About me

I was born in 1983 and grew up on the northern escarpment of Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba, Canada. If we are defined by place, then my identity is rooted in the mixed deciduous and coniferous forests of the boreal plains which covers a glacier scarred topography underlain by 80 million old shales through which underfit streams have carved their humble legacy. It is a prosaic, utilitarian land of warm, smokey summers and winters so cold that poplars crack like gunshots in the still morning air. It will kill a man as easily as it provides him a decent life, and I count on both as I bide my time here. You will hear no – few – complaints from me.

Variably over the years I have materially supported myself through factory work, mineral exploration, construction millwrighting, and software development. Unsurprisingly, my educational background reflects this arc: I have a BSc (Hons) in Geological Sciences from the University of Manitoba, a certificate in Millwrighting, and a diploma in Business Information Technology. Having a wife and two young sons complicates my next professional experiment, but I will be returning to the U of M in the fall of 2025 to pursue a BA in Psychology while continuing to work full-time. I would like to follow that up with a Master’s in Counselling and finish out the rest of my career in mental health services. But the exact character of that path remains to be seen.

This lack of commitment to, or respect for any one career path belies the ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ ethic I inherited from my father, and reflects the wealth of interests which rattle around in my head. My parents were eminently practical people in their approach to life and I am well-derived from their stock; those who hunted, fished, harvested wheat and canola, worked the railways, and built the hydro dams in this vast province. But I also must pay tribute to the intellectual and artistic cant of my soul through reading everything I can get my hands on, writing fiction and poetry, philosophizing, cartooning, and immersing myself in punk, metal, indie-rock, ska, and jazz. I have been known to dabble in the outdoors through activities like hiking, kayaking, skiing, snowmobiling, and camping, although instances of each are relatively few and far between. I manage to run a 5k and/or 10k a couple of times each year and recently got back into golfing. I do a lot, but everything casually owing to constraints on my time.

Philosophically I am an atheist who oscillates between the materialism of modern science and an anti-realism of a vaguely-Cartesian mode that desires so desperately to grasp the phenomenological object but continually fails. I believe the universe we inhabit is a collapsed reduction of an ever-flickering Platonic One manifesting itself dynamically at the level of Planck time, imbuing our existence with a telenomy toward entropy and the overcoming of mediation. In other words, we are the emergent recognition of a flux that seeks to witness itself in the same way we seek to fulfill our own thymotic drive with our effacing pursuits. At least, this is the post-hoc rationalization I have developed to explain the innate will that has both plagued and inspired me since I was a young child. It is the only thing that makes sense to me in an uncanny world that would otherwise drive me insane.

But where does that leave me in the contingent, concrete world of what Hegel called our 'substantial' – that is, daily – life? In a world of hurt, to be quite honest. There is no easy path forward and I fully accept the bonds of what Sartre called 'radical freedom' and what Ortega y Gasset, another existentialist, prescribed as our task: "[Man] has to make his existence at every single moment." The exact steps are never stated in these sorts of pronouncements, but hopefully I have been and continue to be clever enough to understand the principles at play and apply them accordingly. Success remains to be seen. My days pass by quickly and often unfulfilled, but yet there is an increasing peace lurking in the background knowing that I have created a unique reality for myself. I think the primary task now is to enable myself to communicate that outward into the world. After all, one of the greatest capabilities we have as a human being is to incept new concepts and ideas into another. I do not take that right – and obligation – lightly.

Literature

My top five novels – all with multiple re-reads:

Fifth Business, Robertson Davies
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishguro
After Dark, Haruki Murakami
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano

My taste in literature tends toward the interiority of the main character(s), or in the case of something like The Savage Detectives, the outline sketched/carved out by those who knew them. I like psychological progression, meditation on loss, reflection on whether a life was well lived or not – basically themes that reflect back to me the struggles that I believe and feel I am facing in my own life. I like regret and liminal spaces, the moments where a character could have but did not, or in turn jumped into the sempiternal stream of life and faced the consequences with dignity. Dignity is big with me. Nobility, too. I will always pick up a book where men are making their way through a world that simply does not make sense.

Music

My top five metal albums are:

Opeth, Blackwater Park
Katatonia, The Last Fair Deal Gone Down
Havukruunu, Tavastland
Mgla, Exercises In Futility
Agalloch, The Mantle

My taste in metal ranges from black to progressive death to the older-school death/doom to folk/pagan, but the common thread throughout each is it must be melodic. Extreme metal and metal-adjacent sub-genres like death metal or grind generally do not do the trick for me as they prioritize brutality and noise – which I respect, but turn to only when I am in a particular mood.

– 2026.01.14 – top