Meta Micah

A month ago, I did the first interview for my book, for a radio show. The interview was taped so that the producers could take some time off for the summer and then have it ready to go for the Fall when the book is actually out.  Before losing my interviewginity, I wanted to prepare and I figured I should come up with a response to the question, “Describe your book.” Everybody told me I should have this ready and that it should be two to three sentences long. I was somewhat reluctant to do this. How to describe 65,000 words written over the course of five years? But it seemed like a good exercise nonetheless.

So anyway, a couple days before the interview, I happened into some pot.

So, I wrote this while high:

“I learned so much from my parents — wisdom and tools for life. But for some reason, I also needed to challenge this wisdom and the usefulness of the tools to my own life. In the book, I did this two ways: One was to go over some of the key events in my life, playing with skeptical sarcasm to test out each one. And then I’d choose: do I believe this earnestly or is it a joke to me, just a revealing of the absurd nature of existence? I’ve found that it’s both. And thus, this combination is the alchemical recipe of my own tools, the ones that I may one day pass down; the second way was by exploring the teachings that most profoundly impacted my parents and influenced their parenting practices to see if I felt they’d interpreted them correctly. Also, because I still quite like a lot of the lessons I was passed down through my parents, I wanted to learn more. Maybe I even wanted to attempt to surpass their wisdom, to be more conscious.”

Sober analysis: When I wrote it, I remember feeling that I was having an earth-shatteringly profound revelation about my motivations. (In other words, I was high). But even now, I think it is something of a lucid insight into my writing process, which I wasn’t even conscious of while it was happening. Certainly, it’s a very dry, analytical description of that process, appropriate perhaps since I am the son of analysts.

My favorite part, though, is the rather Oedipal ending, the desire to become more “conscious” than my parents, to beat or surpass them at their own game and thus fulfill the metaphorical slaying of the father. Pot used to make me paranoid, but apparently, in this instance, it made me ambitiously self-righteous. It reminds me, in fact, of the way I used to feel when I’d get high as a teenager and would write in my journal about everything that was wrong with “society”. In any case, I’m not sure it really describes the final product as much as it functions as a justification, or an explanation, for the writing of the book itself. I doubt that it’ll ever end up on the radio. Unless I get high before the next interview, of course.

I went on a first date last week. My date and I were set up by someone who told her that I was a divorced. Fair enough. Some people consider you spoiled goods if you’re divorced, but I personally feel marrying and surviving divorce is more equivalent to having done a Ph.D in Love.

Anyhow, on this date, inevitably, the question came up: “So, what happened?” Along with “How’s the book going?” this has been the question I’ve been asked most frequently in the last two years and both of them are seriously hard ones to answer. In the case of the divorce, sometimes I wish one of us had had an affair with our accountant so I could just say that and leave it. But that wasn’t the case. Plus, do people have affairs with accountants? (No offense, Brian).

My ex-wife and I met in university. We were so young. Children, really. Our relationship began when she prank phone called me in our university dorm, but we didn’t meet for a year after that, and didn’t hook up until she was living with a former roommate of mine three years after we first spoke. It was love at fourth sight. But truly, it was love at fourth sight. It’s incredible the way timing works like that.

If I were making a ‘thank you’ speech to all the people who conspired to finally bring us together, one of the foremost mentioned would be the Portugese man in the Portugese mens’ bar in Montreal that we dared infiltrate for our first drink alone. As we talked about love and our exes, an old man came over to us and screamed at me: “You are young! I am old! You… are young! I… am old!” It went on for a while. It may have been the only English he knew, but I got the gist: Carpe Diem!

While walking her home, I told her that I didn’t come over to her apartment so often just to see our mutual friend. “I come to see you,” I said. One block later, we were making out like crazy on the sidewalk.

Everything went fine for the next nine years. And by fine, I mean: lots of sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, work, vacations, fights, almost affairs, tears, rage, anxiety, restlessness, road trips, shopping excursions, dinners with mom and dad, a wedding, anniversaries, one near fatal bike accident… The usual.

Anyways, one day, she came into my tiny sun room office while I was working and sat down on the chair on the other side of the room. This was very unusual. She didn’t normally do this when I was working because it would mean that she’d also have to hear me gripe about whatever I was working on.

She looked grim.

“What’s wrong?” I said finally, after taking a deep breath.

“It’s gone,” she said.

“Oh,” I replied. I looked away, out the window, thinking. Then turned back to her. “So, what now?”

“I asked the guy if they had season three disc three of the O.C. and he said they did.”

I sighed. “Okay, fine,” I agreed. (In actuality, I had gotten massively addicted to the show since she’d first made me watch it.)

The O.C. ran for four seasons and was dominated by two love affairs: one between Marissa and Ryan (a drug-addled rich girl and an inner city kid with a penchant for punching out spoiled rich kids) and Seth and Summer (a comic book geek and a really hot girl who is addicted to a TV show that’s about teenagers in California… so meta!)

Marissa and Ryan’s love affair started in epic fashion:

Ryan, taken in by Seth’s family after something goes bad with his own, goes out to the road in front of their mansion to have a smoke. Marissa is there waiting for a ride. She asks him for a cigarette.

“So, who are you?” she asks after he lights it.

His answer: “Whoever you want me to be.”

Truly horrible line. Truly awesome.

So, eventually the two couples break up. (Seth and Summer do get back together by the end of series, though when she goes off to college their romance is left in limbo). I want to tell you why they broke up and I have been racking my brain but it’s pretty fuzzy.

I think in the case of Summer and Seth, Seth got really into the graphic novel he was creating with this guy Zach and stopped paying attention to Summer, even though, ironically, one of the superhero characters was based on her. In his absence, Zach moves in on Summer. That was a seriously fucked thing for him to do, but then Seth had someone else for a while too. If memory serves, she was bisexual and ends up hooking up with Marissa, too.

Ryan and Marissa never get back together. Maybe they were just too young and stupid to remain in love. Perhaps Ryan couldn’t manage his masculine energy properly and Marissa never learned how to love herself.

For a while, in real life, the real people who played Summer and Seth really dated. But then they broke up for reasons I can’t remember. The last I read, the real person who played Summer was dating Hayden Christensen (the guy who played Annakin Skywalker in the new Star Wars trilogy).

Incidentally, I met Hayden Christensen once when I wrote a cover profile of him for an issue of Toro Magazine, where I was working back when my ex and I were still together. It was never published, though, because the magazine folded the day before it would’ve gone to press. (Everything ends, I suppose). If the circumstances weren’t standing in our way – Hayden being a famous movie star who lives in L.A. and me being a writer living in Toronto – I got the impression that we could probably be friends. Who knows – maybe we still will.



Sometimes I write short stories. And sometimes I just write titles to short stories and never actually write the story. I think this might be because I have a natural inclination to writing poetry. But writing a poem is something I do even less often than completing a short story. Anyhow, “Aurora and The Cheese Guy” might one day be a story, but it might not. It might remain just a title.

Aurora and The Cheese Guy are real people. I met both of them at an event that I attended recently, one which was mainly attended by a cross-section of the new New Agey crowd. The extent of my interactions with these two was so minimal that I got to imagine a lot into who they are. All I know about The Cheese Guy is that he arranged the cheese platter on the food table and I know nothing about Aurora, except that her name is Aurora, which I think says a lot by itself.

At one point, they ended up sitting next to each other. The Cheese Guy is very nerdy looking – glasses, shirt and tie, faded unstylish jeans, bad haircut. He was hired to do I.T by the New Agey organization the event was raising funds for, but he doesn’t know anything about Buddhism, or meditation, or energy. Aurora is wearing black stretch pants and a tight black top, a little low around the neck, dangly orange earrings and a blue headband. She’s sexy. Sexy because she is yoga-toned, but also sexy because her face is perpetually smiling. And she’s open, open to The Cheese Guy in a way he’s never experienced before. The Cheese Guy, in fact, has not had sex or touched a woman’s skin for five years. He’s shy but Aurora is so friendly to him that he starts asking her questions about what she does. She explains reiki to him, how she waves her hand over her clients’ bodies and heals their old traumas or their new injuries. He keeps asking questions so that he can keep looking into her eyes. He has never in his life made such sustained eye contact with another person.

The bongo players start up and Aurora pulls The Cheese Guy to his feet to dance with her. She starts grinding around in an African dance style and The Cheese Guy tries to mimic her. He awkwardly attempts to continue the conversation but she just smiles at him adoringly and dances. Her gyrations slowly draw him closer. She turns around and sways her backside in his direction.

At the end of the night, she invites him to her apartment to have tea and relaxes him into a mood of lovemaking, which continues until the daylight.

Here’s where the hard part of writing a story begins. What happens now? This is where, I suppose, a lot of stories break down. Writers often can’t get past what one editor of mine once called The Turn. A lot of new relationships or potential flings break down here, too.

My idea right now is that The Cheese Guy – someone who can expertly master new systems when he is properly motivated – becomes an avid reader of Buddhism and builds himself up to a two-hour-a-day meditation practice. At the same time, he is drawn further and further into Aurora’s world, into her way of speaking and thinking. There’s some scenes where Aurora meets his friends and they make fun of her New Agey-ness, but at the same time they are also won over by her charm and beauty and harbor envy towards The Cheese Guy.

The Cheese Guy is in love, but one day Aurora tells him that the energy is taking her to another lover. They can remain friends, however, if that feels right to him. It doesn’t feel right to The Cheese Guy and, in fact, the whole situation is unacceptable. He attempts to use his new Buddhist skills to overcome his jealousy and emotional suffering, but to no avail. He is thrown into a crisis.

The story concludes with either a murder, a threesome, or an identity breakdown that brings The Cheese Guy back to being the person he was before he met Aurora, but with the addition of an ongoing thing for New Age women, which is inconveniently and simultaneously accompanied by an intense distrust and bitterness towards them.

During the event, a friend and I stood outside for a long time, smoking a couple cigarettes and catching up. We were outside so long that we witnessed several people leaving the party to go home. The first person I saw leaving was Aurora. She was still smiling as she passed by, walking off alone into the night. And later, I saw The Cheese Guy too. He and a sharply-dressed blonde – his girlfriend or wife, by the looks of it – got into a car together and drove off. His cheese platter was really good.