The Joe Van

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YEAR ONE TO THIRTY-ONE

—

by

Joe Van
in
  • Year 1 (1993)- The year of AIR- rich with many things but ultimately invisible. There are memories that remain.
  • Year 2- WATER- same thing, but a lot more was happening. I was establishing my core self. Eating, walking, and talking.
  • Year 3- RED- I think I had my earliest memory. It was a nightmare about my older brother and I looking for our parents in the night, with a blood red sky illuminating our house. Horrors aside, my younger sister was then born and I started preschool, you know, school before even Junior Kindergarten.
  • Year 4- JUSTICE- I had chicken pox and then developed my ‘police’ mentality. I was a stickler for the rules and would go about making sure everyone else followed them. My grandma told me one time I got upset while she was babysitting me and I announced, ‘I think anyone who doesn’t live here should go back to where they live.’ Very rude.
  • Year 5- GLASS- I was a talking whizz. I remember sitting in the car while my parents got ready to head out and some construction dudes were talking within earshot, swearing like sailors. Later that year my dad came home late and stubbed his toe on a toy in the dark. I heard through the walls him take it out on my mom, swearing and cursing about all the shit everywhere. Then at Christmas we got ocarina of time for the N64! Still a GOATed game, no contest.
  • Year 6- the APOCALYPSE- Y2K babyyyy. But I’m getting ahead of myself, also I entered grade one. That’s where I met my friend Pat, and got to hang out for recess on the playground with grades ones to four. I had entered gen pop.
  • Year 7- the TOWERS- 9/11 happened and when we had computer class we were all looking it up. One kid said there was the face of the devil in the smoke. I made more friends and yu-gi-oh was popular at my school. And super smash bro melee came out which again is still GOATed to this day.
  • Year 8- SPRING- I don’t know why but I remember having a snow day on my birthday, in April. It’s not unheard of but a significant thing for me because it never happened before, and hasn’t happened since.
  • Year 9- SPACE- I’m sure there were earlier moments but I got a space book for my birthday and it’s where I learned about absolute zero, and quasars, and all the fun space stuff out there, like black holes and the theory of the Big Crunch. I remember saving a big bag of fuzzy peaches and eating them slowly while reading. Fun fact about the Big Crunch, it’s now an obsolete theory thanks to James Webb’s confirmation of the accelerated expansion of the universe; leading to an eventual heat death, or Big Freeze. Other things could happen outside of the heat death, but the Big Crunch ain’t one of them.
  • Year 10 (2003)- GREEN- this was an ultimate kid-year for me. I feel like I fell in love with movies. The punisher, hulk, the return of the king, Cody banks?! So many good movies came out. Also I kind of got my first girlfriend. She was at least a girl that I hung with and hugged and kissed on the cheek. I was always girl crazy but this was the first real relationship.
  • Year 11- PAPER- I got into drawing comic books, even though I didn’t read comics. My older brother had some comics and I read those but wasn’t interested in collecting my own. But I liked drawing stories.
  • Year 12- CAMP- I’ve been to RV camp grounds, that’s where I learned to bike for the first time at 5, but in grade 7 the school sent us to camp Tangimakoon. I was making more friends, but tragically I lost my girlfriend around this time, and it was 100% my fault. I wasn’t progressing things. It’s like I wanted to play adult but didn’t know how to do it, and went on to be a pretty late bloomer.
  • Year 13- OPEN DOOR- it was the year of graduation… from elementary school. I was chasing girls, making friends with kids that shot film, and everything was looking up. There was drama with some kids that got kicked out of our friend group but aside from that I had my sights on bigger horizons.
  • Year 14- BROKEN MUG- high school started. Popular kids were talking to me because my old brother was popular, but after I opened my mouth they could tell I wasn’t meant to hang with them. My friend group then dropped me, and I ended up completely alone by October. It was a rough feeling. Another couple of months later and Pat reached out, asking if I wanted to walk home with him and Rachel as we were all neighbours, and from there we made more friends, ending the school year on a better note.
  • Year 15- MONEY- I joined Facebook, went on a field trip to New York City, got my first legal job, got an Xbox from an old friend, and fell in love with Halo. Once I earned enough at my job to buy a 360, I quit. I started smoking with my friends, my brother got me to smoke weed and drink for the first time, and my friends got into shenanigans like climbing our school and local mall, and car hopping.
  • Year 16- WHEELS- you already knew. I was among the first to get a G2 drivers license and I took full advantage. I was a natural behind the wheel and to this day I’m the best parker I know. At this point all my other friends lost their virginities. I was the last boy standing, and for a while more. I was too busy having fun. Plus I used to find it easy to talk to girls, but after I hit puberty I got really nervous about it, like there was something real at stake now.
  • Year 17- ANGST- I started listening to dubstep, was love sick about one girl or another almost every day, and I was pushing the limits of the law. From swapping for-sale signs, to pool hopping, to straight up stealing, and breaking-and-entering facilities. Really dumb stuff like that. I took my first philosophy class and I remember just how profoundly obvious everything became. Even though I had my own issues, I could logically see the path from thoughts to action and how interconnected everything was to one another. It was an intro to logic, but also understanding. But that comes in waves as I’m sure we all know. You can see things clearly one day, then lose it the next. C’est la vie.
  • Year 18- EDGE of the CLIFF- I graduated high school, making more friends on the way out than I did on the way in, and had a feeling of everything being up from there. I didn’t have direct plans yet but the feeling was intoxicating. At this point I’ve smoked weed and drank, but the thing that stuck the most was cigarettes. I got arrested but nothing serious came of it, aside from my friends and I no longer doing petty illegal crimes.
  • Year 19- GOING OVER- I lost my viginity to a co-worker who later became my girlfriend, but the whole thing was on thin ice. I couldn’t trust her when she drank, and the both of us were drinking constantly. I brought her to parties, I drove drunk, and got accepted to college. By the time the summer ended I was packing up to live in another town. My relationship was at its best with daily contact so me moving was the beginning of the end. A couple of months away and she broke up with me. My drinking got worse and I dropped out of school.
  • Year 20 (2013)- BREAK- I was jobless, single, and without a prospect in sight. I went to a job fair but that didn’t help. I went back to school with a friend and together we both graduated. He went on to take a specialized course that he excelled in. I went to work as an arborist and suffered a back injury, while simultaneously coming up with the best idea for a story ever conceived.
  • Year 21- PIECES- I continued looking for work while I pieced my great story together. I was hired as a shoe salesman and finished writing the first draft of my first book. By that point I had decided it was going to be a series of six books. I flirted with some co-workers, and left to work for my uncle’s landscaping company.
  • Year 22- PEACE- I visited my extended family in Belgium and it was a magical experience. In 3 weeks I wrote another entire book. I was drinking very regularly at this point. I couldn’t keep working for my uncle due to epistemological differences, so I quit. I floated between jobs to no success. I joined Tinder but was too shy to go all in.
  • Year 23- LOVE- I wrote another book, the third in the series, and I continued to float between jobs. I was a daily for a long time. But then I found luck in landing a driving job for a major linen company. On Tinder, I made a connection with a girl, Sam. We went out and it was magical. It was the kind of first date you reminisce about for the rest of your life. I was a changed person, but I thought the drinking would stop once I started seeing someone. Instead, I ended up falling into a habit of seeing her one day and drinking alone the next.
  • Year 24- ADVENTURE- I quit linen to find a more fulfilling job and landed in meat delivery. Sam and I were doing great together. We met each others’ family and friends. We went on trips together, but I was still drinking.
  • Year 25- REASSEMBLY- I took online classes for writing as I worked on finishing my fourth book. Sam and I went on an extended trip to Alberta. It was an unforgettable trip, however, I went through withdrawal. It was the first time in all these years that I went more than three days without drinking. I snapped at her a few times. It was shameful. She just thought that was how I acted in the early morning, or after driving for long stretches, but I knew better. By the end of the year I had a breakdown due to an event while black-out drunk. I blamed myself due to the drinking, so I poured out the remainder of the booze and went cold turkey.
  • Year 26- DRY HOLLYWOOD- Newly inspired to try and make a living being creative, I quit my job and pursued film and television. My first job did not go well. I was the Canadian liaison and P.A. for an American group filming a true crime series that had an episode about a Canadian serial killer. The next few jobs were alright, but the best experience I had, still to this day was my first film job. I was volunteering as a P.A. and everyone there was working on the project because they loved film. It was a micro-budget thriller about Islamophobia in an imagined future. The year ended on that high.
  • Year 27- MOVING INSIDE- I finished my fourth book and Covid hit just as I was about to work as an extra on a Guillermo del Toro film. While in lock-down, Sam and I lived together for the first time. Being a recovered alcoholic, there was nothing left to hide. We worked together perfectly. It was up to me to clean everything, but she wasn’t messy so it didn’t feel unfair. The lock-down was a magical time. I started making YouTube videos on my channel. When it ended I had to get back to work. I worked on a television show and Sam and I decided at that time that we move to Toronto.
  • Year 28- BLUES- When the show ended, I moved back into landscaping because I felt I couldn’t continue hustling. I needed a consistent source of income. Then at a party months later, I met a producer who worked at Blues Clues and he gave me a job. I worked there but didn’t have the best time. I felt I was too anxious for somes’ taste. It ended and I paused working for a while to just enjoy life.
  • Year 29- TURNING the CORNER- I met an online friend I made in 2020 who lived in Atlanta, which was a fun trip. It was as happy for me as when the lock-down happened. I still wish I could just live in that bubble of time. I could spend days just creating and being without stress, but alas. When I came back from my trip to America, it was time to be serious. Everyone in my life was pressuring me to get a job. I worked for a month as a science teacher for children in an after school program called MAD Science. Afterwards I got a full time job working at a company called Landcare that I work at now.
  • Year 30 (2023)- CAREER- I continued to work but as winter approached, I asked my work if there was anything I could do inside the office. They told me they could give me a job in marketing because I went to school for film, but it would be a permanent position. I accepted it and got to work learning how their system worked, from email formatting, to their filing system to the program they just started using called LMN. It was a good winter all things considered. Sam was proud of me.
  • Year 31- A NOTCH on the LADDER- I continued to work at Landcare. I also wrote a book of short stories, and pushed my video-making skills in an attempt to try and become a YouTube partner, but it did not work and that stifled my motivation. I should never have made videos feeling like work because it started from a place of fun and creativity. Landcare continued to give me more and different work at my job, with little raise. Sam and I discussed what the future would look like and it did not involve Toronto. We were ready to move away. Her parents lived in the East coast where the housing market was affordable and so we made plans to go there.
  • The FUTURE- I’m already moving far. But this has been my recounting of my own growth through life; year 1-31. It’s not to mention the lives of everyone else who I have shared paths with, for better or worse. I love all my family and friends of course, and look forward to everything now as it comes. The future awaits!