When last we left me, I was promising that the second part of the interview with myself would feature “growing up in Duncan, writing, singing and UFOs.” On we go.
Note: As before, the interviewer (me) has been named Dopple for short.
Dopple: Welcome to the second part of the interview.
Me: Thanks, it’s great to be here on the internet. This new carpeting is very nice.
Dopple: Let’s start with some sports talk.
Me: If you insist.
Dopple: I do. How do you feel about none of the Canadian teams making it into the Stanley Cup Playoffs this year?
Me: I already thanked the Canucks for another year without riots. Overall I am nonplussed. I know in some way I should be at least somewhat outraged but I just don’t care that much. Players and teams themselves move around so much it makes the whole exercise of loyalty kind of silly. Last year a co-worker was pumped over the Blue Jays during their playoff run. I pointed out that only three players on the roster were Canadian citizens. He didn’t seem to like that.
Dopple: Tell me about your singing.
Me: Usually done in the shower or with the headphones on when no one else is at home. I’ve been told that I have a great voice (by a roommate coming home early and listening to me wail away before entering the apartment) and more or less been told to never open my mouth again. Realistically, my voice has a fairly limited range and if I stay within those limits, it’s acceptable. I can do a decent Elvis or Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan is actually a lot of fun to imitate. If I try to imitate someone like Billy Joel or Jeff Lynne (can you tell I’m old?) my vocal cords start aching almost immediately. Trying Geddy Lee would likely result in permanent damage to my singing and speaking abilities.
Dopple: Have you ever sung professionally?
Me: I sang in a few plays. I soloed “Down in the Valley” in grade 11 for “Dark of the Moon.” I even learned to play guitar but really I just learned where to put my fingers on the guitar in order to produce sounds reminiscent of the song “Down in the Valley.” I didn’t know a chord from a strut. I didn’t get paid for any of this, so the answer is no. My only reward were all the accolades I made up in my head.
Dopple: What was it like growing up in Duncan?
Me: The actual city limits, for reasons unclear to me, are very small, so the population has always hovered around 5,000. This makes it fairly tiny by city standards, though with the outlying area it’s actually more like 43,000 (according to Wikipedia). For growing up it was fine. I didn’t get in any fights, I had a bunch of good friends, my family got along relatively well, I did fine in school. I grew up in the 70s and early 80s so it goes without saying I had bad hair. But we all did, so it was a bonding thing. A horribly hideous bonding thing, but one all the same. I remember when our first McDonald’s opened in 1978. It was a major cultural event. If you wanted a Big Mac before then (I didn’t, I had a thing for the Filet-o-fish) you had to drive all the way to Victoria. Two years later we got our first Wendy’s. It was fast food but the way you ordered was completely different than McDonald’s. Someone would come by while you stood in line and took your order down on a pad of paper (because you could customize everything), then you worked your way to the counter to pay and collect your food. It seems very quaint now.
Dopple: That sounds very bucolic but surely there was a dark side to Duncan.
Me: It was more beige than dark. There were bad kids. A lot of people drank too much, including my dad. There were drugs and we had a weird family that lived at the end of the street for awhile and the RCMP would visit semi-regularly. A nine year old kid got run over by a cement truck on the Island Highway a block from my house, prompting the installation of the third traffic light as you pass through the city. Even today there are still only three lights when you drive through on the Island Highway. Also, I’m pretty sure I was kind of addicted to arcade games for awhile. It was mild as addictions go because I didn’t have an endless supply of cash, but I spent enough time in the three arcades (I remember The Saucy Dragon downtown but have forgotten the names of the others) that I got my first full-time job at age 19 working in an arcade. Handing out quarters was not a particularly challenging task so I helped kill the time by writing my first novel, using a pencil and six notebooks. I still have the notebooks today. The novel is bad and unfinished, but I had incredibly neat handwriting, which was actually printing.
Dopple: What do you think of UFOs? Do they exist?
Me: You don’t want to know more about Duncan? I can go on.
Dopple: Maybe later. Unless you have a Duncan UFO story.
Me: In fact, I do. My grandfather–my mom’s dad–owned a Texaco station outside town on the Island Highway (south of town, on the way to Victoria and until 1978, the McDonald’s in Victoria). He and his wife lived in a small home in a large yard behind the station. As I recall, the area around the station was mostly woods and fields of wild grass. One night they heard something outside and when my grandfather went to look he saw a UFO hovering above their house. His response was to get a shotgun and shoot at it. It flew away and as far as I know, never returned. Could you blame it? I guess my grandfather really didn’t like trespassers, regardless of what planet they came from.
Dopple: So you believe in UFOs?
Me: I don’t know what he saw but a UFO is an Unidentified Flying Object and there are thousands of reported cases. I don’t think the question is whether they exist or not–they clearly do–but what are they? Many are just a case of mistaken identity. Some may even be swamp gas. But the number of truly unknown cases is enough to confirm we don’t know everything that’s going on up in the sky. If you ask me if UFOs are extraterrestrials visiting from other galaxies, I would say I don’t know. It seems like a long way to travel to mostly just watch us.
Dopple: What about abductions, cattle mutilations and all that?
Me: Again, I don’t know. I don’t have any cattle. I’ve never been abducted, either, unless you count being made to go shopping with my mom when I really wanted to stay home and play video games.
Dopple: Moving on. Let’s talk about writing.
Me: Okay.
Dopple: You write.
Me: Yes.
Dopple: Don’t be difficult.
Me: You can’t stop me.
Dopple: I think I can.
Me: Fine. Yes, I write. I’ve written since I knew how. That sounds like stating the obvious but what I mean is I’ve written creatively since first learning how to write. My grade three teacher (one of them, actually–I had four because grade three was an experimental “open area” learning experience) read this silly stream of conscious story I wrote and the comment she put down, the only comment from a teacher I can clearly remember, was “Kid, you’re a scream!” It was truly inspiring to me.
Dopple: So you kept writing through school.
Me: Yes. In grade five a bunch of us wrote stories that would be shot with a single black and white camera as “movies”, which seemed incredibly exciting, even futuristic, at the time. The class voted for several and mine was one of the winners because I included vampires. You can never go wrong with vampires. I kept writing short stories and plays and things and that first unfinished novel when I was 19. When I moved to Vancouver I started writing more sporadically and sometimes went years without writing at all. I did keep a journal for a year or so, around 1987. It was mostly filled with sarcasm.
Dopple: Why did the writing become intermittent?
Me: Some people are born to write. Stephen King cranks out books like I crank out CO2. James Patterson writes a new book every two seconds. These people are obsessed, compelled. They can’t stop. I am not like that. I am easily distracted. I don’t get passionate about my writing (or my reading). I read a lot but I don’t try to educate myself, particularly. I keep writing in the passive voice and have to go back and fix it all the time. I write stories that go nowhere and peter out. I put it off. I make excuses. I doubt my ability. The list goes on and on, like a roll of toilet paper that never fully unravels.
Dopple: A colorful metaphor.
Me: I’m full of ’em.
Dopple: Do you still write?
Me: Yes. I made a vow to write every day, mostly on this blog if nowhere else, and I’ve stuck to it reasonably well. It enforces discipline, which is a key thing I’ve always struggled with.
Dopple: How is it going now?
Me: Okay. It could be better but it could be much worse, too, or non-existent. I’ve got a number of projects so I try to rotate between them so I’m always working on something. But it is slow-going. I still struggle with focusing, with putting butt in chair and just doing it, Nike-style.
Dopple: I’d like to know more but it’s getting late. Can we continue this later?
Me: You mean do a Part 3 of 2?
Dopple: Yes, exactly.
Me: It’s a date. But no kissing on the first date.
Dopple: Liar. Like, super liar.
Me: Quiet, you.
Tune in next time in which we find out if I do kiss on first dates, more about writing and other creative pursuits and who knows what else. Probably something dumb.
