. They were loooong days of hot work in the sun, my allergies blowing up in my face, no matter the amount of allergy pills I took, as hay pollen blasted into my face day in and out. I learned he really liked Linda Ronstadt. The nights were eerily quiet and dark. Bill had a TV but he only had a meager collection of VHS that had been taped off TV. I remember watching 1 movie with him, the Tommy Lee Jones directed and starring The Good Old Boys - the premise of which is hilariously summed up with: An aging cowboy must choose between his desire to remain free and the responsibilities of maintaining a family. The movie even had Wilford Brimley in it.

The house was old and beaten up, with a freezing cold shower and a variety of spiders up in the loft where I slept. I learned to ride horses with some competency that trip, and I shot a lot of guns. I had ended up in Cadets and taken a shine to shooting which was no surprise. My grandfather Walter being an award winning trap shooter and a hell of a hunter, it seemed obvious that I’d be into guns. Bill taught me how to shoot handguns. He taught me how to shoot side stance with a duelist’s draw. We killed some gophers those 2 weeks. We’d go on drives and he’d tell me a variety of semi-vulgar, violent or work related stories. I learned about how he’d been a tug boat operator but had lost his vessel due to some bad money deals with some less than reputable businessmen.

Then there was a time where we had to go to this family’s house a ways down the road to look at a piece of equipment and Bill was telling me about their daughter. A pretty young farm girl that I’d probably take a shine to given the chance. What the fuck? I thought. When we got to the property Bill went to chat with the lady about whatever thing he was there to do and didn’t so much as introduce me to the young lady as present her to me before giving me some weird look that conveyed you know what to do, even though I most certainly did not and could not comprehend what he was suggesting. You introduced me to a pretty girl that doesn’t live anywhere near me and who you’ve now crowbarred into entertaining me. She was nice enough and all but she was a real 100% cowgirl and I knew that despite my rural upbringing the city was my future. When the visit was done Bill was like Huh? Whatdja think? And I just didn’t know how to respond. It was such a weird thing to be put upon in a way like that by someone that I still didn’t really know all that well. Although I did start to see the similarities between us; our candor, smartass nature, stubbornness, our general disdain for authority and a rugged individualism that has certainly caused us both a lot of headaches over the years.

I stopped seeing him with as much regularity. He sold his property and moved up to Terrace where he was teaching heavy duty mechanics at Northwest Community College. I moved to Vancouver and started living my actual life. We sorta drifted out of touch although we’d both email each other occasionally.

We got in touch with each other again a few years later. Not long after I’d published my first novel and was now in what I guess I would say was the most fulfilling relationship of my life with G. I was 25 when we reconnected and much like in the past, when he came to town we’d go for lunch. I was a young man now and I’d started to form up my own ideas about the world. I had come to agree with Bill that a lot of regulations and red tape can stagnate creativity, but I was a socialist, had rejected the core ideologies of Atlas Shrugged, and believed in being of service to my community and generally most of the stuff that we call woke now. I asked him about my half sister that I’d heard rumors about and he told me he’d hired a private detective to find her, but she didn’t want to see him or me. We got along, for the most part.

G had never met Bill. She was supportive but asserted that she wanted me to develop a relationship with him but for the time being she didn’t want to participate in meeting him. I think that for her, and other people in my life, they could see this vacancy in my heart, a pain and longing for a deeper connection to my roots and what made me who I was and they didn’t want to see me get hurt even further by someone who’d abandoned me at the start of my life, only to show up intermittently to tell me how to live it. My relationship with Barb and Mike had been strained for years, which is also part of a much bigger story, and I’d always wondered what my life would have looked like if I had been saddled up with the old Cowboy. It was also in these years where I really began to consider just how much of a difference his DNA had made upon me compared to the rest of my family. I am radically different from both my half siblings; my brother is a very respectable and chill high school teacher with fine tastes and a desire to relax, my sister is a regimented, disciplined and fiercely intelligent environmental engineer. By contrast my bar-tending, dope smoking, trouble hunting, artistic existence doesn’t really align with that of my siblings, and I had really started to wonder just how much the nurture of my life had ignored the nature of what I am. I had to think about who I was, without really knowing about half of myself.

The last time I saw Bill in person we were having lunch as usual. I was in the process of wading into an investigation that had me looking into corruption in non-profits, the municipal government and the general overflow of Olympic blood money. I had thought that Bill would be interested in this; that his disdain for institutions he thought leeched off the coffers of society would make him interested in my desire to take down corruption and expose the villains in the midst of my community. But he wasn’t. Things got really dark. He started to tell me how despite the best of intentions things can get really really bad. That you can’t control evil or chaotic people, nor reason with them. That my pursuit of truth and justice would only leave me in ruin. I tried to tell him that it was worth it in the name of what was right and that I wasn’t afraid. He said I should be afraid. That I wasn’t afraid enough. That if I kept pushing on institutions and people with dark secrets that bad things were going to happen.

“Are you going to be afraid when these people show up to your house and rape your girlfriend and murder you in front of her?”

At that point in my life I’d never had anyone speak to me like that. I’d never thought that something so vicious and dark would be said to me by someone that was supposed to be my family. I think I can only really recognize now what a deep wound this cut in me. How let down and betrayed I felt by his cynicism. I’d wanted him to be proud of me, to be inspired by my willingness to fight the system that he so verbally professed to think was broken. But he didn’t want to fix it, or participate in it. Just like being a parent to me he only wanted to get away from it, until it was something that couldn’t really affect him anymore.

Fuckin’ coward I thought. All your supposed tough guy, macho cowboy bullshit and when I’m standing here telling you I’m fighting something worth fighting for you give me this?

He then began to taunt me with the idea of What are you even going to do? What are you willing to do? How far are you willing to go? Before leading me into a story about how John, his brother, had fucked something up so stupendously bad and cost a lot of people money and grief. And Bill? Well Bill had loaded up some rifles, got in his truck and was on his way up North to play keeper to his brother one last time before delivering a final solution to that grief with a bullet. But he never got there. Blizzard shut down the roads, apparently. Whether what he said is true or not doesn’t really matter - what matters is that he said it to me. And there I sat in that cafe watching this sad, internally broken, angry and out of touch old man rain shit down on my desire to live a life of compassion, justice and righteous action - to only show me more of his cowardice. For all this posturing he was just a lost person who didn’t know how to do anything but live for himself. I became terrified that I would end up like him. I don’t think I ever told G about what happened at that lunch. I just foolishly buried it like many other feelings I was having at the time. So it goes.

In the years that followed I would have different people from Bill’s family reach out to me. Cousins. Nieces. Rob. People that knew and liked him and they’d say that he would talk about me. It was slightly confounding to think of him talking about me while holding no position in my life. A seemingly self imposed exile. Not that I wanted to see him for those first few years since our last meeting in the diner. But I eventually let it go. I usually do. Eventually I tried writing to him, but with no response. I wrote and published more books. I sent them to him and heard nothing in return. I even wrote a chapter in the third Bartender novel that takes place in the past where I created him as a fictional version of himself, to have the conversation I’d never had with him, in a way that was much more satisfying than real life could have delivered. For a time that sated me. I defined myself as having part of him in me, but also that I was was free to make my own decisions, unbound by the dogmas of his genetics. I had one particularly emotionally revelatory yoga class where deep in the self induced psychedelic seance of breathwork I somehow managed to de-couple my psyche from his; I freed myself - perhaps only temporarily - from being chained to his existence. This went for all the technical family I had on his side as well. I was separate from them, we’d never been a part of each other’s lives and without Bill it wasn’t really something I felt a lot of obligation to look into. Nor was I going to keep reaching out to him just to get silence. I didn’t owe him anything, and any yearning I had for a better relationship was going to stay unfulfilled because simply: he wasn’t capable of it.

Then in 2020 he re-appeared on Facebook, commenting on my more politically radical posts with his own stagnant political beliefs, seemingly taking enjoyment from baiting me into political tirades. People start to ask me yo who the fuck is that guy? And I’d just have to sigh and shrug and respond that it was my estranged father communicating in the only way he knew how - by being a provocative prick. Eventually I gave him a thorough dressing down on a public Facebook post where I called him a coward and uncorked all the rage that I’d been burying in my gut. For his disrespect to my Mom in the past, while in the present he paid lip service to the wonderful person he proclaimed she was. For his abandonment of me. For his cynical and miserly approach to the world. It didn’t do much. He shrugged it off and kept on being who he always was; only appearing on my Facebook page to post right wing conservative bullshit to try and get a rise out of me. It often worked. It was only when he invoked my Mom’s name and she showed up online, a rarity, to textually slap him back in place that he backed off.

In the years that followed I grappled with how he was trying to connect, but just couldn’t do it in any way that would be beneficial to our relationship. I tried telling my then partner K about it and her response was about the same as it was with anyone that she disagreed with: delete him, block him and never think about him again. But with a parent, even an estranged one, it’s never that simple. You can just cut that person out, but then that’s over. And aside from that last conversation in the diner he’d never really done anything bad. He was just absent and a bit of a prick. This was me bargaining with myself. I recognized that Bill wasn’t long for this world, it was a marvel he’d lasted as long as he had, and there was a desire in me to find some sort of reckoning, or closure, so I could actually be free from the seeming curse our connection plays on my mind.

Then 2 things happened. First, I was supposed to start composing a short story for a contest. Second, I got the job working around the tug boats. I messaged Bill that I had gotten the job and that I might want to pick his brain about some stuff. I think I got a thumbs up in response. Then slowly he started to message me, mostly asking about work. We had a few more positive interactions, but nothing that I could actually call much of a conversation. I would ask him questions and they’d go unanswered. The story I was going to write, I decided, would be a fictional adaptation of Bill’s life. There was so much I knew, but infinitely more that I didn’t and probably never would know. But I decided to tell that story the best I knew how. To give a sense of closure by creating a fantasy that might as well have been as real for all I knew about what actually happened.

Then eventually the right wing memes, climate change denial, misrepresentations of socialism and talking heads parroting conservative buzz word talking points videos started to come. I guess they’d never really stopped, but I was sick of it. I told him to knock it off, I didn’t want to hear about it. Things went back to a bit more normal conversation, I tried to talk about music or ask more about his life, but the music talk went mostly un-reciprocated and the questions continued to go largely unanswered. The political stuff started to come back and I told him again I didn’t wanna hear it. I wasn’t particularly pleasant about it, but I’d asked nicely more than once.

The story ended up blowing out the parameters of the rules for the contest. It quite simply got away from me. I transformed Bill’s life into a very Axel Matfin story; moving at a swift pace and filled with plenty of colorful characters and set pieces pulled by the thread of a man discovering his own identity based on the random adversity, chaos and upheaval of life. It is of course a piece of fiction, cobbled together from memory of stories told and infused by his own self-aggrandizing mythos, into something that I imagine could have run in an equivalent of a Men’s Adventure magazine from the 60s. There was always something about Bill’s cowboy nature to wander that made him an interesting figure to follow on his journey. Ultimately I think I crafted a rather charitable portrayal of the man, to a degree that maybe he doesn’t deserve, but it was the story I felt compelled to tell. The story allowed me a level of peace and acceptance with who he is and what he came from - even if what I wrote is 70% bullshit. If anything it gave me a wonderful place to reflect on my family and the world before I was born.

I like to think that part of Bill leaving was because he knew that wherever he was John’s wicked life would follow. I like to believe that at least part of his decision to disappear was so that my family and I wouldn’t be subjected to the adult version of the chaos that ran in my veins. Bill is measured and disciplined even if he is a bit of an insufferable prick. John from my understanding was more like a feral dog. This theory of mine is influenced by an experience I had as a young kid down at the Lone Butte General store, about a click away from my parents house. I was buying candy and had just come out of the store and I was greeted by a man that I didn’t recognize. By that point I’d met just about anyone that my parents or extended family were friends with, the Cariboo is only so big, so it was really strange that this guy knew who I was. I wasn’t an idiot, you don’t talk to fuckin’ strangers, and I brushed past the man who continued to say things I didn’t listen to as I left. When I got home I told my Mom about it and she got really tense. I never saw the man again, though I speculate that it was John. Who I later learned was indeed cooking drugs not far from where I grew up.

The chaos in my veins. Just part of what makes me so different from so much of the rest of my family. I think that some people were afraid of what I might become. Afraid of my dark potential. I know my Mom was afraid that at some point Bill could come and try and take me away when I was young, it was a crucial reason she’d married Mike, an honorable man, so I would be legally adopted. Still I feel like it’s taken a lot of my life to try and figure out who and what I am precisely because my instincts and thoughts are so much different from that of my closest kin. There have been many many days where I wished that I could have the composure and calmness of my brother and the practical intelligence of my sister. The preternatural instinct of a Matfin’s sensibility to just chill out. Matfin’s are much like Hobbits, although much more smart ass. So of course it has long been a desire to better understand myself, but it’s hard when so much of the story is missing. Some days it feels like I’ve just been blindly following the path this bastard’s blood has laid out before me. But after writing that story it felt like this seemingly pre-determined path was fading from sight. That by taking ownership of Bill’s story, whether he likes it or not, was me giving myself control of my own foundations. When Bill inevitably passes; I’ll really be all that’s left of him. This story is simultaneously me taking ownership of his life, while consuming his identity to accept the multitudes of this man as part of me; but making the choice to own what is good and defy that which never served him and which I will not allow to command me. This story gives me the peace to at least imagine: that he did the right thing.

Writing this post has been much more difficult than writing the story was. I know he’s going to read it. I wonder what he’ll think. I’ve speculated to myself that someone misrepresenting him or his story would really piss him off, I think that because it would really piss me off. It made me consider whether or not there would be any remaining relationship after I shared this with the world. It was scary. But then I got this:

It might not be much. But it is something.

I would be happy if you read the story Heavy Duty it where it’s being featured at Peliplat:

• Part 1

• Part 2

• Part 3

Tick tick tick tick tick.

I hear the second hand moving on my watch beside my bed. I reach out to check my phone but I already know what time it is by the sound of traffic out on 1st Avenue. 5:25. I’ve got fifteen minutes left before the alarm goes off so I savor my new clean sheets, roll over onto my stomach and wait for the wail of 5:40. When it goes off I let out a groan, roll over and am out of bed and am fully on the clock. Lets go get this bread.

Shower. Get dressed. Put my lunch in my bag. Boots on. Out the door before 6.

The first couple weeks really took some getting used to. I had come to realize that if I didn’t catch the 7:10 train, then I wouldn’t make the 7:30 SeaBus, and then I wouldn’t make the 7:55 shuttle bus to my job site. If I didn’t make the shuttle bus I had to wait until 8:10 for the next one, but which point it might already be too late - I’d be stuck in North Van morning traffic, potentially getting stuck behind a parked train, not to mention the other ruckus and construction that is constantly going down on the waterfront. Part of this was admitting that I had to be out the door earlier than my beloved Continental Coffee opened and as such I’ve found myself waiting until I make it to Waterfront station, the Skytrain station connected to the SeaBus terminal, before grabbing a quick Venti from the Starbucks just beyond the gates. God forbid, I’ve even toyed with getting the app to pre-order my morning stimulants. The boat ride to North Van is usually a pleasurable experience, although people pooping their pants is more common than you might imagine. I love looking out the windows at the cranes, other boats, sunrise, and when there’s a ripping storm there is nothing I like more than throwing on Sea Wall from the Blade Runner 2049 soundtrack, by Hans Zimmer of course.

By this point the caffeine is kicking and I set my hockey pool lineups, and then get to thinkin’. There’s only so much bullshit you can scroll through and there’s only so many podcasts you can listen to and I’ve never had the focus to read in transit - so I listen to music and I think. Think about the world; politics, war, the economy and the gradual fracturing of the status quo I grew up with into the techno-fascist frontier we’re embarking on. in 2020 I coined the term Pre-Cyberpunk Dust Bowl and that sure feels like what most people are living through. My conclusion is that it’s what we were promised and man is it delivering in a weirder way than even I could have fathomed. As I write this it’s been 24 hours since it was announced to the world that Trump was featured in the Epstein e-mails being described as doing something to someone named Bubba. This shit boggles the mind.

I think about what I’m feeling, and why I’m feeling that way. A big feeling has been facing the enormity of the job I’ve signed up for and how it’s pushing me to squeeze every last second out of the day, and where do I find the space for myself and to focus on my own personal internal steps. Sometimes I find myself starting to hit a wall, little pools of doubt forming in my mind then I’ll snap out of it and change the music. A pump up song I’ve been referring too since the end of Summer is Nine Inch Nail’s Less Than.

Focus?
We didn’t even notice
We awake in a place
We can barely recognize, yeah
Hypnosis

And you can justify it all
Your back is up against the wall again

Shut up, silence
Add a little violence
And offend and pretend
And defend and demand my compliance

And you can always justify
The missile trails across the sky again

So what are you waiting for?
You got what you asked for
Did it fix what was wrong with you?
Are you less than?
Go and look what you gone done
Come on welcome oblivion
Did it fix what was wrong with you?
Are you less than?

At this point I grit my teeth, crack my knuckles and shift gears into thinking about the work ahead and try to gather my thoughts to step through the front door and hit the ground running.

I’m inside the building at roughly 7:15 every day where I go and sit in the head Dispatch office, which looks directly onto the docks. I can’t really get into the nuts and bolts of what I do but basically I’m writing instructions (we call ‘em Procedures in the biz) for a bunch of different departments and their usage of a new multi-faceted piece of software. One of these departments includes Tug Boat operators, and I’ve been consistently going out on the boats and riding around to see how those guys do their jobs. It’s fascinating stuff. I’ve come to a nice realization that what I do now is not corporate, it’s industrial. I’m an Industrial Writer. This is what makes work feel like an Op, an Adventure, a Mission.

I have breakfast at about 8:30-9:00. 2 boiled eggs, maybe some fruit, maybe some blanched carrots or broccolini, second cup of coffee. Then I work. I interview people. I write. I learn how to use the software. I do pushups. I go on boat rides. I come up with plans. I listen to people bitch about their job and try to empathize with them. I’ll go up to the cafeteria which is on the 5th floor of an adjacent building and hike the stairs to get the blood pumping and buy a pack of gum, or if it’s 11:30 then the daily soup special and a Diet Coke. I’ll eat the soup with something else like a pre-packed sandwich or a salad. Then it’s back to work and right around 2:45 I start to wrap up my business, debrief my boss on what I did that day and what I’m aiming for the next day. Clean up my lunch containers, there is a small galley just off the Dispatch office. Then I pack my bag, say sayonara to the team and catch the 3:15 bus to just beat the afternoon North Van traffic to the SeaBus. SeaBus to Skytrain. Skytrain to foot, to La Peche Pizza on Commercial Drive for two slices that I finish before I’m home. It’s 4:30.

Then I change straight into my gym clothes and go hit an hour of exercise before I’m out of there at 5:45 and downing a shake with banana, orange juice, protein powder, flax seeds and whatever other scrap fruit is in my fridge. Shower and put on some more relaxed clothes, usually wear a button down and sweater to work, and then am out for a walk and to grab anything I might want to eat later, or take to work the next day.

Then it’s 7:00 and I’ve just smoked some weed, cracked a beer or soda water, and am sitting down at the keyboard to hammer out something like this, personal blog posts, or an article for the film website I’m writing for Peliplat - I swear, people, read this stuff I get paid to do it. However the thing that’s consumed me most for the past month or so is a piece that started as what was going to be a short story for a Peliplat contest but, as things typically do, it got away from me and blew the doors off the parameters for the contest, still the Boss Man at Peliplat, a real nice guy named Bob, told me that he wanted to read the story and would be happy to let me post it on the site. Which kinda took me aback. I’ve been paid for just about every other type of writing I’ve ever done: journalism, music reviews, technical writing, copy editing, publishing duties - but no one’s ever paid me for my creative writing, unless you count my novels which I almost don’t these days considering I just strongarmed all my friends and family into buying them. I really like the story. It ended up being something a lot more deeply personal than I was intending and it was clear that it was something that somehow is just as tied to my exploration of myself as anything else. By the time I was done the story it’s resulting connection to other work I have planned, felt by unconscious design - like I knew that I had to go to the places I did in that piece of fiction if I was going to contend with the real world counterparts of its meaning and ideology.

I’ll tell yea this writing fiction is hard work. I am so happy with my twenty something year old self who, to a self flagellating degree, forced himself to sit in front of a keyboard and hammer out page after page of magic. He made me as good as I am now. Which given my output this past year I’m not ashamed to say I think is pretty fuckin’ good. I think that making art, especially original art, is as close to magic we have these days. We’re willing something out of seemingly nothing. It’s not like writing stuff like this where I’m just dumping out what I’m thinking or feeling, or writing about a movie or something else where there’s a basis of theme. Writing fiction is a highwire act of total isolation. Make no mistake to write fiction it takes willpower. It takes sitting down and facing the blank page and asking yourself what you want to do; what would you do if you had limitless power to make things work the way you want them too. It takes a lot of thought and consideration because just like with any great magic; it comes at a cost. You don’t simply make something out of nothing, it just seems that way. You have to transmute your essence, your belief and your internal voice into something at least vaguely recognizable and that doesn’t occur without serious intent. No one accidentally made a great piece of enduring fiction. Writing, unlike other forms, really only requires time and intention. I am not the smartest person in the world, and there are many better lyrical wordsmiths than I, but I make a commitment to my stories and I aim to follow them through for the characters and their journey; because I’m living it too. That just takes time. Admittedly this one foot in and one foot out of reality approach has caused, uh hiccups in my life, but I have come to recognize the power of using fiction to bring your truths into reality as well as form the reality around you to serve your vision. However just like wishing, when using magic you really have to be careful what you create. We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

At about 9:00 I stop what I’m doing. I’m usually totally exhausted at this point in the day, but invigorated by the work I’ve gotten done. I do any dishes that are kicking around while I watch/listen to select Youtube channels to keep appraised of whatever bullshit happened that day. Something I’ve been loving following is the Interstellar Object 3i/Atlas; a thing the size of Manhattan that is one of the rare interstellar objects (something originating outside our solar system) that we’ve managed to track. It’s huge. It does not obey the laws of physics as we understand them, and it’s doing lots of weird shit. There’s a lot of legitimate speculation about whether or not it’s a sign of intelligent life beyond our solar system. I say fuckin’ bring it on, and I welcome our new alien overlords; they can’t do a worse job than us. Dinner is along the lines of steak with veg, or chicken pasta, or if I made a batch of soup that week then some of that. I’ve gotten pretty lazy on the cooking front. Cooking is only really fun when you have someone to cook for and I’m not ashamed to say that there’s been days where I’m just like fuck it and get Chinese and eat the leftovers over the next few days. I believe that’s called bachelor chow. Dinner in me I will halfheartedly clean up my kitchen before laying out my clothes for the next day, rock another shower and use my massage gun on my shoulders and legs before throwing something on TV for an hour before we’re looking at 11:30 and then it’s alarms on, lights off as I knock off to repeat this process 5 days a week. Tick Tick Tick Tick Tick goes the second hand on my watch.

The weekends consist of sleeping the fuck in, doing chores, getting in some quality social time with friends and family and putting my feet up. Oh and maybe a few small beers here and there too.

I’m still working on all the creative goals I proclaimed at the end of the Summer, but as you can see - I’ve only got so much time. Still from the ponderous time in transit, to my work day and my 2 hours of personal writing in the evenings I feel like I’m making the most of it. And at the end of this contract; there’s a 2 month trip to China, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand on my schedule and it’s nice to have something to look forward to.

Tick Tick Tick Tick Tick - Five seconds. Five seconds spent. Five seconds lost. Right now, every second counts and every day I’m waking up to beat the clock.

I’d like to attempt to write something short here about how I feel about the use of AI, given that I used it to generate most of the images for the novel I put out. I got a lot of feedback about that.

Simply put: I used AI to make those images because I am not a visual artist. In the past I have hired artists to make art for my various creative projects and I was happy to do so. However that cost me time and money. I can only pay so much and I can only expect someone to work so fast. So for me, this time around at least, I just wanted to put out the primary piece of art which was writing. If I had used AI to write the book I would have considered myself a coward and a failure. That being said, if you are not a wordsmith, or you don’t have a knowledge and grasp of grammar and spelling (it can be said I also have neither of those grasps) then I would understand if you used AI to help you with a resume, or write the content for your website, or help you make a base contract. I get it. But don’t bring me a book you “wrote” with AI, I’ll scoff that off. In the same way that actual visual artists would look at the boilerplate sludge I created for the images at the headers of my book. It’s ok to me that that stuff is boilerplate sludge, because that’s not the actual thing I’m trying to deliver. I’m using my words to create images in your mind, man.

At the end of the day, to me at least, AI is a tool. It is an advanced search engine with generative tools. I worked with the Microsoft Co-Pilot AI before it launched and it was like - well shit this makes summarizing this thing I read once easier. Or on a more creative writing level: yo give me a list of all the Sumerian Demons. But it is not a replacement human creativity. Even then, the images I created for my book each took about 45 minutes of revision, and in many cases completely starting over. It makes me think about how my Mom would be like the computer just did it it fucked it all up! Yea it can feel like that, and the algo is always alive and reading us, but fundamentally most software, especially commercial software desktop, just does what you tell it to do.

On LinkedIn I see “creatives” who are like - in less than 5 years you’ll be able to make an entire feature film with AI - and I think those people are the dumbest, least creative idiots I could imagine. I want to say “Hey fuckface, you ever seen Lawrence of Arabia?” - because despite AI even having access to that film for reference, it will never be able to deliver on the real experience of having made it in the fucking desert and the toil that went into it and how that will come through with a finished product. And if it already has then yeah we’re living in The Matrix.

The header image of this post is a real life picture, done on film. I hired photographers to take these pictures. I had the shots in mind. They did the technical work and worked with natural lighting. It was real people in the picture. It took real creatives working together to create these images. Now with that I can do a lot of stuff. Photoshop. Illustrator. Because it was shot on film it can be manipulated in ways I don’t fully understand but am aware of. All these things are tools. The camera, the film, the development, the digital scanning, the digital delivery. And I used a modern tool where I tossed this image in and gave it this instruction:

“Create an illustrated image based on this. I would like you to use pencil work and make it very sketchy and moody”

To get this:

I’m pretty happy with that. It’s one ask. no refinements. But I never ever ever ever ever ever ever, with current tech, would have been able to describe that image in a way that AI would be able to create this image from whole cloth. I still had to do the thing in real life to be able to get that. And even then, a real artist with time and care would have made something much better.

I end this by saying: learn how to use the tools, learn their limitations, but remember that so far nothing can create better than the human mind.

It was around 2010 and I was bartending and the owner of the bar said to me: “You’re good, but you need to go faster.” Which felt like an impossible ask. As far as I could tell I was already going as fast as I possibly could. I asked him how I was supposed to do that, and he just sorta shrugged and said he didn’t know how I was going to do it but that I was going need to figure it out. And I did.

In the following years of slinging drinks I learned how to shave milliseconds off many small processes, movements and maneuvers so all those slivers of time saved added up to be more substantial than you’d think. Chaining together activities in sequence of my awareness around me. Never doing only one thing at at time. There were lots of times where I’d just see a massive lineup, the party revving up and people prepared to get absolutely maniac wasted and that’s when it became about more than just going fast. It was about endurance under fire. I’ve seen lots of bartenders and servers become entirely overwhelmed in these moments, fall off the rails and never catch up while the night runs roughshod over them like a doormat. I came to recognize the signs that things were about to go buck and that gave me the opportunity to prepare for it. Prepare to dig deep and then push through the intensity, the difficulty, the sensory overload. I was never much of an athlete so I can’t say for sure but I imagine that it must feel like pulling off a spectacular play.

When I was in the zone it was a harmony of mind and body that aligned me, and through an adrenaline fueled heightening of my senses I felt superpowered. I had learned how to access something in myself that gave me the ability to crank it up a gear, and then, in a lot of ways, I couldn’t gear down. I had to keep up the intensity. There’s positive and negatives to this; it gives me the ability to endure fucking awful situations as they’re occurring but it has also put me in a mindset where I can just endure all the time. When I was much younger, at a certain point, I didn’t want to be in charge, or take lead even though it was always in my instincts do so. But after enough time abstaining from positions of leadership I started to realize that I might as well do it, because no one else was stepping up in my absence, or those that had lacked the ability to lead with foresight and without ego. I stepped up because other people were making things worse and dragging a whole bunch of other people into the results of their bad decisions.

In the seat of leadership I had to learn a whole new set of dig deep skills, and cultivate the ability to display grit and consciousness through the ongoing act of consideration. People talk about empathy like its just something personal, or moral, but I think that more than that its highly functional. Without empathy you can’t actually understand anyone, and if you can’t get inside someone’s head then how are you ever going to be able to predict their moves, or come to agreements with them?

I’ve come to realize that most people don’t really think about accessing their own go time energy. Lots of people don’t have another gear or ability to crank up the volume in their own minds. Sometimes I wonder how these people have the ability to maintain a seemingly stable normal life, like why aren’t they as hypervigilant as I am about their basic survival? And I don’t even mean like I expect people to crack their knuckles and go rock and roll mode like I’m aggrandizing, but I mean like the people that don’t look both ways before they cross the street? I find myself confounded by the amount of people who seemingly don’t have enough self awareness or intelligence to preserve their own mortality, much less have a job and a family, and yet they do. Am I just a different kind of adrenaline junkie? Am I just a psycho? Maybe. Probably just traumatized after a lot of bad luck.

I think part of it is that I’ve always projected a layer of my imagination onto reality to make it more palatable, or at least interesting. Growing up in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do I’d get lost in imagination so often that my fictional worlds and feelings often felt more real than the raw unseasoned reality that I was in. Working in bars and restaurants became part sport, part mind game, and part hustle. The underworld nature of these jobs made it easy to project all my Scorsesian thoughts directly onto the world in front of me- which in many ways was stranger than any fiction that I could conjure up. When I worked in insurance as an analyst and writer I’d frame the entirely dull and dry world as if I was an Intelligence Analyst, like Jack Ryan. In my brain I’d tell myself well I could have been an agent, but after that back injury I couldn’t be cleared for field work. This mindset enabled me to treat the dry as fuck analyst job with a bit more jeuje and spark. At my current job, working at shipyard, it feels like I’m on a military base, which gives me this super indulgent framework of imagining like I’m some sort of special operative working for some mercenary like group pulling off impossible missions.

As time has gone on I’ve learned when to turn on my mission critical red lights and dig deep, but aside from my return to bartending this summer, I haven’t really been in many positions where I’ve needed to bring it. At least not with that same type of win/lose do or die intensity. Which isn’t to say I don’t love it, I do - but it will burn you the fuck out if you make every single day about living in the red or pushing the limit. Eventually there’s nowhere left to dig deep from and you’ll need a refresher.

Still, people said to me over the course of the past month? “Oh don’t you wish you had a bit more time between jobs? To take a break?” and my response is: fuck no. This whole summer was me in go time mode, revving up to the point where I’d have enough momentum and energy to do a job as mentally intense and challenging as the one I’m in. I had to get back up to speed after being stuck at a near standstill for the past year and a half before this, and now that I’m back up to cruising speed I don’t want to lose my momentum. Who knows, maybe I haven’t found the limits of my speed just yet.

Bushwick sat in East Pub, as per usual. He had a Bruhmhill going, his glass of Pepsi cola and a pint glass of grape soda on ice with three shots of vodka in it. In front of him sat a manilla envelope, a dossier. Bushwick didn’t know how to use a computer, hell he’d barely learned how to text. As such when he needed information there were people he went to that were much more capable at scraping the flaking scalp of metadata floating around in the world, Rango.

Bushwick had met Rango because he owed thirteen thousand dollars to a underboss who’d caught him counting cards at an underground casino. Bushwick had bought the debt sheet without even thinking about it. Some pencil neck nerd wasn’t going to hold out on him. When Bushwick had caught up with Rango he was sitting in a makeshift Faraday Cage, a contained space meant to prevent EMP damage, as well as outside digital infiltration or interference.

“How did you find my IP?” Rango had asked after Bushwick had kicked in the steel mesh door.

“What the fuck is an IP?” Bushwick had responded before throwing his little league slugger into one of Rango’s multiple monitors.

It had taken a pretty long conversation for Rango to convince Bushwick that the information he could give him was more valuable than money, but credit to the fast talking hacker - he’d managed to make old stone face understand and since then Rango had been paying off his debt to Bushwick with piecemeal jobs digging up dirt on the different debt sheets he’d accrued. In fact the manilla envelope that now lay in front of Bushwick was the first time he’d actually paid Rango for anything.

“I’ll give you a deal Bushwick.” He’d said when Bushwick called him.

“You call that a fuckin’ deal?”

Bushwick had asked Rango for everything he could get on Dickie Finn and his crew of, as Bushwick had put it earlier crew of rapists and mob knob gobblers. He’d also asked Rango to identify the two Latino men in the grey suit with blue tie and blue suit with red tie. Then he’d asked for any connection between them. Bushwick had not been looking forward to reading the dossier, hence the pint glass of purple and vodka next to him. It was not his custom to deal with more than one problem at a time, but he knew that from the corrupt cops to those obviously cartel pieces of shit that he was about to be fighting a war on two fronts and he might as well get ahead of the curve. He opened the Dossier.

Dickie Finn, Stump Gihzler, Dick Denton and Theresa Agostino. All of them corrupt cops who made up what the dossier called the Golden Kids. All of them hereditary beneficiaries of law enforcement based nepotism. Dickie’s dad was a mick Sergeant. Ghizler’s old man was a beat cop most of his life, but had planted more than his fair share of evidence to be considered a made man within law enforcement. Denton’s pa had played interference and done fixer jobs for politicians. Theresa Agostino was the last remains of the Agostino crime family, who’d been brought down by a Rico charge predicated by her Uncle - Patrick Agostino - a corrupt cop himself, dropping the dime on the family. These oinkers lived a relatively charmed life running roughshod around their chosen territories of the Downtown Eastside, China Town and Olympia Village. They were all white, unless you think Italians aren’t white. They all had connections to notorious protection schemes with prostitutes and street level criminals. At least Dickie and Denton had been fingered in relation to the gang rape of a fellow officer, although given how tight the department was; getting any more information on that was about as likely as getting a fart out of a black hole. Bushwick didn’t care. He believed it and didn’t want to read any more about it. They also all had connections to covering up some of the serial killing that had gone down in the valley six years ago. Pig farm. White supremacists. Doesn’t sound that different from the cops, thought Bushwick. The dossier went on to detail the entire case, but Bushwick was familiar enough with the particulars that he glossed over that part.

Two days earlier Tom Wolfe had busted up a gun shipment over at a warehouse on Granfille Island, it had been all over the news. The warehouse was confirmed to be connected to cartel activity, and presumably 20 suspects had been apprehended and a eight of them were in critical condition. After triangulating the cell signals emitting from the warehouse the day Wolfe had blown the place up, and Rango was able to reduce the list of men who’d been there to a half dozen. He had given Bushwick a list of all of them complete with passport photos, and Bushwick had identified his 2 deadbeats right away. Grey Suit, blue tie was Enrique Fastidio - a cartel enforcer who had made his way from Juarez to Albuquerque and then onto the port City Bushwick called home. He didn’t really have much of a reputation for being anything other than a dependable gun hand. Liked his mother, race horses and… knew how to roast good corn? That was all the personal info Rango dug up on him besides his name. Blue Suit, red tie was Matan Roca a former strip club bouncer turned hitman. After he’d paralyzed a Orange County dickhead in Tijuana, he’d done 2 hits to get himself out of cartel stir and been given refuge in San Antonio before, at chance Andre Decpacito had him as a driver and invited him to the City. He was notoriously ruthless, if not all that bright. It said something to Bushwick that these two were the type of top tier operators that Decpacito had.

Bushwick knew who Decpacito was, but he’d always considered him to be a spoiled brat who simply had the money and power to make moves, even if he didn’t have the sense to know how to wield it effectively. But Bushwick didn’t give a shit. He knew there was no way Decpacito really knew who he was or would care much. It was more likely to have Fastidio and Roca come looking for him out of some sort of personal retribution for the ass kicking he’d delivered them. Still it was probably best to not leave it to chance, even if they were temporarily in the clink.

The warehouse seemed like a good place to start. The police wouldn’t have found much because, of course, they weren’t actually looking for anything.

Bushwick couldn’t believe it but he found himself wishing he could actually talk to Tom Wolfe, but the action hero had been taken out of commission after his expose on the warehouse and, rumor had it, had left the city for the Big Cedar country in the mountainous North. Bushwick turned Wolfe’s card over in his hand, before tossing it on the table. No matter. He’d figure it out for himself, just like he always had. But who knew if he’d actually be able to squeeze his 70 grand out of someone, much less to what lengths Dickie and his gang of hawgs were willing to do to put him in his place.

No sense worrying about it. Thought Bushwick as his took a slug of the hard purple and began packing up the dossier. Time to do something about it.

The End of:

Wolfmen Investigations: Thrashin’.

Tom Wolfe, Don David, Karen Kane, Bushwick and Hector Ignacia will return in multiple Wolfmen Investigations novels. Stay tuned to this space for more.

“It’s all over the TV: Tom Wolfe unleashes public panic on the seawall, cartel members detained, and one of the biggest weapons raids in recent history. Our online feed is blowing up and it looks like the people still love you but the municipality and the police are having a fucking field day with this one. They arrested some guys with some serious connections to local businesses. But I guess they shouldn’ta been riding street bikes in the park and shooting guns,” says Don, sitting next to my hospital bed in the emergency room of City General holding a tablet and watching the feeds. He shakes his head. “You went for it this time huh? Taking on the entire Cartel gun running system with a skateboard and a can of WD-40?”

I just groan. I’ve been in the hospital for the past two hours feeling the broken cheekbone on the right side of my face swollen to the size of a grapefruit, pushing my teeth into a weird uncomfortable position, while I strain to keep my mouth open, split lip and all, since I can’t breathe through my nose, which is stuffed with gauze. My practically disintegrated elbow sits on an ice pack and my leg, despite the administration of high-grade painkillers, hurts no matter what position it’s in. Through my one good eye, thanks to a broken orbital bone, I see Hector and Karen enter the emergency room, talking as they walk over to me. Karen crosses her arms and Hector puts his hands on his hips.

“Well, how’d I do?” I rasp lazily, the haze of narcotics lingering in my words.

“All in all, over 20 of Decpacito’s guys were apprehended in connection with this weapons deal. Your video evidence will ensure that none of them can make bail or appeal for extradition. This puts Despacito in a very vulnerable position, losing so many of his men like this,” says Hector.

“What’s the damage?” I ask through the faint stickiness of blood dripping down the back of my throat.

“Amazingly, you managed to keep it under a thousand dollars. If you don’t count the cost it took out on your body. They’re going to need some new volleyball nets down at the park but excluding that….”

“That’s great news,” I growl, attempting to clamber up in my seat. “Once I’m back on my feet-”

“Tom?” Karen chimes in and I grunt looking up at her with my one open eye. “You did it, you proved your point. Nobody tears into the streets like you. You can’t help but find trouble and you’re good at bringing these things in but….don’t you think it’s finally time you backed off the throttle a little bit? You just broke your leg, elbow, nose, and cheekbone….don’t you think you’d better take a rest?”

I huff and draw in a breath, shaking a little as Don, Hector, and Karen all look at each other with expressions of exasperation and doubt.

“What?! We’ve got work to do! I’ve got work to do! I’m not gonna rest until Despacito and his hombres are either pushing daisies or rotting in a jail cell. We got him on the ropes right now!”

“You just don’t know when to quit, do you?” replies Karen, half smiling but shaking her head.

“I’m fine!” I say with the biggest smile I can muster, which splits my lip open again, blood pooling on my hospital gown.

“I think it might be the painkillers,” responded Hector.

“No one tells me what to do! Nothing going to stop me from doing what I need to do, y ’hear me! This isn’t over! We have to close the case! You think this can beat me?” I bellow to the dismay of the nurses in the background.

Then I hear “Where is that son of a bitch?!” The swinging doors to the ER open and Rae Tseng comes marching into the room with a security guard trailing her and a takeout box in her hands. Don, Hector and even Karen take a step back from my hospital bed while she gets right up beside me jamming a finger in my swollen face and yelling: “How dare you walk out on me like that! Just when we were having a breakthrough of the deeper identities contained within our relationship you disregarded me! And left me to pay the bill! Here’s your niçoise salad asshole!” She opens the box and dumps the contents on my head, grape tomatoes, fingerling potatoes, green beans, quail eggs, rare tuna, peppers, not to mention the oily anchovy dressing draining down my head and face.

“You think you’re the toughest meanest guy in the world Tom Wolfe, but you’re just a…a…a…a goddamn punk!” Rae shrieks in finality and then reaches out with her hands like she wants to choke me, I see the eyebrows of my three companions raise in unison before Karen puts her hand on Rae’s shoulder and turns her towards the exit saying “Well, thanks for dropping by. We’ll be sure to let you know when he’s out of the hospital.”

Rae storms out of the room as fast as she came in, throwing off the hand of the security guard as she passes him. When she’s gone Karen and Don start sniggering, which soon becomes full-on belly laughter that proves to be so contagious that even Hector can’t help himself.

Before I can react, Dr. Lefaivre enters the room looking from my chart to me, giving me a very exasperated look, and then turning to my partners. “Karen, nice to see you. Don. Well here it is, it’s not good. He’s going to need surgery on the knee and it’s probably going to take him most of the Summer to recuperate. Two months off his feet and a slow return to walking.”

“Excuse me?” I say, stunned, as an anchovy falls off my forehead and into my lap.

“He really can’t do anything for at least the first month. Stand as little as possible. We’re putting in a plate and three screws to hold his tibia together, it was not a nice place to break your leg. After the swelling from the surgery goes down he can start rehabilitation exercises, slowly.”

“So, what now?” Asks Karen. “He doesn’t exactly have an apartment and I’m not taking care of him.”

“Oh, I’m well aware of the situation Karen. I’ve contacted his Mother,” replies Dr. Lefaivre, dryly.

“You did what?!” I exclaim, trying to sit up but the pain shooting across my body forces me back into the bed.

“You need to go somewhere and rebuild yourself, Tom,” says Dr. Lefaivre, this time to me.

“But Despacito-”

“Shut up. I’m talking now. You’re very broken right now, Tom, and you need to go take care of that. Do you understand me? You need to take care of yourself.”

It might be the drugs. It might be the concussion. It might be the fact that I’m about to be put on the shelf. But I’m hit with a moment of realization and clarity, probably due to the morphine. Despite it all. My shitty attitude. My thoughtless actions. My selfish pursuits. My bottled-up anger. These people, my friends, are still here for me. I’ve put them through a lot, maybe because I thought I was justified. I was perpetually heartbroken and looking for someone else to care for me, pump me up, and tell me that I was great, but I wasn’t willing to let any of those people actually care for me in the meaningful ways, because part of that might mean owning up to all the ways I didn’t want to take care of myself, sobriety or not. I’d taught myself that unless I put myself under the gun every day, and made everything life or death, then nothing else I could do would ever be worth it. That I would never be worth anything. So I selfishly sacrifice myself and expect that to entitle me to what?

I stop protesting and look from Don, Karen, and Hector, back to the Doctor. I swallow a choke, let out a deep sigh and took a big gulp before speaking. “I understand. I have to get better.”

I’m Tom Wolfe and I have to become a better Man of Action.

Shortly after writing my rather sanctimonious final chapter about my travels to Japan, The Path, I was rounding the corner on the end of June. I was working at the restaurant and, quite frankly, unapologetically loving it. I was treating it like playing a sport. As if I was some former professional athlete that was being asked to lace them up again, one last time, and go hit the field. Along with the muscle memory of the actions of bartending I allowed myself to slip back into a manic pace of writing that I hadn’t really indulged myself fully since my early 20’s. I went straight back to my original pattern of write, work, write. Literally all I did this Summer was write, work at the restaurant and do softball. I say do softball because I really didn’t play much this year.

It was the afternoon of Canada day and I had been visiting family at English Bay. I had to work that night be in an effort to spend more time with family had asked someone else to switch shifts so that I’d be closing the bar instead of opening the evening shift it at 4. Bought myself 2 hours. I was skateboarding back from English bay, going a reasonable pace when one of those rentable scooters ripped past me on the left and clipped my shoulder, sending me slipping out and windmilling my arms backwards and coming down hard on first my right middle finger, then my wrist and then I felt my whole arm uncomfortably lurch and I heard, if not felt, something pop as I slammed into the ground on my elbow. The teenage scooter rider just kept on going, but thankfully some other people stopped to see if I was ok. I groaned and cursed to myself jumping to my feet. I held up my arm and flexed at the elbow but then realized that my middle finger was out of joint at the middle knuckle. There was nothing else for it, I wasn’t going to flake on my shift and spend the next 6 hours in emergency. Fuck it I’d rather play hurt. I reached forward and snapped my finger back into place with a grunt, flexed out my arm a bit and then slowly went to work. I got there early enough to get a bite to eat and soak my elbow in an ice bucket before I finished one of the most physically challenging shifts of bartending I’ve ever had. I had zero grip strength in my right hand and was using the crook of my elbow to carry shit. Thankfully it was Canada day and the whole city was off parting anywhere but a restaurant. Not entirely sure how I made it through the whole night, but I skateboarded home at the end of it, took several painkillers and then went to bed. The next day I got an elbow brace at the pharmacy, gritted through the discomfort and went back to work. My finger was swollen, my wrist didn’t hurt immediately but would in the weeks that followed. My elbow throbbed day in and out, though I could feel it getting better. Then one day at work a dishwasher turned around with a pot in their hand and accidentally slammed me on the back of the elbow, which hurt like all get the fuck out in the moment, but 20 minutes later I found myself thinking that feels a lot better. It had been half dislocated since the crash. So it goes. Somehow this experience with injury once again reinvigorated me. Pain is, after all, just weakness leaving the body.

From that point on I was useless to my ball team as a player. I could barely throw 3 feet let alone from 3rd to first. Instead, because I already had the time booked off work, I went to every game as a coach, play stoke machine and eventually be our designated umpire. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t playing, I was still playing and hanging out with some of my favorite people that I only got to see seasonally. The social dynamic of long time friends getting together as a team is a very rewarding thing to be a part of.

At different points over the Summer I was asked to explain just what the hell I was doing working back in restaurants? I’d say some arrangement of: Tariffs, AI, Job Market isn’t good, I’ve had some offers but the pay wasn’t good enough - and all these things are true, but to be honest with you I just couldn’t give a fuck about anything but playing the restaurant game, showing up for my ball team and writing. I was proving to myself that I wasn’t just some has-been even if it came to just being a bartender - but I know by now that I’ve never been just a bartender. Still it gave me all the room in the world to flex all the muscles of my personality and skillset in a way that I hadn’t, aside from flourishes of bartending birthdays or weddings, for nearly a decade. Not that I intentionally tried to show off or anything, I just wanted to show that I could bring it. It was not just the nostalgia high being back in a place that I’d grown up in at so many different stages of my life, but being back in that restaurant it truly felt like I was doing something for a organization and people I loved. So many people I’d known since my age still had a 1 at the start of it. The friends I’d made there. The lessons I’d learned both in the service industry and in interpersonal relationships. The food that has informed so much of my palette. The scenery. The conversations that you only hear in Yaletown. It gave me a greater reverence and pause for how this singular monolith of a place had informed so much of my knowledge, personality, work ethic, style and ability to go undercover into a world of class that my dirty roots could only imagine. All these things together brought something out in me this Summer. The Come Get Some. The Eye of the Tiger. The Bring It On. I’d look at my silhouette in the Summer sun before I started work and waggle my fingers like an aged gunfighter about to go pop some skulls.

I knew I still had some healing and inner work to do. I was still sorting myself out and trying to figure out what the road ahead looked like. The idea of a relationship was the furthest thing from my mind, my entire focus was on releasing a new novel, as well as media analysis for this website Peliplat that I’d been connected with and I had even made some money in the process. I didn’t want to go back to some corpo job where my time, energy and efforts were wasted on abstract documentation that no one was really going to read anyway. As much as I loved working in the restaurant I did take reasonable pause to question whether or not it was a regression in ways. I had to many, myself included, escaped the service industry to something perceived higher vocation, but I know that’s a buncha bullshit now. I wasn’t too good to work in restaurants in the same way its never that I wasn’t good enough to have those corpo gigs - I just had to make a choice in the matter as to what I actually wanted to do, but I wanted to do things for the right reasons. Simply put: I couldn’t make the same amount of money I was making in the restaurant that I could working corpo mercenary jobs; but I did enjoy it and it gave me more mental time and space to think write and heal. So for the time being I was pretty ok with it, I tried not to focus on it and just live for the moment and the blank page.

Then I got hypnotized by my therapist. We’d reached an end of a certain path of our process where we both kinda agreed that I understood what was going on in my head and heart; I’d reckoned with my past, I’d acknowledged my own shortcomings and failures, I’d forgiven myself and others. I knew my patterns. It was time to figure out how I was going to handle life moving forward - what would life even look like ? They’d asked if I was open to pivoting our working relationship away from simple talk therapy, they’d heard all my stories and they knew all my scars so there was nothing left to be gained from re-examining them, and engage in more of a coaching practice. They asked if I’d be ok being hypnotized, as a means of breaking down the subconscious patterns that informed a lot of my decision making. I was onboard. They had me fill out a questionnaire about what my ideal life would look like under a few categories: Health, Wealth, Relationships. I gave her all the thoughts of what I wanted, or at least thought I wanted out of these categories. A life writing fiction for a living, a loving partner and closer connections with family and friends and the community. There was a lot more detail to all this in the actual discussion. We’d opened up the session with a little catch up on my life, and then she basically led me on a guided meditation / breathwork practice where I entered a hypnotic state and she recited to me the list of desires and details I had as a way of engraining it in my psyche, supplanting the subconscious patterns. When I came out of the session I felt lighter. I felt like I’d just come out the other side of a good acid trip. It wasn’t like it re-wrote my entire personality, but in the weeks ahead I’d find myself not making choices, or making choices, that, in the past, I wouldn’t have thought twice about. Say instead of doing something that I knew to be a tantalizingly bad idea, due to my love of chaos, I simply didn’t do that. Nothing in that session was conclusive of how my life would end up and over the following weeks it all became a lot more ambiguous in my mind - like the hypnosis had initially painted this beautiful picture of an imagined life and outcome, but the reality felt more like we’d only begun chipping away at the bigger block of marble to carve the sculpture of my life. My future felt less defined, and more like it was slowly revealing itself to me as I gave up some intense pretense of what I thought it should be. Ceasing to let my hyperdrive imagination conjure delusional beliefs founded on wanting to have the magic answer to all my problems appear in the form of a relationship, or a job, or an achievement - there are no magic answers. Only actions in the face of uncertainty. I was allowing myself more comfort in the face of uncertainty. There’s some stuff in life you can’t affect or change, and that’s where I normally panic, but I was just learning to let it all go and keep going anyway.

What I did know for sure was that the writing was the healing. That it gave me a place to think about, talk to myself about and reckon with what I was actually feeling. Even if it was just through silly stories and film analysis. As long as I was writing, everything would be ok. I can write my way out of anything. This is the first major personal piece I’ve written for general consumption in the past month or so, but behind the scenes I’ve been crafting and developing a number of other projects. Some super personal, some more fictional. At the same time I’ve really enjoyed releasing a chapter a week of this new book. Moving forward I’ll just be releasing something from my back catalogue every week. The new stuff needs more time in the oven I’m afraid. Looking back on my Japan travelogue I marvel that I was able to keep up the pace I was at over the duration of the trip, however I will admit that the whole thing could use some fuckin’ housekeeping of spelling and grammar. Not to mention there’s information in there that I totally got wrong. Oh well I’m not perfect, that comes in the edit.

At a certain point it started to feel like The Matrix had re-set on me. My life was a near 1:1 of it’s former self from nearly a decade and a half earlier, although re-booted like some sort of waking legasequel to my own life. A continuity re-set of weirdly cosmic proportions as I rediscovered pieces of myself that I’d either forgotten about or had beaten out of me. I was bartending, writing, and highly driven. I was skateboarding to work every day. Staying up late writing. Unconcerned with most everything except getting the pages done and showing up to kick ass at a job I loved. I felt good, I felt satisfied in a lot of ways. My house was a mess, I was sore and tired, trying to not spend from my savings- but honestly I was pretty happy, it was humbling to remember that for a long time no matter how broke, in any number of ways, I was - writing always made me happy. But where was I really going? I knew eventually the Summer would end and the money at the restaurant would become less functional. I didn’t want to end up like the grasshopper from the parable of the Ant and the Grasshopper, where the fiddle playing hopper has a grand Summer, but doesn’t plan for Winter so he freezes and starves. What was actually going to happen next? I realized that if I didn’t find other work that I might as well ask the restaurant for a raise and offer them a six month commitment, which is what I did - however the management who could make that decision were having their own well deserved vacations at the time.

Funny how things work, but as soon as I’d submitted this offer to the restaurant I got a notification from LinkedIn saying there was a good job I should apply for. So I checked it out and it didn’t look like the typical corpo skullduggery that I’d grown accustomed to. It was a real world job that had a major impact on people’s lives, and seemed like an exciting and urgent line of work, more fulfilling than the abstract of standard operating procedures for financial regulations. I just sorta shrugged and submitted the application. 45 minutes later and a recruiter is calling me about the job. I’m a strong candidate for the role, they say. They ask me to tweak my resume to feature the key words from the job posting and I did. They submitted me to the client and then I played the waiting game. In the past this phase of waiting to hear from a job would drive me nuts. The uncertainty of not knowing what was going to come next would give me a generalized anxiety that’d ruin my appetite and sleep. This time around I just shrugged it all off. Either I got the job or I didn’t. I was happy where I was but if some new lucrative experience was to be had I wasn’t going to shy away from that. I tried to retain that thought and vibe through the interviews I did. I felt really good about the whole thing, but wasn’t rushing to celebrate - I know how easily everything can fall apart in an instant. But then I got the job and I knew my life was about to change.

It feels like a natural conclusion to the story arc I’ve been on for the past year or so. It’s not lost on me that I had to go back to the start in many ways to rebuild who I am now. The past six months have felt like I was speed running the past 20 years of my life in a condensed period of time. In retrospect it feels like its been like the start of a sequel to a much loved video game, where your protagonist starts this new game by having all the powers and weapons accumulated in the previous adventure stripped away, and they have to start from scratch, only to not only regain their powers from before but pick up a whole bevy of new skills, abilities and tools. That’s how life feels right now, like I’ve regained all that I was and have become even more. It’s as if the whole past, at times very hard, year of my life has been to build towards where I am now, always ready for another new adventure and challenge.

I’m sure that eventually something else will happen. It usually does. If it’s not one thing it’s another. I feel ready to take it on, no matter what it is. But for now. Mission Accomplished.

I’m not much for poetry, but my good friend Sampson sent me this poem and it really sums up how I’m feeling these days. Read by the great Michael Caine, I think you might like it.

I burst out of the warehouse into the now concussive afternoon sunlight and haul ass across a patch of gravel to the seawall, which at this point in the seaside circumference is a good 20 feet above the level of the water. Freshly minted asphalt slopes forward in a steep decline as the gravel path eventually joins back up to be nearly the same level as the sparkling inlet fenced off with a white metal railing. From the last step in the gravel, I throw my skate in front of me and step into a crouch position as the board begins to pick up speed down the buttery fresh blacktop. The path is busy so I clap my hands together, weaving through aimless pedestrians and clueless tourists. Coming down the hill I get a good look at my line. The blacktop is going to give way to a jagged stone walkway that isn’t fit for geriatrics to walk on, this initial rough ground is immediately followed by a tight cobblestone pattern that isn’t that hard to ride on but will sap my speed like a ball and chain. I’m going too fast to slow down now and with all the people there’s nowhere obvious to bail out without taking out a stroller or an old lady. There’s only one option, dig in and pit it bruh. I drop a few more acceleration kicks into my already gravity-fueled descent and lean back on the board, putting more weight into the tail as I make a connection with the uneven stone carpet, lowering down in a squat, gripping the deck to my feet. The board jangles and kicks but I keep my knees loose and my feet soft, adjusting to the initial janky feedback before the big soft wheels find their connection with the street and the dangerous bucking subsides into a consistent rumble up through my feet and into my legs. I let go and stand up. Luckily the stone walkway gives way to the cobblestone after only 15 meters, but just as I’m traversing from grey stone to brick the black and green Go-Fast Boat appears at my eight o’clock position, water flying from behind it as a cartel member levels an M16 at me. It’s too far to hear the shots over the sound of the engine, but I can see the muzzle flares followed by the whiz of bullets that bury themselves in the dirt and trees behind me. I gotta get out of here, if these guys miss me they could end up killing a fifth grader and I don’t need that on me. Up ahead there’s a giant set of stairs that cuts up through the park and towards an inter-park side road that’s used for maintenance and parks board vehicles. As another round of bullets spackle the area around me I step off the board, kicking it up into my hand, and turn the hard right to go up the stairs.

The stairs go about 50 meters up and they are steep so it’s a good thing that I gave up the coffin nails. My heart hammering in my chest and blood surging through my veins I keep breathing and remind myself that this is what I do. I laugh in the face of danger and defy the impossible out of spite for all the evil in the world. I will always push harder, and farther and go to places that most other people don’t even want to think about. In the pocket of danger, excitement and mystery is where I feel the most at home and because of that, I’ve lost people in my life. They leave or maybe I pushed them away because I don’t want anyone close to me. I know, and they always find out, what a thrasher I am and the amount of devastation that I leave in my wake. I know that I have hurt people. Whether they bled or cried, they all hurt because of me. Living this life does come at a cost or two and I’ve come to realize that solitude is part of that. I know who I am. I’m the guy who runs towards fire and explosions. I’m the one who knows the score on the street and who’s who and how they got there. I walk the three-way line between the bureaucrats, the cops, and the criminals. These days people sure think I’m an asshole like I’m doing it all to say fuck you. But I’m not. It’s not out of ego either; I’ve already had all the fame and public stroking any person should ever have to be subjected to. It’s not because I’m suicidal, I know it looks like it but I’m not. I swear. It’s because I know that I can take it. It’s because I have this deeper feeling inside about not just who I am, but who I’m going to be, and for me to become that guy I can’t stop living in the red. If I can’t take it? The punishment, the scars, the solitude, the edge? What good am I?

At the top of the stairs I’m sweating good and take a brief pause to rest forward on my knees when I turn my head to see a pair of motorcycles approaching me on the access road in the distance. I mutter expletives to myself and push up off my knees taking a few running steps before jumping back onto my skate and pushing Eastbound while I hear the high-powered growling of the motorcycles intensify behind me. It’s a straight flat stretch here, which would have been fine if I didn’t have a tail but those bikes are only seconds away from catching up to me. I put down long hard strokes on the concrete thrusting with full momentum through my core, throwing my shoulder into the movement. I’m going fast but they’re still going to catch up. I see the sign for the bike path ahead that cuts back down to the seawall at an incredible angle. The bikes are coming up on my six and I shoulder check just in time to duck as one of the bikes rips past, its rider swinging a chain at my head. The second biker tries the same with his a piece of rebar but misses me as I swerve to the right. With both bikes ahead of me, Kawasaki Superbikes from the looks of it, I turn sharply to the left and aim the board down a straight-shot paved pathway littered with sticks and small stones. I put in a few more of those high-quality pushes before I squat low and try and make myself as aerodynamic as possible. The canopy of trees above us cuts off large swatches of sun, the shifting light patterns making the road hard to see. I’m picking up speed and have made it almost 40 meters from the mouth of the path access when I once more hear the motorcycles. I have to carve around sticks large enough to dump me and aim for a line through matted sheets of leaves to avoid slipping out. I’m going fast as hell, trying to keep my body balanced to avoid the speed wobbles that could lead to the last bail I might ever take. They can’t gang up on me here, the path is too narrow for motorcycles to ride two abreast, and considering the density of the small park forest on either side of the path, laying down a bike would almost certainly result in a crippling wreck into the large deciduous trees. Same case if they try to ram me; I might take a tumble, and they might even run me over, but I’d most certainly bring them down in the process. I try to keep moving just in case one of them has the nuts to take one hand off their bars and try and shoot me. Up ahead is a hairpin right turn that I need to make if I don’t want to break myself against the concrete barrier abutting the railing of a big ten-set of stairs that is perpendicular to the turn. The stairs and the railing are hidden in the shadows of the trees, their precipice looking like just another layer of descent on this steep path. I know better, I’ve been here. I swerve to the right and prepare to curve to the left so I can have enough space to drop down and drift this turn. But I gotta wait until the last second. I’m going too fast to pull off the drift, shoulda put the gloves on, so I unzip my jacket, reaching down to the corners of it and standing up straight snapping it taught, the ripstop vinyl of the jacket’s interior catching the air like a sail and my speed drops dramatically. The lead bike takes this as his sign to speed up and come at me but I let go of the corners of the jacket and drop into the drift, the wheels sliding sideways as I slide around the turn, my jacket now audibly rippling in the wind. The biker hits the barrier at the the edge of the ten set of stairs, the bike flipping akimbo over the concrete before it disappears from my sight and the rider goes hurtling into space to face a 4 meter drop while flying through the air at 60km per hour. I continue the drift and then right myself to hear an eruption of clatter and a Wilhelm scream. I stand and see a battered path of fragmented carbon fiber where the bike has tumbled and skidded across the concrete. The rider, having bounced and battered off the ground, was now folded in half on the railing of the seawall. The second biker had managed to avoid the same fate as his partner but had to come to a skidding stop at the edge of the stair set. I can hear him revving the bike into a half donut as he brings the bike around for more chase.

There’s still a short stretch of decline in the riding path that I can use to my advantage and I put three more heavy pushes into the ground while I aim my sight up the last part of this set piece; looking ahead to the eight large beach volleyball net setups on the immediate left between the seawall and the water. I’d need to go around these sporting folks to fully connect back to the seawall path but I’m not going to be able to maintain this speed on the flat, especially with sand all over the concrete, that I need to stay out ahead of the motorcycle. Instead, I’m going straight into that beach volleyball setup. I hear a pair of gunshots behind me, the volleyball players look up from their match and then after another pair of shots pop out they begin to scatter. I push harder and faster, the path now parallel with the beach volleyball courts, the bike gaining on me by the second as its driver struggles to steady his pistol sights on my back. When he’s within ten feet of me I drop low and veer left as hard as I can into the sand that spills out of the court areas, diving forward onto my belly. The biker takes the bait and reacts without thinking turning his bike into the deep loose sand which swallows the front wheel of his bike and with only one hand on the bars the whole ride drops forward, twisting into the ground and launching the biker over my head while the bike goes end over end, flipping just overtop of me and hurtling through a couple of volleyball nets before coming to a stop with a large thud. I grunt and grin to myself, punching into the sand and climbing to my feet while the panicked volleyball players run around screaming. I cough, sand spilling off me as I trot over to my skateboard and pick it up. I shake it off before I look back to the path and run into my step, mounting the skateboard and pushing myself towards the main seawall: the last remaining distance to Terminal Station and hopefully a waiting Don David.

As I make it onto the main seawall I can hear the growling sputter of the go-fast boat idling up the inlet looking for any sign of me. The flaming motorcycle wreckage from the spill down the stairs and the panic of people in the park are plain. Oh yea, this is what I’m talkin’ about. I continue pushing, doing my best to keep my distance from the water on the seawall. When I hear the police sirens in the background I breathe a little easier knowing that soon, with my video evidence, the investigation of the warehouse, and the apprehension of my pursuing perpetrators the boys in blue won’t have any choice but to go after Decpacito’s boys for the hardware. I’ve proved my point, even though it did require a bit of a bailout from my partner and the public servants. I told them though, I can get more done in a day than anyone else in this town with or without a driver’s license. You don’t make insane choices and run dangerous gambits when there’s nothing to lose, you do it when you have to put it all on the line and make it or break it.

I’m coming up on the Casino and outdoor stage and Pavilion which means it’s not that much farther to Terminal Station. Then I hear the motorcycles and look over my shoulder to see five of them emerge from what would have been the top of the access road, and they’re picking up speed while they aim themselves right towards me. I snort and bend at the left knee, ripping another push into the street while I take off towards the Casino, the rumble of the go-fast boat creeping up to my left. I grin and laugh to myself because these idiots don’t realize that I’ve already beaten them. They’re not going to catch me, they’re not going to stop me. He who dares wins.

“Play Hot Chocolate’s: Everyone’s a Winner” I say to my headset and the song starts.

I narrow my eyes as I rattle onto the narrow tiled masonry of the open area by the Casino stage and pavilion. The police sirens get louder and I grin to myself looking behind at the motorcycles which are approaching me in vain. Everyone’s a winner baby that’s no lie…you never fail to Satisfyyyyy. As I turn around to look back in front of me I see an incredibly large man on a bicycle cutting the corner of the stage and I have a half second to react, which just isn’t enough. I instinctively leap off my skateboard and into the air but all I succeed in doing is lining my face directly up with his forehead which hits my face like a sledgehammer. I feel my nose break and some part of my face lurch uncomfortably out of position. The handlebars of the bike act like a fulcrum on my right hip, tipping me forward as I flip, head over heels, coming down hard on my left leg at a bad angle which, despite the pads, immediately dislocates at the knee while my tibia audibly fractures and I go down hard on my right elbow; pulverizing the point into a paste of bone as my whole body comes to settle in one janky pile of injuries.

“Woof,” I grunt to myself as I spit blood and try to struggle to my feet while more blood pours out of my face. I fail to get up and fall again, my leg twisted at a very uncomfortable angle, bone grinding on bone. A crowd of people form on me instantly and I reach into my mouth, amazed to find that I’ve still got all my teeth. I spit blood and groan trying to pull myself up but the pain and immobility of my leg make it impossible. My palms bleed into the grit of sand and dirt that have immediately begun to cake around the shredded flesh. I heave a couple of heavy breaths, in and out, while pedestrians gawk at me and I hear the idling putter of the go-fast boat and the growl of the motorcycles in the near distance. I’m seething inwardly, taking pained long breaths waiting to hear if the bikes are going to come any closer to finish me off but they never come, the world is spinning around me and the intense sunlight pours down on my face while someone props my head up with something and asks me if I want any water. My mouth tastes strongly of blood and I nod as what looks like a construction worker pulls me up to a sitting position so I can wash out the metallic stain on my tongue even if my shirt is drenched in my plasma. You never fail to satisffffy!

“Don’t worry man. The ambulance is on the way.” Calls a voice from the crowd.

“Are you ok?”

“Holy shit that was fucking nuts!”

“Oh my god, look at his leg, I’m gonna puke!”

The voices become a trill of conjecture and horror as everything starts to spin for me. The song still piping into my ears. I’m helped onto my back as the pain, blood loss and heat overwhelm me, and everything gets really bright before I heave out one big breath, close my eyes, and hear the voice of Hector Ignacia standing over me. “Not quite the same when it’s all your stuff that gets broken, is it Tom?”

I crack one eye and look up at his silhouette before groaning and allowing myself to pass out.

I draw my phone out of my pocket to see Tom Wolfe’s face splashed across the call display. He’s propositioning me for a video call right now but I just snort and reject the offer, placing the phone back into my blazer pocket.

“Who was that Don?” asks Michaela, raising a thick curved eyebrow along with her mojito which sparkles in the sun.

“Nobody important right now,” I respond, while I think about the nuts on that prick to hit me up during prime patio time on a Saturday afternoon, ‘specially after I told his ass not to.

My lady and I are on the back patio of Fraser’s, a modern independent interpretation of Trader Vic’s, located in the heart of downtown. Tom Wolfe is a pain in the ass but over the years he—a practical native of the City—had taught me—a more recent interloper—all the best places to eat and drink. Fraser’s rooftop patio gives off the appearance of a California backyard while presenting some of the best casual cocktails and BBQ in town. This is perfect because as much as Michaela is a damn queen and beauty, fit for all types of fineries in this world, she doesn’t cop with decadence. She’s wearing a white halter top and an amazing pair of denim shorts, her hair short and tightly cropped around the ears which are adorned with a pair of silver doves. She’s fire, and as much as I love my job, I couldn’t be happier to be sittin’ here sippin’ a Mai-Tai with her instead of takin’ stock of bodies and chasing down cartel connections. We been seeing each other almost a year. It’s not that serious yet, but it’s not not serious either. We’re two adult people who like being together, but she’s a youth support worker around The Blocks and I’m a special investigator- we got busy lives. Still, it’s nice to be with someone that understands the gravity out there on the streets. The weight of the world seems a lot less heavy when you’re not afraid of sharing it with someone. I mean I see Tom’s position on it all, s’hard to find someone who will accept you for who you are and the potential risks that go along with people like us. I already lost someone I cared about for no good reason, so I know what it means to burden loss and the shit of life all alone, but as far as I can tell life is a whole lot better when you’re trying to figure out how to bring people in, rather than keep them out. Besides, that sadness was a long time ago and I’ve put that story to rest.

“Then what’s that lost look in your eye?”

“Damn girl, s’nothin. I’m just finally managing to get some relaxation in.” I raise the Mai-Tai to my lips.

“Good, you deserve it.”

“Thanks, Mickey baby. So, how was the rest of your week?”

“More and more trouble down at the center. Those boys just keep getting rowdier.”

“Well, they like what? 10, 13 year olds?”

“Yeah, but them older boys are hanging around, gettin’ them all riled up.”

“What like 18-year-olds?”

“Oh Don, there’s all sorts down there. It’s not like the parents of most of those kids have the inclination to care about what their kids get up to and even the ones that do, they have to spend so much time workin’ that they don’t have the time to do as much as they want. Still, s’bad as a few scuffles, fist fights, and vandalism can be ‘round the community center, it’s better than the kids just being out roaming the streets.”

The phone in my pocket starts to vibrate again and I don’t even pull it out to look at it this time.

“Is that what it was this week? Some kids gettin’ into fights?”

“Well mostly just one of them. Anthony Lewis. He’s had a rough one. No pops, of course, his momma was deep into the junk, she got clean but you know it’s just not the same. Lucky his auntie is around but she’s strugglin’ to get by after her, well her last man didn’t know how to be decent, let’s keep it at that.”

“Damn. You think that we’ll ever see the end of that story?”

“I ask the Lord that sometimes. I try and tell myself every day that it doesn’t have to be like that Don. Like I gotta try and believe what I do makes a difference.”

“Yeah I know girl, that’s why you’re so damn beautiful to me.”

“You sure it doesn’t have to do with these shorts?”

I just smile at her and then my phone starts to vibrate in my pocket again. I pause this time, stifle an annoyed exhale, and then excuse myself from the table and towards the restrooms. I draw the phone out of my pocket to see Tom’s caller ID face, eating a hoagie, on the screen before I key the answer button, ducking out a side door and onto another area of the rooftop patio with a sigh.

The phone displays a POV shot from the body harness attached to Tom. I’m looking at a darkened room of wood crates and the sounds of voices yelling in Spanish in the background.

“What the hell are you doing?” I ask.

“Oh, you finally answered your goddamn phone,” he huffs.

“I thought I said to leave me alone until Monday? What do you want?”

“I’m gonna need an extraction, where you at?”

“I’m downtown, where are you?”

“Granfille Island. Look Don, I got Decpacito’s crew cold, peddling high-powered weapons over here. The video is all on the cloud by now, but I seem to be caught in a bit of a tight space-”

“You don’t say. Look, like I said I’m downtown.”

“Are you driving?”

“Yeah, the Mark 7, look it’s Sunday man. Besides I am having some time with Mickey, do you need actually need an assist on this one?” As I finish saying the words the POV spins and I can tell that Tom has his back against the wall of crates that had been just in front of him. A half second later the barrel of a gun pokes around the corner and I see Tom’s left-hand flash forward knocking the gun away from him while he swings something hard and flat into the jaw of the man who flies backwards into the wall of boxes behind him.

“What did you hit that guy with?”

“My skateboard.”

“Your skateboard?”

“They took my license, I had to improvise.”

He appears to spin off the wall and move down the corridor of crates from which the man with the gun had come. When he’s halfway down the length of open space another man rounds the corner at the end. Tom is a good 18 feet out from him and the man levels his machine gun right at the center of Tom’s chest. The view lurches forward and then drops a few feet as Tom rockets toward the man who lets off a burst of gunfire that goes well over Tom’s head. Sliding on the skateboard at his hip I see one of Tom’s legs go flashing forward into the gunman’s kneecap, I grimace as the joint audibly dislocates through the phone

“Two more down,” Tom says, seemingly to himself.

“Pick up that guy's gun.”

“I don’t like using guns man, you know that.”

“Motherfucker you pick up that gun or I ‘ain't wastin’ the gas it’ll take to come get your corpse.”

“That’s rather pessimistic, Don,” he grunts, and I see him pick up the gun, checking the chamber and the mag. The gun is a H&K MP5 military-grade submachine gun.

“Where’d Decpacito’s crew get the hardware?” I ask but don’t get an answer. I see Tom sling the gun over his shoulder before he dispenses two of the marble-sized impact-triggered smoke bombs, which he loves so much even at twenty-five bucks a pop, from his belt. The view bobs forward and around another couple of snaking corners before revealing an open warehouse space with three men standing behind tables loaded down with more hardware. Tom’s arm hurls the two spheres which go up with a pop and then instantly fill the space with charcoal black smoke. Tom dives forward onto his stomach, rolling through the smoke and underneath one of the tables coming out directly beside one of the men who he hammers in the knee with a balled, gloved fist. Tom flips over onto his back, the skateboard still rolling, as the two other men turn in astonishment, hearing the screams of their boy. Behind these alerted men is a stack of red fuel barrels. I see Tom scrambling for something as his hands raise the MP5 unleashing a two 3-round bursts of bullets that is immediately rebutted with a shockwave of metal shrapnel and fire from the explosive barrels that Tom dives hands on his head to avoid. He rights himself, getting to his feet and grabbing up the skateboard before his point of view jerks to the left and I see the other man, nearly lost in the peripherals of the camera, leveling a handgun and popping shots at Tom. Tom takes two steps and then drops onto his skateboard, the audible cracks of the gun are out of sight. Two more hard pushes and he’s aimed straight at a hook and cable hanging off a large crane arm that looks like it reaches out of the warehouse and down to the seaside. I see Tom’s hands come up at the cable and then the room spins nearly 180 degrees as Tom lowers his body to the ground. Using the cable to drift the skateboard around the crane, Tom comes back around on the last gunman who he explodes upwards and into, tackling him in the ribs and then slamming him down hard on the concrete. The room is on fire and filled with smoke and more voices and gunfire are coming from the background. Tom throws the gun on the ground, kicks his skateboard into his hand, and then focuses on a side door that leads out of the warehouse and runs towards it.

“Don, I’m gonna take the seawall. Meet me at the Terminal, if I don’t make it there I’m probably dead. Do me a favor and call the cops.”

“Y’think that they’re gonna show for you?” I laugh at him, already shaking my head.

“If that’s the case then you better be there to pick me up. Talk to you later,” he says before the view on my screen disappears and the line goes dead. I’m grinning. I catch myself grinning and then I’m pissed and have a little angry laugh.

I stand completely still for a second before I put my phone back in my pocket, clench my fists, and grit my teeth. Then I take a deep breath in through my nose and out through my mouth, turning around to see Michaela standing there, her arms crossed.

“What’s going on Don?”

“Uh, Mickey baby-”

“Oh really? It gonna be like that?”

“Look, I’m not any happier about it than you-”

“That grin on your face says different. That son of a bitch. What he do now?”

“Baby it’s a long story. But, damn-”

“Look Don, I ‘ain't mad…I’m not mad…I’m furious that that motherfucker can’t give you one damn day to clear your head and spend some time with me without making another fool mess so big that you gotta go bail him out”

“I know, I pro-”

She raises her hand and interrupts me as if she’d never stopped, “But this is what you do, and if he needs your help right now, as much as I hate his ass for it, you gotta go. I’m never gonna hold you back from doin’ what you gotta do, just don’t ask me to always be happy about it. We can talk about this later, but it ain’t gonna be the same if that jackass is dead, so you best hurry, ‘cause it sounded like a lot of gunshots in that ‘lil video you were watchin’ on your phone.”

“If he isn’t dead, I’ll kill him for you baby.”

“Yeah yeah, now get gone.”

“Outtasite,” I say, and plant one on her before throwing on my shades and heading for the exit, car keys in hand and heading towards the custom fabricated 1957 Chevy Bel Air, drawing out my phone and saying “Call Hector Ignacia.”

The skateboard deck rattles as the wheels roll over the indented white and blue checkered seawall tiles that line the perimeter of the Sail Town Marina. My windbreaker, sleeves rolled up, rattles in the wind as I slide up on the two men in suits. The one wearing the grey suit has a blue tie and the one in the blue suit has a red tie. Grey suit’s head is square with a brow like a bulldog and the clean-shaven jowls to match, maybe 225 lbs, six foot. Blue suit is younger and slimmer and taller with a bit more flash in his angular facial features which are accented with a goatee, except that it looked like someone had hit him in the face with a fuckin’ toaster some time recently. The seawall is crowded so I’m not worried about these guys spotting me; they’re not on their guard and wouldn’t recognize me in my current getup anyway. The one in grey lights a cigarette before they turn off the seawall to the private moorage and walk down the metallic grated gangplank leading to the docks, a gate locking behind them. I pop open a side pouch on my belt and draw out a small set of telescoping binoculars. I have to skate a little farther down the seawall to get a good look at their boat, a daunting forty-foot grey and green Mercedes-AMG go-fast boat. I hear the engines start up from where I am; back behind the railing and other boats. Before long it’s churning the waters, pulling out and around into the belly of the main inlet. They can’t open that boat up here, too many kayakers, paddle boarders, and dragon boat teams, but it’s fast enough to outrun military-grade outboards. A short distance behind the super-boat I catch sight of a Seabus which will shortly come to a stop just ahead of the private marina.

I loop the binocular lanyard around my neck, allowing it to magnetize to the backpack strap on the right before I throw the skateboard down in front of me. I get my ass down to the public dock as fast as I can, boarding with a small pack of tourists. I spin my handful of change to ricochet off the edge of the meter before pushing my way to the front of the Seabus where I can get another good look at the super-boat in the distance ahead of me. The grey-green shark has been forced to nearly a standstill and there’s even more water traffic ahead. I pull my phone out of my pocket.

-Stumbled onto a lead concerning what I think are the guns connected to the Granfille shootings. Get at me!-

I thumb into the group chat and hit send. The read receipts on the chat interface tell me that neither Don nor Karen looked at my earlier message. Whatever, I got this.

The super boat starts to amble towards Granfille Island. I put the binoculars away and sharpen up the focus. I take my skateboard helmet from it’s dangling position on my bag and trade it in for the gloves and slide discs. I attach the discs to the gloves by their velcro backing and stuff them into my front jacket pocket. My suspect’s boat turns in before the Seabus, hanging hard to port and coming up to a private side dock that sits roughly twenty feet below the main ground of the Island, beneath a trio of industrial silos decorated with seasonal graffiti from touring artists. There is a stained old aluminum fishing boat meeting my guys. The Seabus is taking its sweet ass time getting to its dock and now I’m stuck behind the pack of tourists and commuters. When the boat comes to a full stop the doors part and the people start to drain through. I use my skateboard to push ahead, stepping out the door onto solid land, and hitting the ground riding.

When the crowd gets too thick I kick the skateboard up into my outstretched hand, toss it onto the gyroscopic hook on my bag, and keep moving. People mill about the oceanside in small units, eating their overpriced, artisanally prepared, lunches procured from inside the giant marketplace to my right. I avoid the pull of the market building plaza which has several city-licensed performers—a banjo/harmonica buddy and a street magician with one of those wiry headsets—drawing in the type of people who come down here and convince themselves they’re getting something more than just benign North American tourist culture and an average sandwich. I cut through the middle of the boardwalk area before turning left and back down towards the water until I hit a guardrail separating people from a fifteen-foot drop into the water. From my position, I can make out the private dock through a tangle of vines that cling to the edges of the Wetside Stage, a bar and revue that has a giant circular glass window looking out into the inlet from behind the stage. I raise the binoculars and take a good look to see the men unloading large metallic cases from the fishing boat and carrying them up to a pallet attached to a cable line, going up and into a warehouse. . There’s a set of switchback stairs encased by chain link fence and scaffolding hugging the building that leads up and out of my sight. I go around a few structures before cutting back into the side streets composed of an array of colonial nautical and indigenous-themed businesses. The scaffolding rises upwards parallel to the large warehouse where a crane arm reaching out over the water draws up the pallet loaded with the metallic crates as well as the men. They stop off the pallet and enter the building, cast in the shadow of the bridge above us.

I cut through some orange security barrier, climb through and hoof it up the scaffolding and peer through a moss-riddled window to see that there’s a catwalk rimming the interior of this side of the building. I hope off the scaffolding and climg to a narrow roof ledge, making my way around to a long short window that looks like it used to open but is now corroded with a few layers of moss and dirt crusting the seam. I pop the hinged crowbar off my belt then unfold the edge tool and scrape the corrosion and growth away from the seam of the window before pulling out my micro can of industrial WD-40. I spray a liberal dose and give the penetrating oils and solvents a second to do their job before I use the hard hook edge of the tool to crack the rusted seal and slowly pry the window open. The window swings out overtop of me and I gently roll myself over the three-foot-high barrier and into the building, fixing the crowbar back to my belt. Large fans are churning in the warehouse and the whirr of the crane reverberates through the room that revealing itself to my echolocation senses through the metallic echoes that sing through the catwalk. I won’t be heard as long as I keep my footsteps light and my profile low. I stay crouched and peer out over the edge of the catwalk to observe that I’m about twelve feet above a 130 square-foot floor space with a swastika-shaped labyrinth of wooden crates and a large open area where sunlight beams through two sliding bay doors revealing the crane arm bolted to the concrete floor. The crane has raised the pallet into the building and I can see men beginning to unload the metallic crates. I shuffle down the catwalk and draw the binoculars trying to get a better look at the valuable cargo. I can make the two men in suits but the rest of them are obscured by the glare of sunlight pouring onto the dust floating through the darkened warehouse. The building is mostly filled with crates, fuel barrels, and an odd assortment of heavy equipment. The men lay out the cases on a table and pop the top on them to withdraw a Sig Sauer handgun, an M-16, and an H&K MP5; the same guns that Bushwick caught a line on this morning.

I take a pause. I get my phone out, attach it to my body rig, activate the video record function, put my earpiece in, and whisper Video Call Don David. Hearing the dialing prompt in my ear, I realize I’m going to have to get closer to these guns if I want to get a good picture, and I’m going to need one if I want the Police to start doing anything about this hardware. The call to Don goes to voicemail and I key the hang-up button on the earpiece. I’m deciding how I should go about things when fate pushes the issue and I hear a voice yell at me from 10 feet to my right.

“Hey!” It echoes out across the whir of the fans and I turn towards the sound and throwing the binoculars in the same motion. It’s a good thing I did because a half second later there’s an eruption of gunfire as the alerted sentry, five feet away from me, tips backward, the binoculars having struck him in the face. In two upwards strides I explode onto the man, reefing the rifle barrel away from my body with my right hand and coming up and around with my left, striking him in the throat with the open webbing between my thumb and index finger. He chokes and reaches for his throat as I yank the gun off him and throw it down the catwalk. There’s a call of gunfire from across the warehouse and bullets whiz by me to bury themselves in the concrete and ricochet off the fatigued metals around me. I grab the rail and leap over to the ground below, a solid 10 foot drop, rolling onto my kneepads in a somersault to take the sting out of the fall but my skateboard clatters out of its holster in the process. I snag the deck by the trucks and hurry to the corner cover on the edge of the wooden crate maze. I can hear the men’s voices call out to each other, giving away their positions.

“¿A dónde carajo se fue?!” says a voice from the far side of the crates.
Where the fuck did he go?!

“Humberto! ¿Estas bien?”
“Humberto! Are you ok?!” another voice answers. The sound is coming through the crates fast, the man is moving.

I grab the phone, put down the backpack, and then affix it to its mount on my jacket. I switch on the tracker and recording device in the backpack before picking up my skateboard.

“Creo que fue el hombre lobo!”
“I think it was the Wolfman!” says another voice, more apprehensive, moving through the crates.

“A quien le importa? Solo mátalo.”
“Who gives a shit? Just kill him!” someone shouts over by the bay doors and the crane.

“Video call Don David,” I say in a calm voice, and the dial begins again.

A gun barrel pokes out from the edge of the path through the crates and I shoot the butt of my left hand forward knocking the barrel away from me. The man stumbles forward and I put him down with a right hook to the bottom of the jaw. He falls hard and then I hear another voice, this one from the catwalk above me.

“¡Hijo de puta!”
Son of a bitch!

I don’t even look up, diving on my stomach onto my skateboard and past the aisle ahead of me, covered by fire from the catwalk, as bullets punch into the wooden crates sending splintering fragments spinning around me. I can hear the phone going to Don’s voicemail again and I grunt in frustration. I get to my feet just in time to see a more apprehensive man step around the corner raising his MP5 at me before frantically clutching the trigger sending uncontrolled three-round bursts of bullets in my direction. I dive sideways around the edge of the crates as the wash of lead rips up the concrete floor sending shrapnel into the air while another bank of boxes explodes overtop of me. I land hard on my stomach. If this guy was smart he’d run around the corner and finish me off where I am, but he isn’t very smart. I grunt to my feet and see my skateboard sitting at the edge of my corner cover. I grab the wall and watch as the ceiling lights paint the man’s shadow forward at the precipice of my corner cover. When he’s just at the edge of the corner I stomp on the skateboard sending it flying into the air, a spray of machine gun fire following it as I step around the corner and grab the guy by in a reverse headlock with my left and then jump forward dragging his head and torso to the ground smashing his face into the concrete. RKO baby. I grunt, getting sick of picking my ass up off the ground. I pick up the skateboard, which has a noticeable couple holes in the middle, and dust myself off and look down the narrow corridor of wooden crates, beyond which there are still however many armed criminals packing a city’s ransom worth of hollow points with my name on them.

“¡Oye! Hola ¿Lo atrapaste? Carlos! ¡Esteban !?”
Hey! Did you get him? Carlos! Esteban?

Behind me, either Carlos or Esteban sounds like he’s choking on either his tongue or all the blood in his mouth. There’s no going backward, there’s no going up. There’s only going forward to get me out of this one. Bring it on. I open the snap pocket on the jacket and take out the gloves, slipping them over my fingers as a voice calls out again, this time in English.

“That you Wolfman? Shit, you weren’t gonna live long for what you did to Deltiglio and Reyes but we didn’t think we’d get a shot at you this soon. Are you gonna come out quietly? Or do we have to come in there and hunt you down like a the dog you are?”

“Video call Don David,” I say one more time.

- Talked to a CI about the shootings on South Granfille this morning. It was Decpocito’s crew who is now equipped with and moving military grade weaponry. From the sounds of things, they have a lead on a consistent flow of these guns.-

I send the message to the secure group chat that Karen, Don, and I use; knowing that neither of them will respond to me right now. I slap my phone back into its mount on my backpack strap and get moving. I walk through the filthy streets of the Downtown East Side cutting back and over towards the new Pan Central residential towers that make a gateway to the seawall. Once I’m there I’m back on my skate.

The seawall is a long paved path with pedestrian and cycle lanes that wraps the waterline of the city in its entirety, from University Way at the South West tip of the city, through several beaches, and then into the inlet that divide Downtown from the South side of town. Three bridges, the Bearing, Granfille, and Caprica cross the inlet at various stages while the seawall follows the water past a few commercial fishing docks and yacht moorings before reaching the man-made peninsula, Granfille Island. The Island is home to an artisan food market, several post-secondary campuses, theaters, galleries, and a couple of dry docks with a few scattered warehouses. The seawall cuts right through the Island, as well as it being a stop on the sea-bus service going up and down the inlet. Past the Island, the seawall continues on the doorsteps of residential buildings that are a mix of multi-million dollar condos and weathered apartment complexes. The path goes all the way to Terminal Station, the traffic and transit hub on the edge of Downtown, but not before it passes a massive casino complex with a large outdoor stage and pavilion built almost on the edge of the water. Once past Terminal Station the seawall curves back into downtown, running past the brand new Pan Central Towers, the bougie new money neighborhood of Sail Town, the fanciful but tepid old money West End, and then the beach-heavy flashy homage to Southern California, Empire Bay. After this the wall goes around the massive Stencil Park on the North edge of Downtown before curling around to another high-end boat mooring facility then into the oceanfront shopping district, a seaplane airport, then the convention centers before stopping as the downtown developments degrade into inner-city industry. The water continues leading to the warehouses, ports, and railway stations that make up the northern edge of the Downtown East Side.

I cut past the Pan Central towers and hang a right up the seawall. A signs say to go slow but I kick myself into a higher gear. The wheels of my skate thrum across the hot concrete, the sun beaming down on me and shimmering like a kaleidoscope off the rippling ocean surface. I carve around geriatric cyclists and then explode forward hammering my right foot into the street, keeping my left hip sturdy, and hurling the skateboard ahead with a twist of my body, a dual lever pushing maneuver. Kids on scooters and bikes stare at me as I burn ahead of them and scores of young women on the walking path pretend like they’re not looking at me. I cut a big grin and continued my ride. The seawall is a pleasant strip of concrete to ride a skateboard, it’s smooth and even and in many places freshly re-paved with blacktop. Too bad the rest of the city’s design isn’t so hospitable for skaters. Virtually all pedestrian and non-motorized vehicle routes that had been designed since the early aughts contained built-in skateboard deterrents. Cobblestone paths may look nice but they’re virtually impossible to maintain a smooth ride on, even if you are cruising on a big ‘ol longboard with 100mm wheels. Many paths across the city are either cobblestone or pre-fabbed checker patterns. Certain places have divots on the sidewalk that are no problem for a bicycle but if you hit them on a skateboard your wheel is gonna jam up and you’re going endo to eat shit on the concrete and maybe get run over in the process. It has been a consistent frustration of mine how all the best routes through the city seem to be littered with aggravating impediments and barriers designed specifically to make skateboarders dismount or risk bailing on the most rudimentary trips. Because of this, the cyclists think they own it all. Cyclists can sneak up on you; the sleek yuppies decked in spandex and aerodynamic helmets with race bikes; the hipsters on fixed gears with beards, caps, and messenger bags; the daily commuter with bad spatial awareness. Most of them choose to forgo a bell or horn, instead yelling at you when they’re already up on your ass. The assumed superiority of a cyclist is usually on display at stoplights where I consistently receive a standard set of elevator eyes before the light changes and I use the skateboard’s superior acceleration to burst forward while they sway to start.

I ride the seawall until I reach a particularly chunky piece of path and hop off my ride. I walk over to a three-tiered set of concrete stoops a few feet off the riding path and put my deck down so I can sit on top of it.

Crystalline ocean water reflects the unencumbered rays of the sun which heat up the fresh summertime air lush with ocean humidity. I take a deep breath, enjoying the smell of salty air combined with hot concrete. Ever since quitting smoking, I have been able to smell and taste things again in a way that I hadn’t been able to since I was nearly eighteen. Despite the fist-clenching moments of cravings that come in waves while I am at my most perturbed, I don’t miss smoking. There are a lot of things I’ve changed about my life over the past few years, the drinking and the smoking sure, but I’ve begun to shift my paradigms about life itself beyond the addictions of my past. When I was going down a dead-end path it seemed perfectly reasonable to point myself at problems like a half-cut cruise missile, aiming for victory or self-destruction. I guess at that point I thought if I managed to take down some scum bags while I destroyed myself, all the better. But when my dead-end path turned out to be the road to El Dorado, it took me by surprise. As Wolfmen Investigations got bigger and our role as protectors of the City increased, my own personal life took a melancholy turn when a relationship ended. She was my long time love and she had to go for a job. It was the job and I already had my job. It was just what needed to happen. Six months after that I got sober. With all other intoxicants deleted from my curriculum and no one left to share my energy with, my taste for adrenaline grew rapidly, as did my tolerance for it. For me, now, there is very little in life that’s as satisfying as my pursuit of action, and because of that general intensity, my social life doesn’t extend much farther than the boundaries of our case files. Sure, Don’s busting my balls about going on a date and he’s right about their being a wealth of options, and most of them are good women, but that’s what’s keeping me from being able to think about letting one of them in on my life. They’re good women and I’m not sure I deserve any part of them. I’m a decent man of action but besides my time with Kit, I have been a pretty lousy boyfriend. I have a hard time believing any of those good women would want a piece of a guy like me for longer than an episode or two. Those who were brave enough to say they wanted to stick it out with me never really foresaw the inevitable headache that I would cause them, not to mention the way villains can’t help but go after significant others. If any of those ladies stuck around for any length of time they inevitably wanted me to start changing; get rid of the hammock, get an apartment, buy some clothes that don’t have tactical pockets, take the police scanner out of my ear at dinner, stop bleeding on the carpet. I’ve already done a lot of changing and now that I’ve gotten what I wanted I have to focus on it. I’ve spent enough time in my life stuck, holding myself back, and denying who I am and what I’m capable of. Change. Change how? I couldn’t, I guess wouldn’t, change who I was and what I had become when it mattered, so she had to go, and I got harder. Then I met someone I wanted to soften, and maybe even change for, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t accept me for who I am. I can't change just because someone expects me to, with no mutual stakes? Despite the charms of women and their interest in me, lately, I have been walking away before anything can happen. I’ve done my fair share of writing cheques with my mouth that my life can’t cash. Then, with a clearer head, I’ve uncomfortably reneged on those emotional payments before the cheques could bounce, before anyone had time to get too attached or wind up with sore feelings. At least that’s what I told myself. Sometimes we have to tell ourselves stuff just to get by. Sometimes other people don’t feel the same way or don’t want to let go of what they thought they had. Sometimes I lose sight of what’s important until it’s too late.

I pop my helmet off, the breeze cooling my head. Then, the hairs on my neck prick up a half second before I hear the words “Well, hello,” painted in the velvety, feline voice of Rae Tseng, from behind me.

“Buh,” is the noise I make.

“I have lunch reservations but my date is stuck on set, join me?”

**********

Rae Tseng and I had met eight months ago at a gallery show where Don and I were doing surveillance on a modern artist moonlighting as a counterfeiter. Rae was an account manager at the high-end advertising firm, Umbrella. She knew who I was, commenting that our website could use a facelift and my attire a queer eye makeover. We’d exchanged witty repartee— quips about the black eye I was sporting as well as her lack of compunction about going straight for the jugular—followed by our phone numbers. Later that week on Friday afternoon, Don and Karen long since gone, she tracked me down at the office and told me she wanted to discuss a case but instead, we’d just ended up making out in the storage room upstairs; the same storage room which, unbeknownst to her, I slept in. I enjoyed her elegant beauty, forward-aggressive nature, deep strategic intelligence, and her savage wit from which no one was excused. As things got hot enough for me to pull a yoga mat off the storage shelves I told her I wasn’t really in any position to start a relationship and she had laughed in my face while she undid my pants. It was fun for a while. It was nice to have someone in pursuit of me for a change. We’d meet and argue ferociously about art, philosophy, and society until the passion started to reach an untenable tension and we’d continue the debate in bed. Her bed. Things started to change when she realized I didn’t have an apartment and already had a long-standing marriage to my work. She began to disregard the image of me that she’d initially come to believe, bad boy PI, and began to look at me as a plaything, a paper doll, and then a project to work on. She started showing up at the office unannounced, making a nuisance of herself to Karen and Don while conducting her business from our command center. I had tried to end it but Rae was especially cunning and turned any bad situation into a semantic debate about the mental processes of men and women, dovetailing into how our perception of the relationship was tainted with past biases. I attempted to re-iterate that she wasn’t, in fact, my girlfriend but she solved that by declaring that we were now, in fact, official. Then she started avoiding me, only to show up unannounced or when her other plans fell through. It started to interfere with my ability to focus on our cases and my own mental needs to stay sober. After enough clever debates, our discourse just degraded into the type of pointless arguing that had me thinking about the bottle and a fresh deck of darts. After she started buying me clothes that I didn’t want to wear and dragged me, as arm candy, to a couple of pointless social engagements that buried me in small talk, I got lost in a dark train of thought; our sex had no intimacy. It was clerical, part of a business transaction for fulfillment of manly duties. I hated it. I ended things. She didn’t want to let it go and she was angry.

“How dare you break up with me! You should be grateful that I have chosen you to spend my energy on!”

“All due respect but I told you plenty that I wasn’t looking for someone to spend their energy on me. I told you how busy I am and-”

“Dt!” she exclaimed, raising her hand and extending her index finger like a straight-blade razor. “But think of what you could become. I am offering to be your partner.”

“I already have a partner. Wait, what? Like, you want to get married?”

“….I didn’t think you were suitable for that before but now I see that you could be worth it.”

“Look, that’s nice and all but I don’t want that. You understand I’m not going to change how I live my life anytime soon right?”

“But you should want to!” she stamped her foot.

“Rae, I already told you what my boundaries were here and you don’t seem to give a shit. You show up unannounced all the time. You expect me to change my plans to accommodate your whims. You don’t respect my work space or my friends and instead, you try and change me to make me more palatable for your world. Sorry, but this has gotta come to an end.”

“Fuck you! You’re just a loser who sleeps in a hammock! How can you deny me!?” she said, then kept talking as if she hadn’t. “I can accommodate your needs and boundaries but you must give me my possession of you.”

My eyes widened then narrowed at that statement. “Look, I’m sorry this is over.”

Except it wasn’t. Over the next couple of weeks, she continued to appear out of nowhere and accost me with a need to debate the nature of our breakup. She’d phone me, standing outside the office and I tried to remain calm while I relayed to her how inappropriate it was to just show up, especially now that we weren’t seeing each other anymore.

I started to hear less and less of her, calls fading to text messages, text messages fading to the occasional late-night attempt at luring me into sex, but it no longer had any appeal. Whatever lust had possessed me evaporated during her forced quest to rehabilitate my life, and image, without my consent. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about her, I just wasn’t going to give her what she wanted. Maybe she didn’t understand that even if she had been able to re-brand me, I wouldn’t have been that person she was attracted to; I’d have become tamed and neutered. The wolf in me didn’t like the idea of that at all.

We hadn't been in contact for months, until now. After the random encounter on the seawall, we ended up on the patio of Cornucopia, a slick bistro in Sail Town with an A+ view of the marina, sizing each other up. Rae is drinking cotes du Provence rosé, rattling her green nails off the side of the glass while I take a sip of my probably eight-dollar glass of mineral water. The hostess had asked me to check my helmet, skateboard, and bag. The patio is full of people with refined tastes and decadent features all enjoying themselves as much as the models in a cigarette ad. An array of eighties synth pop music spills over us and out into the sunny street decorated with plastic people, high-end sports cars, and little dogs. I’d ordered a Niçoise salad, and Rae the sea bream, before we’d settled into a terse conversation about her current partner; the missing date. He was apparently a commercial director, currently busy working on something on a boat over in the North Bay. He had bought her a motorcycle for her birthday. I can’t believe I’m doing this. Everything in my gut tells me I don’t want to be here, but I’ve already ordered lunch.

“What about you? Are you seeing anyone?” she asks.

“Nah. Just been working,” I say.

“I see the news,” she rolled her eyes.

“Well, then you know what I’ve been up to. Do you want me to talk about work?”

“Spare me.”

“Then what do you want outta of me here, Rae?” I shake my head and lean back in my chair.

“Closure, that is all I ever wanted.” The demure tone of her voice conceals the verbal daggers I know she’s packing.

“We broke up, or I broke us up and you didn’t like the way it ended. I don’t know what other closure there needed to be…I’m sorry I don’t know what else-”

“I wanted to be with you, but you could not see that what we had could have been worth fighting for. The way you spoke to me? What we shared?”

“Look, I’m sorry. When we met, it was the heat of the moment, and…it was good and we had our time, but it couldn’t work. ”

“You don’t know that. I was willing to fight for what we could have had.”

“That’s all it was by the end, fighting. Look, I don’t want to re-hash our relationship anymore. We’ve been through this enough, are you happy now?”

“Yes.”

“Well then can’t that just be enough?“

She stops to think. She’s arming herself. Here we go again.

“There were nights and days where all I could do was cry about you, Tom. I did not understand how you could be so cold, to end things so suddenly. You were someone that I could have loved, but you don’t want to be loved.” Rae speaks with an ache in her voice before her tone scars and hardens. “You want to be admired and longed for but you cannot commit the emotions to sacrifice yourself to love. You are afraid to let love for another consume you and become part of you because if you lose that then what would you be? Will you ever let anything define you but your dangerous art of detection and painful actions? Can you not just let someone have a piece of your life?”

It's a bold and heavy statement that feels like a crossbow bolt through my chest, pinning me down while I try and process the accuracy of her sub-textually loaded shot. I get a strong craving for a cigarette and my gaze shifts from her piercing eyes and pursed lips to her glass of refreshing-looking rosé.

“Rae, look, I just knew that you’d never be happy with me as I am.”

“Relationships require change.”

“Look, I have changed,” I stare her in the eye. “You don’t know who I was.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” she says as her phone starts to go off. She picks it up speaking in Cantonese so I have no clue what she’s saying.

I unclench my jaw and let out a deep sigh, taking another swig of soda water, turning so I look out onto the marina when I can’t help but hear a conversation drifting around a patio pillar.

“Esos hijos de puta quieren venir a nosotros, mejor que vengan correctos.”
Those sons of bitches come at us, they best come correct.

“Para eso está el hardware. ¿recibiste la llamada?”
That’s what the hardware is for. Did you get the call?

I pick up my knife from the set cutlery on the table and use the polished surface to look over my shoulder. I can only make out a grey suit and a tight haircut. Across from me, Rae continues to chatter away on the phone.

“Sí, necesitamos ir a conocer a Alveda en la Isla. Vamos a por la cuenta.”
Yeah, we need to go meet Alveda on the Island. Let’s get the bill.

“Tom.” I snap back to Rae who’s put the phone down. “If you don’t have someone who pressures you to grow you’re stunting your own growth. You broke up with me because I am both the symbolic and tangible expression of growth. I am over your basic boy feelings. Any move someone could make towards you would be an infringement on your so-called boundaries. You just don’t want anyone inside your guard.”

“There are reasons for that.” My words are colder than the ice cubes in my drink.

“Then you could have shared that with me, instead, you chose to break us up and change your words from those of kindness to those of a bitter man who resented my affection. Do you want to keep people out of your life so you can run yourself into the ground? You can’t handle the idea that someone might care about you enough to want to see you at peace.”

The men behind me have started to pay their bills and I’m becoming more irritated by the second.

“I don’t know that I’m ever gonna be at peace, Rae, and I don’t know that you ever really did either. Maybe I had a shot at that once but I let it go, I gotta live with that. I’m not worth your affection.”

“Oh, now you open up to me? Months ago I would have gained such understanding at the thought of you sharing such information about yourself, now your offering is a cold empty cloak on a wet day.”

Her phone rings again and she picks it up, raising a finger in the air at me before taking a sip of her wine. The men from the table; one in a grey suit and the other a blue suit, are out on the street now, crossing towards the marina.

I gaze across the table at Rae for another moment, then out to the seawall, then back to her. I get up and motion like I’m going to the washroom and she nods in permission. I walk back into the restaurant, go to the hostess, request my stuff, and leave.

I’ve lost my appetite anyway.

There’s nothing quite like the smell of humid garbage; human refuse and urban decay lined up down the smoking hot barrel of an inner city alley. It’s the type of sour rot that reminds you what it’s like to be alive. I’ve gotten off my skateboard, wary of puddles of pungent alley liquid clinging to the wheels and underbelly of my ride. I’m in the Downtown East Side, somewhere behind a bank of hotels run by the local variety of slum lords with ties to organized crime. People go into these hotels to buy drugs, do drugs, fuck or get fucked, maybe even die. The people down here live a vagrant existence. They are the binners, the people selling stolen goods on the sidewalks, the prostitutes and their pimps, the toothless and sun-cracked faces, the soiled clothes, and the hands you shy away from touching. They cohabitate with the bookies and loan sharks, the hired muscle, and the corrupt cops. Some work at the strip clubs and various fronts for motorcycle gangs. The inhabitants of this street are wet cardboard and unshaven pockmarked faces. They’re the mentally afflicted, tragically addicted, and endlessly exploited. With every change in the municipal guard there’s a renewed promise to end the systemic injustice and move towards reconciliation, and every time those promises are forgotten for corporate gain. Still, the people that live down here are people. They’re damaged, but that’s because they are on the front lines of the tail end of late stage capitalism and flailing colonialism. Most people only glean insight into the gangrenous infection of systemic failure through the political spin of their news feeds or the lenses of their privileged upbringing. Most of the inhabitants down here are a lot sharper about the world than you’d give them credit for and every single one of them knows what the harsh face of reality looks like. Any one of is 3 tragedies away from their reality. They know. That’s why I’m down here, to find out what the people who live on the fringe know about what’s going on in this city today.

Back before Wolfmen Investigations, Don and I had foiled the brazen murder schemes of a madman who’d been introducing tainted drugs into the streets in an attempt to eradicate the population of undesirables so he could develop the real estate and entertainment districts of the area. We’d stopped him, but it hadn’t taken long for the rest of the established drug kingpins to cut deals with the heartless developers. The difference was now that the previously corrupt City had been overturned by our efforts, making room for a new administration that had yet to prove itself as fallible as every other political organization across time. The Police had to at least pretend to give a shit when bodies started turning up. Partially due to the fact that the cadavers weren’t just addicts anymore, all the regular junk was getting scorched. Cutting fentanyl into coke and the regular heroin had caused a real problem, killing off honest-to-God taxpayers and recreational drug buyers at a level that made gun violence in Chicago look like a fucking hangnail. I don’t make a mission statement out of chasing down drug dealers. Taking them off the street doesn’t solve the problem, it just leaves troubling power vacuums to be filled by the international Cartels of criminals who’d begun to take advantage of The City’s high-end real estate and easily avoided criminal dragnet. But in the past year, with the body count still climbing and the new municipality displaying a weak wristed systemic ineffectuality towards violent crime and overdoses, I made a point to hold the line. Our local gang structure was slowly being overturned by the Cartels who made mincemeat out of fat lazy North American criminals and if the criminals weren’t going to fight for the turf someone had to.

The local Police were in the process of being bought off, threatened, or coerced into letting much of it slide, while the federal agencies were too busy thinking of punishing those asylum seekers at the borders to realize that we’d already been infested with a worse type of invader; the criminally wealthy. Wealth, and the political and corporate extension thereof, has always dictated the interests of law enforcement, but what had begun to overrun our institutions was something entirely new for North America. This seizure of our society didn’t follow the typical rules of kickbacks and simple money laundering, it had become a game of possession. The more business legitimacy a criminal institution attains the greater its ability to influence the very laws and policies which establish the boundaries of where so-called civilized folks are willing to go. Just like a game of Monopoly. Sure this is the way it’s always been, but it hasn’t spanned continents with such ease and connectivity as this before.

I make it my business to know who the movers and shakers are. Guys like Andre Despacito, a prince of the Sinaloa Cartel, or Illya Nosov, who has blood relations to Russian Oligarchs, are some of the new breed. Two examples of millennials that are educated in business and social sciences in North America and trained in violence and power by their bloodlines. These crews of feral youth tussled it out consistently with the NATO gang based in the multi-racial suburbs of The City, and The Sons, a white supremacist movement and crime syndicate. Years ago, the Institutional Motorcycle Gang (IMG) had swept into town and taken control of the ports after the previous municipal administration had gutted the Coast Guard and Port Authority funding. These organizations all did business together, but the immoral nature of criminality remained consistent. Amidst the unpredictable rashes of assassination, arson, revenge, nut-flexing, and the ongoing struggle for turf it was hard to keep a cool head.

Wolfmen Investigations might as well be a gang of its own, we held territory and tried to move the line back when it was possible. We couldn’t wage war with the Cartels or even the local gangs; I’m ballsy but that’d be suicide. However, we still took cases, and whenever one of them stepped over the line we let them know that we’d caught their scent. A year and a half ago, one of Illya Nosov’s men had gone over that edge and decided to shoot up a pool hall for no good reason, so Don and I tracked him down. He’d wanted to tussle in the public garden where we found him so before we handed him over to the cops after we made sure he wasn’t going to be able to pull a trigger for the rest of his life. Equally as often, we stuck our necks out for normal people. Getting squeezed by your crooked landlord? Maybe there’s something he doesn’t want his wife to know. Boyfriend’s been smackin’ you around but you’re worried because he’s well connected? Maybe he’s too well-connected. Big kid up the street steal your lunch money? How big is the kid? Wolfmen Investigations has become a social deterrent that’s more effective than the police because we know the streets and we know the people. They trust us.

I dip out of that stank-ass alley and into the Daily Press corner store. Behind the particle board counter are a pair of young Pakistani brothers who cover for their parents on the weekends. They’re wearing Newcastle Premier League jerseys and jeans, watching soccer on a large flat screen adjacent to the cigarette banks behind them. The door is open and there are a couple of fans set up but they don’t do much more than funnel those rich odors off the street and into the store. In this neighborhood, corner stores are sparse with lots of reflective surfaces so that the clerks, usually two of them, can cover the whole store. They are the twenty-four-hour joints that still lock the doors at night, sell single cigarettes, hot dogs and forties. I make my way to a fridge and pull a can of soda water out of its row, returning to the countertop.

“Yo, Fahad, Saad! You guys sell vape juice?” I ask the one closest to me, Fahad, who lazily turns his gaze away from the TV to me.

“Sorry?” Responds Fahad.

“Refillable vape juice?” I ask again, holding up my vape, and he nods in return, pointing to a small bank behind him.

“You got like, ‘cigarette flavor’?” I lean my skateboard against the counter.

“We have several tobacco flavors, which are you currently using?”

“Ehn, it was ‘American Lite Tobacco’ but I think I need something a little more…rich smelling.”

“Turkish blend?”

“What does it smell like?”

“The darkest richest tobacco of the Orient, you know, kinda.”

“Sure, let’s do that.”

“And the soda?”

“That’ll do it. Say, you guys seen anything unusual going on this weekend?”

Saad turns away from the TV to give me a look like I’m stupid.

“Thirteen twenty-five,” says Fahad, now at the cash register “Unusual? In the Downtown Eastside? You will need to be more specific Tom.” He looks me in the eye with an unimpressed expression while I hand him a twenty.

“Fuck! Fuck you!” yells Saad at the TV and Fahad snaps his head back around to the screen.

“Motherfucker!” yells Fahad before returning his attention to the till to pass me my change.

“What, you don’t know the score on your corner? Who’s runnin', who’s holdin’, who’s gonna get hit?

“Mr. Wolfe, I’m in pre-law and I work for my parents on the weekends. I don’t have time to be keeping track of corner games. I would rather forget it all.”

“Right, shit, sorry I asked,” I say, raising my hand.

“But you know who you might want to talk to,” Saad says slowly without turning away from the TV.

“Who’s that?”

“You know Bushwick?”

“Yeah,” I respond.

“He came in here at nine in the morning and was in a particularly bad mood.”

“Bushwick was angry, that’s supposed to be news?”

“Not like usual.”

“Oh?”

“He was missing his hat, his bat, and was bleeding.”

“You sure that wasn’t someone else’s blood?” I snort out a laugh.

“No, he had a rather large gash on his cheek.”

“He didn’t get into it huh?”

“I didn’t want to ask,” Saad shrugged and I knew what he meant. You don’t mess with Bushwick. “You know where to find him don’t you?” he gestured outside.

“Yeah, he’ll be over at East Pub until one,” I responded, picking up my skateboard and waving with it as I made for the door.

Outside I refill my vape and take a few hauls, the nicotine-infused gas now tasting like smokey black licorice. I open the can of soda, take a slug, and begin to walk toward East Pub a few blocks away.

Raoul Bushwick is a loan shark and bookie who spends his mornings at East Pub, a predictable shit hole on the border between the Downtown East Side and Chinatown. Bushwick is one of the meanest sons of bitches in the City but as far as I’d ever been able to tell he ran his dirty game clean. He didn’t take stupid bets off guys that weren’t good for it, but he did let people get in over their heads with the vig on ongoing tabs for the ponies and college ball. He hadn’t lost a March Madness pool in all the time I’d known him. He bought outstanding debt off gangsters and other lowlives who were too lazy to collect. He smoked Brumhill 2,000, one of the biggest cigarettes in the world, like they were going to be illegal soon. He didn’t drink much except for coffee and Pepsi cola and although I’d known the guy for almost a decade I’d never actually seen him eat anything. Bushwick isn’t known to have friends, he was a man who seemed to only take satisfaction in his work. He didn’t so much enjoy sports as he did understand them. Legend was he’d been reading the sports pages and keeping track of every minor league since he was fifteen, using his innate sports knowledge and hereditary understanding of book-making to become independently wealthy before he was thirty-five. Of course, there had been gangsters who wanted to put him both in their pocket and a pine box, but there was some eternal spectral energy about the urban pirate Bushwick that time and time again had allowed him to parlay, pilfer, or punch his way through whatever obstacle was stupid enough to get in his way. He didn’t carry a gun, instead sticking to a little league-sized black Louisville Slugger, but that didn’t mean that Bushwick didn’t have any firearms. He was, in fact, an avid collector of both guns, classic cars, and guitars, the only things besides the occasional high-quality lay that he chose to spend his money on. I didn’t know where he lived, it was rumored he never really went home anyway. I couldn’t say we’d ever worked together but over the years I’d garnered his polite acknowledgement which was as good as it got. Bushwick didn’t respect anyone except his mother. Bushwick was a passive chess master who kept track of every piece on the board but rarely moved any pieces.

I stroll into East Pub, Dance Hall Days by Wang Chung is playing on the jukebox, and Bushwick is sitting at a booth on the right side of the room reading a newspaper, wearing his standard red tracksuit but missing his usual blood-red Kangol hat revealing his high fade. The pub is mostly empty; sunshine splintering through the filthy and fractured windows, a few old ladies drinking eight-ounce glasses of beer, an old fart in a wheelchair watching the keno numbers go up and a tired sagging barmaid filling up her condiment caddy with repulsive maraschino cherries with god knows god knows how many fingernails in them. I walk across the room and stand over the table, my skateboard cradled under my arm.

“Mr. Wolfe. Take a seat,” he says without looking up from his newspaper, turning to the third sports page.

“Heard you had a rough morning, Bushwick,” I say, placing my skateboard sideways on the ground and sitting.

“I heard you lost your license,” he responds, still not taking his eyes off the paper.

I glare and shake my head. He’s got a Brumhill going and right next to him is a short glass of ice and cola with a skinny red bar straw sticking out of it.

“Huh, well I guess word travels fast in this city huh?” I reply, half laughing.

He looks up at me from behind the paper to reveal the large rough gash on his cheek and a pair of hardened eyes accented with a variety of scars beneath them.

“Can I help you?” he asks, “cuz I’m fuckin’ busy.” His voice is seasoned with a lack of patience. If he were sitting at a desk he would have put his feet on it.

“I want to know about the trouble you got into this morning. Thought maybe I could help you out.” I shrug and eye up the extra-large cigarette trailing a delicious plume of Virginia tobacco into the air.

“Oh, that so? How you know I got into trouble this morning?” he says. Sitting up he takes the cigarette from his mouth, ashes in the tray built into the table, and raises an eyebrow.

“Same bird that told you about my license,” I shrug, “What do you give a shit, Bushwick? Besides you get that raspberry on your cheek from a pit bull or a prostitute?”

He looks at me with those big dark eyes, his gaze narrowing around them like he’s sighting in a rifle. “I don’t need your help Wolfe. I’ll sort these guys myself.”

“Fine. Why don’t you tell me the story anyway?”

I’ve always had this way. People just tell me things. All I have to do is sit still, look them in the eye, and ask.

He takes a long pause and then a sip from his cola. “I was staking out a score sheet this morning. Waited for him to get home then I went in the back door and caught him with his pants down. Son of a bitch owes seventy grand from over two years of bad losses, and I bought the sheet for ten grand. Soda’s boys said they didn’t think he’d ever be able to pay off the debt.”

“Jesus Bushwick, you shoulda known. Soda’s so fuckin’ cheap he ran a penny scheme when they went obsolete and made a cool half-mill,” I say and Bushwick rolls his eyes. “Well, I’m assuming you found out whether or not this deadbeat was good for it.”

“Yeah, that cracker didn’t have any liquid. Instead, he thought he was gonna pay me off with some steel.”

“Guns?”

“Yeah, some high-end shit. A case of mint Sig Sauer handguns, couple M-16s, H&K Sub-machine-guns.”

“Mint?”

“Off the factory floor.”

“M-16’s? Fuck me. Son of a bitch just had that shit sitting around his apartment?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, where did he get it from?”

“The guys that came in the front door behind me. They wanted a piece of my man and I told them they’d have to get in line. I didn’t care about their guns, said they could have them back but homeboy was mine until his candy ass paid up.”

“How’d they take that?”

“They decided to shoot the place up and I almost caught one in the head,” he says, gesturing to the cut across his face.

“Jesus H, that’s a close call,” I say, grimacing at the thought of a bullet grazing my face.

“Yeah I ended up jumping off the balcony into the courtyard pool otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to go buy a new hat, y’heard? They iced my deadbeat and then took off with the guns. I didn’t go back to the room, place was too hot to chill and wait.”

“Anything to go on?” I ask.

“Oh they were some of Decpacito’s boys, that’s for sure. To walk in there and shoot the hell out of the place? They had the same brand of firepower that my deadbeat was hanging on to.”

“So, military-grade shit.”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?”

“Is this the place in South Granfille that’s been all over the news this morning?”

“You got it.”

“No one put you at the scene?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” his face winces as he says it. There’s something he’s not telling me.

“Think Decpacito’s boys gonna be looking for you?”

“Save me the trouble of finding them first.”

I nod in approval. “So what, you think Despacito is moving guns now?”

“Could be, those were some mint pieces that my deadbeat had. Fresh off the line. Guns make a difference to you Wolfe?”

“Just trying to see what the next move is gonna be, Bushwick. You got your game, I got mine.”

He takes a fat drag on his smoke and moves his head like he’s mulling it over. “ Well like I said, I got my guys. I’m gonna get my seventy grand.”

I nod again and he changes his body language, sitting up and leaning back looking expectantly as if he’s waiting to see if I’ve got anything else to say.

“Well, fair enough. You afraid at all?” I ask him.

He scowls at me. “Fuck no.”

“You care who sees you talking to me?”

“It’s a free country. Besides, in a place like this,” he waves around at the run-down surroundings, “who’s gonna give a shit? Sure, I’ve known you a long time, don’t think I don’t know who you were before, but like anyone else would give a fuck now.”

I look him in those dark eyes. If someone else who claimed they knew ‘bout my past brought it up I wouldn’t let it slide. Bushwick though? He actually knew. “You know what? You got real brass, Bushwick. What you gonna do when you find these guys?”

“They pay me my money, there’ll be no problem, ” he says, chaining another tremendous cigarette and mashing out the initial butt in the ashtray.

I laugh to myself, take another reminiscent sniff of secondhand smoke, and stand up.

“What if they don’t want to pay you?”

“There’s gonna be a problem for them.”

I nod in approval. “Thanks for the tip Bushwick, you ever need any help gimme a call.” I toss my card onto the table, he snorts a jet of smoke and I walk towards the door.

For the many ass-kickings I’ve delivered, I have taken plenty. Fists, boots, pipes, the butt end of guns, broken bones, concussions, gunshot wounds, there was even that bad experience with my toes and that ball peen hammer. I’ve healed up. I got back in shape. It’s never gonna be my first time taking a beating. Sometimes you take the hits and you play through injury. What’s that saying? Pain is just weakness leaving the body? Maybe it's stupidity too. These days, any extra protection or advantage I can get is for the better, and that means a complete line of custom equipment. Leather jacket with built-in heating, private band communications systems, carbon fiber reinforced forearms, and a Kevlar tri-weave liner. Titanium-reinforced biker boots. Urban climbing equipment. Oxyacetylene torches and surveillance kits. Scuba gear. Shark repellent. Smoke bombs. Tactical helmets. Full body armor. And usually, all that stuff is great, but today it’s summer and it’s hot.

The wheels of the skateboard purr across the hot smooth concrete as I come up on Cork Drive, a heavy industrial vein that cuts across the Eastern part of the City connecting the North and South Ports. Eighteen-wheelers and city traffic fill the busy street as I come up on a light. I steady my left leg while I reach down with my right, tapping at the street with the ball of my foot, bringing the board to a stop at the crossing light. I smack the button a few times and then start stretching out my legs which are adorned in black knee pads. It’s been a while since I’ve done any skateboarding and who the hell knows what I’m gonna find, so I’ve thrown on a matte black brain bucket as well. I'm not getting any younger. I’m wearing a fatigued green hard-body backpack that hugs my body like a turtle shell. In the bag is a red and white striped racing windbreaker made of ripstop vinyl designed to deploy like a wingsuit in the armpits, acting as a sail or air break depending on the situation. There’s also a pair of deerskin downhill gloves with optional slide discs—hard plastic cylinders used to assist in drifting the skateboard around turns when lowering the center of gravity while riding. Then there's the pouches for my vape and a small bottle of water. The backpack also features a handy hook like the talons of a bird that turns on a gyroscopic axis, so I can drop my skateboard into it, leaving it hanging next to me, swinging in tandem with my steps. The shoulder straps on the bag have mounts for both a front-facing flashlight and my phone. There’s a built-in digital microphone and storage system that can record up to 25 meters away at 360 degrees. The same anchors for lights, camera, and action are set into almost every piece of torso gear that we use. To appease the powers that be, Don and I had agreed that in many cases the use of a body camera could save everyone a lot of work when it came to ratifying our claims of self-defense in situations where there was a necessity to act first and ask questions later. We don’t always wear them but in any situation where we thought that fisticuffs or an exchange of bullets would make gathering evidence difficult, we employed the modern documentation methods. The light finally turns and I give the board a little nudge before I jump on, propelling myself forward with the right leg while the left anchors on the green grip tape adorned deck. I’m rolling down Abernathy Street, a main route for non-motorized city traffic.

I grew up in a small town made of mostly dirt roads and wasn’t afforded any opportunity to learn how to skateboard until later in life. All I knew about it was through old Bones Brigade VHS tapes someone’s older brother had kicking around. Once I got to the city it was one of the first things I knocked off my to-do list. I knew I was never going to be a professional skater, but that had never been my goal. I wanted the ability to traverse the urban landscape at an incredible pace, with barriers and changes in environment only momentarily impeding my progress if I couldn’t climb over them. Sure, I could ollie a curb and had the fundamental grasp of a few old-school skateboard maneuvers, but what I liked more than any of that was ripping through the city—all my senses attenuated to the nakedness of my situation. It’s as close to flying as I’ve felt outside of jumping out of airplanes, which I hate doing. To blast through traffic was to feel the presence of everything around me in every direction, through every style of sensory input. Maybe it was a remembrance of this feeling that had drawn me to my gear at the back of that storage room, maybe it was just boredom and spite.

I pass into the Stacetoma neighborhood, made up of cottage-style housing and fatigued apartment buildings of late seventies bohemia. The neighborhood rests on the line between the slums of Downtown East Side and the industrial sector connected to the train lines that divide the East and West sides of the City. Up ahead of me is a S-curve meant to slow cyclists down, although those cocky bastards tend to speed up for the fast weave. As if to prove that point, two guys in full neon spandex pass me at the last second cutting me off before the S. Cyclists man, like serious cyclists, the most arrogant of all traffic. I know I’m exposed, but they ride like they’re just waiting to cash in on a lawsuit. I see a thick black rubber hose hanging across the road, a census counter so’s the City can know just how many folks are using this Abernathy route. I snap back on the tail of the skateboard with my right foot and then drag the raised nose forward with my left, ollying overtop of the hose, which would have got caught up on my trucks sending me for a face-plant. Once I started skateboarding I began to see the city differently. I was forced to read the street in front of me, any stray pebble or deep crack in the sidewalk was my potential undoing. Floating inches above the street with nothing holding me back, I learned how modern cities are constructed to make life hard for skateboarders. Cobblestone streets and patterned concrete might look beautiful and they’re easy enough for a bike to ride over but they’re hell to pay when vibrating you to pieces on a skateboard. The harder the wheels you’ve got the worse off you are.

I hoof it up a small hill, making it over the crest to a slow listing decline that pulls me through the edge of Chinatown and then to a fork in the road that leaves me to choose if I want to go into the inner City or ride the seawall around to either the North or South bays. I shoulder check for traffic and then begin a nice slow carving motion, swaying back and forth across the street. Sun shining down, the smell of hot asphalt wafting from under my feet, and a grin on my face. This feels good. I take a deep breath and then give the board a few heavy kicks putting some stank on as the hill begins to steepen a bit just before the end. There’s another light coming up but it looks like it’s going to turn green for me just in time to blow through the next intersection. Then I hear it—

“Woah Woah Woah,” about twenty feet out in front of me, a Cop has jumped into the street and is waving his arms.

I’m coming in hot but shift my weight onto my back foot and then crank my feet to face forward, the wheels sliding and the board turning so I’m a full ninety degrees and am now power sliding to a stop in front of the Cop. He’s a middle-aged guy with greying hair and a pair of Oakley sunglasses on. He’s placed his hands on his hips and juts his chin out at me while I pull my sunglasses off.

“Can I help you?” I ask.

“It’s illegal to skateboard in this City.”

“What?”

“City bylaw says that skateboards are not allowed except for designated areas. You’re going to have to carry that to a skatepark, son.”

I narrow my vision at him like I’m checking his face for something, “Excuse me?”

“That thing isn’t permitted on-”

“Oh ok, yeah I guess I heard you right. I’m just going for a ride—hell right now I’m on a designated bike path.”

“Well the fact remains-”

“I’m even wearing a helmet. What do you give a shit man?”

“Hey, watch the attitude.”

“What if I am just going to work? You’re wasting my time with this? Don’t you have something better to do?” I say to him, pointing down at the Wolfmen Investigations on my tank top, shaking my head. What with the helmet, sunglasses and apparently a youthful enough vigor to call me son this dumbasses didn’t realize who the fuck I am until just now. He freezes. You don’t like me, I don’t like you, but you can’t touch me. He groans and shakes his head. This dipshit decided to give me trouble ‘cause from about 30 feet out I look like some kid riding his skate. Except I’m not just some kid, I’m me.

“You could have hit someone going that fast.” He manages

“The only person I was gonna hit was you when you jumped out in front of me all of a sudden.”

“I said watch that attitude,” he snorts, having taken a dislike to my disdain for his authority.

There’s a bank of stylish boutiques, cafes, and restaurants up the next block, and a small group of people have stopped to watch me argue with the Cop. He’s aware of it too and decides to back down while the pedestrians scowl at him.

“Whatever man, get a fuckin’ clue and find something useful to do.” I say, throwing my sunglasses back on and dropping onto my board as I catch the next light and continue on my path past the Plaza Skate Park and six sets of soccer fields into the City center.

People look at you differently when you skateboard. They expect you’re gonna make some mess or hit someone, or worse, get hit by someone. You appear as a social liability- like no matter who you are or what you’re doing, you’re somehow associated with a punk sentiment about society when it’s just a piece of wood with some wheels on it. It’s ok, I don’t mind rubbing the right people the wrong way. I am a punk. I love to thumb my nose at authority and deflate self-important gas bags. Mistaken identity? What a wonderful defense. Giving off the impression you’re one thing, as with this cop, throws off their perception and how they are gonna come at you. Let them think what they’re gonna think. I’ve learned that there is always an advantage to have someone underestimating you, no matter how rude or pride punching it feels. Let people think you’re stupid and they’ll tell you everything. Even though it’s been more than a couple of years since I set foot over a board I’m starting to remember how good it feels to be labeled a waste of space and menace to society. It helps me blend in, it helps me get even closer to the street.