My Gift to Prince George

Is one of the symptoms a loss of faith? Or faith in loss?
- Amy Hempel

So I’m leaving Prince George in a little more than a week. I can’t imagine I’ll be back as a resident (though I do intend to visit). This is my going away present to Prince George and the fantastic people I’ve met here.
But you have to promise me you’ll do what I say.
Promise?
Promise?
You sure, you promise?
Okay, that’s three times you promised. No fucking backsies.
Go to the library—the Bob Harkins branch downtown. Do it soon, do it at night. Do it on a night when the air is unsettled and bitter and the snow comes at you sideways like a wind of needles. Go when you’ve been drinking. Go when you’ve had a fight with that boy or girl you once deemed worthy of sharing your bed but about whom you now have your doubts.
Go when things couldn’t possibly get worse. Go when the world has made you sick.
Don’t go if there aren’t tears in your eyes—if there’s no tears, wait.
It’s worth it.

Are you listening? This is important.
Maybe you should take notes.

Go when you’re broken, used up. Make your way upstairs into the general collection, into fiction. Find H—there’s a break in the shelves with tables between. Find Hemingway. When you’ve found Ernest, who killed himself with a shotgun, you’re close. You only need to go a little further.
Get your cheek up close to those spines, get close so you can smell that dusty, moldy smell of old paper. Put your finger on the spine of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast—this is as good a place to start as any.
Drag your finger along the spines.
What do you mean you don’t want to?
What are you talking about? Germs?
Fuck you, you promised three times. Now do it.
You’re close, you’re very close. Drag your finger along the spines slowly, enjoy the way the spines in the plastic dust covers feel against your skin. Your love affair with books, if it has not yet begun, will soon.
Read those spines carefully. And when you see the name Amy Hempel, stop. This book, The Dog of the Marriage—this is my gift to you. You can’t have the book, but I’m letting you know it exists.
This is the best book in the city.

No matter what you’ve been told there are only two kinds of writers. There is the kind of writers that readers read and there are the kind of writers that writers read. Amy Hempel is the latter.
These writer’s writers, they are the secrets most of us try to keep from you. It’s selfish, we do it because when we read the first short story in Amy Hempel’s first collection we knew: I’ll never be this good.
We keep these secrets—Raymond Carver, Mary Robison, Bukowski’s later poetry and yes, Amy Hempel—from readers because we know that we’ll never sell a book if the rest of the world figures out what we already know: that we can never say anything that Amy Hempel hasn’t said and we’ll never be able to say it as well as Amy did. Writers like Amy Hempel will doom all of those plot-driven, third-person narratives of description and epic proportions. Fuck Moby Dick. Fuck War and Peace. Amy Hempel can say everything that Tolstoy ever did in a five page story about a pet-owner whose dog has run away from home.

Amy Hempel is a minimalist in the truest sense of the word. Any insight I may have had in my life and attempted to bring to light in my stories Amy has already had and managed to boil it down to one tiny little sentence with a truth so complete—so terminal—that I may as well not waste my time. And what kills me is; she’s already moved on.
She’s used up that insight.
She’s figuring something else out while I’m still trying to find the perfect modifier to fit between my subject and my verb.

I hear this a lot:
“I love _________’s novels because (he/she) writes the way regular people talk.”
Which seems like a really good thing. A beautiful thing, even. Before you’ve read Amy Hempel. Because Amy forgoes speech—she writes the way we think, she finds words to do justice to the way we think when we’re not using words.
I wrote in a story recently that writers do surgery. I said that some work on the brain to change your ideas, some work on the lungs to make you stop breathing, some work on your bladder to make you pee your pants. I said that the best go right for the heart.
And all of that is true.
What I didn’t tell you is that above the best, in some ethereal, preternatural place, lives a race of writers who do it all at once. And of them, Amy is the best. She’ll arrest your heart, leave you breathless and in need of a change of underwear, thinking.

Thus far Amy Hempel’s entire career is four books long, forty-eight short stories, about fifteen thousand sentences. That’s it, that’s all. Seems tiny, like a miniature version of a career in literature.
But here’s the catch: that’s all she needed to say what she had to say. She didn’t waste a single word. She weighed every word, she crafted every sentence with a care that goes beyond simple love of language and directly to the heart of communication.
When they collected her forty-eight stories into a single volume I wrote a review of it. I want to share a few paragraphs from the end of that review with you. Please, bear with me:

A good writer goes into a story like it’s a darkened room. Some writers light candles, giving us the soft glowing sphere of light, hinting at the unknown and frightening periphery. Others use a flashlight, pointing us at what they think we need to see. Some can’t refuse the urge to narratize the shit out of what they show us. Others just flick on a switch, leave the room and let us try to figure it out for ourselves.
What Amy does is take us by the hand and lead us into the room. She lights a roman candle and fills the room with a brief flash of white-hot light. And she holds our hand the whole time, she tells us it’s okay to be afraid. And she doesn’t let go until the explosion is over and only the fire remains to burn away the room she let us see so well for only a moment.
And then…
Long after the room—the entire building, in fact—has been exhausted to ash. Long after the last faintly glowing ember has been raked under black earth. Long after the ground has cooled, while you sit and wait for the grass to start growing again—Amy leaves you there with the inescapable feeling that the world is somehow different than you imagined.

Unfortunately the Prince George Public Library only carries the most recent of Amy’s four books—The Dog of the Marriage. The other three (Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom and Tumble Home) are something you’re going to have to request they bring in.
Either that or The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel.
Failing that you might want to ask your writer friend (if you have one) if they’ll let you borrow her books. They may claim they don’t have her books, they may claim they never heard of her, but if the writer is really good I’d say that there’s at least a 50/50 chance that they’re lying and deathly afraid of what happens to your estimation of their work once you’ve read a story like Hempel’s In the Cemetery Where Al Jolston is Buried.
It’s no secret that I am an atheist; I have no belief in God. I don’t think about it—about him. I choose to put my faith in my family, my friends and myself—in things I can verify the existence of.
But these days I do occasionally bow my head and offer up something like a prayer. I don’t make entreaties to a useless modern god, though. My prayers—if you can call them that—start with the word Amy and end with the word Hempel.
That book in your hand? Read it. You can thank me later.

[FIK-shuhn] III: A Story for Sarah

I lose more friends this way.
A little known fact about me is that if someone asks me to write something for them I’ll usually do it. (Hear that? That’s the sound of countless girls weeping gently, their tears spattering poetry rendered by my young, lust-driven hand. And rightly so. Unless the poetry came unbidden, chances are I was merely proving that I know nothing about the way to a girl’s heart but that the fastest way into her bed is through sweet, sweet words and a peerless command of language.)
When someone asks me to write a story for them I only ask for a starting point: a title, an opening sentence, a question that could be answered by forcing it through the fine mesh screen of the narrative process, etc.
Sarah has given me just such a sentence. I thought to myself that I would write a nice story for a nice girl who asked nicely. The trouble is that I’ve never written a nice thing in my miserable life. The trouble was compounded when she gave me a sentence that I couldn’t help but read as semi-autobiographical on her part. I don’t know Sarah well enough to crack her psyche like and egg in a socially acceptable, albeit post-modern, show of anthropomancy. Besides, divination is somewhat passé and I’m nothing if not totally here and now, dude.
So I thought it better to play sortilege in my own dementia. Explore the themes and topos already working in my brain and not stray too far from the memes that constantly come up in my writing. What I’ve wound up with is bleak—even for me. And I apologise, Sarah, if this isn’t what you had in mind but this is how I roll—at midnight, dark glasses, dressed in black. I’m like Poe but with a sense of humour and a love of the absurd—laughing hysterically at blood pooling wherever I find it.
It’s longer than I had hoped it would be but I had so much fun writing it that I wanted it to go on and on. And Sarah’s sentence forced me into the third-person as well as the past-tense which are two narrative conventions I’ve often shunned. Though I couldn’t resist having my character tell parts of her story in the first-person at the end—as unreliable a narrator as she may be, she gets down to the subject matter and tells her story close to the skin and, as you are about to learn, that’s a storyteller’s job: to pull back the pericardium and not appear shocked that you’ve let him (or her) get so far.
So here is Sarah’s sentence:

She sat there staring into space wearing a striped scarf thinking of a sentance and worried that the walls are closing in on her in the library because she screamed for no apparent reason but if only they knew the whole story…

And here’s how I managed to pervert that perfectly serviceable thought:

The Dissolution of Priapus
J. D. Buston

She sat there, staring into space, wearing a striped scarf and thinking of a sentence. She worried that the walls were closing in on her in the library—shelves of books creeping ever closer, the smell of old, jaundiced paper and dirty cloth binding stronger, nearer, minute by minute—and she screamed for no apparent reason. At least, she thought she had, but when she looked around no one was looking back at her. If only they knew the whole story. About how cold it had been reaching into the freezer, about how long it had taken, about how it came apart. If they knew these things they’d more than look at her—they’d stare. And she wouldn’t have to worry about coming up with a sentence. They’d be more than happy to do it for her. They’d come for her with pitchforks and torches.
She got up from her chair and started toward the shelves. If the walls insist on closing in, she thought, I’ll meet them halfway.
The wet soles of her boots whispered against the low-pile carpet. Her breath sounded as a backbeat to her footfalls. As certain as she was that every eye in the room was on her, when she looked around she found just one old man—grey and wiry haired, with a week’s worth of ashy stubble on his sallow, corpse-like face and a lazy eye—looking her way. He smiled at her and she darted into a row of books to avoid having to reciprocate.
There, between the rows of books, she sensed that the shelves towering over her leaned in slightly. She thought of the racks tipping inward, falling over one another. She thought of the tomes raining down, her body being bludgeoned by heavy volumes. She knew what blood spatter looked like. She knew roughly how much damage her flesh and bones could sustain and she was pretty sure she could survive the books.
But the books weren’t what really concerned her.
The body was.
She scanned the spines that lined the shelves. She pulled out a thick volume, separating it from the rest: Stedman’s Medical Dictionary. She leafed through the pages until she found what she was looking for. Priapism, she read, was the persistent erection of the penis, accompanied by pain and tenderness—at this word, “tenderness,” she scoffed. A writer she knew once told her that word choices were important. “Nothing hinders communication,” he said, “like a word with two disparate meanings.”
She knew the story of Priapus—how he attempted to rape Lotis and the gods punished him by giving him enormous wooden genitals. This, she reasoned, was a poor punishment for a rapist. To give him a tool, by which he could continue his offences endlessly and, probably, more painfully? What sort of screwy penal code were the gods of ancient Greece working from? “He got off light,” she whispered to herself—or maybe to the books.
She put the book back on the shelf. She looked down at her hands. She was sure she could see black-red still crusted and dust-like in the wrinkles and the folds of her flesh. She felt filthy but there was nothing she could do—the red lines mapping her crime were indelible and stood in sharp contrast to her pale skin. They were there for everyone to see.
Worse yet, her hands were still cold from digging in the freezer to bury the packages.
She stuffed her hands into her pockets and rested her forehead against the bookshelf. Through eyes open and staring at the ground, she watched her tears fall to the floor making little wet marks on the carpet. She was crying—or rather, her eyes were. At the centre of herself she felt cold and disconnected. There, surrounded in a bitter coating of grief and guilt, was a chewy, separate centre of pure, black, sweet vacuity.
“My dear,” came the voice—cracked, worn and affectionate. “Why are you crying?”
She snapped up straight, startled by the intrusion. She looked to her right—where the voice had come from. The old man—pallid complexion, crooked teeth, lazy eye and all—stood a few feet away. His stooped shadow cast a question mark on the shelves beside him.
“Nothing, I’m fine,” she said, turning her back to him, cutting off the conversation, and starting away.
She made her way back to her table. She started stuffing her books into the shabby, green knapsack she’d brought with her. When she reached for her copy of Cooper’s The Practice of Surgery a liver-spotted hand lashed out and grabbed it away from her.
The old man sat across the table, looking as though he’d been there always. “This is a very old text,” he said. “This was a How-To manual for field surgeons during the Civil War.”
She reached out to grab the book back but the old man was deceptively quick and pulled it just out of her reach as he leafed through. “I can’t imagine that anything you could learn from this book would be good medicine by today’s standards,” he said.
She thought about explaining to him that, in the end, her patient’s comfort hadn’t topped her list of concerns. That she’d just needed to know the basics. Instead she grabbed for the book again, catching the old man off guard. Her fingers closed around it and she yanked it away.
The old man looked hurt. “Such a rude thing for such a pretty young lady to do,” he said, frowning.
“Tough shit,” she said, stuffing the book into her bag and closing the zipper.
“I wonder,” the old man said, “why you had the section on amputation book marked?”
She stiffened at this. Something cold and tight found her spine and closed around it, threatening to dislocate a vertebra or two. She shivered; her breath quickened. To be found out in such a simple way, by such a strange old man—it would be absurd.
“Morbid curiosity,” she said.
“I take it you’re a medical student.” he said.
She caught the old man’s gaze and held it steady. She told herself that if she couldn’t look this man in the eye here and now, she’d never manage to look another human being in the eyes as long as she lived. Besides, she reasoned, the man wasn’t accusing her of anything.
“Nursing, actually,” she said, severing eye contact.
“I suppose I could have guessed that,” the old man said, frowning. “But that book is outdated. Are you writing a paper on the advancements made in the field since the eighteen hundreds?”
She shook her head. Tiny hairs bristled on her neck. “No, just what I said. I’m morbidly curious about the process of removing large limbs.”
She pulled her knapsack over one shoulder, tightened her scarf, slipped on her gloves and walked away from the table. Without looking back she lied, “It was nice meeting you.”

The night was cold and the sky was overcast. The streetlamp nearest the library’s exit was burnt out. The strong wind whipped past her, threatening to deprive her of sufficient air to breathe. The blacktop was wet and slick. She walked with her chin buried in her chest, her hands stuffed into her pockets, her eyes tracing the path only a few feet ahead of her. Every step made her joints feel weak—as though they could come apart with little effort.
In the dark, with nothing to look at and nothing to think about but the few measly feet of concrete spread out before her, her mind was forced to conjure its own imagery to play with. Hot red meat wrapped tightly in plastic; a poured cement floor and a wobbly wooden workbench spattered in red and stinking of rust and cold steel; the crack of bones and the snap of tendons; the metallic chatter of a reciprocating saw. A freezer, buried packets, fresh blood pooling in plastic bags, all buried under a few tubs of ice cream and trays of TV dinners.
She turned a corner onto a busy street. People pushed past without noticing her. Her, and her striped scarf. Her, trying to come up with a sentence; her, trying to imagine a suitable punishment for her crimes. These people, she thought, as they shouldered past her, have no idea who I am. What I am.
She went into an empty coffee shop and ordered hot chocolate. She sat alone at a table near the window and stared into the dark brown liquid in her mug. As she contemplated the scent and the warmth of her drink she gradually became aware of a presence nearby. A cold maelstrom formed at the bottom of her gut but she willed herself to look up.
At the next table, with his chair turned so she could see him in profile, was the old man. His nose was hooked; she had a clear view of his lazy eye. His chin was pointed and peppered with stubble. For a few brief moments she realised that he’d probably been handsome once. But whatever he had been, he certainly wasn’t much to look at now.
He turned to her and smiled. His legs were splayed before him, his arms were long and thin—he appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be glued together from spare parts. His cheeks had a little bit of colour—plenty more than he’d had in the library. He looked so relaxed. Try as she might she couldn’t remember the sound of anyone entering the shop since she’d sat down. And the shop was, aside from the old man, as empty as it had been when she arrived.
He picked up the steaming mug on his table, stood, and walked the few feet to her table. He gestured with his mug at the chair across from her and said, “You mind?”
Before she could respond he planted his ass and sipped at his drink. He looked out the window, swishing whatever he was drinking around his mouth. After a time he swallowed.
“Green tea,” he said. “At my age tea’s about the only thing I can drink after dinnertime.”
“Fascinating,” she said, curling her fingers tight around the ceramic handle of her mug. He was beginning to frighten her. Appearing as if from nowhere, first at her table in the library and now here. She thought she could, if necessary, scald him with the cocoa, or even hit him with the mug. This, at least, she knew she was capable of.
This and more.
He sat and didn’t speak. He watched cars pass on the road outside. He fingered a napkin on the table. He rubbed at the stubble on his chin, producing a scratchy music that irritated her. Finally he said, “I was a doctor.”
“Was?” she asked.
“I was. I’m retired. I was a field surgeon in Vietnam; I was captured by the V.C. They kept me in a prison camp for eight months to treat what had seemed to be an epidemic of gangrene. I did a lot of amputations under less-than-ideal conditions.”
He took another long, slow sip of his tea. He didn’t look at her. He watched the cars on the street outside the window. He gazed through his own reflection and took long, deep breaths. The only sound he made for a long, long while was a gasp and a chuckle as a large dog pulled its owner through a deep puddle.
“You know what I always hated about doing amputations?” he said, still not looking at her. Without waiting for a response he went on, “The carefulness of it. You couldn’t just go in there with, say, a jigsaw and hack away willy-nilly at the joints. Nope, you gotta get in there, ligate the artery, control the bleeding—and you know you better have a top-notch anaesthesiologist! In that POW camp in ‘Nam, I had to use heroin to--”
“Stop,” she said, cutting him off.
He stopped.
“What are you driving at?” she said, just above a whisper. “What is it you think you know about me?”
The old man, the doctor, cast his eyes at the floor. “My dear,” he said, “I don’t presume to know anything about you except your taste in reading material.”
“Then why all this?” she said. “Why sneaking up on me in the library? Following me here? Why are you creeping me out?”
The old man adopted a wounded look. His eyes grew impossibly wide as a layer of salty tears enveloped them. The corners of his mouth turned down, his bottom lip edged out a millimetre or two. “It wasn’t my intention to frighten you,” he said. “I merely saw a girl who seemed—I don’t know—troubled somehow. I thought I might help. That’s been the hardest thing since retiring—feeling like I’m not helping anyone.”
She felt sorry for the old man, the old doctor. But she knew he couldn’t help her. No one could. There’s a point beyond redemption—and we all make it there sooner or later. She had reached that point because someone else had reached that point and she had tried to help him.
Her writer friend had told her once that telling a story was something that had to be done close to the skin. “It’s surgery with words,” he said. “Some writers go for the bladder and try to make you pee your pants. Others work on the lungs to get you to stop breathing. Some are brain surgeons, trying to change the way you think. But a real storyteller knows there’s nothing more demanding than open-heart surgery. A real storyteller—his job is to peel back your pericardium and go to work on your heart, never letting you know how surprised he is that you’ve let him get so far.”
“Rohypnol,” she said to the old doctor.
“Pardon?” he said. “Did you say Rohypnol?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s a serviceable anaesthetic—better than heroin, I bet.”
The old doctor leaned in, swallowed hard, said nothing.
The first operation seemed simple enough. He’d come to her—her writer friend had come to her—ridden with guilt and almost dripping with remorse. He told her the story—close to the skin—about how he’d found the girl in the park. How he’d forced her down behind some bushes. The things he’d done to her. He told her about the solution—a simple procedure to remove the offending flesh, to purify him and prevent any further transgressions.
She told the old man all of this in the writer’s words.
“It wasn’t until I started to realise what I’d have to do—reroute the urethra and all its—uh, mechanisms—through the perineum,” she said, staring into her mug. “That’s when I realised it would be rough.”
The old doctor was looking at the floor. His lips were taught, his eyes focused, his jaw set. He looked as composed as anyone could—but for his pallor, which had returned and deepened. Whatever flush the tea had given him was gone and his face was bloodless.
Funny, she thought, one can prepare for the worst. They can control their reaction, their face, their breathing; but the blood always gives you away. The blood does what it wants.
“Did you do it?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, sipping at her cocoa. “I did it.”
“Did he survive? Was the operation a success?”
She set her mug down and cast a glance about the coffee shop to ensure that it was still empty. She returned her eyes to the steam that rose from her mug and said, “In one sense it was as successful as you’d want it to be. In another sense it was a disaster.”
She’d drugged the writer with Rohypnol—they’d both figured it would be poetic justice to use the date-rape drug—and strapped him down to a work bench in his basement. The bench was a crooked wooden affair wanting more nails for stability. It had been built by the previous owner. Some of his older, rustier tools had been left behind and still hung over the bench.
The one renovation she did make was to replace the bare overhead bulb with a proper surgical lamp. She stole a scalpel from the lab at school and set up in his basement with a bottle of rubbing alcohol, some cotton swabs and a few T-shirts cut into rags should the bleeding become too severe. She removed his member as well as his testicles. (There’d been some concern; the writer hadn’t wanted to grow tits but felt it would look weird, his having balls and no dick. Eventually he secured a reliable supply of testosterone supplements and the debate was over.)
Afterward, when he said he’d wanted to keep it, she packed the whole thing—penis and testicles—in plastic and kept it in his freezer in hopes that they could jar it in some formaldehyde eventually.
The old man pulled back from the table. “How did you ligate the supplying artery?” he asked.
“I didn’t, per se,” she said. “I worked quick and cauterized the veins with a soldering iron left behind by the home’s previous owner.”
“And the patient, he—he survived?”
“He did. He kept himself medicated with heroin while the wound healed.”
The doctor, his face gone a paler shade of ash, picked his mug up, brought it to his lips, but didn’t drink. He made a face at the smell and put the mug back down. “And the patient—I mean, did it work? Obviously he didn’t, um, offend again.”
“You would think,” she said. “But as I said earlier, the operation was both a success and a disaster.” She looked at the floor and felt perspiration form on her upper lip.
A few months later the writer returned to her. He asked her what the quickest way to a man’s heart was. She was making dinner and she’d just talked on the phone with her mother so she’d told him it was through his stomach. She turned the question back to him; she asked what the quickest way to a woman’s heart was. “I don’t know about the quickest,” he’d said, “but the funnest is an orbital sander applied with pressure to the sternum. It takes a while, but it’s pretty.”
The answer had unnerved her and she let him know it. Dejected he told her it had happened again. This time with a girl at the bar. He’d brought her out into the alley and raped her.
“That’s impossible,” the old doctor said, cutting her story off.
“Rape isn’t about sex—it’s about power and control,” she answered. “He used his fingers.”
The doctor’s mouth hung open. A small, weak sound came out of him.
The writer told her she’d have to remove the criminal fingers: the middle two on his right hand. She refused at first. She told him he’d have to turn himself into the police; that the first operation hadn’t helped and so neither would the second.
“Oh, okay. Would you like me to explain to them,” the writer said, “how you, a nursing student, performed an elective penectomy on me?”
She set up her operating theatre once more. She searched the abandoned tools for something powerful enough to cut bone. The only thing she found that might be capable was a heavy, clumsy reciprocating saw with but one blade which was broken. “Not that I had much choice,” she told the doctor. “And the blade was still long enough to cut through the thin bones of the fingers.”
Again she drugged him with Rohypnol, again she used the scalpel to work through the skin and tendons (leaving enough flesh to close the wound), again she used the soldering iron to cauterize the blood vessels. When the bone was exposed on both fingers she cut through them with the saw, injected her still-unconscious patient with heroin, wrapped his fingers in plastic and put them in the freezer.
The old doctor writhed about in his chair. She wondered whether the story or her own cool retelling of it was what unnerved him more. She reasoned that it must be a mixture. The doctor was likely comfortable with surgery and with stories told in a calm fashion. What made him uncomfortable were mutilations and bloodless stories about them.
“Of course,” she said, “my writer friend hadn’t known what he was getting into in having those fingers removed. He found afterward that he could not write.”
Because of their placement on a keyboard, the letters I, O, K, L and M disappeared from his alphabet. Commas were strangely absent. When he attempted a more primitive method of writing he found he could not hold a pen properly with his right hand and that what he wrote with his left was illegible.
“And listen;” she said to the doctor, “between the heroin and his missing fingers, for the first month after the operation, he kept dropping lit cigarettes into his lap. He ruined all his pants.”
She wanted to laugh at that. More than that she wanted the doctor to laugh at it. She wondered if it was too late to add levity to the story. She tried to remember what the writer had told her about humour in narratives. He’d said something like, “Either a story is full of jokes, or it is a joke.”
The old man ran a shaky hand through his thin, wiry hair. He looked more corpse-like than ever. Dark rings were around his eyes, no muscles moved under the pasty skin of his face. His jaw hung open just a little and his lips were cracked and dry. Were it not for the flicker in his eyes she’d have buried him in the dumpster out back.
“You writer friend,” he said. “What’s happened to him? Where is he?”
She lowered her head and glared at the last bit of hot chocolate in her mug. It was cold now. Outside sleet had begun to fall and what little traffic there had been when her story began was gone. In the big window she could see herself sitting at the table with the old doctor. Her own eyes were ringed with red, her hands sat motionless on the table. Her striped scarf hung over the back of the chair with her coat. Her knapsack sat at her feet. The window was double-paned and there appeared to be two of her, overlapping—or more likely, coming apart. Two eyes slowly becoming four, one mouth becoming two, one body falling to pieces. Too many pieces.
“He’s dead,” she said.
The doctor shocked her by making no indication that he was surprised. He seemed as composed as he ever had. He nodded his head, bringing it up and down in small, slow arcs. He kept his eyes focused on her. The look on his face said that he’d known this would be the outcome.
“Couldn’t stop, could you?” he said.
“No,” she said. “I suppose neither of us could. He kept coming back. I don’t even know if he was really doing the things he said he was—but he wanted me to keep taking more and more of him.”
“And you had to, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
The next time he came it was his tongue—he’d tied up a girl and abused her with his tongue (she’d never found out exactly what he meant by that; whether the abuse had been verbal or physical). Then he wanted her to take more fingers, then toes. Then it was his hands and thumbs.
“He wouldn’t stop. And I…” she trailed off.
“You started to enjoy it as you got better at it, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
The doctor pulled his chair closer to the table and leaned in toward her. In a rumbling voice like concrete scraping concrete he said, “I know. It’s impossible to stop. When they’re asking for it and you want to give it—it just seems right. I know.”
“He came once—and I don’t even remember what it was that he wanted taken off that time—all I remember is his tongue was already gone and so were his hands so he put a pencil between his lips and wrote it out for me. And while he was under, after I’d finished taking off his left big toe or whatever the fuck it was he wanted removed… I... I took an ear. He didn’t ask me to, I just did.”
The doctor nodded. The look in his eyes was not one of surprise, or sickness or even resignation. It was compassion, perhaps understanding. He reached out and took her right hand in his own. He squeezed her fingers hard and attempted a desperate little smile—which faltered and faded before it ever really came to be.
“I never let him wake up again,” she said. “I kept him drugged for days, taking a little bit at a time, wrapping it in plastic, putting it in his freezer. I practically moved into his house. I didn’t go to school, I didn’t eat—I did nothing but surgery.” She was crying now, there was a note of acquiescence in her voice and the doctor knew what it was she was resigned to: punishment.
She thought that the doctor would turn her in.
“My dear,” he said. “My dear, dear, young nurse, you only gave your writer friend what he was looking for: dissolution. He was coming apart on the inside—he had you take apart his outside because that’s what made sense to him.”
“But it’s a crime,” she said.
“It is,” he said. “I know it is.”
“I have to be punished,” she said.
“You do—and you will be,” he said.
She looked at him, dried her eyes and waited for it; waited for her sentence.
The doctor said, “After a time, when you realise how absurd it is, you have to embrace it or you die. You have to laugh at it—I laugh like hell about it at least once a week.” At this the doctor held up his left hand. She was floored. She didn’t know how she’d not noticed it before—she figured the old man had kept his left hand in his pocket the whole time, or at least distracted her with the cunning and confident way he used his right. His left hand had only one partial digit left on it: the bottom half of the thumb. “Most of my toes are gone as well,” he said. “I’ve only been punishing myself for a short while. But once a week I take a little piece off for what I did to those Viet Cong. There was one case of gangrene in that camp—I took that limb and convinced the V.C. that it was contagious and that an epidemic had begun. I freed myself by disposing of my captors one digit; one limb at a time. I’d spend half my days diagnosing Viet Cong with gangrene and the other half talking off bits of them. I did what I did because I had to—but that don’t mean I should get away without being punished.”
She nodded. No one should ever get away without being punished.
The world was sick—not just her. She was just one infected cell. And while she couldn’t put together the pathology of it, the cure made sense to her. She trusted the old doctor. She trusted the cure.
She had her sentence.

A N T I C I P A T I O N

My pen knows what to do. I close my eyes and I see this girl who glows. A girl who radiates. When she smiles, she beams. She warms my heart. I open my eyes with a feeling of floating past all the garbage around me. I will emerge unscathed because I will not endeavor to hide myself from whatever is coming. Bring on the worst. I welcome it with open arms. – Henry Rollins

When it snows, everything gets quiet. Like opium for noise—the sounds stay but they seem removed from my position. Even the sound of my breath—coming as it does in short, sharp bursts of troubled air—sounds like something someone else is hearing and trying to describe to me.
Poorly.
I know I told you not to use adverbs, but listen: This is the calm before the storm.
I know I told you not to use clichés, but I’m sort of a dick that way.
When it snows everything gets white and looks pure. A filter of pearlescence obscures all the dark harshness. Even blood looks pink. And of course you, the thought I can’t help thinking every time my pants come off, don’t belong here. You’re a big black mark in all this white glory.
I guess the problem is that I could never entirely erase the memory of you. I breathed you in once—the scent brought to mind thoughts of blood, sex and revolution; remember? So even now I’m bloody, sticky and revolting.
Cleanliness is for the birds.
I burn through the snow. I sweat. I exhaust it all to ash, refuel and go again. I cut through the ice—incendiary—abuzz like a nice hot length of neon tubing through the cool murky air.
You so black, me so bright—I hope you’re afraid.
What we’re about to find out, my dear, is what really happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object.
You realise, of course, that someone is going to get hurt. Civilizations may collapse.
I’m ready.
Bring it on.

Reflections and Eulogies: Prince George

The grey clouds to the east, casting the Cariboo Mountains in a relief that you couldn’t quite call sharp, receive the first trace of light. Staring east where the street drops off downhill, I see this night end in a frame of beetle-killed pines and darkened houses. A dusting of frost turns the grass into tiny, sterling silver blades that fail to pierce the soles of my boots. They do a better job on my mind.
Though, after yesterday, my mind seems suddenly vulnerable.
I make a fist with my right hand, then my left. The tendons, still stiff and sleepy, pull taught under my skin. My fingers are icy nubs; useless to handle the newspaper I just pulled out of the mailbox. I pull my shoulders back and attempt to stand up straight, meet the morning head-on with head held high. I’d be lying if I said this was easy so early.
The sulfuric pulp mill smell begins to permeate my senses and I grind my teeth at it. It’s better than the inexplicable rendered-meat smell of beef extract that seemed to fill the air yesterday—but not by much.
Somewhere in the distance a dog barks, a siren sounds, a car engine whines. This is Prince George in the morning.
And what I really want right now is a cigarette.

Back inside, my second cup of coffee warming my fingers, I flip back and forth through the five available cable news networks learning all I can about traders, guns and money. But my stomach tells me it’s far too early for lies and propaganda, so I turn the television off and go about preparing for my day.
I brush my teeth, I wash my face, I run my hand over the stubble on my head and jaw. I look at myself in the mirror. Every day there are surprises here. I am constantly saying to myself, “Is that a wrinkle?” or “Is that a grey patch in my beard?” or “Is that hair? On my back? Jesus!” At some point or another, male pattern baldness stops being a hypothetical to be thrown around when discussing cultural vanity with your friends and starts being a reason to make sure you never run out of fresh razor blades.
Sooner or later, we all fall apart. The centre cannot hold and youth does start to seem wasted on the young.
I throw on the black military style jacket with the too-long-sleeves, drape the green and black knit scarf around my neck, put my keys in my pocket and head out into the pale blue world.

On Central Ave my boots make a dry, crackling sound against the gravel—like hard rubber jaws crunching concrete crackers. And listen, if more than ten minutes go by on Central Ave and you haven’t seen a logging truck laden with evidence of the death of another acre of forest, something has gone horribly wrong. Somewhere there may be a driver standing at the side of a logging road next to an overturned truck praying help comes before a hungry bear who has yet to fatten himself sufficiently for hibernation.
In the southeast, where the sky is pink with the threat of another day, you can see where snow has begun to stick at higher elevations. Whether the sky is overcast or whether the sun has already won its daily victory over the stars for luminous dominance you can’t quite tell. What you can tell is that it’s not yet light enough for people to feel safe driving without their headlights and I squint into every pair of glowing orbs that approach in the vague hope that behind some windscreen or another I’ll see a face awash in something other than Sartre-ian anxiety.
Where the muscles of my back tie into my spine I am tight, bother and thought have conspired against my comfort here and I find myself resenting my own mind. But like I said, it does seem vulnerable lately.

Outside the mall I stop to tighten my laces. Down on one knee I watch an older man; svelte and straight—a Sikh with a turban and an impressive white beard—exit the mall and light a cigarette a few feet away.
I stand up and say, “Excuse me, sir, I hate to be a bother but would you happen to have a spare?” I put two fingers to my lips to indicate that I mean a cigarette.
He reaches into his coat, extracts a pack of cigarettes and holds it open to me. I take one and he offers a lighter.
“I like your haircut,” he says, smiling. “You know Buddhists shave their heads to deny their vanity?”
“Yes, and Mohawk warriors do it because they see their hair as a gift from the creator and they refuse to involve the creator in petty human conflict,” I say.
The old man nods. “That’s a lofty enough reason, we Sikhs keep our hair long to acknowledge the perfection of God’s creation. Are you a Mohawk warrior?”
“No. Not really.”
“Then why do you shave your head, spiritual reasons?”
“I’m an atheist,” I say. “I do it because it feels nice. And because I’m losing my hair anyway.”
The Sikh takes this in and considers it a moment. He plays with his beard and looks away; I take a few drags off the cigarette. Finally he says, “I wish I had your courage.”
“My courage?”
“To live without a god.”
Now it is my turn to look away, to play with my beard, to engage in thought. “It’s not courage,” I say. “Not unless you equate courage with honesty. It’s just an admission that I have serious doubts that can only be explained by denying the existence of a supreme being.”
“And doubt is good, in your mind?”
“Doubt is as close to holy as anything gets in my mind.”
“And you’re not afraid of doubt?”
It’s about this time that the truly bizarre nature of this conversation begins to dawn on me. I don’t know this man. I’ve seen him before, though. Close to my home, even. And were this conversation, under the same circumstances, taking place in Toronto or Montreal it might seem a little too strange for me to be comfortable. Frankly, I’d be alarmed.
But it’s not, it’s happening in Prince George.
I say, “I was outside on my front lawn at six thirty in the morning today, looking at the first little bit of light over the mountains. I walked here from my home near Spruceland. I watched CNN, CBC Newsworld, CNN Headline News, FOX News and CTV Newsnet for an hour this morning. If I were afraid of doubt, man, I’d never feel safe or comfortable or happy. It’s a choice—an active decision to be sure—but it’s the right one for me as far as I can tell.”
The old man drops his cigarette and grinds it out with his foot. “You know what I like best about Prince George?” he asks.
“No, what?”
“The ability after ten years to be surprised by the people and the conversations you can have with strangers. The philosophers of the entire country run away from degrees and come here, I think. The best of them, anyway.”

An hour later when I leave the mall I pass by my Sikh friend who is again outside having a cigarette. He nods at me and smiles and I do the same. Maybe he’s right about Prince George being a refuge for philosophers fleeing degrees and learning—but I doubt it. This is no place for the timid.

Slouching Deathward

This here is probably the final word on the writing of Slouching Deathward and anything I say after this will be about the process of trying to get it published. I am now finished the line edits and waiting for Monika to finish proofreading it to ensure I made no major flubs. Once that is done I will sit down and over the course of a day or two, make the final changes to the manuscript. So now is as good a time as any to make some final statements.

ON THE TEXT
What I’m going to wind up with is a highly polished story. I’ve never spent so much time revising, editing and rewriting. I’ve tortured over every single word choice, I’ve written and rewritten sentences, trying out different word-orders and I’ve spliced paragraphs together in a dozen different configurations to satisfy my desire to make sure everything is right and in the right place. As a result I’ve managed to whittle my prose down to the bare necessities. I’ve killed any superfluous plot points and murdered pointless subplots. What I’m left with is a stark and bare story that, had I wanted to waste my breath, could have easily been a 70,000 word novel.
This is a story full of short, minimalist sentences and unadorned paragraphs that (I hope) will move readers along at a good clip. I figure it’s comparable in length to Camus’s The Outsider or Orwell’s Animal Farm but could probably be read in about half the time because the sentences and paragraphs are so fluid.
Also, this is the first time I’ve paid attention to plot or attempted to use the device of suspense in any way. I dare say, I’ve almost written a page-turner. Lest that should come off as arrogant bragging, I’ll point out that I have, in the past, deliberately avoided writing anything that could be considered a page-turner. I feel that a lot of stories that have strong plot-driven narratives tend to develop plot at the expense of character development. Having always wanted to write character-driven stories I have often forgone plot altogether—particularly in short stories (in fact, I defy anyone to point out a short story by me that has anything resembling a plot). I tell my stories out-of-order and stay away from linear narratives to put the focus on the people.
I have done that here, too; albeit to a lesser extent. I keep the present events moving along in order but occasionally flash back to random points in the past to develop character. I think it worked well, though it’s not as complex as my narratives have been in other attempted novels, it works better.
And while the characters and the plot work together, each assisting the other’s development, I have trimmed back none of the ideas. I don’t beat readers over the head with my “message”; but it does underlie every single word of the story—it’s concentrated. I suppose that’s the advantage of choosing my words so carefully this time around.
Don’t let that scare you off, though. There’s still a very simple tale here about family, love and justice. You don’t need to be able to appreciate the deeper themes to enjoy the story.
Speaking of themes…

ON THE THEMES (WARNING: THEMATIC SPOILERS AHEAD)
If you’d prefer to discover the themes of the story for yourself you’d do well to skip ahead to the next section. However, I have been asked by a couple of people about the themes of the story so I will break my own rules and discuss it a little here.
I will not spoil the plot; I will only point out the hum of the generator.
I have been asked if this is a science fiction piece. I suppose, if you consider books like 1984 and Brave New World science fiction, then yes, it is. It is set at some indeterminate point in the future and there is some extrapolation on current technology. There is some science and it is fiction. Though I have to admit, I am prone to using Atwood’s term, “speculative fiction” as there’s no science in the book that I don’t see being developed today.
The major themes are represented in the title, really. “Slouching Deathward” is a mash up of two apparently separate ideas that seemed to follow the theme of my story. The first is Don DeLillo and his assertion that there is “a tendency of plots to move toward death.” The second is W. B. Yeats’s poem The Second Coming.
As often happens to me as I formulate an idea and attempt to view it through the lens of my own philosophy, I find pieces of an idea strewn here and there in the literature I read and the news I see on television. I happened to be attempting to apply the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, to the economy and political systems when I read The Second Coming.
Forgetting the religious implications of the poem and thinking instead about what “second coming” implies—the end of the world as we know it—I began to get a sense of an understanding of entropy on Yeats’s part.
Entropy is, of course, the tendency of systems to move from order to disorder or a measure of that disorder. Lines in the poem like, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (which, at this point anyhow, serves as the epigraph to my book) and “The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity” sort of gave birth to the story in my head.
So the title is made up of both Don DeLillo’s idea that all plots move toward death—an ending, disorder, entropy; DEATHWARD—and the final line of Yeats’s poem, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Hence: Slouching Deathward.
The ideas of chaos and disorder are explored throughout the story, every word weighted to add a sense of either order or chaos; and the feeling that we are moving form one to the other at ever greater speeds. Every system breaks down eventually—good or bad, there’s no escape.
Of course, as with everything I write, existential themes are explored as well; integrated into the examination of chaos. The idea of characters searching for meaning in an absurdly meaningless universe; choosing eventually to create their own meaning—in part by rebelling against the absurd.

All that being said, I am extraordinarily proud of this little book. I think it’s the best thing I’ve written to date and I hope someone out there will take a chance on it. I am eager now to write something a little longer and a little more complex. I am eager to attempt to outdo myself.
Soon the book will be sent off to publishers and I’ll start working seriously on something new. Now is the time to start wishing me luck on both accounts.

EMI/Capitol Records Trading Circle

Okay, what you have here is a list of CDs that either I or Monika own, released by Capitol Records or their parent company EMI (If the release is EMI, not Capitol, that info follows the album title in brackets. If the release is copy controlled that info follows in parentheses. If you can tell me a safe way to burn it, I will.):

THE 101ERS – Elgin Avenue Breakdown [EMI] (Copy Controlled, who would have guessed?)
BEASTIE BOYS – Check Your Head
BEASTIE BOYS – Ill Communication
BEASTIE BOYS – To The Five Burroughs (Copy Controlled)
BEASTIE BOYS – The In Sound from Way Out
COLTRANE, JOHN – Blue Train
DAVIS, MILES – Birth of the Cool
K-OS – Joyful Rebellion [EMI] (Copy Controlled)
MOTORHEAD – No Remorse 2xCD [EMI]
THELONIUS MONK QUARTET with JOHN COLTRANE – At Carnegie Hall (Copy Controlled)
PINK FLOYD – A Collection of Great Dance Songs [EMI]

Well, there you have it. I guess EMI/Capitol generally put out crap music anyway. Either that or this is reflective of my long-standing belief that mainstream, major label acts are crap anyhow.
The EMI catalogue seems especially bad though. Of the eleven EMI/Capitol discs Monika and I own, I can only strongly recommend four of them… and three of those are jazz albums.
Motorhead is, of course, always worth the trouble. The records by Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane and Miles Davis are all groundbreaking within that genre and should not be left out of your collection.
Would it help if I remind you that Birth of the Cool is Lisa Simpson’s favourite album?

Here’s how it works: send me a blank CD or enough money to cover the cost of one plus postage and make a selection. I burn it, send it to you and EMI/Capitol doesn’t make a dime. Or, send me your list of EMI/CApitol CDs and we straight up trade burnt CDs. Again, no money for EMI. Fuck ‘em.

One More Time: FUCK THE RIAA

I’m sure when Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables nearly 150 years ago, the idea of Jean Valjean serving nineteen years in prison for stealing bread to feed his starving family seemed like an absurd idea and just the sort of exaggeration required as a jumping-off point to examine the issues he took on in that book. Especially the issue of justice.
But, as I have often remarked, the subtle art of irony appears to be dying a horrible death. I believe it started when the U.S. began building “Peacekeeper” missiles to carry nuclear payloads. It was probably kicked into high gear when it was decided to have an occupation army carry out “Operation Iraqi Freedom”.
How can anyone appreciate irony—let alone write effective satire—when reality is so far fetched? And now, even Hugo’s exaggeration is simply a banal reflection of our modern world.
Jammie Thomas, a single mother of two children, has been ordered to pay damages of almost a quarter of a million dollars for illegally downloading and sharing 24 songs with the peer to peer networking program Kazaa.
Does it seem a little harsh? Well, from the language of the trial you’d never know what harsh really was. According to RIAA lawyer and prosecutor of this case, Richard Gabriel; “…the defendant violated the record companies' exclusive rights.”
Naturally, if you’ve been paying attention, you know that corporate entities (your Exxons, your Haliburtons, your Enrons and yeah, Capital Records) have the legal rights of a human being and none of the responsibilities.
Clearly, at least in the eyes of the music industry, their rights have been violated.

Corporations are in control. They make the rules, they buy the laws, they own us and our minds. And we allow it. And if we should step out of line, we will be punished. Corporations with more money than you or I will ever see have rights, and those rights will be observed. And you will pay.
How do you like that?
The following is the email I have just sent to Capitol Records:


From: jd.buston at gmail dot com
To: contactus at capitolrecords dot com
Date: October 5, 2007
Subject: A thank-you note

Hey Guys!
Congratulations on your recent triumph over The Forces of Evil—in this case a single mom in Duluth. I’m ecstatic for you and for the music industry as a whole. This will teach those lowlife music fans that have supported your pampered asses for years that they can’t stop now! Christ, I bet the folks on your board have at least a couple mortgages each to pay, am I right? BMWs don’t pay for themselves, huh?
You show ‘em, man. Let ‘em all know that the decrease in the quality of the music you put out and the exorbitant costs of CDs are no reason to think we should all just take the handful of worthwhile songs without paying. I’m so sick of these liberal-hippie types and their assertions that you guys are greedy-eyed monsters with no humanity at all. At least you have a sense of justice!
Who needs a soul, am I right?

By the by, in case you can’t detect sarcasm, what I really want you to know is that I will never again, as long as I live, buy another album put out by your record label.
Thanks for nothing, assholes.
David James Buston
Prince George, British Columbia

Next I’ll find a contact address for the RIAA. I’ll post up that email when I write it.
Sending that message was therapeutic. Felt nice. Maybe I’ll start sending more angry letters to corporations when I feel tense.
At any rate, if you’re as outraged as I am I would like to suggest you send a similar message. Here’s Capitol’s email address:

contactus@capitolrecords.com

And here’s the mailing address, send it directly to the president of the company:

Capitol Records

1750 North Vine Street

Hollywood, California 90028
Attn: Andy Slater

Also, I’ll be posting up later—maybe this weekend—with a list of all the CDs and Records I own that were put out by Capitol Records. The deal will be: send me a blank CD and I will send you a copy of the Capitol Records release of your choice! Why? Fuck them, that’s why!

Positive and Negative are Relative.

It’s times like this that I wish I could record my entries in audio format—if not video. That way I could begin this entry by heaving a sigh and go through it wearing my heart on my sleeve and remove any doubt as to my sincerity.
Because subtext, it seems, has become a problem.
Say what you will about the Youtube phenomenon of Chris Crocker, but he’s not that good an actor. He really does want you to leave Britney alone. Of that there can be little doubt.
This morning Monika and I were watching the news, as we always do. A press conference had been arranged by a group called—I believe—The Friends of Burma.
Now, you have to have had your head in a hole the last couple of weeks not to know what’s going on in Myanmar (colloquially referred to as “Burma” by those that originate from there) but, for the sake of bringing everyone up to speed, let me engage you with a short explanation:
Recently Burmese monks have been leading regular protests against the military junta that currently controls Myanmar. The most basic demand being made is that the junta give up power and bring in democratic elections.
The military government—as juntas are wont to do—has refused and has silenced the demonstrators. According to the Myanmar government, only a handful of monks were killed. According to journalists, the junta has hands big enough to hold thousands of bodies.
At any rate, these Friends of Burma asked the Canadian government today to divest from Myanmar and to impose economic and trade sanctions. It seems like a reasonable solution—very little to ask for in the grand scheme. Take your money and trade elsewhere. If Stephen Harper is willing to join George Bush on his witch hunt in the Middle East, why not take a few minutes (and a few less lives) to bring democracy to people who are actually asking for it?
Why hasn’t every country in the world already done this simple task?
But I digress…
Now, I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I commented on the fact that all the speakers at the press conference were minorities—a French Canadian woman, a Burmese gentleman and so on—and said that Stephen Harper would not listen to them. Whatever I said precisely doesn’t matter. What matters is that Monika heard me opine, essentially, that they ought to give up. She was under the impression that what I meant was that, because they were a group of minorities, they would get nowhere.
This is a negative way of reacting to the situation. What I’d meant was to highlight the deeper problem—the inherent racism in the Harper government—rather than legitimize it by suggesting hopelessness. Because it is true that the Harper government, and all democratically formed governments, answer only to the people who elected them. Harper won’t listen to leftist minorities who won’t vote for him anyway. If you want Harper to divest from Myanmar you have to get the people who elected him (and who may re-elect him) to request it.
Get some Alberta ranchers and oil tycoons to make the request tomorrow morning and Harper will have pulled every Canadian dollar out of Myanmar by lunchtime.
But this is one of the many flaws of democracy.
And what I’ve learned in the last twenty-eight years is that to point out things like this, apparently, is negative.

I have been accused of negativity all my life. Because I am angry and cynical and my irony is often misunderstood, I am left holding the bag for all things cruel and hopeless. I am called a nihilist when I am in fact an existentialist. I am accused of being consumed with rage when I am actually indignant. I am called just plain negative when I believe I am being most positive.
But positive and negative are relative terms.
Some people see anger as a negative emotion. They see cynicism and scepticism as bad things. But where would the world be without cynics and doubters? Cynicism and doubt foster thought, and they cause questions to be asked.
In a world without cynics we would still believe the earth to be flat. In a world without doubt and anger minorities all over would have been eradicated. Without indignation and a willingness to make an obstacle of oneself we would never have had women’s lib, never would have seen the civil rights movement and I’d hate to think of what would have happened in Vietnam.
Without cynics and sceptics, forget science. Forget technology. Forget advancement and ecology and everything good the human race has accomplished.
Some people—people who like to think of themselves as “positive”—prefer to put a happy face on everything. They want to make lemons out of lemonade and put a good spin on a bad situation. And it’s nice that they want to do that. I know I do it from time to time to keep myself working, writing and living. I’m glad those people are out there because they make me smile when I need it most.
But to do it all the time is to delude oneself. And I doubt you could do a greater disservice to yourself or your fellow human beings than to accept that sort of delusion.
The reality is that sometimes when life gives you lemons you don’t want lemonade—so sometimes when life gives you lemons you give life the finger.
But it’s okay. It’s fine. If you’d prefer to make lemonade every time, go ahead. I won’t stop you. Just remember when you put your glass down and you still have your freedoms and your rights and funny, interesting books to read and exciting music to listen to and new gadgets to play with; when you still have breathable air and drinkable water; don’t forget to thank one of those awful cynics. No matter how you define the terms “negative” and “positive”—cynics and doubters are on your side, doing important things.
Please, don’t misunderstand me. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without “positive” people. But it’s important that I make it clear that I believe “negative” people are just as important because someone has to be critical of the things we see and hear. And “positive” people are almost never critical thinkers. “Critical” is just such a negative sounding word, after all.

You know, I’ve heard that an artist has jumped the shark when he or she starts to explain his or her work. I should just put my words in front of you and let you deal with them. Unfortunately I feel the need, just this once, to make certain that I’m being understood.
I don’t think of myself as negative. I don’t feel negative and when I react to things in a negative way I know it and dislike the way it makes me feel. When I don the mantle of bitter irony, when I’m being cynical and catty and mean, I’m trying to challenge you or make you laugh (or both).
But if you don’t like it then stop reading me. If you don’t like to have your perfect little world threatened by the strains of harsh reality; if you don’t like to be challenged then by all means, go pick up a Mitch Albom book, stick your head back in the sand and keep pretending that everything is hunky dory.
But don’t call me negative for acknowledging the imperfections of this world and pointing them out. Because only in pointing them out can we begin to talk about solutions and change things for the better.
Your mother was wrong: bullies won’t just go away if you ignore them. Reality works the same way, reality is a bully.

Even the title of this blog has been called negative. “The Thinking Person’s Guide to Suicide? Couldn’t you have called it something a little more cheerful? It’s just so negative.”
Well, I’m sure it seems that way. But I guess this where subtext becomes a problem. Maybe it’s true that we as a culture don’t understand irony anymore. Maybe we’ve lost the intellectual ability to examine the things we read critically—as a matter of fact, I’d say it’s almost a sure thing.
The irony exists, my friends, in that the rules I lay forth for the Thinking Person in their exploration of suicide are all the things I DON’T WANT ANYONE TO DO. The rules for committing suicide as a Thinking Person are not the sort of thing a Thinking Person should, or would, do!
Get it? It’s funny in a sad, bittersweet sort of way.
So no, of course, I don’t want the Friends of Burma to give up hope. Hope is all we have in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Hope is what keeps us alive.
The eighth rule in the Thinking Person’s Guide to Suicide is this:
When the sign reads, “Abandon all hope ye who enter here” do as it says. You won’t die right away, but you might as well have. You’ve been negated.

Live in a Depression

North, way north, of British Columbia’s hot spots of Vancouver and Victoria and Whistler and so on, is a hole. A depression. Within that depression is a town. That town is called Prince George.
The last days of September huddle for warmth between autumn and winter here. Two years plus one week since I arrived in Prince George I am downtown early on a Saturday morning. The sun rises orange and bright over the Cariboo Mountains, saturating the vibrant yellow and red leaves with light—contrasting painfully with a downtown core built in the seventies, awash with de-saturated, utilitarian colours.
I’m sure shades like apricot and golden-harvest seemed like a good idea at the time. But for millions of Germans, so did eugenics.
A curtain of steam rises from the still-warm Nechako River into the freezing air, hiding the cutbanks from view. A handful of Indians pour into the streets from a nearby shelter. One of them says to me as I pass, “Hey man, wanna buy some hard?”
I thank him and shake my head no, pulling the collar of my jacket tighter around my neck.
As I move down George Street between the courthouse and the city building I listen to the echo of my footfalls on the empty street. I stop a moment to peek into the window of a used book store. There is blood on the concrete here—I try not to think about how it got there.
I move on, quicker now, down Seventh, toward Victoria and the promise of hot coffee.
Every now and then I pass a modern building, something totally out of step with the rest of this town. All glass and steel, these structures serve little purpose but to remind people like me that we are 778 kilometers away from the clean, angular lines and the bright blues and greens of Vancouver. 486 miles from the bright lights and busy nights of Vancouver. An eternity removed from five dollar mochas, edible Chinese food, more book stores than you can shake a stick at.
In a completely different world.
Left on Victoria and into Tim Horton’s. A medium double-double. A quick, liquid dream about those five dollar mochas and then back out into the street.
The temperature before I left the house was four degrees below zero. The forecast promised it would get worse before it got better.
Without thinking I move through the parking lot toward the library. I climb the concrete stairs and go inside, letting the warm air and the smell of old books relax me. On the second floor I sequester myself away from prying eyes at the table furthest from the front desk. There I sip my coffee and stare out the window at Connaught Hill.
A raven, enormous and proud, alights on the balcony railing outside. I remember, briefly, how Raven turned himself into a pine needle so he could steal the moon. My mind wanders, I think about words to feed into the library catalogue computer: corvidae, Poe, Haida, myth…
I have learned recently, and perhaps too late to do me any good here, that the most important thing about being in a place is being there. In twenty minutes or so the Farmer’s Market will open near the courthouse and I will go buy organic grapes. But for now I sit by the window, watching Raven sharpen his beak on the steel railing, wondering what he’ll steal next.

Narrative as Preservative

Have you ever looked at a map of British Columbia? Of course you have. Maybe while planning at trip to Vancouver or the Island. Maybe dreaming about a getaway in Whistler. Maybe you just wanted to see where Kelowna or Kamloops was. Or, maybe in a brief moment you embraced the darkness and wanted to see where Robert Pickton was from.
How many of you have looked at the northern part of the map? How may of you have noticed the part of the province that exists as totally separate from the dull-eyed hipsters slinging lattes, shuddering at out-of-towners calling their home “Van-City”? I’m going to go ahead and guess that, unless you live in the north or know someone who does, very few of you have. What I want you to do, and I’m asking nicely, is get our your map of British Columbia. I want you to put your finger on Vancouver and find Highway 7 going east. I want you to follow it. Go through Kent, head north through Yale and Spuzzum and Lytton. When you get to Cache Creek I want you to go north on Highway 97. Even on the map, without the benefit of British Columbia’s breathtaking scenery, it should already be obvious that things have changed.
Still, I beg you, venture on. No matter how tempting Highway 99 and it’s promises of a return to Vancouver’s culture and coffee houses and boutiques seems, I want you to persevere. Go through Clinton and Chasm and 70 Mile House. When you get to 100 Mile House I want you to stop. This is as good a place as any to take a look around. Get out of your imaginary car, stretch your mental legs. Notice how few roads there are, how sparse settlement seems from here on.
Now, draw a horizontal line through 100 Mile House. Draw it straight through the province, from the coast of the Pacific to the Alberta border. Now fold the map along that line and look at the north as it’s own, separate entity. This is, after all, how most of the people here wish you would see them.
Where you are now is Northern British Columbia. And, if you’re looking, then you see Prince George by now. There it is, being a hub. Not much to look at on a map, is it? I wish I could tell you it was different being here.
It’s not.
When I left Ontario two years ago this week, I wrote a eulogy for the south-western portion of that province which had been my home for twenty-six years. It was bittersweet in that I knew I’d miss it but it had also become blatantly obvious that I had to go. Something had to change in a drastic way and the opportunity to head across the country to a radically new address seemed like the best option at the time.
It was.
Now, as I prepare to leave here, it occurs to me that I will need to eulogize this place: Prince George and Smithers and Terrace and Prince Rupert. This place, far away from the hipster Meccas of the Pacific Northwest—Vancouver, Seattle, Portland. Though this time I do it with a measure of glee, I have to admit, I will miss this place. But I know Prince George will make a better memory than it did a home.

As a storyteller who has adopted Tom King’s axiom “The truth about stories is that they’re all we are” and modified it to the much more simple “We are the stories we tell” I’d be lying if I said I thought places were much more than the stories told about them. Nothing means anything until you can pin it down in words. Already I see a few of you in my mind’s eye, shaking your heads, preparing your arguments.
Let me save you some breath: as a storyteller, this is my thinking and there’s nothing you can do to change it.
History makes everything. History is stories.
In three or four months I will leave this place. While there is some small possibility that I will wind up back here in the north—perhaps Prince Rupert—it’s more likely that when I come back to British Columbia I will be in the south. I am saying good-bye to this place. It will no longer be my home, but I hope to visit again someday.
For the next three or four months I will be, from time to time, eulogizing Prince George and the surrounding area in a series of stories. Because places change. A year from now The Spicy Green might not exist. Books and Company may close down forever. And all any of us will have will be memories. And if you’ve never been to these places, all you’ll have are my stories.
Because, as Chuck Palahniuk said in his skewed guidebook of Portland, Oregon; Fugitives and Refugees: “The trouble with the fringe is, it does tend to unravel.”
This place, my home, is fringe. Even what some would call the “mainstream of society” is fringe when you get this far north. And the thing about an unravelling fringe is that the deterioration doesn’t stop there.
Things closer to the centre become the fringe.
Until there’s nothing left.
Nothing but stories.

The eulogy begins.

A Hastily Written Screed Inspired by the Enemies of Reason

Oh for fuck’s sake. You know, part of what seemed great about moving to BC was an escape from Ontario politics. However, after reading this (and, let’s face it: dealing with it in every aspect of political life) I feel the need to set something straight for the wing-nuts out there who want to defend their religious assertions against the godless secular humanists and their theory of evolution.
First off, it’s important to realise that the scientific community uses the word “theory” in a way that Joe Blow might not be familiar with. Scientific theory according to Wikipedia is, “…a logically self-consistent model or framework for describing the behavior of a related set of natural or social phenomena.” To further explain the uses of the terms “fact” and “theory” in science, in particular in the context of this argument, it is important to know that a scientific fact is an observation made—a measurement or evidence found as the result of an experiment. A theory is an explanation for the observations. In the context of this issue, evolution—the change in inherrited traits from generation to generation—is a fact. The Darwinian framework is a theory for explaining the fact of evolution. A heavily tested theory at that.
So yes, Darwinian Evolution is a theory—a heavily tested theory that has held up for over a century against the constant and ridiculous onslaught of religious fundamentalists. A theory—just like the germ theory of disease, gravitational theory, atomic theory, general relativity and dozens of other scientific theories that we all accept as valid and upon which a staggering percentage of the scientific community has reached a consensus.
But the misunderstanding of a few undereducated dipshits out there isn’t want concerns me. What really has me shit-pants frightened is the way Canadian politics seem to be tipping way over to the right, appealing to a few disgruntled weirdoes who believe that their religion is under attack.
This is how Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 and what’s been going horribly wrong in American politics ever since. With the help of fuckers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the GOP managed to drag the church right out into the middle of American politics—where it never fucking belonged in the first place!
And now, apparently, Canadian politicians are trying to do the very same thing!
Now look, ask my religious friends. I don’t care what religion you practice so long as you respect my right to forgo religion entirely. But the minute you start talking about ending the separation between church and state I start worrying about where my tax dollars are going.
And when you start threatening to teach creationism on par with evolution, I start making Molotovs, okay? It’s ridiculous. And before you get your panties into a God wad, I’ll point out that I’d be just as offended if I thought my tax dollars were going to teach kids that the earth was flat, that the moon were made of blue cheese or that Santa Claus was the first Governor General of Canada.
We hurt kids by telling them lies and saying that those lies are on par with scientifically tested theories.
Period.

I apologise for any spelling or grammer errors as well as any percieved harshness. As the title indicates, though, it is a screed and a hastily-penned one at that.

The seventh rule in the thinking person’s guide to suicide: know nothing and the world will kill you. It’ll save a lot of hassle.

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“Dave, why don’t you write in your blog anymore?”

“Because, I’m busy.”

The truth is that what with the constant trip-taking Monika and I have been doing and the relentless search for a job more dependable (and, hopefully, less soul-crushing) than painting I have barely been able to squeeze out a couple of hours a week to work on Slouching Deathward. Obviously this blog is nowhere near as important as a novel so, unfortunately, it falls by the wayside.
I do, however, tend to get irritated when the blogs I read aren’t regularly updated. Frankly it never occurred to me that anyone reading this blog might feel the same way. To be honest it never occurred to me that anyone was really reading this blog at all.
So I’ll update you on what’s been going on with me lately and in the future I shall endeavour to update more regularly with posts more literary than this one is likely to be.

I recently returned from a trip out to BC's Northern Coast. The trip took me from my humble home in Prince George to the lava beds of the Nass Valley, to Hyder Alaska and to the rain-drenched, foggy costal town of Prince Rupert.
All in all it was an enjoyable journey during which I learned a lot about the history and geography of the area and managed to get some pretty nifty pictures of black bears as well.
Ever been ten feet away from a four hundred pound predator? I highly recommend it—if you’re in a car. Otherwise, it’s probably not a great idea.

The trip up the coast actually planted the seeds for a very interesting novel. The details have been growing in my mind at a rate that could only be classified as “phenomenal.” I’m very, very excited about it. So excited, in fact, that it will supplant the novel I planned to write once I finished Slouching Deathward. (That novel, Anathema Magic, will go ahead eventually, I assure you.)
As for this new idea: I’ve plotted a non-linear narrative by merging the concepts of First Nations oral tradition, interviewing and journaling. I don’t want to reveal too much yet—at least not until I begin working on it in earnest (meaning after I’ve finished Slouching Deathward). I will say this much:
It will require absurd amounts of research on my part to make it in any way believable. Because of the narrative techniques I’ve chosen to use I’ll also have to plot the story more carefully than I’ve ever had to do before. It’s a daunting task to be sure but one I look forward to undertaking.
The birth of this story is largely influenced by my irritation at the Canadian publishing industry. If you’ve ever read the submission guidelines of Canadian indie publishers you’ll realise that “Canadian Content” is a phrase often used and seldom defined.
I’ve always felt that stories should have broader appeal and speak to the world at large instead of being marked by the intensely (and, truthfully, jingoistic, bullshit-laden) nationalism that seems to define Canadian art. If I’m going to write a satire I’m going to deliver my message to the whole world, not just a few yahoos in the north.
This novel will be my Official Canadian Content novel. It will at the same time poke fun at our obsession with our own Canadianess and speak to Canadians directly in a way that I hope people from other places can appreciate as well.
There’s Indians and Sasquatches in it—that’s how fucking Canadian it is.

Those of you who know me well know that I’ve had ideas for several novels floating around my head for a while now. I’ve got at least four or five in there that have been bouncing off the bone walls of my skull for two years or more. With the inclusion of this new novel I’ve decided to start keeping detailed notes on the ideas that whip through my mind on a regular basis. There are a few reasons for this:
First, while I have, in the past, had no trouble keeping the stories straight in my head I’ve recently found myself confusing various plot points, settings and characters with the wrong stories as I consider them. I won’t say I’m getting old but my mind certainly isn’t as sharp as it once was. (Alcohol? Drugs? I suppose it’s possible…)
Which brings me to the second reason. I have heard many authors remark that while the execution of writing a story becomes easier with age, one’s creativity often wanes. In other words, writing the novel becomes easier—coming up with the concept and plot of the novel gets harder.
Being as that I have a half a dozen novels and twice as many short stories in my head at any given moment and am constantly coming up with new ideas and ways to explore different narrative techniques, I figure I ought to get them down while I can. Particularly the stories I know I am not yet skilled enough to write. Y’know, throw a net over them before they can get away.
The third and final reason for this is the growing complexity of the plots I come up with. It’s one thing to sit and let a short story marinate in my mind without writing it down for weeks. However, when one starts considering a longer story or a novel and allows that story to gestate for longer than, oh, say, ten minutes, it tends to mutate and become intricate at an exponential rate. If I don’t write it down how can I expect to remember all the facets of a plot?
Am I afraid that this will take some of the immediacy and impulsiveness I so love out of the creative act? Of course I am. Is it worth risking losing a great idea to the abyss at the back of my mind? Fuck no.

So that’s it for this update. I intend to use most of this weekend to work on rewrites for Slouching Deathward as I want to get it off to a publisher before Christmas. Monika is a way for a multi-day hike through Jasper Provincial Park in Alberta so there’ll be no distractions (besides internet porn and Facebook) and I’m feeling “writerly” rather than “masturbatorly” so the odds are in my favour.
I’ve got a couple of short stories that'll be ready to come out of the oven soon. I’ll probably post the rough draught of one of those when I finish it.

It’s funny. I know now that I am less than four months away from the end of my sentence here in Prince George and I’m starting to think I might miss the solitude here. Sure, it’ll be fun to be back in Ontario for a while—and something I dearly NEED. But I’ll miss the hours spent writing merely because I don’t know (or care for) anyone enough to hang out with them.
It’s true: I’ll never be totally happy.
And if I was, I’d probably kill myself. An artist, I am told, thrives on conflict.
I tend to agree.

Espanola and Beyond

Sometime in the 1780s an Ojibwa tribe occupying a bit of land on the north shore of Lake Superior sent a raiding party south into what is now the United States. The raiding party brought back with them a white, Spanish speaking woman who married an Ojibwa man of a family living near the mouth of the river.
The woman taught her children Spanish. Much later, when French Voyageurs came to the area and heard the locals speaking bits of Spanish they called the place “Espagnole”.
This was anglicized to “Espanola” and the river was named “The Spanish River”.
At least, this is the story I’m told on the card on my nightstand in the motel just north of town.
I’m also told the town gained some notoriety in the eighties when the mill mistakenly discharged toxic waste into the river killing thousands of fish. The card goes on to assure me that the accident actually flushed the river. When the fish came, I’m told, back they were untainted and the mill now has an extraordinarily strict zero-emissions policy.
But I’ve never been one to believe everything I read.
And this is where I am tonight; watching the rain fall on the black, rocky hills where the Trans Canada Highway intersects with the main road of Espanola. I’m watching the warm red glow of the Tim Horton’s sign across the street through the white haze of the drizzle and wondering how I got to be so far from home.
The card on my nightstand also tells me that the CBC series “Adventures in Rainbow County” was filmed here and that the star of that show, Lois Maxwell, lived here for eighteen years. The card reminds me that I probably know her better as Ms Moneypenny from the 007 films.
Every shit town has it’s claim to fame. Even here, just outside of Sault Ste. Marie, nickel mines and all, a town no bigger than the one I grew up in can gain some fame—dubious or otherwise.
Al Secord—two time NHL All-Star—grew up here. Former Canadian steeplechase record-holder Greg Duhaime lived here. Some local yahoos played a three-day-long hockey game to raise money for a local hospital and managed to set a world record.
I cross the road and start up one of the black hills. Believe it or not, there’s some beauty in it. My sweater, damp from the rain, catches on some thistle and I sit down to pull the needles free.
Sure, folks in Espanola Ontario have a handful of things to brag about. They have their stories to tell. Doubtless, if I were to step into the dingy-looking tavern I saw on the main drag I could find a few faces—deeply lined, dirt so at home in the creases you could grow radishes in it—that could entertain me for an hour or two. I could hear tall tales and drink watered-down lager from dirty glasses and—I hope—hear a song or two.
But here I am, at the end of the first day of my journey between Tilbury and Prince George and while I can’t decide which of those is really my home—I know it ain’t here.
So I sit there, unaware at that point that the rock under me was turning my shorts an evil shade of black, and I smoke a stolen cigarette, reminding myself that the ungodly amount of smoking I did in Ontario must cease. And trying to decide where home really is.


Don’t count on the stories I tell about my time in Ontario and the trip back to be in any sort of order. The stories I want to tell will get told, in the order I want to tell them in. Simple.
Really what this is about for me is getting back into the swing of storytelling. I did so little of it on my vacation that I need to reestablish my footing and relearn a few of the ropes.

The (just short of triumphant) Return

Okay, so, I didn’t write a goddamn thing in here while in Ontario. What’s more, I haven’t written a fucking thing since I got back. But you know what? More and more Chinese made products are being found to be made of dangerous materials every day and people are coming up with just about every solution under the sun short of calling a stop to the use of Chinese sweatshops to produce North American goods.
So you’ll forgive me for thinking my lazy pen is maybe the least of our troubles.
You know, it reminds me of a business class I took in high school. They were teaching us this shit about supply and demand and how the economy constantly cycles between recession, depression, prosperity and inflation. “It’s all inevitable,” the teacher said. “Sure, sometimes we skip outright depression and the prosperity portion of the cycle is sometimes short but this is the cycle and this is how it must work.”
I raised my hand and, when called on, I said, “Well, couldn’t we nip inflation in the bud? It seems to me that constantly charging whatever the market will bear is what makes recession inevitable. If producers and retailers just voluntarily lowered their prices now and then couldn’t we avoid the jugfuck of recession and depression altogether?”
The teacher, the look of a fawn caught in a Hummer’s headlights crossing her face, said, “Well, how does one convince a retailer or producer to lower their prices for the common good?”
“Well, assuming that a businessman is less interested in the common good than in profit, couldn’t the government regulate it?” I asked.
“That’s communism,” she said, “and that’s evil.”
So, before you suggest to someone that production of goods be moved back to America or Canada where the government can regulate the process and materials involved or (heaven forbid) suggest that Chinese workers and producers be paid fairly and, in return, expect that the materials used be of the highest quality (or at least demand regular inspections) remember: that’s communism and communism is evil.

As far as my lack of entries goes, I do have some good news.
While I was away, in Ontario and as I drove back across the country, I did take notes. Lots and lots of notes. Oh your God… they’re scribbled in pen on hotel stationary, printed in crayon on the backs of pictures drawn by my niece… they’re fucking everywhere. They detail the origins of little towns in Northern Ontario, they describe the joy of the wedding of a lifetime, they exalt the beauty and simplicity of friendships rediscovered.
I would imagine that somewhere in that mess of scribbles and scrawls I can find a story or two to share. In fact, I’m certain of it. This is a wildly wide country and I’m an obsessive storyteller. The things I’ve seen… they’re worth a keystroke or two.
So!
Apologies for my blogger’s delinquency. I am back and I have time. The stories will come if you’re patient. In fact, the more patient you are, the sooner they’ll come…
…or maybe it’ll just seem that way.
Either way, take heart in the fact that someone is here to tell it.

Burning Spirits

The quiet is pervasive. It’s the sort of silence that makes you want to reach inside and stop your heart for fear that its next beat will ruin the moment. The sort of silence that brings that image back to your mind, that image of the earth from 4 billion miles away. And what you think about is how it’s just a wet rock amid myriads of burning bodies.
And this is the sort of silence that’s intrinsically linked to your sense of insignificance.
And for good reason.
Your boots, the ones with the worn heels and rusty buckles, meet the wet blacktop that looks like obsidian. The streetlights reflected orange and fine between the rocks and cracks of the road make you think of some far off night when… never mind.
You bend over instinctively at the sight of a dime. You pinch it between your thumb and forefinger and pick it up. You put it in your pocket, still wet with dirt clinging to it. In the space of two or three breaths you’ve forgotten the entire moment.
You continue on—one foot pulling the other forward and brining the rest of you with it—because what else are you going to do? What else is there to do? Another revolution of the engine, another breath, another step.
And you think of how combustible all this is—your life, your world and your body. You think of roman candles and striking sparks against the things that try to slow you down. You think of a furnace that burns everything down to ash that blows away in time. And you know how you want to burn—in mind, body and spirit (as though you really believe in any of those things as separate)—and how you want to exhaust the fuel and leave the cinders for someone else to wonder at.
Then the smell of woodsmoke—or better: of a fire extinguished—hits you all at once and reminds you of your place in time. And, as though that thought weren’t dismal enough, you remember picking up that dime. And how bad you actually need it.
You know life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. But knowing it doesn’t make a lick of difference. One booted foot swings out ahead of you, finds purchase against the obsidian blacktop, pulls you forward, and you continue on. Because this is what you do: survive.

I tend to think of things in terms of what will burn and what will not. Maybe this is vestigial—some mental remnant of my days as a preteen firebug. Nonetheless, I look at what will sustain a flame as valuable and what won’t as expendable.
I suppose it really goes back to watching the faint orange glow behind the soot-blackened glass of my parent’s woodstove. Remembering those moments as irreplaceable and defining makes warmth and fire somehow more important than anything else.
Consider:
Buddhist monks in Saigon, 1963, burn themselves to death as a protest against the Ngo Dinh Diem regime.
In 1965, 82 year-old German imigrant Alice Herz committed suicide by self-immolation in Detroit as a protest against the Vietnam war.
In the same year Norman Morrison, a 32 year-old father of three, set himself on fire outside the Pentagon office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as a protest of the destruction of a Vietnamese village by napalm.
The same year a 22 year-old Catholic Worker Movement member named Roger Allen LaPorte burned himself to death before the UN building, again, to protest Vietnam.
In 1968 a Polish lawyer, Ryszard Siwiec, burned himself during a Communist ceremony in Warsaw to protest the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia.
In 1970, Kostas Georgakis self-immolated in Genoa to protest the Greek military regime.
Need I go on? I have examples from 1970 right up to this year. How about Heo Se-wook who took his own life by self-immolation on the first of April of this year to protest South Korea’s freetrade agreement with the US?
Not close enough to home?
In November of last year Malachi Ritscher immolated himself by the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago to protest America’s occupation of Iraq.
A little over a month later a man in Bakersfield California set himself on fire (along with a Christmas tree, an American flag and an American Revolutionary flag) in front of the Kern County Courthouse as a protest against the Kern High School District who had voted to change the names of their schools’ winter and spring breaks to “Christmas” and “Easter” breaks. He had a sign that read “Fuck the religious establishment and KHSD”.
I guess that’s why the song Ash Ground into Concrete by Ann Arbor hardcore band A: The End Result resonated so strongly with me when I first heard it. A lyrical sample (that heavily influenced the intro piece to this entry):

“Which way would you say you’d like to spend the rest of your days: letting the embers burn out on the hearth, or throw fuel on the furnace burn it all down to cinders and take the inferno to heart?”

The sixth rule in The Thinking Person’s Guide to Suicide is this:
Have a good reason. Losing your job or your partner or your mind is not good enough. If that’s all you’ve got then swing one foot out in front of the other, find purchase on the ground and pull yourself forward.
Have a good reason, because there have been plenty of people before you who had damn good reasons.