I didn’t have time to write a newsletter this week because I was working on a very important book review. And also because this dude on twitter who is, I think, in his third year of trying to poke holes in my autism diagnosis (past hits include “I thought it was illegal to pay for healthcare in Canada” and thinking that a review of my book in a Winnipeg paper that he randomly stumbled across did not contain enough diagnostic criteria) decided to question my history as a freelance writer for a change of pace.

I said that I’d been writing about music or film for twenty years. He found this as highly suspicious as he finds everything about me. And then he demanded proof. I suppose I could have been a grownup and ignored him, or pointed out that I don’t owe strangers on the internet proof of the rather mundane facts of my existence, but Aaron and I have all of our Chart back issues in order on our bookshelves, so it was pretty easy to pluck out the November 2000 one and take a few shots of the short style piece I did on Nelly Furtado at the beginning of her career.

The bad news here is that I am baby and continue to let awful people on the internet get to me. But as I said on twitter, part of why this gets to me is that I feel quite ambivalent about the amount of myself that I’ve put into the world these days, and that someone could either sort through or discard the too much information about myself that is a mere google search away and claim that I’m a wholesale liar when I’m already feeling vulnerable salts the wound for me. I’m also offended at the implication that, if I was attempting a lifelong literary hoax, I wouldn’t be a little better at it.

The good news is that looking at my first print article did give me a little nostalgic rush. I tend to forget that I had this whole other life as a (very low level) music journalist, but I really did do some interesting things in my late teens and early twenties. I can’t say I wrote a ton of good shit during that period. But I suppose there are worse ways to work out the kinks in your craft than to ask Nelly Furtado about her SNUG pants and write 300 awkward words about them.

Anyway, here’s “Turn Off The Light.” It’s still a banger.