Fixer Upper Fixer Downer| Drugless Euphoria I’m not here to tell you what to do with your life. I don’t know what you’re looking for, or if there’s anything you can’t live without. But don’t you want to start somewhere? It’s not just a new leaf for you, or a new year. It’s an opportunity to re-evaluate your life, or change your life. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.” –James Baldwin (from a letter to a 14 year old me) I’ve spent my whole life trying to define my relationship with books, and that effort has not been easy. It hasn’t been easy to reconcile the fact that I get so mad, sad and happy through the written word. Why are books like this? What is it that motivates us to seek these escapes, or seek refuge from these anxieties? Is it that you’ve never been able to accept the reality of your past, and you find these stories so much easier to live in? Does fiction give you a chance to be someone else, or have a better life than the one you had? Is it that you’re a pessimist, and you just like to wallow in the depths of the bottomless pit of life? Is it the simple joy of entertainment, the sheer escapism? Or are we just desperate to connect? Is it that we’re so lonely and isolated that we need books and art to hold on to? And even then, we can’t connect? Is it that we need this escape? Or are we looking for a way to give ourselves permission to explore the depths of our humanity? Whatever the reasons, it’s my experience that the best stories, and art, are able to bring us closer to ourselves. They give us a sense of purpose in life, and a glimpse into our potential as human beings. They give us access to our feelings, our fears, our heartbreaks, our joys and our triumphs. These feelings are a part of who we are, and how we can learn to connect with others, the only way we can really connect. When we connect, we can create the kind of world that we dreamt of as children, that inspires us to continue. And even if the world we’ve created isn’t exactly what we wanted, it’s something. It’s better than the life that we’ve been living. For me, books are so much more than this. Books are a lifeline. They keep us connected to our humanity, they connect us to the world and to other people. They allow us to feel, and they allow us to see ourselves more clearly. They are a part of us, whether we read them or not. Books are proof that we are alive. If you’ve never read Ulysses, it’s basically impossible to watch the film. If you’ve never read Gravity’s Rainbow, the film doesn’t come close. If you don’t know about the war in Iraq, you can’t really know what happened on September 11th, 2001. If you don’t know who Jesus Christ was, you can’t understand who we’re up against in this world. If you don’t know who William T. Sherman was, you’ll never be able to understand the depths of violence in America. Books are a crucial component in our ability to live in a civilized world, or at least in the quest for civilization. They are central to how we organize ourselves, how we organize our societies, and how we create societies for the people we have in our lives. How we teach our children, what we want our children to be, what we believe they should be, how we see them. Books are the most powerful medium that we’ve ever come across. They are a direct line to our humanity, our hearts, our core, our souls. And, at the same time, they give us the power to choose our reality, and they can bring us closer to truth. It’s one of the reasons why we should celebrate the reading experience so much, and celebrate each other. Books help us face the truth, and they help us change the truth. They give us the chance to grow, to confront ourselves, to re-discover ourselves and the world. And while reading a book, we are given the chance to explore everything that we’ve ever wondered about, every hope, every dream, every hope we could have of our future, our past, and ourselves. It allows us to do it all through an act of our own choosing, and so we need to start with books. When I’m searching for advice for my own life, I’ve always found that books are an easy place to start. It’s easy to ignore the bad, but it’s hard to look away from the good. And it’s impossible to deny how good it feels to find a way to deal with your problems by reading. I don’t think I can tell you what books to read. I can, however, say that it’s never been a better time to dive in, and get lost. I’ve tried to tell you what books have made a difference in my life. These books are a representation of all the books that I’ve ever read, books that have made me cry, laugh, smile, feel better about myself, feel more connected. They make me think about what’s in store, and what it means to be an author, and the impact we can all have on the world, on history. I wrote most of these, and I also have a bunch of other ones that I wrote when I was in high school. I would put one in my school bag and go home and read it. They were filled with stuff I had written for my English assignments. I was in grade 10. This was my favorite book I ever wrote. I remember when I wrote it, in 2003. I was living in an apartment building with three other dudes. The other two didn’t live in the apartment, we used to share an apartment. We were all friends, had drinks together, hung out together, shared all kinds of things. But we never actually knew each other, and they actually just found out about me the other day. The other two didn’t know the third guy, but they did know one another. This is where you can hear the story of my first suicide attempt. I wrote about it at some point. But, it didn’t do that much. I don’t know why. I guess I just never found my way back to it, and then I got distracted with school and stuff. I went from being a suicidal depressive to a writer, and from that I lost it. That’s something that I’ve always struggled with. Even though I write about sex, I’ve never really been the kind of writer to show off my body, or do anything that you’d consider showing off. I’ve always tried to keep a high level of privacy about myself, or about my life, but I think, perhaps, the idea of writing about it in a way that other people could read made me uncomfortable. It’s always been about my relationship with myself. But, it was that kind of relationship with myself that drove me to do something like this. Not that I ever felt alone with this, but I guess I just wanted to share it. There’s some kind of energy that, for me, comes from looking at others, and maybe by extension, myself. It comes from knowing that you’re seeing yourself, and knowing that you’re seeing others seeing you. It’s that kind of energy that makes us want to take our clothes off and show each other our nakedness. And so, in a way, writing this book was my attempt to expose myself to myself, to the people I knew, to the people I didn’t know. It wasn’t a very interesting book. I think I’m just starting to be really interested in this kind of writing, but this is still where I was. I tried to talk about things like the weirdest thing I’ve ever done, the weirdest place I’ve ever gone, how I went through that moment of being homeless. I don’t know why I wanted to make this thing, but this is what I did. This was just after my second suicide attempt. I never did anything with this piece, and it was just sitting around in my computer. I’m interested in this kind of writing, and now I’m just trying to go back and rewrite this thing and do something with it. I’m going to put a link to my other book in here as well. This one is definitely written by a younger version of myself. The first paragraph is written as a list of things I want to tell you about myself, but it’s still just a list.