Shulgan.com

And so it begins...

The week leading up to the Superdad launch began this morning with Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow posting the first of what should be a couple of different reviews bound to run over the next little while. It's a complimentary review...

Shulgan, an accomplished Toronto magazine writer, was raised in a small Ontario town, and wore his ideals of masculinity on his sleeve: drinking his ass off, fighting, partying, snorting coke, smoking crack. His binges tied into an idea of wildness, of being "alternative" and authentic and not settling down to become a boring adult. (...)

The news of the pregnancy galvanizes two conflicting urges in Shulgan: on the one hand, the urge to settle down and step up to his responsibilities; on the other, the need to prove that he is still young, wild and free. Neither urge wins, and Shulgan manages to do both: acting the role of a sober dad-to-be while sneaking away to score crack, to go on all night, guilt-ridden binges that he almost completely hides from his wife...

When the baby comes, Shulgan's commitment to his family redoubles -- and so does his need to get high. What follows (the meat of the book) is a painful account of someone who can't break off his love-affair with self-destruction...

It's a relief, to hear the way Doctorow understood what I was trying to get across. Another relief: I've done a couple of interviews now, too, for pieces that will come out over the next couple of days, and on the whole the tone of the questions has been respectful but interested—in other words, the best I could have hoped. And even so, it's tough to get through them. It's tough to talk about this stuff, you know? It's tough to talk about the worst stuff you've done, the stuff that makes you hate yourself. Maybe it'll get easier over time. 

One thing that is really helping me get through this week is a book I read on the plane ride home from Nepal — Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (#30 of 2010). I am obviously a bit late to the Mitchell bandwagon, so apologies for that, but holy crap it's an absorbing read that has stuck with me—no, has resonated with me, has been helping to bolster me through the inevitable self-analysis provoked by this week's interviews. "If you show someone something you've written," says one of Black Swan Green's characters. "[Y]ou give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin and say, 'When you're ready.'" Yeah, that feels about right, this week.

There is a remarkable page-length bit where a pre-adolescent talks about his dad's alcoholism—and the section is enough to keep off booze forever anyone who struggles with this sort of stuff. I may print it out and frame it on the wall of my study. It's on page 100 of the paperback book: "'Tell you what it's like,'" the boy says. '"[I]t's like this whiny shitting nasty weepy man who isn't my dad takes my dad over for however long the bender lasts, but only I—and Mum and Kelly and Sally and Max—know that it isn't him. The rest of the world doesn't know that, see. They just say, Frank Moran showing his true colours, that is. But it ain't.' Moran twisted his head at me. 'But it is. But it ain't. But it is. But it ain't. Oh, how am I s'posed to know?'"

And then, toward the final third, this bit of Black Swan Green: "Secrets affect you more than you'd think," Mitchell writes. "You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone'll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn't it the secret that's using you?"

The 49-Hour Day

Oh my gosh I'm so happy to be home. I woke up at 5 a.m. this morning with Penny on one side of me and Myron on the other, both of them wrapped up in the yak-hair blankets I brought them home from Nepal, both of them snuggled into my ribs, and I just breathed in and out for a while and gloried in their proximity to me. How crazy is it that I can wake up one day and be ten time zones away from my family, and then the next day, have them sleeping around me?

It occurs to me that my life is a bit like a comic book. Maybe this blog is a bit like a comic book, as well. I've just completed the six-issue Nepal story arc and now things are shifting into the Superdad launch arc, which will graduate to the city election arc, which in turn will graduate to something else.

Yesterday started with me rising at 6 a.m. in Nepal. Nine hours later I set off on a 30-hour trip that had me arrive in Toronto, where I then spent another ten hours awake, doing that photoshoot I mentioned yesterday and then heading to St. Matthias church where this neighbourhood group I belong to, Trinity Bellwoods Community Association, hosted an all-candidates debate for Ward 19. Which went amazingly. The hall was packed, as you can see from the above picture. The two clear front-runners in the ward, I think, are Mike Layton and Sean McCormack, followed closely by Karen Sun. 

The only problem was, I almost nodded off. Well, maybe I did nod off once or twice. That thing where your head falls forward and then you catch yourself with a startle and then look around at all the other people around you to investigate whether anyone else caught you falling asleep. The 49-hour day I had yesterday taught me one thing, at least, which is, holy crap my wife is impressive. As a midwife she regularly deals with the sort of sleep deprivation that I struggled through yesterday. (For example, even though I'm writing this on Tuesday morning, I still haven't seen her because she's doing this thing where she shadows an OB-GYN and she's doing a 24-hour shift that doesn't end for another hour yet.) Anyway, Natalie will blow through a 36-hour birth and then saunter through a full day of clinical appointments and only then will allow herself to catch a full night's rest. I don't know how she does it.

So, preparations for the Superdad launch. Yesterday's photo shoot went great, I think. The photographer's name was Kourosh Keshiri and he spent a lot of time taking extreme close-ups of my face. The piece will run later in the week so I'll be sure to link to it. And although I was a bit worried about looking haggard and worn after all that travel time, I think it worked—it kind of suits the mood of the book. 

Layover Ruminations

Two-hour flight from Kathmandu. Eight-hour layover in Delhi. Nine-hour flight to Belgium. Two-hour layover in Belgium. That's where I currently am, in Brussels Airport, where the nattily-attired staff all sport silver-framed spectacles and pink dress shirts. It's remarkable, the way the sting of 30 hours of travel time is dulled when you're travelling toward, rather than away from, your family.

Super-excited to be heading home. I'm heading into an insane week, a week so appointment-crammed, in fact, that an hour after I get home, an hour after this 30-hour trip, an hour after my long-awaited homecoming, a photographer is coming over for a quick photo shoot for something related to this week's launch of Superdad. Hey, I, too, question the wisdom of that scheduling. Except there just wasn't any other time to do it! It's an insane week! Maybe the most insane OF MY ENTIRE LIFE!

And yet, I feel pretty good about it. I've been wondering about my absence of stress. Normally, heading into a week like this, I'd be all acid stomach and cranky mood. You know, between you and me. (Between you and I? I should know this. Crap.) But between you and me, I think my comparatively relaxed state stems from having made it through these past couple of weeks. From having made it through this trip to Nepal.

I learned a lot in Nepal. My research was fascinating, and I made a lot of new Sherpa friends. I learned Toronto cyclists like me have it pretty good compared to Nepali cyclists. I learned I’ve developed an aversion to monkeys, a.k.a. the squirrels of south-east Asia. And kind of weirdly, I learned I quite like the sort of public toilets one finds in Nepal and other developing-world countries. The holes in the ground, I mean. The ones with the two footprints on either side of that dark chasm. They seem so much more hygienic, the way they force you to hang your bum out in the air rather than pressing it against some Bakelite surface previously touched by lots of other bums—the way we do in North America. Maybe I'll install one in my own house someday. For guests. Stay tuned.

But the big thing I learned? That I could be away from my family for more than two weeks, er, I learned I could be by myself for 15 days—and stay sober. I mean, I figured I could do it—I wouldn't have gone on the trip unless I thought I could do it. But I guess I was worried all the same. You know, considering this trip was by far my longest since I quit all that stuff. In retrospect, you know how I had that little freak-out right before the trip? And how I spun it as mostly about the impending launch of the book? Well, I wonder whether also playing a role was my own anxiety with the solitude I was bound to have in Nepal, and the opportunity that solitude afforded.

Avoiding inebriants was a cinch on my first swing through Kathmandu. There really wasn’t any time. One night, and then it was off to catch another flight into the mountains. I didn’t come across any drugs while I was trekking around the Khumbu Valley, just south of Everest. Nor was there much alcohol. This generation of Sherpas saw their folks struggle with alcoholism, and now many of them are teetotalers like myself. So alcohol also was pretty easy to avoid.

The second time I was in Kathmandu was another story. When I wasn’t conducting interviews I did a lot of walking around the Nepali city of four million. Among the temples of Durbar Square a local teenager glommed onto me and offered to show me the sites, the way they do. He explained about the temples adorned with wood carvings of erotic couplings, and the ornate arabesque windows of the Kumari Ghar, where a young girl, I think she's about five, lives in royal splendor because some Nepalis believe she's an incarnation of a deity—a living goddess.

So that was cool. But just as I ended the tour, an hour or so later, my amateur guide's eyes grew a little shifty and he asked whether I needed anything, anything at all. “Like what in particular?” I asked, innocently, and then I got it. “Oh,” I said. “No thanks.”  All casual. And then I handed him a couple of hundred Nepali rupees, to make him go away. Similar offers from street kids happened twice more the next day, my last full day in Kathmandu, both times in the shopping district of Thamel, a labyrinth of narrow corridors and closet-sized storefronts selling Buddhist wood-carvings and Pashmina shawls. And each time, I declined.

Now, as I write this in the fluorescent bustle of Belgium's international airport, as I’m only one long flight away from home, I’m looking back at these last 15 days, and trying to form some conclusions. The relief I feel is kind of remarkable. Until now I didn't realize how anxious I was about being away from home for so long.

I didn’t give in. I stuck it out. Still straight. That means something, I think. Let’s not get overly triumphant, here—in retrospect, given my history, I should do a better job, when travelling alone, to fill my schedule with appointments and meetings, to avoid giving myself any opportunity to fuck up. Still, faced with the opportunity and temptation to indulge—this time, I didn’t.

Does resisting temptation make you stronger? Does it make you more likely to resist temptation, the next time? I don't know. It might work the opposite way. I have to think about that. I'll get back to you. In the meantime, perhaps the absence of an action that induces self-loathing is a triumph in itself. Sure, yeah, I did it. I made it out the other side. I stuck it out, still sober. And somehow, next to that, the rigors of this upcoming launch week seem pretty trivial.

Best. Breakfast. Ever.

I'm starting this post with a pic of Sherpa kids playing a game that translates as "cockfight" so you can see how misty it's been for much of the time I've been up in the Himalayas. The game's kind of cool; it's kids hopping around on one foot, trying to knock down the other competitors. But the point is the mist, which is delaying the start of trekking season. The mist prevents the tourists from flying up into the mountains. Because I was lucky enough to get that helicopter ride, I haven't been too worried about it. But the mist was on my mind as I arrived in Khumjung, because Khumjung is supposed to have a great view of Everest, and despite my journalist's cynicism, Everest was something I badly wanted to see.

"Maybe tomorrow it will clear up," said my guide, Kanchha, as he led me up the hill just north of the village, to point the way farther up the trail, to the point where maybe, just possibly, if it ever cleared up, one could see the big guy.

Kanchha lives in Khumjung, and so we had dinner at his place and then I made my way back to the Khumjung Lodge, where I was the only guest, you know, because no one's been able to fly in yet. Kanchha kept calling this lodge a "flash" hotel, and compared to some of the lodges up here it was pretty "flash." For example, it had a bathroom with a toilet rather than a hole in the ground. And, bonus—it had a shower! That worked! The next morning I woke up at my usual insanely early jet-lagged time, and looked out the window. Whoa—it was clear! I pulled on my clothes, grabbed my camera and made my way outside. Up the hill along the trail Kanchha had shown me, the previous day. Would it stay clear long enough for me to see Everest?

After some minutes of sprinting-slash-speed-walking, I should have been in a clearing, at least according to the directions Kanchha had given me. Except I couldn't find any clearing around. Come on! Hurry up! Where's this clearing? Where's Everest? It shouldn't be this tough to find the world's highest mountain, except possibly I'd taken a wrong turn somewhere, I couldn't find this vantage point, come on come on, I could see some cloud cover coming from the south, crap, was I going to miss my chance? And then, through the shaded woods, I came smack upon this:

What the hell?! I hadn't heard of anything up here. This wasn't the sort of mud-daubed-stone construction that was typical of many of the other buildings in the Khumbu. This was a genuine edifice. This must have been incredibly expensive to build, in an area where construction materials need to be helicoptered in. I walked along the wall, turning several times, and then came upon this:

Which led to this:

What the hell? I couldn't figure out what it was. The mountaintop abode of an evil billionaire? The setting for a really great episode of the Twilight Zone? The disconnect between this and everything else around here was jarring. It was a little creepy. Bear in mind it was maybe 6 a.m. at this point, as well, so it was super quiet. And then I found the front door, and came upon this guy:

He seemed delighted to see me. A little too delighted, maybe. The way a spider's delighted to host a fly in his web? Naw—he explained I'd come upon Hotel Everest View, which bills itself as "the world's highest hotel" and is owned by investors from Japan. Total occupancy? Whatever fits into 12 rooms. Each of which cost $200 a night in an area where trekkers can find a cot in a lodge for maybe $15. My new friend offered to show me around.

Talk about "flash" hotel. Were those down comforters? And dude, that tub belongs in the Guiness book, possibly, for best view from a bathroom. I asked about the mountain in the distance. Everest, the dude confirmed. Everest? Really? I felt like a seduced Argonaut suddenly recalling my mission to find the Golden Fleece. I had to get outside. I had to see it. Certainly, he said, follow me to the patio. Along the way he asked whether I wanted breakfast. And seconds later, I was seated at one of those white tables just visible below.

They brought me a coffee, and a minute after I badgered the waiter into snapping the below pic, a cheese omelette. 

And most importantly, they showed me Everest. Everest! The world's highest mountain! The tip of which totally tore through my usual posture of hipster disaffection. It was thrilling. I don't know why. I'm not a big scenery kind of guy. I don't get excited about this sort of thing. But there it was. And I was excited. It's the world's HIGHEST MOUNTAIN! HOLY CRAP! I WAS SEEING IT. MYSELF. RIGHT THERE. RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME.

Everest is the tallest one on the left. Pictures don't really convey the majesty. Obviously. The two peaks in the middle are Lhotse and South Lhotse, and the one the right is something called Peak 38. Here's another pic:

On Everest, if you follow the silhouette from right to left, you can even see the steepness of the Hillary step. I just stared at it through the whole of my omelette. I really tried to stretch things out. I asked for tomato ketchup. I asked for extra toast. And I just looked at it. Right there. Right in front of me. It was awesome. Finally it came time to pay my bill—breakfast was the equivalent of about $15. I would have paid ten times that. On the way out I passed this:

Apparently the only guests in the hotel, a pair of Japanese people, were altitude sick because they'd helicoptered straight to the hotel the previous night. That made me feel better about my own experience, several nights before. And then, on my way down, the peaks around me began to get obscured by cloud. And I didn't care.

Thanks, Altitude

Everybody told me not to go up too fast. They said the problems start after 3,000 metres, and you should spend a night right around 3,000 metres before trying to go up any higher. That's why I'd originally scheduled to spend a night at the town of Namche Bazaar, pictured above, which is around 3,200 metres.

Except weather problems meant I'd already wasted a day in Phaplu, so once I arrived in the Khumbu Valley I was itching to start my research, to begin interviewing the people I needed to meet. Maybe five seconds after we met, still on the airfield at Syanboche, my guide asked me how I felt. "I feel good," I said. And I did. "You're a strong man," he said. "I don't think you'll have any problems if we go straight to Thame."

The most important person I had to interview in the Khumbu Valley was Dr. Kami Temba, a Sherpa villager who worked under foreign doctors as a local translator for 18 years at a Canadian-funded hospital — and then, at the age of 37, went to medical school himself. At the age of 37! Now he's the senior doctor at the hospital where he used to work as a translator, which happens to be one of the world's highest-altitude hospitals. Dr. Kami lives in Thame, which resides at an altitude of 3,800 metres. With my guide watching me, awaiting my decision, I shrugged. "I don't want to waste another night," I said. "Let's go straight to Thame."

Understand: I was itching to meet Dr. Kami. And I did feel strong! Because I am strong! Nothing affects me, right? I don't get sick. SHULGAN EQUALS INVULNERABLE! GRRRRRRR! Never mind that this feeling of invulnerability has gotten me into trouble in the past. Such as, oh, I don't know: CRACK. But I wasn't thinking about that. Too excited. We set off. We passed lots of fascinating elements of Sherpa culture, such as mani stones, on which Sherpa villagers used to carve the Buddhist mantra, "Om Mani Padme Hum." Over and over. Endlessly. And then they would set them up on the trails, like this:

Each one of those stones must have taken months to create. Months! I guess it was a form of meditation. "People don't really do that anymore," said my guide, Kanchha. "Why not?" I asked.

He paused a moment, then replied, "Facebook."

Naw, he didn't say Facebook. In fact he said cell phones, which arrived in this region only last year. But you get the idea. Technology's spread has caused the Sherpa to cease their traditional pastimes. Probably I should feel sad for that. Except chisel-tapping mantras into granite seems like just the sort of boring thing we should leave behind. 

After three or four hours of hiking we arrived at Dr. Kami's place. Super-nice dude. We walked around his hometown. I carried around my voice recorder and asked question after question about his life. I met his wife and the neighbourhood kids, and took a lot of pictures.

By the time we finished dinner, I was bushed. Dr. Kami's wife set me up in an extra bedroom and I went to sleep around 8 p.m. And woke up at 11 p.m. feeling like — wow! FEELING LIKE ASS. Feeling horrible!

Somebody's fist was squeezing my brain stem. We're talking hammerlock. Can brains fill with air, and pop? Mine felt like it was about to. Also, for dinner I'd had Nepalese momos, little dumplings like spicy perogies, lots of them, and now the momos were dancing around my abdomen, trying to escape. And my legs were leaden and stiff and painful. 

I told myself this was good. In this book I'm ghost-writing, one of the main characters experiences a bout of extreme altitude sickness, and I'd never before been altitude sick, so this was good. Right? Now I could recount what that felt like, from first-hand experience. Great. That was great. Except geez I felt horrible. I put my hands on my head. Pacing back and forth in the room didn't help. Verbally expressing my pain—that didn't help, either. Although I did it anyway. "Ohhhh," I moaned. "Ooooow." I just wanted to be in my bed, back home, with Natalie giving me a hug. Should I try to vomit? Should I go and wake up Dr. Kami? I didn't have any aspirin. I didn't have anything.

I drank about a litre of water, and went horizontal until sleep returned. At 3 a.m. I woke up again. An internal audit revealed — what? I still felt like ass. But crucially, I didn't feel any worse. I didn't feel any better, necessarily, but I didn't feel any worse. No fluid in my lungs—so no H.A.P.E. And so far as I could tell, I was still coherent. I picked up the book I was reading. Yep, I could digest it fine. So probably I didn't have the other bugbear of upper-atmosphere malaise, H.A.C.E. Somehow I drifted off. Sunshine woke me up at 6 a.m., and at that point, I definitely felt better—the nausea was almost gone.

Over milky coffee, I told Dr. Kami about my night, and he used a device to measure my oxygen-saturation level. Things were fine, on that front. He gave me a Diamox, a medication meant to stave off the effects of high altitude, as well as a couple of aspirin. And as the day went on, I felt stronger. My legs loosened up. The headache evaporated. And the next day, when I woke up? I felt great. Apparently, I had my acclimatization. 

One final thing I've been mulling over. It has been a long time since I've been hungover. Since I quit drinking, in fact. (Duh.) Probably, if I stayed at my usual sea level, with me on this permanent ban from alcohol and all other stuff, with me about as straight edge as one is able to get, I would never again have experienced the pleasures of the really first-class morning-after ass-feeling. Except this relatively short bout of high-altitude sickness felt exactly like the way I used to feel, after a typical 5 a.m. binge. So thanks altitude. Thanks for reminding me how awful that feels.

Phaplu to Syanboche

I'm a bit behind on posting to the blog as this research trip I'm on has kept me in remote areas of the Himalayas where Internet access is pretty unreliable. I'm currently in Namche Bazaar. Anyway, last time we spoke, I was in Phaplu, where I was supposed to stay for only a night. But then on the day I was supposed to catch a flight out, the morning was misty, and the afternoon was misty, and that evening I was still in Phaplu and facing a daybook full of delayed appointments scheduled for places higher up in the Himalayas. I only had 10 days in the Solukhumbu Valley just south of Everest, and I had dozens of people I needed to see, and everyone was telling me that this September was the mistiest in decades and I might not even be able to get out the next day. Or the day after.

I went to sleep that night with a headful of worry, and the next morning I woke up with hope -- would it be clear? But no -- too misty for a plane. I talked about Facebook with Ngima Tendup Sherpa's cousin and made sure my things were packed... and stared at the sky. I spotted a bit of blue around 10 a.m., just as Ngima and I were walking along Phaplu's main drag. A few storefronts later a friend of Ngima's stuck his head out the office of Yeti Airlines. A flurry of Sherpa and Ngima grabbed my arm and we were sprinting toward his uncle's manor house. "No airplane—still too misty," Ngima explained. "But a helicopter's on its way from Lukla."

The challenge was to get to the helicopter, get in the helicopter, then fly the helicopter to a helipad above Namche Bazaar, all fast enough for the pilot to make the trip back to Lukla before the clouds closed in. I slung on my big pack and Ngima took my backpack and we sprinted along a muddy and stone-encrusted road, past the gap in the wire fence that passed for a security checkpoint (I passed) and down onto the Phaplu airfield. The below photo was the only second of rest time I had before I climbed into the chopper -- I didn't even have time to say goodbye to Ngima.

Getting to Namche would have been at least a two-day walk.

In a helicopter, however? It took 20 minutes. The pilot was muttering about the cloud cover all the while... these mountain valleys are tough to fly in -- helicopters go down in them all the time. So when we got to Namche he shook his head, no way. That was a bit of a relief -- here's a pic of the helipad where we were supposed to land.

That bit of exposed dirt there, I mean. I was like, dude -- are you serious? Instead he swung me up to another flat bit of ground about 300 m higher -- a recently constructed "airstrip" that was really only a bit of a clearing, just downhill from Khunde and Khumjung. The helicopter flew off. I tried to figure out which was the path to Khunde. Just before I left a Sherpa dude appeared from below the airfield's edge and sprinted toward me, waving his arms. It was my guide, who introduced himself as Kanchha, and he was pissed because he'd been at the lower helipad and had to sprint up the steepness because he was afraid I'd leave before he showed up. You can see Kanchha with me in the picture below. Turns out he's a nice guy. Twenty minutes later, we were headed to Thame, and he was musing about altitude sickness and whether I was giving myself enough time to acclimatize. More on that next post.

Adventures in Solu Valley

OK, in a better mood today. And maybe apologies for yesterday's self-directed freak-out. I chalk it up to anxiety over the book's release combined with too little sleep as well as anxiety over this research trip. Now, a day later, now that things have actually started happening, now that I'm no longer waiting around in airport terminals and instead am actually meeting people and learning about a new culture -- now I'm having fun.

Yesterday began with a flight from Kathmandu to a village, Phaplu, in the Solu Valley of the Himalayas, which formed the lower part of the walk that Sir Edmund Hillary and other climbers had to use on their trek toward Everest, back when there weren't any airstrips. These two kids were on my flight. They seemed to want to use my camera, and so we also get this shot. 

We were lucky to get the flight -- at the tail end of the monsoon, storms often prevent planes from flying up into towns like Phaplu. And then landing was a bit crazy. One second we were flying hundreds of feet above the Himalayan foothills, and then the next second the land rose up to meet the plane's tires. There wasn't any descent -- instead, the land ascended to push against the bottom of the plane. We seemed to fly in a straight line relative to sea level. Crazy.

Above and below is Ngima, the Sherpa man who showed me around Phaplu. Super-nice guy. He lives in Kathmandu and coordinates development work in the Solu valley, where he grew up. We stayed at the home of his uncle, which is more like a Sherpa version of an old English manor house -- lots of bedrooms, and with satellite Internet access. You can see Phaplu in the distance, below.

Soon after we landed we dropped our packs off and set off on a tour of some of the schools in the area. Below is the Women's Literacy Programme in Phaplu, where the students welcomed us in the traditional manner, by draping over our necks khata, our silk welcome scarves.

Class picture:

Next we walked uphill for about an hour and a half on our way to another Women's Literacy Program in the smaller village of Chhinakpu. We passed a vocational school that was in the midst of construction. As someone who has worked on my own home it was pretty fascinating to see the construction methods, which are in a lot of ways superior to ours -- certainly, the buildings they create seem stronger and more durable. Not a lot of power tools or hydraulic earth moving equipment here in a mountain valley that only became accessible by road last year.

The two-person ditch-digging is cool -- one sticks the shovel in the ground and the second person pulls the rope to help get the shovel blade up over the trench edge.

 

The wood shavings are from the planing tools the carpenters use to fine-tune the dimensions of the window frames.

OK, then it was back onto the hiking on our way up to Chhinakpu. By this time it was getting toward late afternoon and the clouds were setting in. The second photo is Ngima taking a call on his cell phone -- funny, the strange combination of remoteness and connection.

And then the more remote Women's Literacy Program. We had another khata ceremony here, although I didn't get any pictures of it. The women are pretty amazing -- with kids, managing their homes and often working at jobs, they also spend two hours of class time six days of week in the program -- plus homework.

OK, after the visit we stopped for some salty tea and by the time we headed off it was dark. Then the rain started. The walk downhill was more fun than it sounds -- it reminded me of a downhill trail run, albeit equipped with umbrellas and flashlights. When we returned to Ngima's uncle's place, after about an hour in the rain, I scratched my head and saw that my fingers were bloody. A quick feel up around my hair produced more blood, and some scabs embedded in the hairs, and Ngima nodded. "A leech fell on you," he said. Apparently during monsoon season the woods here are full of leeches, and they drop down onto the people and feed on them. They secrete a local anaesthetic, too, which prevents you from feeling that they're there, when they're there. Maybe on my next trek I should take a pair of these.

Kathmandu Blues

Hey, so it turns out I'm having some difficulties dealing with the impending publication date, and the fact I'm about to air my darkest secrets in the incredibly public forum of a memoir. Surprise suprise. My editor gave me the first of the advance hardcover copies just before I left on this research trip I'm on, and the book looks amazing, it's the perfect size and I love the cover and the dedication-that's-not-a-dedication still reads well and huh, it's a book, it's real, the damn thing exists. And then my thought was. Geez, Shulgan, are you ready for this? Is your family ready for this?

Another for example, the chunk from the book in the latest issue of Today's Parent, where the contents' page tagline refers to the book excerpt as "Daddy on Drugs." Which stings. Except wait a second, the tagline is accurate. I was a dad who was taking drugs.

And then there's the excerpt in the latest issue of Toronto Life. In response,someone sent the editors an email which on the whole seemed complimentarty but which included something referring to how I'm laying out for public consumption "the unimaginable suffering of my partner." 

Which is kind of like, oh god. She's right, of course, that letter writer. Natalie and I went through some really tough times as a result of my drug use. We continue to go through those tough times. She has unresolved anger. I struggle with how I could ever have done what I did. It would be hard enough to deal with all these things. And then I went and wrote a book about it. And published it. And oh god it's coming out next month! Are we prepared for this?

Oh yeah, to make matters worse? Did I mention I'm jet-lagged on the other side of the world? Yeah, basically, all this stuff wants me to flee to like the Himalayas or something, and huh, look at that, I actually happen to have to go to Nepal, on this research trip that a project deadline meant I had to do in September. And thus, here I am, in a Kathmandu hotel room with Couer de Pirate's Comme des Enfants (Natalie's favourite) playing over iTunes, keeping company with an iPhoto database of photos of my kids, each of which prompts the question, what have you gotten your family into, Shulgan?

Lots of people have been sending in messages congratulating me on having the courage to air my struggles. Which is kind of missing what I'm doing frankly. Courage doesn't really have anything to do with it. I wrote the memoir because I needed to figure things out. Why'd I go and publish it then? Is the question. It's a good question! I'm wondering that question! The somewhat feeble answer is, I'm a writer, that's what I do. Fuck, I'm proud of the book! It's the rawest and most honest thing I've ever written! It stands as a work of art. It's really good, dammit. Pretentious much? But shit, you know what, I am a little pretentious.

Am I exploiting my family's pain for the sake of some artistic experiment? And isn't that selfish? Perhaps. That's a question I have to explore more, on an occasion where I have more time. As it is, I should hop in the shower because I have to go and catch a flight to a mountain valley. 

I could deal with the "Daddy on Drugs" labels if it was only me. But on top of that I'm on this research trip and I'm missing my family and I'm looking at photos of Natalie and the kids and the first thing that comes to mind is my fucked-up role in all of this, that they were the perfect parts of this component and I was the daddy on drugs and hey, how do you feel about that, Shulgan? Huh?

The answer is, Shulgan, you feel shitty about it, and then you go and use that overall shittiness as motivation to better yourself, you use it as motivation to not drink or drug on this research trip, you use it to work as hard as you possibly can on this ghostwriting project, you use it as motivation to be the best dad and husband you can be. So OK. It's into the shower. It's time to get on that.

Superdad: The Launch Party

Oh, and here's the Facebook invite.

Marriage Is What Brings Us Together

My sister's getting married today. My brother and I are the MCs. Pretty excited.