Must Be The Season of the Witch

So here we are, four years later and once more in the grip of a national election. I'm confined to the cheap seats for this one but Lord knows that won't stop me from bitching about it on the internet.

In the visionless, micromanaged era of Stephen Harper's Conservative party you could rely on the petty small-mindedness of the man at the centre to really only have one policy goal for Canada: that he be the one running it. The man would occasionally tinker and fiddle with knobs and switches but that was about it.

Power was really the only purpose of the last Conservative government and any backbench MP who could meaningfully threaten their polling numbers, or provide a point for the opposition to unite and rally around would be summoned by trans-dimensional screeching to the Prime Minister's Barad-dûr and suitably coerced back into silence. It was an uncomfortable era and it led to an unprecedented politicization and centralized command of institutions of government, but in the end very little actually changed and most of us - unless you were eating Gerry Ritz's disgusting listeriosis-infested meat - woke up alive every morning.

Yes, boutique tax credits fucked up the treasury and any scientist with a mouth was gagged, but if a right-wing evangelical nut job voiced an intent to use the Army to shell abortion clinics or gay marriages he would simply vanish overnight, and neither the Prime Minister nor his trusty lieutenants would seem to be able to recall the miscreant's name.

It doesn't feel like that now, though, in this age of the Baby-Faced Goon and his squadron of Nazi scumbags. It's impossible to believe anyone would be capable of maintaining such an iron-like grip on the tiller. Remember that Scheer actually lost his leadership race to Maxime Bernier and he knows it, and likely the only way for him to stay at the top of the party is to acquiesce to the lunatic factions that can keep him there...the ones that his predecessor never needed to particularly acknowledge or humour. I mean, Christ, the man can't shake a bystander's hand without looking like a spineless weirdo so the odds that he'd be able to - or even want to - steer the boring but ultimately uneventful course of his predecessor is wishful thinking.

In the grand scheme of things, perhaps this was inevitable. The Harper machine suppressed the hard-right White-Jihadi wing of the party so much they're started to bubble up out of the ground, seeping like sewage through the grassroots of their own party and spilling over into Bernier's PeePee experiment. As the bff of Rebel Media's Squealer Goldy tries to unseat an accomplished air force veteran and more racist tirades and homophobic rants and conspiracy peddling nonsense come out of the closet from an increasing number of staggeringly under-vetted candidates, Scheer knows if he asks them to do more than offer a perfunctory apology there's a chance his base will be won over by Maxime Bernier's insane ramblings about a terrifying new globalist UN Conspiracy to put fluoride in water and stop electrocuting The Gays.

So buckle your safety belts and put on your tinfoil hats. We're in a for a wild 30-something days.

There Are Tardigrades On The Moon

Oh fuck me, not you lot again.

I swear I didn't mean to take, uh, two years off of writing this time.

I swear I've been absent for good honest wholesome reasons like legal drugs or work or an underground boxing league or just being too manic-addled and unhinged to bother and opted - BRAVELY - to spare you poor souls the insane spittle laden ramblings of a half-sauced madman who constantly barks for more vino and whose heart will stop beating if the coffee supply runs out.

I swear I'll probably end up going quiet again fno matter whatever else I say in a fit of panic.

Not writing is a bit like falling out of a gym habit or giving up a healthy diet (both of which I'm also guilty of, thankyouverymuch). You tell yourself nothing's changed and that you'll be getting back into tomorrow or next week, but you actually just saying it over and over, until eventually years have passed and you're shelling out for a gym membership you've barely used while your knees are buckling under your rapidly expanding girth and your brain is so cluttered with tedious minutiae and snippy comebacks that it would take either electro-shock therapy or the world's best blowjob to clear it all out and settle down but neither option is available.

Ahem.

(I've found that if I jam myself in the thigh with a fork the jolt of adrenaline can usually help me contain myself and regain composure long enough to string a few sentences together, although as it now stands the fork is also the most contact my thigh has ever had. So be it.)

Am I back? No. At least that's not what I'm saying, if only because every single time I write that I disappear for another six months to say it again. The history of these dumb scribbles has really never been much more than me simply repeating the phrase "I'm back to writing again!" over and over again, every fifty years, in between long decades of silence. Whatever. I'm here now, though maybe not for long and maybe not often. I've been circling around it for ages but the more things there are to write about, the harder it is to actually do - I get so overwhelmed with the possibilities that this year of our lord 2018 2019 offers that it's much easier to do nothing but bathe in the dark blue-grey glow of night-mode Twitter in a glaze of drool and crumbs with some obscure French synth-pop on constant repeat in my headphones than to sit still and focus and lend voice to thought.

All of which is to say there's no one particular thing which is dragging me back to my keyboard to write again, but I suppose if I have to start somewhere I would confess that I've been summoned back from the ether and re-materialized into this meat world by the mystical crystal magic of presidential candidate (and future Mother Goddess of some fucked up patchouli injecting commune) Marianne Williamson, and the effect has been so baffling and profound that I have decided to endorse her nonsense candidacy.

As far as I can tell she might as well be President. Why not? At some point you have to decide to lean in on the crazy and Williamson seems like a good choice for President of a country that really only exists as a grotesque work of fiction now. Sure, she thinks diseases and injuries are just the result of you not sufficiently willing yourself well hard enough, and that AIDS and Cancer can be defeated with "love"...like the Care Bears are going to show up and cure you*, but in fairness the current President probably thinks you rid yourself of AIDS by fucking your virgin daughter, so is she really that much further off the mark?

We live in an era where deranged billionaires and has-been musicians are competing to have the most dystopian sci-fi vision for their underage rape harems until Boris Johnson has them killed on behalf of the Royal Family, and the various husbands of Pamela Anderson swap political barbs on Meet The Press while Disney tries to make it 1990s again through endless remakes. Face it, chumps: the seal was broken in 2016 and all the dark shit of the underworld continues to spill out.

Nothing matters now. A self-help guru who identifies as a "Love Warrior" and thinks antidepressants and vaccines are secret mind-control devices slipped into the food supply by the CIA and/or the Prime Minister of New Zealand might as well be President of a country too stupid not to shoot guns at their own hogs/children. If it truly is that far gone, then surely - SURELY - the best hope for everyone around the world now is to just end it as quickly as possible and move on.

Anyway, Williamson it is. Let's embrace this chaotic dark age of ignorance and lunacy and live our lives like there really isn't that much time left because boy golly there really isn't.


*In fairness a Care Bear love beam is probably very radioactive and might actually cure/worsen cancer, or at least affect it in some way. Results on its efficacy against HIV remain inconclusive.