BORN TO BE MILD is a misremembered memoir by former CBC journalist James Hees, who looks back on a youth spent standing uncomfortably close to danger.

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Growing up poor in a small town, Hees was a peculiar child whose imagination subverted reality leaving him in temporary fantasy episodes he called the movies in his mind. While others chased risk with boldness and bravado, he hesitated. That hesitation, he now believes, shaped the course of his life.

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His world was anything but mild. He met Ron, a fallen businessman sipping “non-beverage alcohol” outside a shelter. He rode with Rex, a charismatic trouble-magnet with a gift for turning boredom into catastrophe, and with Skits, a volatile sidekick who made every dare feel like a verdict. Summer brought a string of near-misses: a highway stunt that nearly ended in twisted metal, a school break-in sealed by silence, wildfire work that became an entrapment, and a railway job where a handcar met a freight train head-on. Each time, he weathered a narrow escape.

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Radio became his refuge. Behind the microphone, Hees reinvented himself, moving from small-town stations to national broadcasting, even as addiction, grief, and the darker stories he covered as a journalist began to close in. Reporting during Edmonton’s “dark years,” he witnessed lives unraveling at the margins and confronted the uneasy truth that survival is not always earned.

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With dark humour and unsentimental clarity, Born to Be Mild reflects on cognitive issues, moral luck, and the strange mathematics of who lives, who falls, and who is left to tell the story.