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The people at Open Book Toronto recently subjected me to the Proust Questionnaire.

The Proust Questionnaire was not invented by Marcel Proust, but it was a much loved game by the French author and many of his contemporaries. The idea behind the questionnaire is that the answers are supposed to reveal the respondent’s “true” nature.

You can find my answers here.

And, curiously enough, I recently blogged about this questionnaire. It was given to chatbots. I fear my answers were more sensible and thus less interesting than theirs.

Continue reading »]]> With summer at an end, and inspired by the nude face of Zoetica Ebb during her No Make-Up Week at Biorequiem, I’m showing off my legs.

That’s my house robe with shorts by Al Sharif of Syria.  The slippers are Prince Alberts, the hat is something Father acquired while in Turkey,  the couch is a new La-Z-Boy, the coffee is freshly ground Jamacian Blue Mountain, the pipe is a Butz Choquin packed with ‘Rise and Shine’ – a Brigham knock off of Dunhill’s now unavailable in Canada ‘Early Morning Pipe’ and the dog is a damn fine companion.

Life, at the moment, is fine.

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Like any community of malcontents and weirdos, writers have certain quirks in common.  One of these is the trunk. While it might look like someone just sits down and writes a novel, the process is much sloppier than that. Stories are started and abandoned. Some are finished but remain awful. There are pages of notes, half-thoughts, outlines of things that never went anywhere, letters to people one has not seen in twenty years, sometimes letters back from them, decent stories that still need work, things that could not sell, snippets of poetry and prose, rants, ramblings and drugged, up, delusional twitter feeds from some subconscious hellscape.  Every completed novel, the good, bad and the ugly, stands atop a mountain of corpse-words and that mountain is put in the trunk.

It’s probably not a coincidence that a trunk looks like a coffin.

Then again, coffins sometimes look like fish.

My trunk is not actually a trunk at all.  It’s a big old clothes drier that was in my apartment when I got here.  Now it’s packed tight with paper.

While every writer has their trunk, every writer relates differently to it.  Stephen King took parts of his and made it into the Bachman Books.  Naked Lunch was edited together from parts of Burroughs’s trunk.  I seem to recall some poet throwing theirs overboard while at sea.  I never even look in mine.  I have a seperate space for things I can look at.  Those things don’t require anything as large as a trunk.

My trunk terrifies me.

Just sitting here, thinking about it, shrinks my lungs. There’s a lot of very bad writing in that drier.  A lot of very bad writing that I, knowing nothing, once thought was very good writing.  The bad prose is, perhaps, forgivable. The confidence with which I wrote it, not so much. When I was a child I was told that looking directly at the sun would cause blindness. Like Santa Claus, God and dentistry, that turned out to be bullshit. But I know that looking in that trunk would cause a fit of self doubt leading directly to block. That’s how bright my humiliation is.

I never had any natural talent but I can’t even begin to fathom what I was doing with some of that crap.  Thinking most of it was bad enough.  Actually going to the trouble of writing it down and thinking it was good enough to ever be read by anyone? The stark ratio of shit to quality that I produce?  That’s enough to turn one off the whole enterprise.

And I would quit if I could – Santa-God-Dentist knows, I have tried.

But our virtue and our vice often comes from the same thing.  Once I make up my mind about something, I’m willing to see it right through to the bitter end.  When smarter men would give up and stay down, I keep getting up.  Though this is often portrayed as virtue, it’s a dangerous one.  It’s sent me on benders, got me kicked in the face and kept me in relationships much longer than was good for anyone.  I play to extinction.  I know this about myself. It’s not as romantic as it may sound.  I’ve spent the last few years trying to learn failure.

Giving up can be very good for you.

I was a child when I decided to be a fiction writer.  I had no idea what that meant.  I knew it meant writing stories so I dedicated myself to that.  As far as the sort of life writers led, what they did on their spare time or how they made a living, I was completely clueless.  I wasn’t raised around professors, scientists or authors.  Quite a few writers were.  Insofar as I’ve ever been jealous of another person’s upbringing, I’m jealous of that. It might have saved me a great deal of trouble. But I also know this – It would’ve ruined me.

Because, when I started reviewing books and saw what most writers actually do, I knew that wasn’t for me.

Not knowing any of that or having the sense to figure it out and quit while I was ahead, I taught myself how to write. I cannot ever recall getting any advice or anything remotely approximating an education from my school teachers. I was never even taught the formal rules of grammar and punctuation. To this day, I have no idea what they are and navigate by feel. What I did get from these people was encouragement. This was the last thing I needed.

I didn’t even know what books I should be reading. I’d find an author I liked, find out what authors they liked (if I could – this was pre-internet) read those authors and try to find out who they liked and read that.  This was a path that took me from 80s horror to science fiction, to the beats, to the lost generation, back into Victorian novels and French Romanticism, then, eventually, to Homer. I stole everything I could from these folks. Usually breaking it on my way out the back door.

At about age 18 or 19 –I’d already quit school and moved to Toronto- I came into a copy of William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well.”  Although this is a guide to writing non-fiction, it was the first book I’d ever read that imparted sensible advice on building a sentence. It emphasized clarity. From there, it was on to “The Elements of Style.”  This remains my most treasured reference book.  I prefer it to the dictionary and I really like the dictionary. Those two books taught me how to write. They gave me new eyes.

It made me look at my previous work how my first bespoke suit made me look at my previous clothes.

Having learned as much as I could on my own, I decided it was time to try attended Humber school for Writers where I had the privilege of being taught for a week by Robert J. Sawyer.  It was the first time that I’d learned anything about writing from another human being and I learned quite a bit.  I learned the names of some things that I had figured out for myself and gained a much better understanding of the rules governing them.  It made quite a bit clear.  He did say, however, that I was “a writer of enormous talent” and I thought of all those late nights and long hours  trying to figure out how a sentence worked and shuddered.  In spite of this, if you -for some damn reason- aspire to be a writer, I’d recommend him highly.  The Humber School for writers, not so much.

My trunk is full of stuff I wrote before knowing any rules and the stuff I wrote while trying to apply them.  While I understood and agreed with the principles, there’s a pretty big gulf between knowing something and being able to do it.  I know how to throw a curve-ball but I sure can’t throw a curve-ball.  Shit, I know how to throw a knuckleball and I probably couldn’t even get one of those out of my hand let alone reach the plate with it.  And most of my trunk is written with the sort of arrogance that one only ever finds in the truly ignorant.

It came easy.  Shit usually does.

Looking at my trunk makes me feel like a pitcher watching a highlight reel of his very worst moments from little league on.  You might be able to say in some cold objective voice: “Look how far you’ve come! You can actually throw a strike now!” You might even be right.  But it’s not a cold objective thing and, holy shit, it is not the sort of thing anyone needs to be thinking about right before they take the mound.  If you look at a pitcher, when things start to go real bad, you can see that movie playing in their eyes.

The greats can battle through that.  They can ignore it.  Everyone else carries it with them and reenacts it.

As far as I go, I find it hard enough to face every blank page and the failure, fuck-ups and embarrassments it represents, without waking up every single day with a drier full of them at the head of my bed.  I’m gonna throw all that old writing out.  If I ever need to mine stories or ideas out of my trunk, I’ve made a  bigger mistake than could ever be found within it.  Because, even worse than the prose is the man who wrote it.  And I’m always going to have to face him.  When things go bad, when I’m stuck and whenever I’m gripped by doubt, I’ll see that man.  i’ll be goddamned if I ever depend on him for anything and I sure don’t need an altar to the bastard.

The mirror is a tombstone that always looks backwards and the mirror is enough.

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Just found my baby book while cleaning.  Here’s some of Mother’s notes:

“Ryan was an extremely good-natured little fellow – crying only when he was hungry.  He enjoyed travel; new places and faces and lots of attention.  Ryan had a winning smile for everyone and was a true little “charmer.” By six weeks, he was sleeping soundly thru’ the night and often he would awake with a smile to wish me good morning! Ryan was a BIG baby and at the age of 3 months was wearing some of his new outfits sized to fit 12-18 month old babies!!”

I have no idea what happened either.

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I’ve been feeling strangely restless of late and last night, at about 2 am, I asked the wife if she intended to be awake until dawn.  Like me, she’s a night owl and usually goes to bed shortly before the sun comes out.  ”What time is dawn?” she asked.   I checked the weather network and found that the sun rose at 6:28.  Having informed her of this, I was pleased to learn that she would be awake.

“Let’s go to the park,” I said.  ”And look at birds.”

She found this idea agreeable and grabbed her camera.  We both wore pink, which garnered immediate compliments from cyclists.  For both of us!  This is quite odd as it’s usually my plumage that attracts notice while I tend to reduce the people beside me to invisibility.  ”Try to upstage me again,” I said to my dear wife, “and I will cut you.”

Taking my comment as a challenge rather than a warning, she pulled her switchblade and lunged towards my throat. Using the akido I learned in previous relationships, I disarmed her.  Our struggle brought us close together and our fight quickly escalated into passionate lovemaking on the sidewalk outside of the mini-mall.  This garnered no compliments from anyone.  It did attract the notice of the police.  Decoying them with the box of Timbits we keep for such purposes, we escaped into the park.

It was a shockingly beautiful morning.  So beautiful, that I had threaten to cut it too.

Pictures with captions after the jump.  None have been manipulated in any way.

Wife and I.

Sometimes I glow in photos. It's a nasty habit that Nan has warned me about.

They always tell you to stop and sniff the flowers. They never warn you about the bees.

One of my favorite pics of the wife. You can't tell but we were surrounded by chickadees. She's looking up at one of the cute little fellows.

Keeping an eye out for danger. I'd heard rumors of joggers.

Happily strolling along.

I don't often pose for photos. This is why. Though truthfully, even without the camera there, I would have been acting like an ass.

Imagine how happy the wife was to see me pick a flower.

Now imagine her disappointment when I gave it to myself.

And now imagine me hearing ye olde list of Ryan's personality flaws.

For the life of me, i don't understand why certain people don't just pick their own flowers. I did eventually give it to her. She did one of those 'he loves me, he loves me not' things. Turns out I love her. Big mouthed flower.

On a bridge, being quiet so that we won't wake the troll beneath it.

It woke up anyway but, luckily for us, wanted a pre-breakfast swim.

I just realized these photos are chronologically backwards. Not bothering to change that now.

Why don't I go to the park every morning? It's wonderful.

Waiting for the wife who was busy with her camera.

Still waiting. No wait, these are backwards. So not waiting so much yet.

It's almost like you know what's about to happen!

Leading my wife up the garden path.

I plain like this photo. Nice and simple.

Continue reading »]]> I wrote a guest editorial for Auxiliary Magazine.  You can download the pdf here.  I did not write my bio and I’m not taking any responsibility for that.

Auxiliary is an alternative fashion, music and lifestyle magazine - available online and in print– and I was asked to do something that related to alt culture.  I don’t really know what alt culture is or where I fit into it.  Am I an alternative?  I doubt it.  I did drop out of high-school instead of riding the office train to retirement at sixty five but, far as I can tell, I never had alternative to being myself.  Most of the important decisions I made turned out to be irreversible before I knew they were important.  I suspect most people are in the same boat.

Not really sure what to write, cognizant that people only listen to me because I dress well and determined to give the public what they want, I wrote an editorial comparing alt culture to the dandy. Seemed apt.  And, if not, at least it’s some bullshit I can stand behind.  Or in front of.  I do have a book to promote, ya know.

I don’t read many magazines but Auxiliary seems decent, which is a shame.  I prefer indecent publications like American Conservative or anything else that includes splayed vaginas like Pat Buchanan.  But Auxiliary lacks nudity and remains suspiciously quiet on the state of the American family and illegal immigration.

I suspect “alt” is just a codeword for secret homosexual, communist Illuminati agenda.

Aside from myself, you’ll find a lot of pictures.  If, for some reason you prefer reading to gawking at (clothed!?) goth girls, there’s Clint Catalyst, Nina Flowers, industrial band Android Lust and Andy Deane as well as an interview with Michael Swaim of little known humor site Cracked.com.

Anyway, go have a look.  Enjoy or don’t.  I’m not going to tell you how to live your fucking life.

Continue reading »]]> To impress a selection of war criminals, our government recently spent a small fortune on an artificial lake and some wooden deck chairs.  Since the wife and I are not war criminals (yet) we were not allowed anywhere near this costly display.  So we decided to accept the next best thing: A trip to the Muskokas.

We were surprised to discover that real lakes and chairs are much larger than their fake counterparts.

Size is relative.

The trip was partly a much needed vacation and a chance for my wife to spend some time with my family so that she might ally with them against me.

How a real lake looks.

A few years ago, my parents sold their palatial Victorian mansion in Newcastle and moved to a resort compound in Huntsville.  Not only had the upkeep of their stately home become  difficult for a couple in their declining years, their rural deadwater of a village had become too populated.  What had once been a place where no buses ran became the end of the line.  It transformed from a bastion of rednecks into a bedroom community for Toronto.  My every childhood haunt has either been torn down, burnt to ash or turned into a subdivision.   Sometimes all three.

But the local Kick and Stab, where I was so routinely punched in the face, still remains.  I will dance on its grave yet.

Young Ryan Oakley in a favorite climbing tree.

There is something of a misconception amongst city folk that everyone who was not raised in a city is a suburbanite.  There just aren’t enough rural people in general and certainly not enough in the city to convince them that there is such a place as the country and that it has nothing to do with the suburbs.   It’s a hopeless sort of urban elitism as the word “sub” should attest.  But I am a country boy; raised around septic tanks, cast-iron stoves, farmland and forest.   I am relieved that my parents once again live in the boonies and that I can spend some time out there.

I occasionally crave that.

This was one of those moments.  There were factors known to all – the G20 etc.-, factors known to some -my roommate’s broken leg- and some altogether private reasons but this was a good time for me to get the hell out of the city.  Frankly, for the past month, I’ve wanted to walk into the woods with a knife, some matches and a fishing rod.  I would return when I felt good and ready to return.

Things did not come to that.  Instead, the wife and I got some bus tickets and headed north.  I was just as excited for her as for me.  She arrived in Canada some time ago and still hadn’t seen its natural beauty.  (Unless you count a day-trip to Hamilton.)   Being stuck in the city, she has developed a warped understanding of the Canadian character.  That’s not to assign a higher order of authenticity to country folk –I know them too well for that and, at any rate, this is Huntsville we’re talking about– but it is to say that one must see different things to get a complete picture.   She was going to see a lake, do some fishing and get bitten by a few mosquitoes.  All that is as Canadian as apple pie.

The parents and I took her fishing off the dock and she caught her first fish.  I caught my millionth.

Funny enough, that’s not her first fish.  Her first fish was much larger than that and escaped my grip before we could get a picture.  That was, however, about the biggest I managed to catch.  But what the fish lacked in size they made up for in abundance.  We caught quite a few and returned them all to the lake.  It was great fun and the wife posted some pictures, which I retweeted.

Doing that somewhat predictably resulted in this.

Which my wife saw.

Suddenly the golf game I was trying to avoid seemed like a marvelous idea.

This also made it very clear why Tiger Woods is so motivated to play this ridiculous ”sport.”

I’m no sort of philander (one woman is more than enough) and actually enjoy being around my wife (for most of the month) so my golf game is terrible.  By the fourth hole, I’d completely given up keeping score.  I’d lost count of my number of shots right off the tee and it just seemed pointless.

I’m a bit better at swimming and enjoy it far more.

And my expertise in both sitting and standing beside a lake is unparalleled.

Though, I must admit, I had some stiff competition.

By evening, the wife and I were able to put aside our sitting contest and enjoy something she had never really seen before and I never get to see enough: The stars.  The night sky is the one thing that I constantly miss about the country.  Aside from being beautiful, the stars remind me of the utter futility of all human endeavor and the complete stupidity of all our problems.  When faced with the vast nihilism of space, the complete apathy it has for anything as insignificant as a planet full of humans, I always feel a mixture of humility and exaltation.  Exalted because it’s quite clear that every problem and solution we have is ours alone; humble because the outcome is so totally irrelevant.

I’m also reminded that space is massive.  Much bigger than an elephant, which is easily big enough.  It’s also quite old.  I think that the amount of time we have alive as measured against the age of the universe is about how big our bodies are when measured against its size.  And yet people are obsessed with living for a slightly longer period or extending their control over a bit more space.  They do some pretty awful and cowardly things in pursuit of both aims.  Seems absurd.

I stripped naked and went for a midnight swim, looking up at these stars.  No pictures of that.  There’s some things that a camera just won’t do justice to and other things that cold water shrinks.

Although I forgot to shave for the duration, the trip was a good one.  It’s always a pleasure to see my family.  this was even better than usual as it allowed them to get acquainted with the family’s newest member.  You basically don’t get enough of these pleasant moments.  And you won’t.  No matter how you cut it, the bulk of life is going to be unpleasant or indifferent with occasional periods of bad.  So, when things go your way, you’ve got to enjoy it.   The rest of the time, endurance is key.  Having some happy memories is a good way to get through.

Because, fuck it, one day we all wake up dead.

Not really dead - just napping on couch after work.

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As I take people like Oscar Wilde, Cicero and Friedrich Reck-Malleczenwen as my models of political dissent, I think it’s important to remember that even in horrible times, especially then, beauty, dignity and basic human decency are of paramount importance.  Although they are the first things to become improbable, you must never allow your better parts to become impossible.  So, as counterpoint to the barbarity of the weekend, I’m collecting some images of myself in some nice bloody suits.  Because this is an image heavy post, there’s a jump.  So, if you want to see more, jump!

Friday Around the Fence: These Pics by Danielle of Final Fashion

Saturday at the Park: Pictures By My Beautiful Wife

Thursday Picnic at the Anti-Police March