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When I was five, my grandfather paid me a dime a day to dig weeds out of the front yard. He paid an extra penny for every rock bigger than my fist. I tried to cheat by presenting rocks I found in the back lane, but he never fell for this, even if I rubbed dirt on them. This was around the time he taught me to play cribbage, and I discovered I could read his cards in his eyeglasses. I never lost a game. That same year Marge Murray paid me a quarter to organize her pot-and-pan cupboard. I later cleaned outhouses for her in exchange for weeks fishing on Gun Lake, where she and her husband, Bert, had five rental cabins. The Murrays met when Marge was a 13-year-old net mender down on the Fraser River docks. Bert was a few years older and a fisherman. Neither ever went to school. Bert scratched his back on door frames and, over the course of his life, pulled 20 bodies out of the river. Mrs Cleverly up the street paid me a dollar to mow her lawns once – only once because her vicious whippet bit my tit. I never went back. For several years running I was the top salesboy of door-to-door raffle tickets and cookies for Arnold’s Coiffures Minor B soccer team and Stong’s Grocers Little League baseball team. In my last year of elementary school, I helped a neighbour deliver the afternoon newspaper in exchange for beer and marijuana. In high school, I did a 73-paper morning route, which permanently disordered my biological clocks. I was an enumerator for Elections Canada once – only once because I misunderstood my assignment and only registered the households on the periphery of my catchment area — Shaughnessy, Vancouver’s most affluent neighbourhood — which meant thousands of rich people were not able to vote that year. I sold Christmas trees and strung up Christmas streetlights for the Point Grey High School Senior rugby team. At 14, I was a taco, burrito and empanada cook and a breakfast grill cook for carnies at the Pacific National Exhibition. I parked cars in the semi-desert dust just east of Kelowna the summer before Grade 12 at the Black Mountain Music Festival. I also sold beer there illegally – illegally because I was underage, and the beer had been trucked up from Oregon because B.C. beer workers were locked out that summer by the only breweries in the province at the time: Labatt, Molson and Carling O'Keefe. I sold a black garbage bag of marijuana in small amounts to friends but ended up owing money because I smoked too much myself. I was a bull cook at a lead-zinc exploration camp in the Northwest Territories. The drills ran 24/7, the drillers worked in three eight-hour shifts, we slept in four-hour shifts and cooked three breakfasts, lunches and dinner every day. The flies were bad, and the sun never set, but I learned a lot about cooking. I pumped gas and changed oil and tires at Lovegrove Chevron on Dunbar Street. I was a waiter and, for one horrifying night, a topless waiter at the Pit Pub in the Student Union Building at the University of British Columbia. I also made and sold burgers, fries, and nachos at the Pit and during a World Council of Churches conference “eucharist burgers” – the “body and bun” of Christ. After my shifts, I drank pints and ghostwrote essays for other students. I was a pot washer and kitchen assembly-line worker at an Extended Care Hospital. I dug a ditch and painted two houses in Kitsilano. I worked as a framer once – only once because within seconds on my first day, I sliced the tip off my left index finger and spent the rest of my shift in the emergency room of St Paul’s Hospital, next to a man whose foot had been crushed by a train. I worked the 8 pm to 8 am shift at a halfway house for polyabusers on Burrard and 16th and the graveyard shift as a security guard at a gated housing complex in Shaughnessy. These, too, seriously corrupted my clock gene circuitry. I sorted, shelved and signed out books and checked people’s bags at UBC Main Library, while at the same time amassing the largest library fine in the University’s history. I was a lab worker in the Home Economics Department at UBC, where I cleaned the cages of alcoholic rats. I loaded and unloaded bags of cement on and off a truck for a day on Naxos Island, for which I was fed moussaka. I planted around 100,000 trees in the Okanagan Valley and on Vancouver Island. I tutored in Vancouver. I waited on tables and bartended in Toronto at Lee’s Palace. I painted and sold Lee’s Palace three 4’x8’ paintings, one of which was called Lunch in America. I sold books at the Granville Book Company. I wrote press releases and catalogues and manned the desk at the Jacqueline M Gallery on Beatty Street. I wrote book reviews for local magazines and liner notes for Vancouver music groups. I worked at the Abbey Bookshop in Paris. I was a bicycle guide in France and Spain. I was an English teacher in Madrid and Paris. I was a SAT and GMAT tutor in Paris. I was a screenwriter in Paris. I was a playwright in Paris, Neuilly, Vancouver, Toronto and Copenhagen.

I am a translator. I am a proofreader. I have been a journalist. I was an art critic for two decades. I was a podcaster for the OECD. I have been an interpreter, once for a documentary film crew and once, disastrously, for a factory that, for some inexplicable reason, hired me to fire its entire workforce. I wrote about that here.

I am a copywriter. I am an editor. I am a writer.