When I was a young man I wanted to be a great criminal defence lawyer. I wanted the visibility and the notoriety I imagined would come with that. It was narcissistic and vain and shallow but I was young and cocksure of myself. I would not entertain any challenge to my self image.
We all loved going out in Grampa’s boat. It was a blue boat that matched the colour of the sea. My brothers Zack and Linden and I had been coming to Deep Bay all our lives, which isn’t all that long, when you think of it. I’m ten, Zack is seven and Linden is five.
This is an excerpt from ‘Bubna’ a novel I am writing. It’s an historical fiction about the life of Countess Bubna-Litic, an English blue blood who came to Canada in 1914. She was one of the most eccentric women ever to have emigrated to Canada. The Countess eventually settled in Kelowna BC where she built the Hotel Eldorado on the shores of Lake Okanagan. It was an astonishing achievement, the first destination resort hotel built in the Okanagan, deep in BC’s hinterland some four hundred kilometres from the west coast. Divorced, eccentric, a feminist and vastly wealthy the Countess was not to be trifled with.
On a beautiful summer day the hotel opened. It was 1926.
Joe. Joe, listen to me. Stop. Now!
You are too old to be the president of the United States of America. It’s time to go. None of us should be left in positions of power and authority when we get older and because that statement needs a number, I’m thinking 70.
I rewrote this blog after the US Supreme Court decision this week which gave Donald Trump sweeping immunity protection for criminal acts during his presidency. He is widely expected to win the US presidential election this November.
I wrote this at Deep Bay BC on Vancouver Island one early morning in the summer of 2024. I was alone and I shut my eyes and listened to the world around me as it woke up to greet another day.
And now I’m old. And that’s a good thing. I get to be old when many of my friends did not. They don’t get to say ‘I was old once.’ and I do.
Each year in June I write about my friend David Larsen. He died three years ago. David started as my boss and ended up being the greatest friend I have ever had and one of the most important influences in my life.
Writing for profit is a fool’s game. I don’t, I write for myself. Some of my writing is profound, some is important, but most of it is neither of those two things. I am at my best as an observational humourist, filtering the mundane through the ‘amusing’ lens and writing.
David Sedaris is a great American observational humourist and he has unknowingly guided me as I spelunked my way through many a dark, confusing writing tunnel. He taught me to stop worrying about inspiration. He says that human beings are very funny, hilarious at times. The knack he says is to get better at seeing it. He is right, if I have grown as a writer it is because I am better now at ‘seeing’ us as we are, simple and complex, shallow and profound, tragic and hilarious. We are endlessly fascinating, a never ending source of writing inspiration.
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