Closed for the winter. These words mean a lot to me, as you can tell, since I’m a seasonal worker. From the end of November to the end of March, my yearly, unspoken contract with my boss ends and I’m free to indulge in anything I want, within reason. I catch up on the games I’ve been putting off for just this, and my Netflix list full of recommendations gets burned through pretty quick. But there’s something else I do and it’s on the top of the list. It’s the main reason I look forward to my off-season. I write.

Now, I’m not saying I’m any good, but I’m also not saying I’m any bad. What I can do is produce mass, and every winter, I bust out my laptop and enter that trance no narcotic high can simulate. For me, it’s the ultimate escape, to a world I’ve built since I started doing in the wayback, circa 1995, as a shitty sixteen year old trying to blow out the lines of all that pent-up angst and undirected aggression. So yeah, with full disclosure, the grammar won’t be perfect and that aforementioned mass will be crude and without its edges smoothed, but hey, let this small-town, Canadian, aging white bitch do what he can with his grade 11 English school board education.

Things have been going good for me this last year or so, and that makes it time to start taking these thoughts that have been swimming in my head for years and, as I put it before, blow out the lines. It’s like plaque in arteries and I want them free and clear for what’s to come. There will be a lot of strain. As this transition was taking place, I heard an expression: ‘burning the material’. It basically means taking something you’ve been working on and slaving over and will never be happy with and just saying ‘fuck it’. Put it out there so that it’s no longer just yours, and it is what it is, and you just have to move on to one of those many, many other things you wanted to do, but were held back from actually doing because of task A. It’s time to effectively move forward in the present while honouring all that’s come to pass. It’s time to record the journey. It’s time to save the game.

A few months ago, I thought having a youtube channel would help me clear the space I needed to move on. I didn’t care about the Ad-pocalypse and never thought to make a cent. I just found passing on my ideas, even to the aether, would help… and it did. I kept a notepad that I outlined what I wanted to say, but when it came time to record, I missed half my points and just couldn’t shake the awareness of the camera’s presence. Not that it bothered me, it’s just kinda hard to explain, but I think some of you get it. No, my place is here, in text, where I can think out every line of text and read it over so I only look like half the idiot I really am!

So, apart from these pesky, errant thoughts, I’m going to show some love for the things that helped make my life, life in general, everything from bearable to absolutely amazing. Every now and then I’ll throw up a short story, clunky and unrefined as they are, it’ll give you a window into my portable ‘escape hatch’. Fantasizing and daydreaming got me a long way before we had these smartphones to deny us a single, idle moment, but to this day I find nothing beats good ol’ imagination. With a little luck, and when you just want to check out of a long line or a boring lecture, you can spend some time with me there.

Here’s the deal: I know full well you’ll read this on the toilet, on the bus, in bed right before you bang your significant other or rub one out. That’s life in the 21^st century, and its fucking great for that. Our interests have become so niche since the net was placed in the palm of our hands, that I find the people I can relate to are spread more thin than I realized. And maybe you realize that too. And maybe the same, intangible bullshit that gives me goosebumps does so for you. How great would that be? You’d have a new read on your hands, and we would learn of another node in the great human super-organism that is firing at a similar, if not the same rate.

This, all of this, is very new to me, but I’m excited and eager to learn, and I look forward to sharing the significant parts of my journey with you.