The world, as it turns out, is a master bureaucrat. It closes doors without looking up from its sandwich. First the manager quit. Then the label ghosted, proving corporations can achieve enlightenment by becoming pure absence. A promoter stiffed him for $250 and swore he’d never promised it, which was technically true, because promises in the music business have all the integrity of a snowflake on a hot amplifier. Streaming royalties showed up like crumbs.

He took side gigs.
Then full-time gigs.
Then teaching gigs.
Then he stopped telling people he “played music” and switched to “I used to.”

The van died in Thunder Bay, which felt cosmically appropriate, like the universe leaning in, “Here’s your punchline, kid. Don’t spend it all in one place.”

He went home for the holidays. His parents noticed his shoulders had changed direction. They now folded inward like someone trying to protect a pilot light. At dinner, his father asked, in the tone of a man asking about a house fire he can see smoldering in the distance,
“So what happened out there?”
“It didn’t work out,” he said.
“I should’ve listened,” he said.
“You were right,” he said.

His mother reached under the table and held his hand, something she hadn’t done since he was small enough to ride in shopping carts. She squeezed in that parental Morse code that translates roughly as: We never wanted to win that argument. We just wanted you intact.

He wasn’t successful. He wasn’t even sure he had the right to use the noun “musician,” which now felt like a title requiring government ID. But one night, after his parents had gone to bed and the house settled, he took out his guitar. He played softly, as if the neighbours might issue a noise complaint. Somewhere in the second verse, he realized something startlingly non-tragic: he hadn’t lost music at all. He had only lost the public relations handbook explaining how you were supposed to win at it.