I was born in the late 70’s on the south shore of Montreal, Canada. My childhood was strangely atypical, given that the settings were basically standard québécois suburban conditions. I was a solitary child, my alcoholic/workaholic dad’s 5th and my mom’s precious only, and although I had step-siblings, there weren’t much a part of my daily life. My closest friends were the 3 children of a neighbouring protestant Haitian family.
Following my parent’s divorce at around 11, I (was) bounced around for a while. From the quietude of St-Hubert city, I went to live with my grandparents in the country (in a town where, at the time, sidewalks were somewhat absent), to then move back with my mom to a rough and poor part of Montreal North. At around 13, we came back to the south shore, to another rough and poor neighbourhood of Longueuil city, in an effort to get me closer to my then cancerous and still alcoholic father. The following years were just as eventful. I got kicked out of two schools, mostly because I was going less and less. We moved in with my (also alcoholic) stepdad. At 15, after a car accident I inadvertently caused that left him amputated, I had to move in with my laryngectomized father the next year. That’s when I dropped out of high school, but fortunately also when I started playing music more seriously. I was still 17 when my dad asked me to leave the house and moved out on my own. He passed three years later and is now resting, hopefully, in peace.
My early adulthood was scattered with odd jobs of which my favourite was being a bike courier. I had different music projects, mostly singing and playing guitar in grunge, metal and punk projects until I started experimenting with electronic music in the late 90s. Later, I learned stage lighting and sound as part of a government funded project for dropouts, while eventually starting making a little money with music. By the early 2000’s I had discovered the joys of freelance work and it didn’t take long for me to start learning how to build websites. Along with some tv, advertising and stage music gigs, I spent a few years as a designer and programmer. In 2009, a strange twist of fate pushed me to buy a small tea house in Montreal with my girlfriend at the time, a business we ran for about two years before our relationship ended.
Then in my early thirties and too depressed to go back to any kind of freelancing, I took a job at a renowned tea house, also in Montreal. For the first time, life was somewhat easy. Well, at least financially speaking, as I’ve always had minimal needs. Still, over six years of customer-facing jobs took its toll on my nerves and I ended up burning out. I so then transferred to the same entreprise’s warehouse, working mostly alone on evenings and weekends, listening to countless hours of podcasts, presentations and audiobooks. This lasted for about 3 years until I needed my freedom back. Still interested in visual design, sound and music, I started looking for video editing and motion graphics jobs with minimal success. In truth, my heart was now somewhere else: I needed to write and maybe even teach what I had learned in the most important aspects of my life. At 45, I thought “enough with the bullshit”. My true place is in the fields of spirituality and philosophy.
As I’m writing this, I’m still living in Montreal, near Mount Royal, with my lovely partner and two cats. We’re learning to grow plants.
