So there I was, sitting on Westboro beach constructing a sand castle, listening to Latin Jazz, admiring the many beautiful women of Ottawa, and desperate for a cigar.
I’ve stopped cigarettes altogether now. Not through any deliberate choice or with any serious commitment or effort on my part mind you, but more by accident: I had a few too many on election night 2016 and by the time I had recovered later that week the desire was gone. Spooked straight or something. Besides, I have never been a regular cigarette smoker anyway and the way things are going these days it won’t be long before a drag will land you in prison, unless you can convince the cop it’s actually just a harmless joint. “I swear it’s weak pot, officer! What kind of responsible citizen do you think I’d be if I touched a menthol?!”
Whatever. Cigarettes are gone now and I don’t want to dwell on it because I hate sounding like one of those prats who can just up and quit on a whim and then brags to everyone about it. I still smoke cigars from time to time and the more Tito Puente I hear on the beach under the sun the more comfortable I am with the possibility that Health Canada will one day try banish me exile in Cuba.
I'd had two margaritas at the beach club café despite promising to cut back on booze, but I felt they'd make an adequate substitute for lunch and I’d been a good boy about eating my vegetables and going to the gym. At any rate, the whole scene was nearly perfect except that the beach is still technically located in Ontario so the booze costs forty dollars and must be consumed in a locked room far away from other humans, and where a paid staff member shouts at you to feel bad for diminishing the purity of your bodily fluids with the devil’s tequila. It’s all very aggravating and pedantic but at last it stops you from nursing a drink for too long.
But if the sun is shining - and warm - on the weekend, then nothing should be allowed to get in the way of a good mood. We have so few days of light left before the winter returns that just about any agitation can be endured. There's only so much Vitamin D left this season so grab all you can, friend, and admit that that there are far worse places someone could be.
Imagine what poor Reince Priebus is going through right now all alone in the west wing, huddled under his desk in his office with the lights off and the door locked. Sheltered in place, they call it, as the dwindling survivors of his staff scramble for cover or claw madly at the bulletproof windows, desperately trying to scamper to the safety of their DC attorney's office. With Spicer out they are all that remains of the once mighty GOP establishment inside the White House, and now Bannon is able to roam the halls with nothing to keep his blood lust in check, free to rip the head off of any passing intern and slather himself with the goo inside.
Some ambitious new idiot-maniac will be named as the new communications director, the soulless Huckabee Sanders will be the new permanent Press Secretary, Tillerson and Sessions will be gone soon - either by choice or after being pushed off a cliff - and the putsch will be more or less complete. Who knows, though? Franz von Papen was acquitted and OJ Simpson can get parole so maybe there's hope yet for a chump like Priebus, if he can stay out of the meat grinder a little while longer or at least feed it Chris Christie. Then he can flee the building to go help run some SuperPAC until until it's time to write a book without worrying about a surprise visit from Kushner in the middle of the night with his burlap sack.
Anyway, all of this was running through my head while I was lying on the beach and I couldn't help but think that to the White House regulars - the military and the security personnel, the cooks, the cleaners - the building must look like the paranormal center of a nightmare horror show these days. The world of Upside Down. A Presidential palace but with no bikinis or steel drums there, I bet. At least, not for the likes of them.
It seems like it's getting harder to get away from anything anymore. I know I certainly can't escape it, even out in the sun listening to the surf, kind of buzzed and slightly baked, and with no meaningful connection to these events or people save that we both seem to be stuck in the same alternative reality. My thoughts swirl around from a history of coup attempts to Senate rules of procedure back to the poor fucker in the situation room whose job is to connect the President's calls, and how the topsy turvy remains unrelenting.
Maybe there is an upside to it all though, consider: we're all rapt. We're all addicted. We're all becoming news hounds doped up on skepticism and constantly on edge, and perhaps that is ultimately for the best. People who have never talked about politics before are following every detail all the time, months after the inauguration and years before the next election. Perhaps a constant stream of outrages and abuses is exactly what it takes to shake off a few hundred years of growing complacency and atrophied political consciousness and start flexing some muscles again.
Or I could be wrong and we're all about to die of skin cancer or nuclear fallout. ¡Lo que sea!
Wednesday, July 26, 2017
Thursday, July 6, 2017
Dispatches from Canada Day in the Wilderness
[Editor's Note: The Publisher wishes to apologize for the delay in posting this piece. Immediately after being assigned to it, the writer fled the city and refused to ever speak to us again. Our office intern Alfonso was able to trek into the remote lake country to recover the column from the writer, sustaining some serious water-balloon related injuries in the process. We miss you, Alfonso, and wish you a speedy recovery!]
Today is apparently Canada Day. I had almost forgotten, you see, but then Facebook helpfully woke me up at 4 o’clock in the morning with a loud, urgent, buzzing notification of animated maple leaves and fireworks, and after the initial panic had abated I was set straight and decided the subject needed to be addressed.
So here I am, writing this from the main room of a remote cabin high in the Gatineau hills, far from the traffic and noise and people and absurdity of the nation’s capital, and where it’s easy to forget about the basic elements of space and time. That probably has something to do with the way the light reflects off the lake or the sound of the lightly drizzling rain I can hear outside or that beer is served with breakfast, but it’s more likely that we’ll never know exactly why. Whatever it is, it’s exactly why I am here in my own Eagle’s Nest - my brain has been too susceptible to distraction lately and even in it’s usual modestly-boring way, Ottawa is still able to keep me from doing anything productive. At times like these I need to step into a quiet void to regroup, otherwise I'd likely just go completely mad altogether.
Even in quiet years the city becomes a chaotic mess every July 1st, when a few hundred thousand people descend on Parliament Hill to watch a mediocre concert, wave at whichever minor Royal is in town, get buzzed by some Air Force jets before getting hammered completely on overpriced liquor. This year is a whole different beast altogether though: everything has been ramped up to Peak Nonsense for the country’s 150th birthday. Advertisements have been implanted in my brain for months. U2 will be in town for five minutes [Editor’s note: It was NOT U2, but simply Bono and The Edge performing a single song on the main stage]. Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall will be in attendance, no doubt before he goes off to speak at some quack-science homeopathy seminar later this week. The streets have been closed for days and tourists have been flooding even the quiet neighborhoods, begging locals for directions or help on how to use our woefully incapable transit system, or how to kill time. My answer to both is pretty simple, bub: it’s every man for himself; get the hell out of town and save yourself.
Canada 150™ is exactly the kind of program I have come to expect from the Government of Canada: a feel-good branding exercise like Own The Podium or Have It Your Way that we convince ourselves is in the spirit of a Norman Rockwell painting but is more the style of a cheap beer company or Tim Hortons for which I have no time or patience, though I can almost never quite put my finger on precisely why.
For instance, the Canada 150 logo seems perfectly fine to me and not – as some reactionary bigots on Facebook seem to think – a secret attempt by the Trudeau government to turn wholesome children queer with a desecrated Canadian flag. Perhaps I don’t mind it because I am (barely) clever enough to remember that it was in fact the Harper government that chose the design, or because even if it was such a secret plot it could only do our collective conscious some good. We could all stand to have our minds (among other things) blown more often. Nor am I particularly opposed to the idea that this anniversary is somehow more special because it is the sesquicentennial…if only because it affords me the opportunity to try and spell “sesquicentennial” while sipping a beer and making obsessive observations about the weather (and thus fulfilling two vital Canadian stereotypes).
Anyway, I must acknowledge that the whole phenomenon does provide a reasonable excuse to sit here, now on a deck (the rain has ceased, it turns out) in the middle of the wilderness, getting baked while Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and The Hip’s critically underappreciated Last of the Unplucked Gems play on the radio, and think about Canada, even though I find the older I get the more I find myself completely perplexed by the very idea of nation-states. Ugh, whatever.
This country, as surely you must have figured out by now, is 150 years old. Maybe. Depending on your generation, background, and political philosophy we either became a country in 1867 when a bunch of quasi-genocidal anglophiles lobbied the British for self-government, 1930-something when the Westminster Statute expanded the ability of that government, the 1980s when the Constitution was finally repatriated with its much-vaunted Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or some 20,000 years ago when the first humans settled in the area that would come be Canada. At least, until the Eurotrash arrived and - using a combination of biological warfare and the regular kind - killed most of them, scattered the rest, and built a new place out of their bones.
To be fair there has been some progress since then: the highest officials of the white man’s government will work in a building that’s no longer named for a major proponent of a system of cultural destruction and child rape. Additionally, the pub-sized Victorian-era beaux-arts building across the street from Parliament Hill which has been vacant for decades will become a new cultural appreciation center, uh, somehow. Still, I’m sure they would have preferred some money to make their water drinkable or homes livable so it should hardly come as a surprise to anyone that as we approached the annual orgy of red and white, there would be some choice words about the whole proceedings - and righteously so.
So I’ll be forgiven – surely - that I can’t help but grin a bit that while I sit out here in the emerging sun, on my second cup of gritty cottage coffee the downpour continues on Parliament Hill, keeping the crowds away or at lest damp. It shouldn’t improve my mood but it does...Canada Day should never go quite as smoothly as the government wants it to.
At any rate, either the fresh coffee or the next beer or the brightening day has perked me up somewhat and I’m able to get past the full force of my negativity and think about some of the upsides. In the past six months, for instance, this country has emerged as one of the stalwart pillars of the liberal international order and, along with France and Germany, stand as the last line of defense for the whole of Western Civilization. The rise of an independent and assertive foreign policy in the face of the American retreat from global leadership is something to be proud of.
Plus, you know, all of the hokey stuff you see in the commercials. I’m taking advantage of a beautiful landscapes right now, and the image of the easy-going multiculturalist scoiety is a great idea as long as we’re willing to fight for it. It is nice – and serves a greater good - that you can get bitten by a poisonous snake (which will become a real thing as climate change brings more of them here) or get hit by a car or get drunk on powerful beer at your cottage while writing your Canada Day blog post and accidentally fall down some rickety wooden stairs onto sharp rocks, and still have your hospital bill covered without having to worry about going bankrupt or being shit on by Human Turdbag Ted Cruz.
There’s an argument to be made, I’m convinced, that a critical, distinguishing trait separating civilized nations from the uncivilized is the ability to recognize and acknowledge the bad parts of one’s history and problems of the present while celebrating the good. We should do that more often, especially as Canada 150® tries valiantly to simplify everything into vague, sugar-laden Tim Horton’s style jingoism. But the hard part is doing it: if the mantra of the post-Harper years is to be that “better is always possible” then we have to be willing to put the work into making the possible real.
Jesus! An honest-to-fuck deer has just walked up to the shoreline a few dozen feet from me, hopped into the water, and has begun to swim across the lake. I have no idea if he’s ever done that before or does it often, or if he even knows where the hell he’s going, but off he goes anyway. Maybe he’s taking a morning constitutional, or swimming out to die. Either way I take it as a sign that the lake has become too tempting to resist; an omen form nature that I’m starting to ramble and this whole thing is going to fly apart if I keep it up.
[Editor's Note: This is the end of the recovered transcript. Have a safe long weekend, everyone.]
Today is apparently Canada Day. I had almost forgotten, you see, but then Facebook helpfully woke me up at 4 o’clock in the morning with a loud, urgent, buzzing notification of animated maple leaves and fireworks, and after the initial panic had abated I was set straight and decided the subject needed to be addressed.
So here I am, writing this from the main room of a remote cabin high in the Gatineau hills, far from the traffic and noise and people and absurdity of the nation’s capital, and where it’s easy to forget about the basic elements of space and time. That probably has something to do with the way the light reflects off the lake or the sound of the lightly drizzling rain I can hear outside or that beer is served with breakfast, but it’s more likely that we’ll never know exactly why. Whatever it is, it’s exactly why I am here in my own Eagle’s Nest - my brain has been too susceptible to distraction lately and even in it’s usual modestly-boring way, Ottawa is still able to keep me from doing anything productive. At times like these I need to step into a quiet void to regroup, otherwise I'd likely just go completely mad altogether.
Even in quiet years the city becomes a chaotic mess every July 1st, when a few hundred thousand people descend on Parliament Hill to watch a mediocre concert, wave at whichever minor Royal is in town, get buzzed by some Air Force jets before getting hammered completely on overpriced liquor. This year is a whole different beast altogether though: everything has been ramped up to Peak Nonsense for the country’s 150th birthday. Advertisements have been implanted in my brain for months. U2 will be in town for five minutes [Editor’s note: It was NOT U2, but simply Bono and The Edge performing a single song on the main stage]. Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall will be in attendance, no doubt before he goes off to speak at some quack-science homeopathy seminar later this week. The streets have been closed for days and tourists have been flooding even the quiet neighborhoods, begging locals for directions or help on how to use our woefully incapable transit system, or how to kill time. My answer to both is pretty simple, bub: it’s every man for himself; get the hell out of town and save yourself.
Canada 150™ is exactly the kind of program I have come to expect from the Government of Canada: a feel-good branding exercise like Own The Podium or Have It Your Way that we convince ourselves is in the spirit of a Norman Rockwell painting but is more the style of a cheap beer company or Tim Hortons for which I have no time or patience, though I can almost never quite put my finger on precisely why.
For instance, the Canada 150 logo seems perfectly fine to me and not – as some reactionary bigots on Facebook seem to think – a secret attempt by the Trudeau government to turn wholesome children queer with a desecrated Canadian flag. Perhaps I don’t mind it because I am (barely) clever enough to remember that it was in fact the Harper government that chose the design, or because even if it was such a secret plot it could only do our collective conscious some good. We could all stand to have our minds (among other things) blown more often. Nor am I particularly opposed to the idea that this anniversary is somehow more special because it is the sesquicentennial…if only because it affords me the opportunity to try and spell “sesquicentennial” while sipping a beer and making obsessive observations about the weather (and thus fulfilling two vital Canadian stereotypes).
Anyway, I must acknowledge that the whole phenomenon does provide a reasonable excuse to sit here, now on a deck (the rain has ceased, it turns out) in the middle of the wilderness, getting baked while Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and The Hip’s critically underappreciated Last of the Unplucked Gems play on the radio, and think about Canada, even though I find the older I get the more I find myself completely perplexed by the very idea of nation-states. Ugh, whatever.
This country, as surely you must have figured out by now, is 150 years old. Maybe. Depending on your generation, background, and political philosophy we either became a country in 1867 when a bunch of quasi-genocidal anglophiles lobbied the British for self-government, 1930-something when the Westminster Statute expanded the ability of that government, the 1980s when the Constitution was finally repatriated with its much-vaunted Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or some 20,000 years ago when the first humans settled in the area that would come be Canada. At least, until the Eurotrash arrived and - using a combination of biological warfare and the regular kind - killed most of them, scattered the rest, and built a new place out of their bones.
To be fair there has been some progress since then: the highest officials of the white man’s government will work in a building that’s no longer named for a major proponent of a system of cultural destruction and child rape. Additionally, the pub-sized Victorian-era beaux-arts building across the street from Parliament Hill which has been vacant for decades will become a new cultural appreciation center, uh, somehow. Still, I’m sure they would have preferred some money to make their water drinkable or homes livable so it should hardly come as a surprise to anyone that as we approached the annual orgy of red and white, there would be some choice words about the whole proceedings - and righteously so.
So I’ll be forgiven – surely - that I can’t help but grin a bit that while I sit out here in the emerging sun, on my second cup of gritty cottage coffee the downpour continues on Parliament Hill, keeping the crowds away or at lest damp. It shouldn’t improve my mood but it does...Canada Day should never go quite as smoothly as the government wants it to.
At any rate, either the fresh coffee or the next beer or the brightening day has perked me up somewhat and I’m able to get past the full force of my negativity and think about some of the upsides. In the past six months, for instance, this country has emerged as one of the stalwart pillars of the liberal international order and, along with France and Germany, stand as the last line of defense for the whole of Western Civilization. The rise of an independent and assertive foreign policy in the face of the American retreat from global leadership is something to be proud of.
Plus, you know, all of the hokey stuff you see in the commercials. I’m taking advantage of a beautiful landscapes right now, and the image of the easy-going multiculturalist scoiety is a great idea as long as we’re willing to fight for it. It is nice – and serves a greater good - that you can get bitten by a poisonous snake (which will become a real thing as climate change brings more of them here) or get hit by a car or get drunk on powerful beer at your cottage while writing your Canada Day blog post and accidentally fall down some rickety wooden stairs onto sharp rocks, and still have your hospital bill covered without having to worry about going bankrupt or being shit on by Human Turdbag Ted Cruz.
There’s an argument to be made, I’m convinced, that a critical, distinguishing trait separating civilized nations from the uncivilized is the ability to recognize and acknowledge the bad parts of one’s history and problems of the present while celebrating the good. We should do that more often, especially as Canada 150® tries valiantly to simplify everything into vague, sugar-laden Tim Horton’s style jingoism. But the hard part is doing it: if the mantra of the post-Harper years is to be that “better is always possible” then we have to be willing to put the work into making the possible real.
Jesus! An honest-to-fuck deer has just walked up to the shoreline a few dozen feet from me, hopped into the water, and has begun to swim across the lake. I have no idea if he’s ever done that before or does it often, or if he even knows where the hell he’s going, but off he goes anyway. Maybe he’s taking a morning constitutional, or swimming out to die. Either way I take it as a sign that the lake has become too tempting to resist; an omen form nature that I’m starting to ramble and this whole thing is going to fly apart if I keep it up.
[Editor's Note: This is the end of the recovered transcript. Have a safe long weekend, everyone.]
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