I’ve already mentioned what a craven lot of liars and revisionists we writers tend to be, and nobody need feel singled out or disparaged by that, because, of course, when I say that, I point the biggest finger of all right at myself. I usually respond to questions of veracity or accuracy with the catch-all that I and a few of my best writer friends always adhere to—”it’s fiction, stoopid!”

       Any time I delve into any degree of biographical info to inform a story, you’d best believe I’m revising, embellishing, changing the names to protect the innocent, and altering situations. The stories always come first. Service to the story is always the thing.

         So when I get the occasional question like, how much of Jack, or how much of Wolf, or how much of this or that guy from this or that story is based on your own life, the answer is usually, ‘“ehhhhhh….it’s complicated.”

      And I’ve mentioned this story in the past, but it’s something I’m still unpacking in a lot of ways, so welcome to my self-therapy. Like a lot of drunks I’ve known, I tend to repeat myself.

      When I was 12 or 13 (I’ve mentioned the age 12 earlier, but it was probably closer to 13) a classroom incident and general relations at home culminated in my shutting down and not talking to people anymore. That’s not to say I became mute or anything, but I stopped expressing myself verbally or confiding in anyone…I decided that I couldn’t trust anyone and talking to people about what I was going through was  a waste of time. My brain became a Closed System, as some folks in the biomedical industry might frame it. The trouble is that this is not really an ideal way to go through life, and it wasn’t just a phase I went through for a couple or three months—I maintained this mindset WELL INTO MY ADULT LIFE.

        The problem with having all these conflicts and emotions (and keep in mind I’m Autistic, so those conflicts and emotions are weird on a GOOD day) that you approach as a closed circuit is that after a while those issues manifest themselves in very unusual, irrational and sometimes aberrant ways. By my late twenties I was borderline suicidal, veering into alcoholism and probably on the edge of a breakdown most of the time.

        You can’t maintain that kind of a position.

       In the end I went forward in life because for good or ill, you have to. If you don’t you’re gonna die, for real, if not physically, then spiritually, or mentally, if you prefer that.

        The major shift that happened for me was finding out there damn well WERE people I could express myself to, and the more I opened past my immediate sphere and built solid relationships, the more nourishing and rewarding that was. The more I became what I was supposed to be, the more I was able to let go of that destructive, closed mindset. 

        Wolf is the person I might have become if I had never started getting serious about writing, joined a band, started a zine, started looking into what others in my field of endeavour were doing, traveled out around the country and seeing what was going on, raising hell and bleeding out loud until I caught the ear of the people in my life who would become important–friends, lovers, collaborators, the people in the world you can truly talk to.

        That’s why, when I talk to people who are maybe introverted and beaten down, I try to make them understand that you need to go forward in life. Because life’s going to go forward whether you do or not, and if you don’t crack open in a good way, you might run the risk of cracking open in a really BAD way.

     When I came into the Slam scene (circa late ‘90s/early oughts) much of what the poets were slinging  seemed to be consisting of a couple of different themes—either privileged white boys pretending to be something other than themselves or people taking one or another position as an attempt to dispense some cozy nugget of wisdom…I found both factors to be bad, fake and offensive, but especially the second group. I haven’t got any great answers to the world’s problems or a whole lot of wisdom to dispense as if I were the zen equivalent to a gumball machine. I guess I’ve got that last bit, so take it for whatever it’s worth.