Alberta Review: Anyone Can Cook
Alberta Review: Anyone Can Cook
Part two of my chapter from Be Badass
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A few months ago, my former boss and all-around amazing human being, Jacquie Fenske, approached me to tell a story about my life for a book she was working on. She called it Be Badass and wanted to collect the stories of some of the people in her life who she felt were inspiring, interesting, and had pushed boundaries in thier lives to succeed. It was an honour for her to ask me to submit a chapter.
Last week I shared the first part of my contribution. Here is the second half. The book can be purchased here.
To develop this outlook and approach to authority requires confidence, foolishness, and patience. These seem mutually exclusive, but there are very few things in life that are mutually exclusive. And it is far easier to aspire to it than to practice it.
As Stephen Marche writes:
"The first fiction writers create are the fiction of the writers they became."
being short in the early years of my life, would say no to a toy but always yes to a book. My dad loved military history, and that came to me.
When there was farming to be done, I was hiding between the bales reading. I knew hard work had done it when needed, but did all I could to avoid it. My school marks were good, but it wasn’t because I tried very hard.
In this sense, I was already straddling the rural-urban divide. The geography wasn't wide-open prairie like it would've been 45 minutes south. Instead, there was farmland, but there was also bush. Ten minutes north, you could find muskeg, even. This creates a sense of comfort and safety. The trees physically hold you close. Threats may be lurking out there, but you don't see them. In that sense, it echoes a more urban environment. We were the middle of nowhere but only 20 minutes from town, two hours from the city—the city always being Edmonton, no matter where I've lived since. I may have internalized this geographical proximity more than others, but it created this sense of divided sensibilities.
It was likely the confluence of geography and upbringing created the idea that authority wasn't necessarily to be opposed but questioned, not defied, but corrected. What would, in normal times, be seen as middle-of-the-road sensibility is now, in a time of orthodoxy on all sides, radical badassism.
The journey to having a deeply-held belief that truth must be spoken to power, but only in an effective and positive way, is long, but it matters far less than in those early years. All it did was reinforce, likely, what was already there. This is likely true for most people. The old saying that money and fame only exacerbate the traits already inherent to the person is mostly true. But if I had pre-written a path to reinforce the dichotomy within me—or, as my friends and wife would lament, the internal, sometimes confusing contradictions—I couldn't have chosen better. An undergraduate in history and political science at a small university where I could shine as the token country boy but develop a clear understanding and even affinity for urban life, urban sensibilities, and urban beliefs.
But like anyone else, one's entire life is not necessarily interesting, nor is it in any way important. There are inflection points, sharp moments of realization, and deeply impactful events. In many ways, we choose which of these shapes our true, essential identity. It is determined by how we navigate the impactful events.
Political theorist Francis Fukuyama wrote in Identity: The Demand for Dignity:
"Identity grows... out of a distinction between one's true inner self and an outer world of social rules and norms that does not adequately recognize that inner self's worth or dignity."
The outside world shapes, but only as our inner self adapts to and allows. For some, this means embracing the outer world. For others—for the badass—it means shirking them, at least in part, because a true badass gets things done, and to do that, you need to at least accept and work with the rules society has set, whether we like it or not.
If we define badassery as the need to be many, sometimes contradictory things with a wide range of viewpoints and experiences, then only one moment from my first time truly away from home matters.
It had been maybe a week or two after starting my undergraduate education in Edmonton—a full two hours away from home—I decided it all needed to change because I was simply homesick. The path I had chosen would lead me away from home, away from that rural life I loved, and away from my family, the things a homesick 18- year-old wants less than anything else.
I did the sensible thing. Instead of waiting it out, going on a bit longer, and settling myself, I started to change majors; I’d get one of those deplorable business degrees so I could take over the family business. That would allow me to get an education but stay close to home.
But then fate intervened. My dad was in the city for work. He showed me how to entertain myself and embrace being alone in a place with so much to do. We went to the Chapters we'd gone to as kids and finished at the Kingsway food court with an Orange Julius. It felt like the clock had been turned back ten years, and it was exactly what I'd not wanted to give up.
But my dad gave me some advice that day that has stuck with me, and it is a cornerstone of how I'd come to define being badass. It was simple: don't let yourself be defined by one thing. As with most pieces of advice, especially those conveyed via one-liner, sometimes I'm not exactly sure how he meant for me to take it. It was, at the time and in the context of what I wanted to study, what I wanted to do, where I wanted to live, the kind of life I wanted, and how to make that all work. So, I think he meant it to imply that my future job does not need to reflect who I was or what made me happy. But I took it as a lesson in diversifying interests, diversifying outlooks, and, above all, diversifying my approach to the world ahead of me. Embracing change.
I went through my undergrad in an uneventful, enlightening, but not necessarily impactful way after that. I learned how to learn and made friends, but it was five years (yes, five, not four—I took some three-course semesters because I still liked going home a lot). I embraced city living and loved going back to the country, appreciating that neither offered the same thing, which was ok.
Grad school was big and taught me a lot, including some life lessons. But it was the opportunity it afforded me that has the most relevancy to this life lesson on badassery— the idea that you can be two things at once and succeed and push back on authority while being balanced—was the move to the biggest city of them all (for a Canadian): Toronto.
As part of my graduate program, I undertook a co-op placement at a major bank, working in physical security— "threat intelligence analysis”, we called it. It mainly involved following up on bank robberies and spying on protesters. It was an important first job in the corporate sector of corporate Canada. I learned a lot about big boy jobs and what it was like to be a very, very small tine on a very small cog in a very big machine.
But what mattered was I learned even more about how to balance my rural roots with big city living. I visited every small town in an ever-growing circumference around the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) but more importantly, I learned to embrace real urban living. Things are starting to change, but even ten short years ago, Edmonton and Calgary were not that urban, not in the sense of a New York, a London, or a Toronto. I looked at it as an experiment; the eight- month co-op term allowed me to explore, and knowing a definitive time to go home was quite freeing.
That was the first mission I gave to myself: explore, learn, and especially embrace this way of life. The second was to speak honestly about not only rural life but distinctly Albertan rural life and the view from the West. Friends, acquaintances, co-workers. Not in a pushy way. I was cognizant of the need to not be that Albertan. But when a topic came up, I was careful to ensure that the prevailing view from Bay Street—or, on social matters, Queen—was not the only valid one and that typical, conservative, often characterized as backward, thought could be intellectually and academically defended like any other. Just because the loudest voices were shrill and often far too vulgar to sound intelligent didn't mean they weren't right, or at least valid.
Much of it was well-taken in the capital of Canadian finance—they knew making money actually mattered, especially at that time, around 2015, they knew where it was made. Speaking truth to power was much more often like preaching to the choir, although one that, due to the other elements, the social ones dominant on Queen Street, was too scared to sing too loudly or risk being labelled something that was far too unpopular there—conservative.
It was a good warm-up, though, because not too long after, I found myself in the nation's capital, where the prevailing attitude was openly hostile to anything coming out of the West. There, it took real effort to not become the vulgar Albertan, raising his voice and pleading for sanity. I didn't always succeed. It was perhaps the most important thing I've done, though, to talk to casual acquaintances about the fact that, no, oil and gas can't be replaced today, nor can it be done in decades, and that as long as that was a reality, Alberta would be Alberta and we needed to work together if there was to be any peace in the federation.
Of course, since then, around 2017-19, things have only gotten worse on that front. But I can at least say I tried.
I tried even harder to save the world after this when I did the dumbest but most noble thing imaginable. I got into politics. They called it centrist politics, working in a wide range of roles for the Alberta Party. Sometimes as a driver, sometimes as a bagman, sometimes as a campaign manager, a Chief of Staff, a comms lead, or whatever else was needed (cash was always tight). There's no need to belabour this time in my life. As important as it was, and is, to my current job as a government relations manager—the more vulgar term being lobbyist—it mostly reinforced what my other roles invented into me. Listen. Empathize. Be prudent and caring. But never back down, never pretend that what you are being told is true when it isn't or is impactful when it is minor or that it is novel when it is, in fact, pedestrian.
As someone working in public affairs, we are too often confused with liars. As an industry, however, we know only validated messaging works, only truthful alignment between the client's priorities and the government’s will pass muster, and only things the public will accept can be entertained. We spin, we stretch, and we emphasize the good and bad as needed, just like all marketing does, but it must all be done within the confines of the truth and with empathy directed to our audience, be it the public or government officials. You must keep the interests of your audience, client, and the truth all in mind at all times to be successful.
At this point, it is important to note that my ideal job, the one that would signal that I'd made it, changed many times throughout these experiences. I went from wanting to be a paleontologist to an archeologist, a lawyer, and a diplomat. I never thought I'd become a political staffer, a lobbyist, or, as I define myself, no matter my job title, a writer.
As I've defined it, being a badass is accepting multitudes and being balanced in approach but faithful to the truth. And it is with this in mind where the most critical moment of realization comes: life is murky and requires balance while staying faithful, and that's the power of stories. For many years—following my formative ones in my pre-teens reading nothing but science fiction—I dedicated myself solely to reading non-fiction. How else, after all, does one learn about the world? But as I came to define myself more and more as a writer and the power of facts and evidence declined in our age of “lived experience” and “personal truth”—no matter how much these things should be mocked—I realized that in stories truth, or at least the kind of truth that cuts through someone's pre-conceived notions, exists largely in narrative. As Marcel Proust wrote:
"Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through outer agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its controls on them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey."
Life, and more importantly, the story about lives well-lived, tell the truth. Of course, we can't place balance at the centre of our definition of badassery without also acknowledging a story by itself is not true because it feels that way. We must validate it. But the most clear-cut example of the power of narrative is in historical fiction. What reveals what really happened better: an academic history of dates and figures or an imagined novel of a character that is vigorously researched but provides a story around the facts? Even if we stick to facts alone, which conveys a deeper insight into an event, a newspaper article, or a diary entry of someone who lived it? The power of narrative is real and as old as humanity, and it is a lesson I have learned only as of late.
There's one thing I haven't touched upon in my story because it doesn't fit neatly into any bit of the narrative. Or maybe it does. Perhaps it is standard and dull; a country boy can survive cliché. Either way, there is one essential element to being a badass, as defined. That is a sense of freedom. Freedom not only to act but freedom to fail because it is only by failing can you come to an understanding that with freedom comes responsibility.
Freedom also demands social norms as much as freedom requires busting those norms in the sense of truth—not just factual truth but the kind of truth that reaches the soul, that makes life worth living, the truth of the good life, facts and figures be damned. But perhaps this is easier for a writer to say. Again, Mr. Marche:
"Writers live in a state of submission. Submission means rejection. Rejection is the condition of the practice of submission, which is the practice of writing."
If being a badass is speaking truth to power, you need courage, the true courage, the courage that is not arrogance (acting without thought), but the kind that understands the consequences of its actions. This requires a great breadth and depth of experience. My dad once told me, as I was crying in a food court, wanting to quit school and come home to the country, that a man should never let himself be defined by one thing. This could mean many different things, but I've interpreted it as a need to experience as much as one can, to look at life through a variety of perspectives, and to just get out there. It gave me courage I do not think I had prior to this point.
And it is perspective, multiple perspectives, multiple experiences that allow one to speak that truth to power. There is no right way to develop a voice that resonates with a broad audience. This, today, is something that feels lost in the public discourse. There seems to be a clear path to being influential, defining our terms of discourse, and setting the Overton window, to becoming one of those people Chamfort says you must learn many things from, despite knowing more. It is an affluent, urban upbringing, then the right school, then, most importantly, the right beliefs. Speaking for experiences you have none of is accepted as authoritative because of where you came from, not who you are, what you think, or, most critically, how well you think.
This aristocratic mindset can only be prevented by speaking truth to power, by being that badass.
Again, quoting Fukuyama, it is an attack on identity and democracy itself:
"We have to recognize, however, that in aristocratic societies there was a deeply rooted belief that honour or esteem was not due to everyone, but only to the class of people who risked their lives. Predemocratic societies rested on a foundation of social hierarchy, so this belief in the inherent superiority of a certain class of people was fundamental to the maintenance of social order."
Basically, self-identity leads to self-worth, which is essential to democracy. Being a badass, then, is an inherently democratic act.
It is the final element of being a badass, putting yourself in a position to challenge, to question, but to do so in way that is effective, friendly, and that is so important. It is making sure, no matter who you are, you experience life widely. Your identity, the way you self-identify, is important and cannot be pre-determined by birth. Do not let yourself be defined by one thing. Because it is only in that experience that understanding, empathy—and truth—can be gleaned. Only with a complete understanding of life can truth be spoken to power. Without it, the speaker of truth is akin to the holder of power—single-minded, biased, unenlightened, and certainly uncaring. It is, in the true meaning of the word, ignorant.
"Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere," - Anton Ego, Ratatouille.
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