Chapter 1- If You Were 1/16th Native You'd Understand!

This strange little planet we call Earth that we all inhabit is full of peculiar people full of different ideas and opinions. We also tend to have ‘rites of passage’ if you will, that we all seem ready and eager to conform to. Inherently these tend to be either motivated or set into motion by our race or religious background. There are many cases of this in North American society, for example, for a young Jewish person it might be their Bar or Bat Mitzvah; for a young North American Italian it may be the first time they are introduced formally to a relative who is associated with organized crime; a young African-American might feel like a man the first time he slam dunks over top of the rich white kids from the suburban prep school; and for a Portuguese teen, it may be that first day on the construction job where he will work for the rest of his life.

Myself on the other hand, well I was born a pretty much normal, boring suburban white kid. Therefore, I have only one rite of passage, and it involves drinking copious amounts of booze and ending up in a police car. My background is such that I cannot trace my roots back on either side of my family outside of the great country of Canada. Now, I know what you are thinking, “That’s impossible”! Well let me tell you that you are in fact wrong Bruce (I have a thing about calling people generic names like Bruce, Doug, and Dikembe. And for this I apologize). As great is sounds, the whole being one hundred and ten percent Canadian is not all it’s cracked up to be. I mean I have never in my life been able to cheer for a country in the World Cup of Soccer. Do you have any idea how agonizing this is? So my first twenty-five years of life have therefore been spent rooting for whoever was playing against Portugal, Italy, or Brazil. Such is my pathetic life.

Despite this entire lack-of-family lineage, I have discovered a few things over the years. First and foremost I have a French last name, so there is some French in me. According to my grandparents we also have some Native blood in the Moreau clan. Natives are generally associated with a few things in this country: living on reserves, not paying taxes, huffing gas, and generally getting drunk as fuck. Unfortunately for me, I am still forced to pay taxes and am not eligible to live on a reserve. This leaves me only two options, huffing gas and consuming so much alcohol that I piss myself (another story for another time). I’ve never really liked huffing gas all that much, as I found it made me kind of woozy and I kept hallucinating that I was seeing the characters from that PBS show Today’s Special. Mostly it was that mannequin that was supposedly a security guard and that talking rat named Muffy. Really I mean what kind of dignified talking rat puppet would let someone name them Muffy. Anyways, getting back to the point here, I suffer from a problem that many people of the Squaw (I think this is a pretty racist Indian word, not too sure on that one) background suffer from. What is this you ask? Well to put it bluntly, I get so retardedly drunk that the stupidest shit imaginable happens to me.

So there you have it. I’m a putz. Admittedly, people have used harsher words to describe me, but we’re going to stick with that one. It just sounds so smooth coming out of the mouth, putz... putz... putz...putz...putz!

This is just the beginning though, as ahead I will attempt to rehash some of the more ridiculous moments that have occurred in my life over the last seven years or so.