Stranger Than Fiction, 7

In 1987 I settled into my new apartment, a large comfy bachelor in an older building in the West End and affordable rent.  The noise from neighbouring tenants day and night, upstairs, downstairs and next door on both sides got to be something intolerable.  I still didn't know about earplugs.  Life otherwise was taking on a numbing sameness.  I still worked at the same job in the Downtown Eastside with little drama and put in a lacklustre performance.  I coped with church and assorted idiots.  I continued my prayer walks but the thrill was gone.  I was burned out, and worse than burned out.  I used to joke about being beyond burnout and I did not grasp or appreciate how true that really was.

In the fall the cultured idiot contacted me and asked to stay with me since he was on the wagon and seriously involved with Alcoholics Anonymous.  We stayed together in my apartment for two months without drama, without incident.  Despite the close quarters we got on fabulously.  I liked him much better sober than drunk.  In the evenings we often engaged in long chatty conversations laden with wit and irony and often sent each other into paroxysms of laughter.

I was reading a lot of Jung and studying and interpreting my dreams assiduously.  I seemed to be in counselling relationships with an odd variety of people, a priest among them.  They seemed to appreciate my input in their lives and of course I never accepted a penny for my services.  I genuinely wanted to help and instead of offering advice we would engage in lengthy and meandering dialogue.

July 1, Canada Day, my parents dropped over to see me unannounced.  They had been divorced since I was thirteen and this was the first and only time they both visited me together.  It was wonderful and comforting.  We went for a walk around Lost Lagoon then had lunch in the local White Spot.  The visit felt somehow symbolic and it was a gift as I had the day before been through something traumatizing and without knowing anything there they were offering me comfort without even knowing it.

My friend who was staying with me asked me if I would be interested in renting a farm house in winter.  Friends of his sister had told him about it.  The rent was cheap and it occupied an overgrown acre of land.  I went to see the see the house: an old wooden bungalow, rather like a great rambling shack.  It was in frightful condition but I knew I would be living there.  I took the place and quickly learned carpentry and renovation skills as I laboured to make the house liveable as well as clearing the land and making trails in the birch forest in the back. 

Then the nightmare really began.