2019. I was cooking up a pirate story for quite a while. I had seen a documentary about the golden age of piracy in the Caribbean and the treaties and dates and even some of the names I had seen have been the exact same ones I heard when I learned about the acadian deportation in high school. In 2019, I wouldn’t shut up about that story whenever I went to smoke pot with my buddy. I don’t even think she gets or care about the story I’m all riled up about but she knows I like to draw and smiles at my antics. I could go on and on about it while smoking...until I’m too stoned to even know what I’m talking about.

...oh, just once in a while.

One day, I found one of uncle Raymond’s kids movies on YouTube and went “Oh, Uncle Ray did horrible things, but he was a sweet gu…”

Then I realized: Goddamit, Cynthia! Why the Hell do you think a pedophile had so many kids’ movies?

Thirty years later, I knew what it was like to lie to oneself to get juuuust a little bit of dopamine, one night after the other, while the rest of your life slowly drifts away.

I knew what it’s like to have forgotten what happiness feels like and have it replaced by a substance. Suddenly, I saw him as a monster who was conscious of his ability to control people through their addiction and used that to rape kids. Oh, he was a cool cartoon character, alright because I couldn’t come up with a better villain.

Rural, conservative communities, no matter their language, often act like “depravations” like addiction and child abuse only happen in big cities while rural areas are cutesy and wholesome and acadians, well, we have been portrayed as cutesy and wholesome from Longfellow to Antonine Maillet to Wilfred Lebouthillier but we are not tragedy characters. We are mere humans. It is time to face our dark side so we can heal it.