About me

I’m going to start this “about me” information in my mid-thirties, saving you the boring details of an uneventful, yet life-altering preceding period best left for a book entitled “What the Hell Was That All About?” choosing instead to focus on the impetus for this project and starting somewhere readers can get oriented in preparation for the details to come.


After doing every minimum wage job on the planet, I went back to school to become a teacher. Upon graduation I spent a ridiculously short time in the teaching profession deciding that emotional outbursts were best left for truly devastating experiences and teaching junior high was not one of them. I decided to work for the airlines so I could travel a bit and encourage my boys to see the world on a shoestring budget. While the idea sounded great, the wage wasn’t, so I returned to my former profession (but not for long).

In less than a year, I met who I thought was the love of my life online and one year later, moved to the U.S. where things didn’t work out. Making the best of the situation and for reasons that were no doubt perfectly clear to the universe but never to me, I stayed for another three, completing the Second City Sketch comedy writing program in Chicago and then getting a scholarship for law school (which I attended for over a year, but then could not finish due to financial reasons).

After returning to Canada, I went back to teaching and resumed my writing, all the while digging back into the cyber dating world once again out of boredom and desperation – a deadly combination that invited nothing but disaster. I was back at square one and no idea how someone like me could have gotten so turned around.

You see, I thought I had followed every sign like a faithful disciple of universal principles that stated if you look for omens and do something about them, everything will work out.

But that was not the case. After a year and a half of wondering what sort of sick joke God was having at the expense of my ill-fated life, it hit me. My job was not to question why - the mysteries of the universe have never been solved and who am I to think I'm the one to do it? It was simply to roll with the punches and persevere. It was time to stop fighting something bigger than me, write what I know, see the humor in it all and enjoy how the remainder would unfold.

The question then became, what was I really good at? Then I realized a better question: "What was I not good at but spent oodles of time pondering?" Then it hit me.

Relationships.

I was an expert on what not to do, and a novice on how the game was played. So I decided to write about it, fates be damned.

The universe can only keep me out of the starting gate for so long. If I keep it up, the law of probability states that sooner or later I’ll get what’s coming to me – for better or worse. And since I’ve always tried to be a decent person, the odds were in my favour that things were on the verge of turning around. In the meantime I thought, ‘I'm going to have a helluva good time observing the inane and writing about it.’

I had been looking for love online (and largely unsuccessfully) for almost ten years, I figured it was time I found out why I was such a loser in love. So I went on line and asked.

Thus was born "Love on the Net - A Survival Guide to Internet Dating."

This blog documents not only the process writing this book entails but I have become my own experiment. I'm taking every principle I've learned over the last 10 years with a focus on the last two books I've read to push me into the next leg of my journey: Jack Canfield's "Success Principles" and Timothy Ferris' "The Four-Hour Work Week".

What have I got to lose? I've been through it all, I did it all backwards and I would do it all again. But this time, I'm making myself accountable to the whole world and telling the universe it can kiss my ass. I’m out to prove I can do it. And if I can, then anybody can.

And so, the journey begins...