100.

Worship is a devil of a thing to explain, especially when it comes to culture.

I’m sure we’ve all got our little secret cultural love affairs, tucked away in quirks that require an hour’s backstory to untangle. Yeah, those memories that latch onto an ingredient with the singular focus of fetish, making that the signifier of a whole slew of emotions. Mickey Mouse comes to represent trips to Disneyland when parents were still together; Hunter S. Thompson was a like-minded strangeness in an adolescence made of the same; a childhood sled is implanted the smudged memories of a simple life made exceptional. It’s not logic, or rationale: it’s worship.

Mine is directed towards the usual suspects: blue-eyed wonders, the abstract concept of film, European scooters. It’s not hard to figure out where most of them are rooted: it’s all a tangle of mythology, mystery and modness.

But there’s one that no matter how hard I try, won’t leave me alone: my idolatry of Margaret Atwood. And try as I might, I can’t explain it. I’ve tried and failed many times. Her words just burrow deeper inside me than my self-awareness can reach.

I tried badly not to advertise it, especially when I was growing up and felt acutely that a healthy appreciation of her work was something that they mailed to you along with your Canadian passport: it felt almost cliché to have so much of myself wrapped in someone who had become a nation-wide institution before I’d even been born. I even tried to deny it, but all it would take was a handful of her sentences to turn me into the kneeling supplicant at the Altar of Atwood.

You see, she says things like this:

“The childhoods of writers are thought to have something to do with their vocation, but when you look at these childhoods they are in fact very different. What they often contain, however, are books and solitude, and my own childhood was right on track.”

And fleetingly, my own childhood, my own strangeness, is printed on a page somewhere. And it doesn’t feel stolen; it’s a reflection. It's a secret message. It's a well-timed encouragement. And it’s what drives me to own every book, read every phrase, consider every salient or nonsensical point she makes with an affectionate patience that’s usually only granted to lovers.

It’s worship. It doesn’t have rules. What’s yours?

Sidenote: I’ve just noticed that this marks my 100^th post on Ampersandology. Happy postday to me? And thanks to all my readers so far: I dig hearing from you and knowing you're out there.