Whenever I turn my eyes to a page, I can’t forget Mrs. Brooker’s face.

I never knew Mrs. Brooker, nor even know her first name. She must have died long before I was born, her passing recorded in some dusty crate of records in a northern English town. But I see her, because George Orwell saw her; and because he sketched her cleanly, I cannot forget her face.

“Partly blocking the door of the larder there was a shapeless sofa upon which Mrs. Brooker, our landlady, lay permanently ill, festooned in grimy blankets. She had a big, pale yellow, anxious face…

…She had a habit of constantly wiping her mouth on one of her blankets. Towards the end of my stay she took to tearing off strips of newspaper for this purpose, and in the morning the floor was often littered with crumpled-up balls of slimy paper which lay there for hours.”

-George Orwell, The Road To Wigan Pier

Well, check off another loss to the impending death of newspapers, I suppose.

I discovered Wigan Pier when I was 14 years old, and devoured it whole beneath my blankets in two nights flat. But even as the book unraveled, I kept turning back to those very early pages. Back to Orwell’s introduction of Mrs. Brooker and her silent, filthy husband, and I’d fall into those words again.

It was so perfect, how he drew them. So simple and pristine. Each adjective carefully chosen, polished and allowed to speak the fullness of its definition. And so the couple lurches into focus, as if you had just closed your eyes on them and saw the scene behind your eyelids.

The Brookers are doubtless long dead, but in a handful of pages, they live forever.

God, I realized, in the way sudden clarity springs so easily to the young, that is power.

—

So on the first of this month, I decided to try my hand at National Novel Writing Month. I got this far, and very little farther:

In the second after the shove and before the crash and wail, when the animal seemed paused mid-flight and tail lashing at the air, there was just enough time for me to think: maybe I shouldn’t have thrown the cat out the window.

Let me be completely honest: I can’t write fiction. This is terrible.

It’s strange, because I have such an active imagination. I can spend hours laying on the couch, letting distant futures spin out in my mind. I conjure ghosts in places steeped in stories, and imagine them going about their daily lives. I covet little bits of history — an old pill bottle, a Red Flyer wagon, a tattered Golden Era comic book — and fondle them, and drift off into a fugue of who held them before.

But I can’t write about it. I can’t turn imagination into a sentence that deserves a page; inevitably, I lose interest and turn away.

See also: I almost only watch documentaries.

See also: I almost only read non-fiction.

There is something sacred in this, I think, in the recording — however dramatized — of the real.

Our species has long struggled to come to terms with time, and how it passes. Life slips by in moments that dash across the meadow and then vanish in the bushes. We cling to memories, but our memory is terribly unreliable. We turn to marble, stone and steel to construct immortality, conveniently forgetting that even mountains are eventually worn away.

But in non-fiction, time stands still, and looks you in the eye, and God it lives forever: the infant’s first wail, the battered ruins of the family home, the shouts and ululations after the perfect shot and goal.  Mrs. Brooker wiping her mouth with a wadded strip of newspaper, and tossing it on the floor beyond her shapeless couch.

Chasing the immortality of the scene, the people and the scene, the people and the scene and the sense of things, the vibe, and the light: that’s what burns me up at night, when I lie awake and think of stories I so desperately want to tell. And I just think: if I can tell it perfectly, then it could live for generations, and generations more.

You’ll never tell it perfectly, by the way. But it keeps you trying.

All this is to say: Orwell’s book is why I became a nonfiction writer — a journalist, I suppose — and not a novelist.

Though as it turned out, it’s not like there’s more money in one over the either. Heh.

Speaking of which, anyone have a journalism job?

On tonight’s late-night edition of Nothing In Winnipeg, we’re going to talk about rock’n’roll.

Here’s where I start feeling a little old: the mid-1990s were a bang-up time to be a Canadian kid with a guitar, a Kool-aid dye job and a bad attitude. Music was happening. MuchMusic was happening, and we lived and died by the riffs it doled out. Canadian content rules pushed homegrown music onto the channel, and what floated to the surface was, by and large, pretty rad: bands that later become intolerably commercial were writing pretty neat songs.  Videos were totally out there, man. People were doing weird things with music and somehow making it work.

Best of all: in a country of wide open spaces, the boom seemed to happen everywhere. I’m pretty sure everyone from the East Coast was part of a hip indie-rock band. Skate punk blossomed across the West. Toronto was holding up its end with razor-sharp riffs. And even the most widely successful Canadian rock was smart. 

Oh yeah, it was a good time to tune in and turn it up.

Then this little band called Rusty came along. And they rocked, hard.

I was 13 years old when first I heard this tune, and it blew my brain out my ears and sucked it straight back into my head again. The tune taught me what “misogyny” meant; it also taught me what a perfect rock’n’roll tune sounded like.

In time, it would teach me the definition of “criminally underrated.”

Rusty’s debut album, Fluke, was short and sweet, as perfect a slab of hooked-up four-on-the-floor rock’n’roll as you can find.

It was also deliciously different. It was sorta grunge and punk and pop and rock, but whatever you called it the tunes were blended from something raw and deliciously real. Every tune was hooky as all hell, brandishing that ragged mix of delicate melodies and atonal wails, grinding rhythms and elegant phrasing. There was nothing quite like it at the time; truth be told, I’ve heard nothing quite like it since.

God, this album rules so hard.

Rusty was a band of their time, no doubt, but they also wrote sort of before and beyond and outside of it. Eighteen years later, Fluke is still a bad-ass album, their SnowJob gig may as well be legendary, and their 2011  reunion was reportedly the most requested of all Canadian bands of the era. Apparently, I’m far from alone in my fond memories of the sound.

I will argue in front of any judge that Ceiling is one of the most strangely alluring rock ballads yet written.

Okay, yeah, I’m biased: I still remember my older brother, my hero, snarling along with Misogyny on his rare visits home from med school. That’s when I fell in love, and the first rock’n’roll show I ever went to was Rusty: it was 1996 at the West End Cultural Centre. I had turned 14 a few months earlier, I went stage diving, I came home bruised and battered and bleeding from the lip. My mom asked me what the hell did I do and I shrugged.

She’d never understand, but it was the greatest night I’d ever had.

He’ll always ask for one more try, one try; you’ll always give him one more.

Rusty ended up releasing a solid (if more lo-fi) follow-up record, Sophomoric, and a few other CDs that sort of ran out of steam, and then they were gone. And 18 years after their debut, so many of us search out the YouTube videos to say: they were one of the most underrated Canadian bands of the 1990s.

But you never really know what you have, until you’ve drowned in Nickelback.

As for me? Rusty became my gateway drug into punk rock and thrash and everything loud. But even now, when I turn back for something from my early teens that makes me want to clean, I put on the entire Fluke album and just start scrubbing.

Sick band. Sick songs. And a sick reminder of the 1990s that would actually be worth reviving.