Born in Toronto, Ontario, I moved around with my drunken mother and schizophrenic sister before arrriving in the nightmarish hick-town of Rockwood, Ontario. There, having and above-average IQ and having been raised in a deficient family led me to be just different enough for me to spend 8 long years as the whipping boy of all of Rockwood's 3000 inhabitants. I've often said the only lesson of value I learned in elementary school was how to hate. After recovering from the crushing, mind-destroying conformity of a tiny south-ontario town, I went to high school in the much more metropolitan city of Guelph, where I met the first few people in my life to express individual opinions to me. It was there that I learned that conformity and mundanity were not a desired state which I had failed all my life to accheive; it was a disease which I had remained immune to.
Nevertheless, it was a disease which ran rampant, and I wassick of living in an intellectual leper colony. As soon as I graduated, that's when I moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. From a village of 3,000 people, I moved to a city of 3,000,000. Finally, I felt like I was home. There ws enough diversity and variety here to support any sort of lifestyle you might care to live, without credible fear of ostracism or isolation. It was here that I met the people who showed me the true diversity and vitality that life could offer a person who cared enough to look for it, and the excitement and opportunities for someone brave enough to grasp at it.