Uncovery: Beyond Addiction and Recovery

Why not just not?  My waiting for a feeling of optimism to arrive has proved unrealistic, so why not I just stop waiting.  Why not, for a change, I just give up on waiting for any improvement?  Why not I just stop waiting, for anything.  And how about while I’m not at it I don’t … Read more

I am still trying and still failing to situate my householder-husband role into the Goldilocks orbit: planet me revolving around the romantic relationship while at the same time keeping time with the divine.  William James defined religion as paying attention to our experience of a relationship to the ultimate.  I love that: Paying attention to … Read more

I can get very into renouncing.  The word renounce—from the old French word renouncier, meaning to cede, to give up.  Also, from its deeper Latin origins, it means to proclaim, and to protest against (okay-okay, I know I exceeded the socially tolerable quota of etymological references already in the last episode, by about two.  So … Read more

One thing I always wanted to do, although where I could do this I have no idea, is to look up at the sky from the depths of an empty well, because, supposedly, if a person is staring up from the bottom of deep enough shaft the stars can be seen, even in bright daytime.  … Read more

Hello Stephen, I’d like to have a conversation with you about drugs, and solitude.  Your latest book, The Art of Solitude, is my favourite among all your books, and I have read them all, except for The Tibet Guide, which I’ve never had occasion to use.  And I reckon never will have, certainly not in … Read more

  The Relapse Trilogy Intro: What a Coincidence I vowed in my wedding that I would learn to love this woman and my relapsing’s a sign that I’ve learned fuck all.  Nothing of value, anyway.  On the title page of the epic manuscript I wrote about how I cured my life-long addictions—actually I didn’t say … Read more

Uncovering Addictions will stand between Dr. Gabor Mate’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and Bruce K. Alexander’s The Globalization of Addiction because it is both a diagnosis of addictions as a response to trauma and an identification of addictions as a consequence of societal disconnection. Like Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, by Marc Lewis, … Read more

John has an undergraduate degree in music composition and a masters in ethnomusicology and the neuroscience of music from York University. In the 1980s, he was the music and opera critic for the Georgia Straight, for which he won a Western Canada Magazine Award for Best Arts Review. Before leaving Vancouver in 1988, he wrote … Read more

Every morning over the past 14 years, John has devoted an hour to his memoir. For the four years prior to the pandemic, he was been perched on a stool at a Starbucks on a gritty corner in downtown Toronto, half a block north of a sex shop/crack house, a noticeable hub of dismal activity … Read more