For thirty-four years I inhabited one world as one self.

I say inhabited, but I dwelt nowhere, in an unreality of habitual inhibition. I was a pious heretic, an obedient radical, dedicated to satisfying the criteria of being a good person — and, even more importantly, of avoiding being a bad one. School had equipped me with critical toys for dissecting alleged beliefs of the past, still held, believe it or not, by contemptible fools still stuck there. I had it on good authority that authority was to be questioned, interrogated, tortured until it broke. In school I’d also received a beautiful set of broken idols, and I enjoyed subjecting them to ritual reshattering. But the greatest gift of my education was a headful of disdainful ideas about the commercial world, a disdain reinforced by all my entertainment heroes. But despite all these cynical thoughts about the rat race — and all those careerist rats scrambling beside me, and, hopefully slightly behind me — in my heart (and, come to find out, also in my hands and feet) I preferred death to being a bad employee.

But one deep-frozen Toronto winter, I exited. I vanished into nowhere, and returned as a new self in a new world, as crazy and wordless as a newborn. Nothing was different, but everything had changed. Urban petrichor whispered dog wisdom into my opened nostrils, in concurrency of ammonia, maple syrup, motor oil and wet gravel. The subway was overflowing with international angels. I rode my bicycle everywhere, singing and babbling nonsense, poems flowing around me. Everything was here, real, superphysical, important.

Somehow, though I was here, capable of welcoming myself into this new world. Somehow, I reparented myself, sometimes patiently. Somehow, I retaught myself speech. New meanings remapped themselves to old words. Ironic bilinguality was set like a wafer on my mother tongue, investing each word with humming, glowing irony. The daughter tongue of Pierre Menard, reauthor of the Quixote became legible in my ears. Somehow, I could still use the old meanings of the old words to communicate whatever I needed to say, provided it was nothing anyone could possibly care about.

From the outside, nothing much was different. I was the same guy — maybe happier and definitely more cryptic.

I raised this baby to a second adulthood, with a few minor rebirth setbacks along the way.

But everyone knows everything.