ManicWorld Magazine

“I want to go to the party!
I want to drink the bacardi!
Who’s bringing the molly?
Who’s gonna stop me…” -Private School, Arkells

A few years ago I packed my sentimental things into large brown cardboard boxes and moved. I moved to Montreal to create art. I wasn’t fully sure why. I attended an art high school and that was just the thing you did. For any internet or social problem, the solution was always to create art. Externalize your feelings, and process your grief into a poem, sculpture, or avant-garde film. In the 2010s, Montreal was the designated place to do that, to be unapologetically weird. At the time, the city had this alluring bohemian energy to it, that attracted many creative types. Remember, this was the time when hipster-dom peaked, and before gentrification had fully grasped Montreal’s housing supply. And so, I left the English-speaking part of Canada and with minimal knowledge of the French language, I moved to the province of Quebec.

If I had gone to a normal high school, I probably would have tried getting into law school, or policy-sci, or competing for a sports scholarship. But I went to an art high school. A weird art school in the east end of Toronto where all the teachers were former hippies recovering from their extensive acid trips. It was a school where the students were free to dress up as goths, punks, or whatever they wanted. Even after graduating, for years afterward, I’m embarrassed to confess that I still felt like I was still in an art high school. I still struggle with setting realistic goals for myself.

At this school, we didn’t have jocks or debate bros, we had poets and singers, but most of all, we had cinephiles. For an insecure seventeen-year-old, I wanted nothing more than to feel validated. I wanted the world to hear every emotion I felt. I wanted my massive ego to grow even bigger. I wanted my naive emotions to fill entire stadiums.

If I was able to survive a normal high school, I would have put all of my energy into something more productive, like editing the school paper, joining the swim team, or running for student council. But because I found myself in this odd institution, all that raw teenage ego went into wanting to make movies and joined a beat poetry club.

Maybe I was just another teenage boy entering adulthood, maybe I feared death and craved immortality. My theory is that I was just an annoying Toronto-nian. Toronto as a city has no fixed identity. We’re not rich like New York, not sexy like Montreal, not political like Ottawa, not glamorous like Los Angeles, not hip like Atlanta, or sporty like Vancouver. Anyone who grows up in a cultural wasteland like Ontario desires to make art if not just to distract oneself from the miserable everyday-ness of ordinary life. Just like Bertolt Brecht had a drive to make out of the ruins of post-war Germany in his bomb-out theatre without a roof, or Bruce Springsteen had to sing about the misery of small-town New Jersey, sometimes we all just need to escape. That’s just a part of being human, always craving that sweet erotic ‘je ne c’est quoi’. Call it “soul”, or call it “zen”, I was desperate for a spark of energy to ignite my miserable life in Toronto. I was an aesthetic junkie, hungry for some good art.

And so we, me and my old friends, snuck into grimy gay bars and then drunkenly scarped our knees at the skate park, yearning for a taste of sweet urban aesthetic bliss. Chasing an experience that would inevitability turn into a fleeting memory. It was a time that felt like pure euphoria rolled up into a neatly packed joint.

Eventually, I stopped going out to those beach jams. I grow up into an adult, slowly and then quickly. All of a sudden I had facial hair under my delicate chin and nose. My music tastes began to change, and I noticed myself listening to Joy Division less and less, and Peter Gabriel more. Drinking out at the parks at 2 am just seemed less and less enjoyable. I guess that is just what happens when your brain’s frontal lobe grows.

Gradually, I started to recognize less and less of the face out at night. And the last thing I wanted to happen to me was to get ‘stuck’ there, drinking cheap beer at Leuty Beach. I feared becoming a Peter Pan. The only scarier than growing up was staying a teenager forever. I didn’t want to turn into those creepy adults that hang around teens. Deep down, I intuition-ally knew just how wrong it was for a grown adult to date a young person. It’s just so gross. That knowledge made me so uncomfortable trying to process my reality. For years, I had ignored my situation, until my failing mental health forced me to confront it head-on.

So I stopped showing up to the parties, and I started spending my time at AA meetings held in an old Anglican Church basements with other grown-ups.