This is the part where I take you by the hand and begin leading you toward a grimy-looking door set a little too securely into the wall of a derelict tenement-building. I hand you the first hit, it’s free, and assure you that everything is going to be alright. Please, don’t let the strong stench of hobo urine, the accumulated filth, or the scattering of used hypodermic needles deter you from entering this hellish-looking den of iniquity. Just place your unsullied palm square in the middle of the “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” warning (painted in blood), give a hard shove, and follow me. Completely at your own risk. And I can’t promise you will exit the building the same person you went in, or even at all.

 

What follows can hardly be called an adventure. A challenge maybe, or a trial; the best way I could describe a reader’s experience of this book is as a third-person ordeal through my many tribulations. Self-imposed tribulations for the most part, as I have had a penchant for taking golden opportunities and magically transmuting them into lead weights to hang around the neck of my gargantuan regret-monster. Maybe the thinking was to eventually add so much weight that my monster wouldn’t be able to pull it, and I could finally escape from it’s shadow. A poor tactic to be sure. It didn’t work.

 

What such tactics did ensure though, was that I ended up with a laundry list of hard-luck stories born of many poor choices. The dependability of “Yours Truly” to consistently make the absolute worst decision in any given situation has often baffled even the most adept scholars of the human mind. Maybe not quite to that extent, yet, but that’s only because they’re still unaware of my existence. However, given my track record with the people I have crossed paths with over the years, should any so-called “experts” of human behaviour look into any of my experiences, whatever previous findings they have relied on concerning the rest of humanity will go right out the window.

 

From the depths of poverty did I emerge, to painstakingly scrape and scrabble up the ladder, to positions of wealth and responsibility that I had no idea even existed outside the realms of rockstar, hockey-player or some other such high-profile god-figure. But like Icarus was in regards to the sun, I was in regards to the ways of having: woefully under-educated. I panicked every time success and abundance invaded the comfort zone of familiar lack and struggle, and I expertly chased them away.

 

The pit of despair is a greedy beast with an intense phobia of being alone. It hangs on to it’s children with the strength of eons when they attempt escape, making freedom impossible for all but the most determined fighters.

 

I did manage to escape now and then, sometimes even for extended periods of time, but faithful minions of the pit eventually found me and brought me home to repent. And the higher I climbed, the harder I fell, back into the wretched embrace of sweet misery; the default home of poor and ignorant weaklings.

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