This story is adapted from the 2010 Giller Prize nominated book The Matter with Morris. It originally appeared in the September 2010 edition of The Walrus magazine.
"Morris Schutt, aged fifty-one, was a syndicated journalist, well liked and read by many, who wrote a weekly column in which he described the life of a fifty-one-year-old man who drove a Jaguar, was married to a psychiatrist, played pickup basketball, showed a fondness for Jewish novelists, suffered mildly from tinnitus, had sex once or twice a week depending on how much wine he and his wife drank, and who cared for his mother, a hypochondriac and a borderline narcoleptic. There was a son as well, who had just turned twenty and who coloured his mother's hair every six weeks. He was a gentle, slothful boy. He had tried university, disliked it, and dropped out. He played online poker. He smoked too much weed."