Human Happiness
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Brian Fawcett. Human Happiness
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Brian Fawcett is the author of more than twenty books, including Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow, The Secret Journals of Alexander Mackenzie, and Virtual Clearcut, or The Way Things Are In My Hometown. He is a former columnist for the Globe and Mail, has written articles and reviews for most of Canada’s major newspapers and magazines, and is a founding editor of the internationally followed Internet news service www.dooneyscafe.com. Fawcett was born and raised in Prince George, B.C., and now lives in Toronto.
Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow
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And so the years begin to pass. My father quits his safe job, buys his business and begins to work 14 hours a day. My sisters grow into teenagers, get pregnant and are both married by 18, my older brother buys his first car and I don’t make the Little League all-star team. I do acquire a star-shaped scar on my forehead, which I earn by filling a small jam jar with gunpowder I collect by taking a knife and screwdriver to my father’s shotgun ammunition, poking a firecracker fuse through the jam jar’s lid, lighting the fuse, and then standing in a circle with my friends to watch the explosion from 3 metres away. A shard of glass nails me in the forehead hard enough to knock me cold for a few seconds, and my closest friend catches another shard in his leg just below the knee. Two weeks later, he and I will blow up his mother’s concrete washtubs with gunpowder we’ve manufactured from scratch.
In other people’s lives, a second railroad arrives in Prince George; politicians deposit tons of bullshit about all the wealth the railroad will bring when most of what it brought were empty railcars to haul away the trees and hungry people looking for jobs. A P-38 Lightning crashes into the sandbanks across the river at 500 kilometres per hour after buzzing the main street of town at 30 metres; the city’s population doubles, the roads improve and pavement multiplies; my father’s business prospers; and trees, many trees, come down. Life in northern British Columbia, in other words, is normal.
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