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“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.”― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

The Desolation of a Boy

When I first saw my father’s balls, it was the second time I saw him before he died again. His first death came from an unattended stroke that left him unable to keep himself fully clothed.

My sister was a doctor who tended was tending to him at the time. Wiping his mouth and putting in his IV drip.

Here was the man who beat my mother unconscious when I was a child. I hated her for it. I hated that she was weak. She couldn’t stand up for herself. If she couldn’t defend herself, how could she be strong enough to defend her child?  She couldn't.  

But how could she defend herself against violent monsters? He stopped beating her when I was in my mid-teens. I internalised her internalised helplessness. When I was bullied in school, I hated myself for being weak. Weak like her.

But I didn’t hate her. I hated him for attacking her. I feared for her. In my dumb child mind, I was unconsciously the coach from Rocky. Yelling at her to get the fuck up and knock him out. But no one listened. There was no one in her corner. When I feel taken for granted, I feel there is no one in mine.

Till this day, if I feel am not being defended, I turn into a angry monster. The one I could not be to save my mother. I become my father’s monster..

But now he was just another old man who couldn’t put his pants on. It gave me no satisfaction. The satisfaction I continue to get is when I summon the monster on my own accord.

The beast that haunted my father is passed on to me. It lives in my blood. It sleeps like Smaug slept on mountains of gold. Left asleep, I am defenseless. But on quiet days, I can hear him breathing.

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Master Your Domain

If you don't own something, an apartment, a slave, a dragon, you're not the boss. You have to assume full responsibility for everything that you do. Why be subservient? Why be a slave to group consensus? Why bow to naked Emperors? You must be the master of your own kingdom.

You have to own things. You can't just walk into things with your eyes half-open. You walk into things with your eyes fully open. You have got to know what you're getting into. You have to take possession of your life.

Whatever form of meditation or mantra you choose to espouse, there needs to be some period in your day where you remember that there is a world out there, trying to tell you who you are. And there is a world inside you that is trying to tell you who you are. Now, where do you want to put your eggs?

Because the world outside is very noisy and tempting. It has all the razzmatazz, all the tinsel and glitter. It's got all the toys. But that is because you think you are not enough in the first place.

When you don't think you're enough in the first place, the whole idea of the world is to sell you stuff. First, they have to make you feel bad about yourself. Less than in some way. It is the system.

So the world will try and tell you who you are. And you have to tell yourself who you are. And there is this ongoing battle.

Somehow, there needs to be a reconciliation between the two. But in the end, you've got to get all the eggs in your basket.

There's also the ongoing battle internally. There's the you that you want people to think you are, and there is the you that you are. And how do I figure out who I am?

Do I have the correct assumption on the way that people are perceiving me? And how I actually am objectively? Or am I bullshitting the world?

There are essentially two worlds. There is the inner world of energy, and the outer world of energy. There is two identities. One is real. One is false. The external world is trying to tell you who you are.

That is what we are all pretending to be. When you start to play that game, you run into all sorts of trouble with the ego.

But that is the dynamic that we are in. Give ourselves enough confidence to reassure ourselves that we are enough. However, when I say, I am going to own a suit, I don't mean by paying for it. I mean, by owning it. It's now my suit. It's my idea to put on the suit.

I have to personalize it in some way. I have to understand the narrative that allows me to own that suit. And thereby, I put on my suit of armour, and go on into the world. And guess what? I am having a good time because I am "owning" the suit.

As a writer, I know the essence of storytelling is only this dynamic. There is nothing else in a story but this dynamic. It's the struggle between other people's perceptions and your own desires and who you truly are.

That is all there is.

In the end, you have to leave yourself in order to understand the value of yourself. You have to lose stuff to realize that all the stuff you are losing is ephemeral. They are transitory. They are not yours.

Despite what creepy codependent roomates think of you, you are enough. You have always been enough. But you have got to somehow subjugate and prostitute yourself before you realize your own value.

That is the essence of all my stories.

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All fairy tales deal with what we truly fear. Jean Cocteau's 1946 version's a Freudian message after World War 2's pain. Unhappy childhoods create beasts. Fairy tales require archetypes. In Sleeping Beauty, the king and queen have a princess after trying forever. She arrives healthy & beautiful. They have a christening day & invite everybody except Maleficent.

Maleficent's a dark witch. Queen of the underworld. The underworld is where you go to when things fall apart. Down there in the chaos, you can decide to do what you were supposed to do instead. And maybe you get to rise up again, renewed. Then you can repair the kingdom. Carl Jung conceptualized the underworld as the unconscious. A place of fantasy and dreams. He saw your mind as a place of living personalities, not as a computational system.

Jung believed that we need to look inside ourselves into the symbolic background of our psychological structure and rediscover what we lost. It's the ancient mythological motif of voyaging to the depths & rescuing your father from the underworld. It's what Ariel does in The Little Mermaid.

It's Jonah, or Pinocchio & the whale. God hears Jonah’s prayers from inside the whale and it vomits him up on dry land after three days. That’s the whale Geppetto is in. That’s a dragon. It’s that thing that you have to conquer to get something valuable. It's Iron Man flying into the belly of the beast at the end of The Avengers. It's Belle rescuing her father from a cursed castle.

Maleficent is Isis. Kali. Azrael. The negative element of femininity. Rebecca Romijn Mystique, not Jennifer Lawrence. Maleficent made $758 million because there's a part of you crying out for the incorporation of the demon within. Your dark side gives you strength of character and self-respect.

Harry Potter has a piece of Voldemort in him. It means that to be truly good, you can't just follow rules. You have to understand malevolence in order to withstand it. You can't have proper respect for yourself unless you know you're a monster, because you won't act carefully enough.

Logan, Hulk & the Beast have to incorporate the monster within. It's impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth. Then you realize you're somewhat dangerous.

You'd demand that you treat yourself with respect & other people do the same. Being a doormat doesn't make you a good person. It doesn't mean being cruel. It means that being able to be cruel & then not being cruel is better than not being able to be cruel. Miyamoto Musashi said, "The ultimate aim of martial arts is not having to use them."

So Maleficent crashes the party. Since she wasn't invited, their daughter will die when she's 16. Other positive magical women reduce that death sentence to prolonged sleep.

It's an Oedipal story. If your parents protect you too much from the dark side of life when you're young, as you reach maturity, you'll be so naive & fragile that you'll want to be unconscious. The Oedipal mother gets too close to her children. In her attempts to protect them, she fatally undermines them. She does everything for her kids. What's left for them to do? Nothing, including never leaving. That's the motivation.

It's how censorship weakens you. The state acts as an Oedipal mother, claiming to protect you but really just wants you to stay an infant forever. But adults aren't infants. All you do is destroy them when you treat them that way. Especially when they're adolescents.

It's how censorship weakens you. The state acts as a creepy Oedipal mother, claiming to protect you but really just wants you to stay an infant forever. So it can have purpose, and power over you. But adults aren't infants. All you do is destroy them when you treat them that way. Especially when they're adolescents and just developing. 

Beauty and the Beast may be postponed in Malaysia over a gay character. Malaysia treats gays like second-class citizens. In other words, the same way it treats other minorities. 

Are they afraid orgies would break out in cinemas during Be Our Guest? Maybe they didn't see Ursula from The Little Mermaid as a power lesbian. But they're OK with a teenage girl getting it on with an abusive buffalo. As long as he’s straight, has money and a nice house.

Tale as old as time.

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“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”- Friedrich Nietzsche.

If your fundamental belief system collapses, how should you live?

Nietzsche clearly said there would be two consequences of the collapse of ethical and religious belief systems. One would be nihilism. The belief in nothing. He regarded that as an escape from responsibility. 

It’s a logical consequence of the breakdown of religious belief systems but it is also a cop-out. It’s the cop-out that Dostoevsky explored very deeply in his novel, “Notes from Underground.”

It describes an intelligent and irresponsible person who has slipped into a pit of meaninglessness. He experiences hate, resentment and revenge. It’s the kind of thing that would afflict someone in the underworld. They have nothing to hold them together.    

Nietzsche also talked about the likelihood that people would turn to totalitarianism. He particularly discussed Communism as a replacement for religion.

In Canada, if you were a lapsed Catholic in Quebec, the probability that you would be a separatist increased tenfold. Quebec separatists advocated the independence of their province from Canada. 

It was because Catholicism fell apart in Quebec in the late 1950s. It was one of the last places in the Western world where the feudal Catholic system had maintained itself up to that point. It collapsed just like the belief in Christianity did in Russia in the late 1880s.

What happened in Quebec when Catholicism collapsed was that the birth rate plummeted. In the 1950s and earlier, it was common to see families with nine or 13 children.

However, Quebec's statistics bureau said the 2015 rate was 1.6 children per woman, down one percent from 2014. It marks the sixth consecutive year it has gone lower. 

It was because everybody bailed out on the church. Nobody got married. And if you were a lapsed Catholic, you were 10 times more likely to be a separatist. 

When Catholicism fell apart, people who needed very structural belief systems just turned to Nationalism as a natural alternative. That accounted for the rigidity and Utopian nature of the Quebec movement towards independence. 

They had axioms of belief that were unchangeable. Such as the future potential would justify any action. That is not an idea. That is a statement of faith.

The same thing happened in Russia when the Communists became active in the 1920s. Any amount of horror was justifiable because it was going to bring about some future state of paradise.  

However promises of Utopia never deliver the promised future paradise. It usually delivers the opposite.  More people died as a result of Communism than from homicide (58 million) and genocide (30 million) put together. 

If you combined the death toll of both World War I (37 million) and World War II (66 million), they exceed communism’s death count by only nine million.

“What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?”- Nietzsche.

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What Do You Want to Do?

I want to write something inspiring. I want to sell out Madison Square Garden. I want to make people laugh. I need to express myself. I have to start and not stop.

I have a monster in me. Sharks need to move or they will suffocate. That is why I can’t stop or I will drown. I’d much rather live among the mermaids than crash upon the rocks by the siren’s call.

I am sure nothing is certain and we are not promised tomorrow. May we not be too old before we realize that the pain of regret cuts deeper than the wounds left behind by discipline. 

We may not have done everything we wanted, but we should do everything we want. At least once. Or maybe twice as hard. Perhaps the third time is the charm.

I want to change people’s mind. Let them see that the way they view the world is not the only way. We do not have to agree with each other but we can still love, lust and pound away in dark fantasies illuminated by hindsight.

I want to change how I operated. Be more aware. More left-brain. I don’t know if I can or even if I should. But I could try. Fortune favours the bold. Well-behaved women seldom make history. 

I want to change them with my freedom. I can not affect others without first having affected myself. I will speak my mind without fear of punishment because there is no one to punish me. I am the one who whips.

I will have to risk a lot. But the alternative is even worse. No risk, no reward. No growth occurs in comfort zones. I am willing to put my livelihood at stake to make the changes I need. I will not let my dreams die forgettable deaths.

The trade-off for working everyday is less time spend in childhood. Nothing that is comfortable should remain. Parents, allowances, breakfast in bed. They are not all rewards. They can be shackles. 

I’m not going to tie myself down to something that compromises my desires. Nothing is worth the trade-off between security and freedom. If we live  in an ever-changing world, nothing is secure anyway. 

So you might as well be free to do what and who you want. Whenever you want. Unless you truly just want to pay bills and die. I’d want to look at the faces of my friends, lovers, foes, family and freaks before I shuffle off this mortal coil. I want them to see me as who I truly am. Not a masquerade.

It matters enough for the risk I am putting into it. No one wants you to be your authentic self. Your family and friends say they do, but they don’t. They mean well. They may not be aware of it, but everyone around you has a vested interest in you remaining in your current position instead of rising up to do whatever you damn well please.

Because if you did everything you dreamed of, then they will have to look back upon their lives of following every instruction, command, and morality clause to find out that they were carrying dead people’s baggage. Put it down.

You were born free. Don’t take on the burdens of your ancestors. It will not please them. They’d rather their great grandchild be free of the chains that bound them.

It is possible. People with a lot less have done a lot more. I don’t want the lonely to feel alone. We are many and we are among you.

I want my work to not be appreciated in it’s lifetime but then become a cult favourite among the cool, the tattooed and the weird. I want the hopeless to believe it’s possible.  

“And if hope could grow from dirt like me. It can be done.”- Pearl Jam, “Down.”

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“I lean against the wind, pretend that I am weightless, and in this moment, I am happy.”-- Incubus, “Wish You Here.”

I don’t know if the universe will be here in a million years. I might be wrong, it’s been around for at least a few billion. But even that will end one day. Every human achievement, scientific discovery, art and monuments will be gone forever.

One of the things that will remain is the music shared between people who love each other. 

“The sky resembles a back-lit canopy with holes punched in it.”

I don’t know why, I think love exists on another dimension. We access it briefly in our own through transcendent memories. Perhaps that’s why songs, art and literature are so powerful. They are not entirely of this world.

Someday it and we will return from wherever we came from. A place I do not know but an undiscovered country we all will visit in the end. But will we recognize ourselves if we saw each other in heaven?

I don’t know for certain. All I know is we’re lucky to be blessed into existence from a blast of Zeus’s mighty nostrils. We’re here for a short amount of time ‘till we are no more. In between, we think too highly of ourselves for a while and then we die. 

Before that day comes, if we were good in a past life, we can do experience our wildest fantasies come true in this thing called life. It can be like swallowing the blue pill, entering the Matrix and bending reality to our wishes.

It’s the only explanation I have for some of the things I’ve experienced. 

I hope you have too.

“Dearly beloved, 

We are gathered here today 

To get through this thing called life

Electric word life It means forever and that's a mighty long time But I'm here to tell you There's something else The after world

A world of never ending happiness You can always see the sun, day or night.”

                                   -- Prince, “Let’s Go Crazy”, Purple Rain, Track 1 (1984).

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“Life is too short to last long.”-- Blink-182, “Bored to Death.”  Blink-182, Showcase Theater, Corona, California, 1995. 

I asked my brother’s friend once, “If I were a song, what song would I be?”

“A Green Day song,” he said, without missing a beat.

I don’t know why part of my soul has been punk. Maybe it’s a bunch of kids who can’t play who do it anyway. 

Looking at this old Blink-182 photo from 1995 taken at the Showcase Theater in California, I see faces I know among the crowd. I have seen these people before. They belong  to me.

There’s the insecure teenage boy who has never kissed a girl. He has a lightning stripe on his guitar strap like Rivers Cuomo from Weezer.

“Ooh-wee-oh! My name is Buddy Holly! And you’re Mary Tyler-Moore! 

I don’t care what they say about us, anyway! I don’t care about that!”

Those last two lines echo the punk rebel ethos. Not caring what they say about us. They never cared for you. That is why we must care for each other. There is no one else here.

You can hear the longing and loneliness in David Bowie’s “Major Tom.” In Green Day masturbating all day on “Longview.” It’s in the opening strings soaking The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony.”

There is nothing left but us. If an asteroid crashes into the Earth tomorrow, and all human achievements are lost, did it matter that art once existed?  

I think so. I think it makes it even more important.

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Lou Reed died 2 years ago today. Look back at the legendary rocker’s best musical moments from the Velvet Underground and beyond.

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#WesCraven and Drew Barrymore on the set of “Scream” (1996).

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#OmarSharif and Peter O’ Toole, gentlemen.

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#ChristopherLee and Caroline Munro in Dracula A.D. (1972).

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David Letterman’s first and last guest was Bill Murray. 1982-2015. 

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#BBKing and Ringo recording B.B King in London, 1971.

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#BBKing, Eric Clapton and Elvin Bishop, New York City, 1967.

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#BBKing Live at the Apollo Theater, Harlem, 1963. 

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Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and #BBKing in Chicago during their joint 1969 tour.  There'd be no Rolling Stones, Beatles, Cream, Clapton, Santana, Hendrix or Zeppelin without B.B. King and his fellow bluesmen. He started playing on segregated Mississippi street corners. Behind the deepest pain lie the sweetest songs.

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It’s wedding season. The time of year where the most common question asked is “What’s your address?” Sifting through countless invitations, those in our mid twenties to mid thirties must decide which weddings we are going to go into debt for this year. Weddings can be a lot of fun, and...