John Armstrong, author in Canada’s west. They say it’s a ‘hilarious memoir of horrible jobs’ in a fourteen part series at The Tyee:
I was free, but only for a while. We were all prisoners of the same hard truth, that a man had to make his way through life somehow. He could do it with a pickaxe or a pen and it hardly mattered which one he picked up. In the end, we were all doing life sentences, the warrant signed at birth, condemned without appeal and at the end of it release or execution amounted to about the same thing, with time and place yet to be determined.
“Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.” You could copy that line out of the Book and throw the rest of it away.