Hunter_Janzen

Hunter Janzen: Brockville, Bodies, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves I’m Hunter. Born and raised in Brockville, Ontario — yeah, that Brockville, the one tucked away on the St. Lawrence, the City of the 1000 Islands. I still live here. Work here. Write about this place, oddly enough, for a project called CamoWallet. But my real beat, for the last twenty-odd years, has been people. Specifically, the messy, beautiful, often baffling intersection of sex, money, and connection. I’ve been a sex educator, a dating coach, a researcher. I’ve seen a lot. Done a fair bit. And somehow, it all keeps bringing me back to the river.Growing up here in the 90s was... specific. You had the river, that endless highway of water. You had the tunnel — the Brockville Railway Tunnel, Canada’s first, dark and damp and echoing with the footsteps of a hundred years. As a teenager, it was the perfect place to sneak a cigarette, or, if you were lucky, a first kiss. My friends and I would spend Fridays at the 1000 Islands Mall on Parkedale, just hanging out, trying to look cool. I worked my first real job at the old A&P on King Street West, stocking shelves. Boring as hell. But it taught me about people. You see a lot, watching a town do its grocery shopping. The quiet desperation of a couple not speaking as they pick out a chicken. The furtive purchase of a romance novel. The body language, you know? It all tells a story.Brockville isn't just where I'm from; it's the filter through which I see the world. When I talk to a client in Toronto or New York about the transactional nature of dating apps, I think about the Victoria Building, solid and grand, watching over King Street for over a century. It's about permanence versus the swipe. Or I think about the flat, calm water of the river in the morning, and how it can hide such strong currents underneath. That's human sexuality. That's a relationship. The surface is one thing; what's pulling you under is another. Living here, on this specific patch of the Canadian Shield, it grounds me. Reminds me that some things are built to last, even when everything else feels like it's changing at the speed of a notification.I came into this world on a cold, grey Tuesday, February 23rd, 1982, at the Brockville General Hospital, the one on Kendall Street back then, before they consolidated everything. My parents had a modest house on Perth Street, not far from the hospital. I can still remember the sound of the trains. You can't escape them here. The CP Rail line runs right through town, and that low, mournful horn becomes the soundtrack to your life. My first memories are of that sound, the smell of the river in the spring when the ice breaks up, and the fluorescent hum of the waiting room in Dr. Henderson's office on Garden Street, where my mom would take me for checkups. It was a town of factories then, of smokestacks. Philips Cables was still a big deal. It felt solid. Working-class. A town that built things and moved things on the water.These days, my activity is more sedentary but just as investigative. I write articles for the CamoWallet project, about Brockville. Sounds random, right? A sexologist writing travelogue-style pieces for a finance-adjacent website? But it fits. CamoWallet is all about navigating a world that wants to track you, to own your data. My whole career has been about navigating the invisible currents in relationships — the unspoken rules, the hidden transactions, the stuff we don't put on our profiles. Writing about Brockville lets me explore the same thing, but through the lens of a place. The hidden history of the tunnel, the stories the old stone buildings on Court House Avenue could tell, the quiet resilience of a town that's reinvented itself after the factories left. It’s still about peeling back layers. Still about finding the authentic story underneath the polished surface. And I get to sit in my favorite spot, the Keystorm Pub on King Street, nursing a coffee, and just... write. Watch the town wake up. So what’s the emotional takeaway from all this? That competence isn't about having all the answers. It's about being comfortable with the questions. For years, I thought my value was in what I knew — the Kinsey scale, the research on attachment theory, the statistics on dating app usage. I could talk for hours. And I did. But the real work, the stuff that actually helps people, came from listening. From sitting in my rented office above the shops on King Street, listening to someone unravel the knot of their own desires or fears. It’s in the pauses. The things they don't say. That’s where the trust is built. And it’s the same with this town. I don’t know everything about Brockville. But I’ve learned to listen to it. The way the fog sits on the river. The quiet on a Sunday morning. The echoes in that long, dark tunnel. It’s all just... honest. And that’s what I try to be. In my work, in my writing, in my life. Just a guy from Brockville, trying to make sense of the stories we live and the ones we tell.