This writing tatt is very significant to me. I asked hometown New Glasgow Nova Scotia tattoo artist Brian Mackenzie if he could draw up something reflective and symbolic of writing, include a quill pen and the hand-written word “Solitude”. This is the brilliant design he came up with, now on my right arm.

“Solitude” is also the title of one of my favourite Black Sabbath songs. The Sabbath song incidentally is lyrically a depressing track. Musically though, it is one of the most amazing slabs of doom metal ever orchestrated. Check out Cathedral’s cover version as well, which appears on the brilliant Earache Records “Masters of Misery” Black Sabbath Tribute CD.

The song, and the music of Sabbath evokes great memories of the pursuit of all things I was interested in, while writing. I may not have even realized my forging and refining my words was to such an extent that I would want to become a writer. There were dozens of nights where I sat in my room listening to music like Black Sabbath filling empty pages. Either I was writing poetry, essays or any other ideas in one of the many notebooks I kept around. I was either attempting to refine my craft or working to get some things out on paper so I could understand what I was thinking during those formative years. When I pick up one of those notebooks today, there are pages I can look at some of the words and remember where I was or what was going on to make me want to say what I had to say.

Most people at a young age are in pursuit of things. My formative writing probably was not with the realization that writing was something I would even pursue. As I became more aware of the talent I found, it just became clearer that writing would become very much a part of my identity.

At the time when I sat up all those late nights writing, my pursuit, was pursuits. Those pursuits ranged from dreaming about a career in music, making that final buzzer beating basketball shot in a championship game, for Pepsi to go on sale cheap, to hoping I could sleep until noon on a weekend. Endless thoughts for an endless thinker…From a writer.