Jak Phoenix: Paid in Full-A Short Story

Matt Williams

What is it about writing a bio that so clearly puts your existence into perspective at the bottom of the grand scale of important things? You don't want to over-embellish and seem like you're full of yourself right? But then you don't want to sound boring. In the interest of giving others a chance, I'll leave out the stuff about being an astronaut archaeologist.

I grew up in Ridgeway, Ontario, swimming in Lake Erie when we didn't realize it was toxic and having adventures in forests now flattened for suburbs. Then I found movies.

Thinking back, I have to place the original Star Wars trilogy as one of the biggest influences on my childhood. Or maybe Back to the Future...or Indiana Jones...or Bill and Ted. Wow, the eighties. When you filter out the crap, we had an unfair amount of awesome stuff.

An attempt at breaking out of the bland doldrums of a nine-to-five computer service job was what drove me to take a shot at writing. It was something I also used to love doing when I was younger. If girls, sports and music hadn't dragged me away from writing as I got older, who knows what would have come of it? My bet is that it would have been of more worth than what came of the results in the fields above.