Here At The End Of All Things

There's something almost liberating about Tuesday's election results.

No I haven't lost my marbles. Well I have, obviously, but that was true long before this week's exercise in mass cultural suicide that was the 2024 Presidential Election.

When the inmates first took over the asylum in 2016 it felt more complicated. America, we've always been able to believe, is a great country and Americans are a great people and when bad things happen there is an unfortunate and immovable structural reason for it. The electoral college is dumb! Jerrymandering distorts congressional results and disadvantages Democrats! Confederate States make it so much harder for minorities to vote!

So when Trump won in the electoral college but not the popular vote, it was easy to lean on these to explain how a country most of us want to think the best about could still be saddled with a comically incompetent, racist, buffoonish molester in the White House. By a significant margin most of the voters in 2016 had in fact picked the mentally stable candidate, but were let down by a few thousand morons in some key states.

But 2024 is an apocalypse of a different order altogether.

Of the people who showed up to vote, most of them looked at the chaos of 2016-2020, the absurdist campaign rhetoric coming out of a clearly sundowning brownshirt and said Yes, let's go with that option, please. It is no longer possible to pretend that this is a country of good people merely trapped in a failed system, because the people who didn't vote this time around - and there are at the time of this writing perhaps ten million of them who took this year off after 2020 - clearly also looked at all of that and said, Sure, whatever.

Don't give me Bernie Sanders' timeless grifting about a Democratic party that has failed workers and driven them into the arms of the Republican party. This election featured one side which actively campaigned on wanting to make things worse for working people: A tax plan everyone with more than three braincells has been able to see would only benefit the Tech Bro Billionaire Class (which openly colluded with the Trump campaign), gutting the services ordinary working class Americans depend on, the mass deportations of innocent people, tariffs that will make just about everything ruinously expensive, and an open desire to kill the planet and ban life saving medicines and medical care. Opposing them was the side which has spent the last 4 years forgiving student loans, expanding critical services to vulnerable people, and championed regular human beings and the rights of everyone to live in an equal society, all while overseeing the quickest economic recovery in American history.

But sure, do go on Bernie. There's already been a revolution and it turns out the "Jews Will Not Replace Us" crowd were the winners.

The lesson from this election could not be more clear: The American People, as a whole, will either actively or passively fuck over the health and safety of their families, friends, and fellow citizens for a whiff of an illusion that they'll save a buck or two, and they don't care how ignorant, selfish and uncompassionate they are doing it. Western Civilization as a concept - an alliance of secular humanist governments bound by the rule of law, respecting the rights and liberties of individual citizens - is over. Its heart has been ripped out.

I don't know what will follow it, but if you're Queer, a Woman, Disabled, not-White, or even a straight white dude who wants the planet to still be habitable when your kids grow up, it is now your moral duty to understand and operate in this reality - that you are surrounded by people who will eagerly feed you to the fucking wolves because someone has promised to make gas two cents cheaper. That's the price they've placed on your lives.

There is a clarity and simplicity in that truth that, while less comforting, is much more straightforward than maintaining the delusion we've been living with for the past two decades that the American People are capable of being better than that, despite evidence to the contrary.

Observant readers may see that this is the first update I've made here since pretty much the last election. Every couple of years I come back and write a thing and then rhetorically ask "am I back?", and then I never am. Am I back this time? Who knows. Perhaps even more astute readers will remmember that the title of this page - Mayblossom Senility - comes from Hunter Thompson's 1970 screed "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved", which I will leave you with for now:

My eyes had finally opened enough for me to focus on the mirror across the room and I was stunned at the shock of recognition. For a confused instant I thought that Ralph had brought somebody with him — a model for that one special face we’d been looking for. There he was, by God — a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature … like an awful cartoon version of an old snapshot in some once-proud mother’s family photo album. It was the face we’d been looking for — and it was, of course, my own. Horrible, horrible.

Good luck, everybody. I'm glad you're still with me here, at the end of all things.

The Hour of The Wolf

While it is the policy of this publication to report the news and not interfere in the activities of the Meat Space, it is the explicit belief of the Writer that his thoughts accidentally control the Universe and that if he openly states a prediction or opinion with any confidence, Reality will reorganize itself for the sole purpose of spoiling it. Therefore, out of an abundance of caution for the millions of lives at stake, the publication of this entry has been withheld until after the US Presidential electoral contest or alcohol-related death of the Writer, whichever starts - or ends – first

The Hour of the Wolf, the dearly departed Max von Sydow once explained in Ingmar Bergman's underrated horror flick of the same name, is the hour between night and dawn. The hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fears, when ghost and demons are most powerful.

The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most children are born.

  * * * * *

I can remember it vividly: It was 6pm, I was standing on the street corner with a friend of mine, on the way to the bar we’d booked to watch the 2016 election. We were so sure of the result. We were so sure. We’d even made last minute adjustments to our pool picks, it sounded like Clinton was probably going to win Florida, after all. I took a long deep drag of a cigarette, threw it on the ground, and stomped it out. “Alright,” I said, “Let’s go watch this fucker get taken down.”. By 2am I was sitting, alone in my living room, staring at my phone. Three bottles of champagne in the fridge and a few cigars in the humidor, waiting for an afterparty that never materialized. It was the end of Western civilization, they’d pulled the whole temple down on themselves.

If nothing else, the 2020 election cycle is giving us all a chance to re-examine the assumptions and understandings we previously took for granted. We're revisiting what polls are important and the need to look at state-level predictions and not just the national picture. We're learning how states count ballots and how cable newsrooms determine when and how to call the races. I'm about to find out just how bloated my liver and heart can get before each rip themselves out of my carapace and crawl away.

These are all important pieces of data to have.

As I write this, I don't know who won the Presidential contest (if, indeed, anyone has yet), and I don't really know how they did it (or didn't). I don’t know what the senate or anything looks like. I've had many thoughts though - oh, yes - but I dare not put them on paper or speak them out loud. I've become neurotically superstitious about US elections (all elections, really, but few have the power to vaporize me in atomic backwash), and I'm convinced that basically anything I say will jinx it. If I tell you I think Biden will win 350 electoral college votes he'll lose every state, if I tell you Trump will win 350 electoral college votes, he will. There's no winning against this impossible universe.

So I'm trapped in my own Hour of the Wolf, it seems. All bets are off. There are no rules. I have no idea what will actually happen and my imagination is running rampant with all sorts of possibilities I'd never had to consider before. Civil War II? Scorched Earth Lame Duck Presidency? It's like my first time all over again - on one hand unbelievably exciting; on the other, absolutely terrifying.

For the last few months I’ve been scribbling out little notes to myself. Thoughts on how the race and campaign was developing. Some of it literally scratched out on random pieces of paper around my pandemic bunker apartment, others as three or four sentences sitting in a draft blog post, seeping through in a tweet or two. What follows here then are some of these notes, condensed and smoothed out, and somewhat organized. Just things that have been in my head that I need to get out before I burst. By the time you read them the die will have already been cast and hopefully I can’t fuck any of it up, we're just waiting for the universe to unfold now.

*****

Let's start off with the basics: it seems impossible to me that Donald Trump can conceivably win the popular vote. Not just because the polls clearly don't suggest that, but because little in the past 4 years strikes me as likely to make very few groups of people MORE pro-Trump but many groups of people substantially LESS pro-Trump. Additionally, the polls consistently point to a sizeable shift in some groups compared to 2016 (heck, compared to 2019): Biden ties or leads or comes much closer among all age groups, among white women, among men, in nearly in all regions than Clinton did 4 years ago. Of course it can all be hogwash but it agrees with the fundraising numbers, and it jives with the bizarre Grand Coalition the Biden campaign has stitched together where I now receive emails from Bill Clinton-era cabinet secretaries, Bernie Sanders and the AOC squad, and Bush II administration war criminals all on the same day and all pushing support for the same ticket.

I’m old enough to remember declaring that demographics would make Texas a toss up state after 2012 and that Romney represented the last hope of a Republican party determined to focus entirely on older white men. Obviously I was wrong then and I’m far too spooked to make such a bold claim yet, but it’s hard to imagine that the damage Trump and his enablers in the GOP have done to their credibility among huge and growing portions of the electorate – in particular women - will be soon forgotten or undone. That so much of this goes hand in hand with enabling the kind of tin pot authoritarianism of a young adult dystopian novel, I think, makes the damage that much more permanent. We can’t go back to the way things were, not while McConnell and Graham and Sessions and Pompeo and Cruz and Rubio still draw any water in that party.

The 2016 election was like finding out your neighbor did time as an axe murderer. It doesn’t matter how polite they are or how good a neighbor they are now, you’re never letting your kids go over there alone.

*****

The electoral college is trickier to predict, but here history helps calm my nerves. There are three states Trump won in 2016 which were surprising - and incredibly close - upsets, which control the balance of electoral college, and which had been Democratic states for many years beforehand. Biden not only keeps polling in the lead in all three but tied or leading in a bunch of other states too. Trump likely needs to sweep all of the 5-8 genuine battleground states, Biden only needs to pick up a few of them, and the poll suggest he has a few strong prospects to choose from.

The X factor to me is the unbridled, unmitigated, bald-faced fascism of the ailing husk of the Republican party. What depraved depths are they willing to go to in order to cheat their way into a few more years of power? Throwing out ballots is small potatoes for these goons, so surely nonsense lawsuits and armed insurrection come as second nature to them. They're all Sons of the Confederacy anyway, getting shot to death by the National Guard is practically a family tradition.

The campaign itself has been a whole different roller coaster. Issues, dear boy, issues. It's only early November as I write this but already the week the President had covid seems like a distant memory, but it was less than a month ago. At the time it seemed like it could have been a craven attempt to gain public sympathy but I don't think so - the last thing the Trump campaign needed was anyone to be reminded that the bodies are piling up in the morgues and this pandemic is raging on unchecked (as I type this I see Ragin' Cajun' Jim Carville has just tried to coin "it's the pandemic, stupid!" and predicted Trump will be the loser by 10pm on election night. Carville is my kind of crazy but I'm not putting any money on that). The pandemic is hitting the pro-Trump places who until recently insisted the virus didn't exist, and I think that reality is unravelling the whole narrative Trumpers have been using to hold their world together.

Hunter Biden too, seems to be largely a miss by the Republican strategists and the closer they cling to it the more desperate they seem. The accusations of cronyism or corruption or insurmountable entrenched entitlement stuck harder against Hillary Clinton because she was, after all - despite an exceptional career in her own right - a career politician who got her start in politics from the starboard side of her husband's White House and was not very successful at hiding the deep rooted belief that it was her turn, both in 2008 or in 2016. The Clinton family has always seemed like the real life analogy for House of Cards' viciously ambitious Underwoods and the more they replicated that imagery the easier it was to make the more ludicrous accusations against her stick.

By way of contrast, the Hunter Biden story largely seems to remind people that Joe Biden has always been a remarkably kind and well-liked family man who has endured significant personal loss but still managed to do his duty while being a loving parent. Every time they try to make hay of the father-son relationship (candid photos! leaked text messages!), voters get a peek at what it would be like to have a caring, human father in the Oval Office instead of the cheating, groping, crude, child abusive sociopath they have now. I was reminded of the Conservative attack ads of our own 2015 campaign: "Look at Justin Trudeau, look how HANDSOME he is and look at all of the disgusting NORMAL JOBS he's had before just like you! Outrageous! Vote for our boring robot leader with a titanium golf club wedged up his ass and who absolutely hates you."

It's almost hard to see why it's not resonating.

At least not with everyone, mind you. Clearly there's a significant portion of the US electorate firmly willing to be thrown into a burning cauldron and reduced to their bones for their beloved Fuhrer. We've seen it throughout this campaign but it's reaching a particular fervor at the close...the Y'all Quieda trucks draped in Trump flags trying to surround Biden campaign busses (a comparison to Al Quieda is actually unfair, in my opinion, as doubtless the American version insist on using Made in America trucks which is fucking insane. Any good fanatic knows the value of a used Toyota Hilux), or legions of supporters trapped after their covid superspreader rallies in the cold and dark by a campaign that actively hates them, is trying to murder everyone, and hasn't been afraid to hide it. To each their own: My advice to the die-hard Republican supporters is to go on and die.

But back to Covid. Carville's not wrong - the pandemic is the prism through which the entire election has turned. It perfectly exposed the administration's complete idiocy and willful negligence. It drew a perfect contrast between the calm, steady, competent experience of a caring former Vice President and the indefensible childlike tantrums of the dementia addled corrupt incumbent. It's been raising the stakes all year and giving regular folks on the ground the growing understanding that nonsense comes out of whichever failed amateur pornstar is currently briefing from the White House podium is disconnected from their reality and is entirely self-serving.

*****

So that's what I've got. I said at the start I don't know what's going to happen. I still don't. It's the Hour of the Wolf and it may be rapturous or catastrophic but you came for some thoughts and maybe a prediction so here it is: Biden reclaims Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. That's enough to end it, but I believe that one or two of Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Arizona will flip too and seal the deal with ~300 electoral college votes. That's what SHOULD happen, anyway, if I haven't fucked it up by typing this all out.

Christ I hate this. I will see you on the other side.

Dispatches From The Bunker: Rome has Fallen and the Visigoths are Running The Show

I can only assume there is - or shortly will be - a Trump family brand of coffins to sell to rubes and sycophants.

For the price he'll charge you might expect them to be made of something like mahogany or walnut but after your loved ones are dead and the National Guardsmen in hazmat suits are trying to place their corpses into a lime coated pit with thousands of others, it'll turn out to be made of that cheap backboard IKEA puts on their Billy bookcases, snap apart, and splut. Down goes some plastic-wrapped granny into a mass grave with all the dignity and grace of the office of President of the United States.

I mean, really, what in the good God damn is going on?

For a newshound like me who has been stocking up on nonperishable goods since January, the last month has been like watching a line of people playing chicken with a runaway freight train. Each person thinks they will jump out of the way in nick of time. Every single one of them fails.

And yet, every one of them sees the idiot ahead of them fail but thinks "Ahh, but that won't happen to me!" and when you ask them why, they reply "because I'll jump out of the way in time!" One could almost admire the audacity if the body count was theirs alone, and if Donald Trump didn't seem so eager to push the United States right back on to the tracks for reasons that escape even the most skilled shitbag whisperers. Fun and malice, I guess.

We are a species of morons, by and large. Dumb lumbering brutes with no effective sense of self preservation who would be perfectly content jump into a woodchipper if someone promised us a free soda because, Jesus, that sounds so much easier than doing something hard.

Nobody has truly been able to act in time, except maybe Iceland. Even here in Canada we aren't as smart as we love to say we are and for all of our pleas from smart experts and officials stressing the need to stay the hell apart and self-isolate we are still a nation with more than enough Boomer snowbirds who think all of this shit just happens to other people (like Natives or Mexicans) to overwhelm even the most robust of industrialized healthcare systems.

Watching a parade of brain-dead administration officials, conservative hacks, and Republican leaders talking up how noble it would be for the elderly to sacrifice themselves in a vain attempt to stem the hemorrhaging stock market and how 2% of a country of 320 million people isn't that much to ask to have a shot at reelection is total mind fuck. I've spent the last 48 hours wondering if I woke up in a parallel dimension where the only religion is a post-apocalyptic suicidal death cult, and everyone wears fetish gear and eats live babies. Nevermind that when the US goes continues on it's worse-than-Italy trajectory the fatality rate will be more like 10%, and not just among the olds. It's an invitation for the country to light itself on fire.

These are the same goons who used to try to scare Americans away from Obamacare reforms by claiming the healthcare systems in the rest of the civilized world had nefarious death panels. Boy golly, wait until next week when these fuckers get to see what battlefield triage looks like.

Any country that could avoid the deaths of more people than all of their wars combined 23 times over by just standing slightly further apart for a few months but can't even be assed to try that for more than a few days isn't truly meant for this world, and while personally I wouldn't have believed people would stand by a President who is fine killing 32 million of them out of a frothy combination of ego and dementia, I wouldn't have voted for him in the first place.

Apparently I'm supposed to be putting together a decent End of Days soundtrack, so here's your entry for today:

Did someone give you something to help you ease the pain?
Like the liquor in the bottle, we watched you slip away
And I feel as if I know you through the bars of a song
Always surrounded, but alone

But no goodbyes, you'll always be Miss America
We watched you fly but nothing's free, Miss America
And as you fall apart we just call it art
Was it so hard to breathe?

Wash your mangey hands you goddamn beasts.

Dispatches From The Bunker: Continuity of Operations

The publisher wishes to inform you that, due to inactivity on the author's part and the need to consolidate bandwidth in the face of ongoing global developments, this space was scheduled to be deactivated some time ago. However, when informed of this intention the author immediately - and over a considerable number of increasingly vulgar emails - demanded the space be retained.


In the middle was a big cauldron that they were stirring, stirring,
And there were trees around that they kept burning, burning.
I asked a toothless man who all these people were and
he said, "The soapmakers, and we are working, working."
So are we all fucked or what?

I mean sure, most of us probably aren't going to die. Most of us probably won't even get very sick. Still, it's hard to shake the feeling that in a matter of weeks we'll all be medieval peasants - either toiling in fields with donkeys that have all manner of clattering pots and pans strapped to them or dead and buried in unmarked mass graves. At least we're hotter than the original breed of diseased medieval waifs, or at least most of us are.

It seems that it is critical at times like these to make sure to panic as much as possible. Really just go hog wild and get it all out of your system. Make flagrantly irrational shopping choices and strain all of the parts of the global supply chain that really haven't been pressure tested for this kind of thing to the breaking point because, honestly, a toilet paper shortage is never actually conceivable until we all turn into idiots lumbering around grocery stores like panicked cows.

Alas, I've trapped myself in my Emergency Command Bunker - which is normally reserved for elections and any time we're landing something on Mars - with enough nonperishables and toiletries for a siege, enough fruit and vegetables to watch rotting away for weeks of entertainment, and enough booze and cigars to live out my own delusional Prince Prospero fantasy.

Wash your hands and stop touching your face and remember that mo End of Days is complete without a good soundtrack, so enjoy.

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.

On Filicide

I'm sitting here eating my traditional February 14th meal of tacos and wine and watching a cell-phone video of a SWAT team clearing a classroom in Florida where terrified teenagers shake with fear holding their hands in the air. I find it jarring but I suppose that it's actually a pretty typical scene in a country that seems to have more guns and thoughts and prayers, than they do political brains or balls.

Before you get that wide-eyed look of panic: don't. I'm not going to write yet another thing about guns. If you're reading this you either already agree with me or you're planning on shooting me and either way I'm not really in a position to argue. Sure, I could point out for the umpteenth time that the United States is - by several orders of magnitude - the only country in the world in which this regularly happens, and I could demonstrate that that every jurisdiction in the Western world that makes it harder to buy guns and doesn't let you buy assault rifles experiences fewer gun deaths and almost no mass shootings.

Perhaps I could even point out that as I write this the number of fatalities is 17...10 more than were killed by Al Capone's gang during the 1929 St Valentine's Day Massacre that led to the National Firearms Act and the banning of machine guns, or that the same Republicans who insist the problem isn't guns but insanity are in fact the very same Republicans who gut mental health program spending and pass gun laws making it easier for people with mental health issues to buy assault rifles.

At any rate, the large-scale slaughter of their own children combined with a complete lack of political will to take even the most modest steps to prevent it seems to be the definitive property of the United States; the modern manifestation of American Exceptionalism.

Happy Valentine's Day or whatever, I guess.

[The Publisher has been informed that the author insists on making this an ongoing series and will return shortly to "call out that goddamned negligent father who murdered his kids with snake-oil quackery and then got a keynote sales pitched at a Wellness convention run by the shitheads who deserve to be drowned in a bathtub alongside the NRA national leadership"]

Harder Better Faster Stronger

I decided (partially by accident and partially by design) to leave 2017 in pretty much the same state I entered it: cold, drunk, exhausted with the previous year and terrified of the chaos that awaits us all in the next. To that end I stayed in, polished off my holiday box of wine, ate too much Chinese food, smoked my new year’s cigar at my desk because if I go outside in this cold my toes and genitals are going to fall off. I do love fireworks and it's a shame to miss them but I suppose it's better to not be found in a hypothermia-induced daze face down in the snow and slush. Besides, this way it was easier to maintain my months-long blockade of all but the bare minimum human contact.

2016 was a bonkers year, there really is no other word for it. Just fucking Bonkers.

There was plenty of obvious wretched stuff of course: the inauguration, the looming doom of nuclear conflagration, terrorism, poverty, and the continuing slaughter of beloved celebrities. Nazis marched openly in the streets of the United States, hurricanes ransacked the Caribbean, and Brexit rolled on. The planet continued to die at an alarming rate. It was truly an awful year.

But I suppose if I try very hard even I - cynical, jaded, bitter soul that I am - can admit that there was also some pretty great stuff in there too, like watching Sean Spicer stagger through explaining the size of the inauguration crowd, and the two weeks that Scaramucci was White House Press Secretary (Jesus! I forgot that even happened until just now - note to self: use the "Mooch" as a unit of time more often). For every celebrity death of 2016 and 2017 there's at least two jackass awful ones getting their comeuppance for years of ludicrous sexual barbarism, CNN seems to have finally grown a pair of balls, and Theresa May nearly lost her job to a wet dog in a humiliating and self-inflicted General Election.

At the start of 2017 Steve Bannon looked like an unstoppable monster rumbling through the dark and underpopulated corridors of the West Wing, cracking open the sculls of hapless RNC staffers and feasting on the goo inside while Reince Priebus hid under a desk and prayed the odor of his soiled pants wouldn't alert The Beast to his presence. Now both men seem like distant memories, like Flynn or Gorka or Manafort; their downfalls swift, sudden, and ruthless...as if they - like all forces of darkness - simply lose their power whenever someone turns on the lights.

Even better, the year wasn't just limited to the Scheißbrigade tripping over themselves to fall on their faces. The good guys started to organize, and effectively: Obamacare beat back about 400 repeal attempts by a GOP Congress that can't tell its ass from its elbow, Doug Jones mapped the floor with Roy Moore for the Senate seat of the gay bashing, bible-thumping, black shooting, pregnant-teen backwater state of Alabama, a Trans woman will sit in the Virginia legislature, and the first act of Hamilton was uploaded to PornHub.

You're starting to get the picture: the year wasn't all bad.

Heck, when I think about it I had a pretty good year myself, which is rare. I swam in crystal clear 4-degree glacial water over a continental divide. I picked up art, bought a new drum kit and got my groove back. I even managed to get into a Twitter spat with Piers Morgan. Those are all pretty special memories.

Taking the last four or five months off from pretty much everything and everyone has turned out to be exactly what the doctor ordered. It's rejuvenating, almost meditative. My focus is coming back, at least a bit. I'm a regular in the gym again, and I even tweet about Canadian politics from time to time. The repeated shocks of 2016 and the long grind of 2017 is starting to wear off. I must be adapting, my blood is starting to work with bad news in lieu of hemoglobin or something.

Resolutions are cliche and trying to set serious goals for myself to accomplish by the end of this year might as well include landing on Mars for all the good they'll do me. I will almost certainly and unrepentantly break any promise I make to myself to eat better, drink less, write more, or adopt a better attitude. But knowing that doesn't mean you don't try anyway. All I can say is that I'm done letting my brain dry up, and I'm going to do my best to make sure 2018 is full of rants, half marathons, weights, and travels.

Am I back? Maybe. I'm not certain yet, but I sure hope so.

Tropico

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!

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.]

Vitamin D

This weekend was exactly what the doctor ordered: warm, bright, and sunny...the perfect time to relax at the Westboro Beach Club, sip margaritas, do some serious thinking, and brutalize Kevin O'Leary with crude insults over Twitter for fun; it was like a spiritual colonic.

The city was largely emptied of assholes - the Conservative leadership convention had drawn most of them to Toronto where after two and a half million rounds of voting Andrew "wait, him?" Scheer became the new leader of their party with a resounding 50-point-something percent of the vote. That he beat front-runner Maxime Bernier at the end was a bit of a surprise, though not as big a shock as the first ballot results. Brad Trost in fourth, ahead of Michael Chong? Boy golly are these people stupid. Trost insists his supporters were instructed to only rank he and fellow Leviticus-shill Pierre Lemieux on their ballot and then drop off, but I doubt that was the case and it sure looks like the body fascists and gay bashers are going to have a friend in the new leader.

All of which suits me just fine, to be honest. If they're going to keep picking these medieval throwbacks to run their party we're just going to have to keep kicking the shit out of them for it, and there are few things I enjoy more than a good Conservative stomping. Scheer's bizarre, debased interpretation of Sunny Ways^TM leaves a lot to be desired and if the poor fool keeps smiling while talking about his mother's death he and his Bible-thumping supporters aren't going to be on the stage for very long.

The weather was even nice south of the border too, with the Trump family off of the continent on a whirlwind trip to the two or three countries that either don't hate him or can't say no. Melania even smiled once - while posing with the other G7 spouses for a photo in a room where surely her odious husband wasn't present.

Nothing good lasts forever though and just like a flash thunderstorm - Kaboom! The weekend was over and the disastrous trip was finished. The pictures coming out of the Vatican are like something out of Roman Polanski film, a real goddamned horror show. His Holiness seemed sick to his stomach the entire time but managed to avoid projectile vomiting (no doubt saving it for Callista Gingrich to arrive as Ambassador while her husband Newt sniffs out some Italian ass). The First Lady-turned-Hostage tapped out Morse-code messages to the outside world on her husband's probing hand while First Daughter Piper Perri tried to offload $10M in Ivanka handbags to the Roman Curia. The President himself was grinning like an idiot for the whole visit, no doubt daydreaming about what reward would await him at his future dacha when Moscow Center saw his performance at NATO and the G7.

Frankly, I'm surprised we're all still alive. I mean, we are probably well and truly fucked but I do take some comfort in watching a new Western order develop around Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, and even our own Justin from Canada. Even so, we probably have to look to ourselves for solace, which is why I've been trying to spend so much time behind the drums, in the midnight gym, or on the beach.

I hear that NASA is planning to shoot a satellite at the Sun, which strikes me as a waste of precious engineering resources - surely it'd be more effective to send a manned mission, and I will volunteer in a heartbeat. Until then, I guess, we just have to stick it out.

And Then There Were Fifty-Six, or Some Stupid Thing (An Update on the Conservative Leadership Race)

The geese are back and are already hissing at me; it's not even youngling seasons yet but there they are, nevertheless. I suppose it's inevitable: if you're going to rip a few of their heads off with your bare hands and then chase the others away in the middle of the night, flailing the corpses wildly, they're bound to give you some kind of a reputation and a pissy attitude. I intend on at least earning the shit they give me.

Nowadays I'm spending my midnights in the gym, by and large. It's the perfect way to balance a deep rooted hatred of human beings with the need to use modern and up to date equipment. Some of my fondest fitness memories come from all-night gyms too, like the time I watched the entire Israel-Lebanon war on CNN International at two o'clock every morning from a treadmill in a darkened retail basement. The treadmills weren't connected to YouTube back then, so it turns out I have a lot of catching up to do.

This week however, there's been one way to spend a late night that's just as good for the heart and soul as a bout in the gym. Anyone can do it and everyone should, at least once: pour yourself a nice glass of wine, sit out somewhere where there's a nice warm breeze, and read the comments on Kevin O'Leary's Facebook posts.

"Coward!" they cry, as he announced he was dropping out of the Conservative leadership race and endorsing Maxime Bernier. "Traitor!" Apparently a good number of people - suffering from some kind of reasoning defect - joined the Conservative party to vote for him and want him on the ballot. As if the possibility that the guy who skipped out on debates to shill for shitty wine on the Shopping Channel might not make it all the way across the finish line. Surprise!

O'Leary is citing his lack of French as the deciding factor for him to drop out (as of this posting there was no explanation as to why that wasn't considered before he got into the race to begin with), while almost everyone agrees that he's probably dropping out to avoid the embarrassment of losing to someone like Bernier or Scheer or whichever clown is ultimately successful in taking over that clown car.

Personally, I think it's more the opposite - I think he was scared he might win. Polls suggested it was a real possibility and if you can't even be bothered to show up for your own campaign events then why would you want to actually do even more? Especially for less money and after relocating from Sun Beach, FL (where you're surrounded by gropeable girls in skanty bikinis who probably let you do whatever you want if you're a star) to a drab boring dump like Ottawa. The whole thing was like a reality TV stunt and we are well rid of it.

By my reckoning this leaves Racist-in-Denial Kellie Leitch and her former partner-in-crime Chris 'I ought to know better' Alexander, a gestalt entity of Tory MPs of which Scheer or O'Toole are the best bets (don't bother Googling their first names, they won't be around long), self-styled "Mad Max" Bernier, Michael Chong, and a squadron of C-listers vying for the leadership.

Of the bunch, Chong is the only faintly interesting one because in addition to playing a surprise cameo in the best Globe and Mail disaster of the year, he was evidently unaware that he was supposed to do a gong-show act as part of the contest.

He's also caught my attention because he seems to have been able to trick some people into thinking he isn't really a Conservative. Supporting carbon pricing has thrown some lefties for a loop, a feat made even easier when they gloss over the fact that he wants to eliminate dozens of programs which work to curb carbon emissions, as well as cut three income tax brackets and corporate to benefit the rich. His proposal on Parliamentary reform was genuinely interesting but even if he were somehow able to win a leadership election for a party whose members probably think he's from "Red China" and then a general election against Justin Trudeau it seems unlikely much of it would be able to come to fruition anyway.

Ugh, whatever. I oscillate wildly between wanting this race to finally be over, and wanting it to go on forever. With O'Leary out and no longer making videos about how the country he hasn't lived in for years is run by female CBC executives, or struggling to answer basic questions about how government works, there really doesn't seem to be much point in going on any longer. Conveniently, advanced balloting started yesterday so let's get this show on the road.

Man's Search For Clarity

I don't know how crazy-ass stupid you have to be to be appointed as the White House Press Secretary but I'm starting to believe even I could do it, and I used to jam forks into toasters to rotate bagels. I suppose it probably helps when the boss is a petulant man-child who can be sidetracked by a slice of chocolate cake.

Alas, by the time you read this Sean Spicer will be on his sixth or seventh clarification in a desperate attempt to make us all understand exactly why he tried to compare Bashar al-Assad to Adolf Hitler by arguing that Hitler hadn't used chemical weapons on his own people - which is baffling because for more than sixty years "using chemical weapons on his own people" has been the textbook definition of Adolf Hitler; it's how he built his personal brand.

Spicer's previous attempts (plural!) to refine his remarks included watching him struggle lamely to find the words "Concentration camp", before giving up that spectacular mental wrestling match and calling them "Holocaust Centers" right there on live TV. Then there was some gibberish about how technically Hitler never dropped chemical weapons from airplanes and that's all he really meant to say; rhetorical Adonis that he is. It's probably correct, I guess, since you don't have to use an airplane when you just drop the pellets through a hatch in the roof. Which for the record the Nazis did a lot, the White House later had to point out in a statement in this the year of our Lord, 2017.

Really, Holocaust Centers? Holocaust Centers? Look, Sean, heaven knows I've forgotten my train of thought my fair share of times before, but if you can use the word Holocaust without remembering fucking "Concentration Camp" you need to get out of the White House Press Briefing Room and lie down until the ketamine wears off.

I suppose it could also be that you're deliberately trying to undermine the severity of the Nazis' crimes by avoiding a particular phrase that comes with a lot of unpleasant baggage and imagery in favor of a term that, frankly, I'm surprised Richard Spencer hasn't already trademarked for a future business name. But in all honesty I doubt the Press Secretary is clever enough for that - he's more banal than he is Bannon - and if there is one thing that may save us all these next (Jesus!) three years and ten-months, it'll be that the Trump administration keeps shooting itself in the foot and then trying to cover it up by shooting itself in the stomach.

Surely it won't be long now before Spicer ends up out on his ass and off on his next adventure, forming the world's shittiest crisis communications firm with the soon-to-be-former-CEO of United Airlines and whichever maniac wrote the Kardashian Pepsi ad.

Surely.

Fuck me, it's been a banner week for morons. For a brief moment in time it looked like I was going to be writing a post about how some good things have actually happened: the Republicans got spanked but good on health care and Paul Ryan got to look like a massive turd, Nikki Haley's gone rogue at the UN, Kevin O'Leary continues to lead in a race that promises to keep our own Conservatives in the political doldrums for another four years, and winter finally seems to be lifting. As I write this diatribe there's no shortage of "Ben Carson gets stuck in elevator" headlines to laugh at, and that is very welcome change from a detailed analysis of Mike Pence's filthy and bizarre perversions.

I've even started to lose weight, having decided to drastically reduce the number of calories I eat to practice for my frail dotage, when there won't be any Meals on Wheels at all.

The good always comes at a cost, though. It's unavoidable. The President's dementia continues to flare up, finally acting on Syria may end up triggering World War III, and cutting most of the alcohol out of my diet has ruined my ability to sleep. I just keep wandering around in a daze, unable to balance the catastrophically high levels of caffeine and rage-spittle in my blood.

I guess what I'm saying is that beach and cigar season can't come soon enough.

Spring Cleaning

This weekend, after much cajoling and nagging I finally gave in to the demands of several people and watched the critically acclaimed series Stranger Things. The show is all very well and good if - like me - you don't mind spending six hours perched on the couch like a coiled spring, but the real horror comes after it ends; that's when you have to go back to living in a reality where Rick Perry is the Secretary of Energy and you are forced to wonder if Eleven and the gang really just went through all that trouble for nothing.

He's probably the least objectionable member of the administration too, God help us.

Vacation was good for me, oddly. By an order of magnitude Iceland is the most beautiful place I have ever been and so despite the whirlwind trip only lasting 5 days I came back with a weird sense of ease and contentment. Time away is reputedly good for relaxing the mind and rebuilding the muscle that helps you stay focused and concentrate, but I suppose for that to be any help you still have to actually use that muscle from time to time. Is this how people who meditate feel? Should I start meditating? It doesn't matter, I wouldn't stick to it anyway.

I returned from the top of the planet determined to write a comprehensive review of my experience, but the hits started coming about five minutes after the plane touched down and haven't stopped since. Boom, Muslim Travel Ban. Bam, a failed raid in Yemen. Boom, Betsy DeVos confirmed. Bam, everything Sean Spicer has ever said. The President is issuing Executive Orders like he has a fax machine with a direct connection from Hell, and each is worth an expletive-filled screed of its own. Alas, you can't even start typing about something before before the next one hits you like a never ending storm surge of shit.

To top it off my new Alesis Crimson Mesh electronic drum kit arrived just before I left, so the days I would normally spend writing have been devoted to tinkering with the Latin percussion settings, and at any given time at least 20% of my brainpower is tied up in a meaningless argument over whether I would prefer to have a spent a previous life as Buddy Rich, or Gene Krupa. I mean sure - Buddy Rich was the more technically skilled player...but at least Gene Krupa looked happy sometimes, you know?

Simply put, there are so many things that deserve to have an essay-long post written about them but you don't have that kind of time and it would be nearly impossible for a real person to write them all...never mind a gin addled part time hack like me. So without further adieu I'll get to unloading a month's worth of thoughts now, in no particular order:

It's amazing how many of the people who say we can't provide shelter, healthcare, or education to refugees running from war and violence because we have to take care of our own first turn out to be the same people who don't want to take care of our own with shelter, healthcare, or education either. Funny, that.

Does Iceland count as Europe, or North America, or something else? On one hand the showers are all weird and the gas is expensive; on the other there's tons of parking and no cigarette machines anywhere, which is simply not the Europe I know.

I am increasingly convinced that there is a parallel universe not far from our own with the perfect Cable News Network. Jake Tapper, Rachel Maddow, and Shep Smith are in the studio. Anderson Cooper reports live from location. Wolf Blitzer is locked in a disused sound stage surrounded by cameras he doesn't know are disconnected, so he can to live out his days some place where he can't hurt anyone.

If you can make a modern suspension bridge that's very tall and impressive then you can make it two lanes wide, Iceland.

Kevin O'Leary didn't come back to Canada for you.

The Washington Post's new slogan is "Democracy Dies In Darkness" and Jesus, what a fantastic album title that would be. I can see it now, The WaPos: Democracy Dies in Darkness. I wonder if they need a percussionist.

Yes - you're absolutely right. These are serious times and these people have contributed to the total devastation being wreaked on innocent people across the United States and around the world, but between Julian Assange's Wikileaks, Milo Yiannopoulos and Breitbart, and the falling out between the Left and Bill Maher it's hard not to smile at least a little at the downfall of people I've hated for fucking years.

What is Jeremy Corbyn actually for? Like, really, what is his purpose?

If your country is overstocked with lobster meat and a pizza is going to cost $50 either way, why waste the precious space on pineapple anyway?

SNL has somehow managed to strike a second golden age and needs our help to make it last. To that end, I have some additional casting ideas to support Melissa McCarthy's Spicer and Alex Baldwin's Trump: Jessica Walters as Betsy DeVos, porn performer Piper Perri as Ivanka Trump, Betty White as Jeff Sessions, Lady Gaga as Melania Trump, and Chris Christie as himself because you know that sad sack of shit has no goddamned dignity left.

Whew.

Thank you for indulging me, dear readers. It feels good to let this stuff out, and it with any luck it will be easier to function without all those bats flying around in my belfry. Vacation over.

Here We Are, There We Go

I suppose I should start by congratulating you. If you are reading this then you have at least survived long enough to watch the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States and will accordingly be recognized as one of the last to bear witness to Western civilization.

You have won at history, and that's a pretty impressive feat when you think about it. This month marked the anniversary of the day David Bowie, presumably tormented by the ghastly images of what awaited us for the rest of last year, was called back to his home dimension and left this world for good. If the Gregorian calendar - of which I am reluctant participant - starts the start of the year year as January 1st, then January 10th was the start of it all going to hell. From that point on it was a bloodbath; 2016 seemed determined to kill every last one of us, never letting up for a second - not even in the wee hours of New Year's eve for the unfortunate soul died outside of my apartment.

So I'm beginning to think this whole era is one of those nightmares you're just never going to wake up from. We're living in Trump's world now, at the mercy of his tiny hands and weirdo fetishes until he gets us all killed or John Roberts ends up swearing in Mike Pence after a constitutional debacle, whichever comes first. Either way we should probably get used to calling this Year Zero, breeding more donkeys to carry our pots and pans, dying in childbirth, and debunking the Beaverton articles Kellie Leitch's campaign manager insists on posting as fact.

It's all so hard to bear that I've decided to slip into a fugue state and fuck off for a week to go adventuring. If we are the universe attempting to look at itself, then I better start looking at things before Chinese ICBMs or hysterical problem drinking whisk me away. Iceland in January may seem foolhardy, but I'm made from rugged Canadian stock and $20 pints may be precisely what I need to slow myself down and adopt the marathon pace that will be required to endure the lunacy of the years ahead. Besides, it's much better than my original plan of going to DC for the inauguration and it's as good a place as any to watch a nuclear war on CNN. Afterwards I can send myself off to sea on an ice floe to slip peacefully beneath the waves, if it comes to that.

But perhaps not. Adventure may be the key to escaping the general malaise that is our dim and fading present, and to kick off a new chapter in learning to live after thirty. We're all on the other side now, I'll see you there.

Waiting For Three Ghosts

The box of wine is open, the ribs are marinating, the television is playing one of the best Christmas movies ever (I refer, of course, to Eyes Wide Shut), and I am sitting in my chair swigging brandy in a leopard-print housecoat with a pair of reindeer antlers.

Holiday traditions are important, right?

New Axioms

Fuck me, that was a tough beat.

I've been in a daze since election night, finding myself wandering around aimlessly like it's The Day After and we're all victims of a catastrophic nuclear war. It's probably good practice for the real thing, I suppose, in case my streak of bad luck continues and I don't get vaporized instantly.

The news from the transition team holed up in Trump tower over the last two weeks is enough to convince even the most lighthearted and well adjusted optimist to drink himself to death in the corner of a dark room, all while Hillary Clinton's popular vote advantage continues to grow and it becomes increasingly evident that she will still never be President despite amassing more votes than any of the white men to ever run for that job.

Jesus, an incredibly tough beat.

That is not to say that I'm convinced Clinton will join the ranks of George McGovern or Al Gore as one of the Greatest Presidents America Never Had, but when you consider that their failures just left us to contend with Richard Nixon and George W Bush it feels like they got it easy. Dick and Dubya were crooks and fools, offensive in their own right, but the clouds lowering on us this inauguration day are some horrifying new thing indeed.

To be honest, the results were less depressing for me than they were disappointing. I've long been an American Enthusiast who held that there was a trust - a faith - that came from the stirring oratory of Lincoln or Kennedy or Sorkin, that our neighbors may be zany from time to time but they were, on the whole, a genuinely good and well-intentioned people. "If there is hope," a much younger and more foolish version of myself once wrote a million years ago, "it lies in the voters." Well so much for that, ho ho!

As it happens, this election has bereft me of that trust, and I fear it has left me for good. I've lost the faith, it seems, and that's been the most disturbing feeling of all to reconcile. True, as the white trash descendant of other working class white trash, I'm not unsympathetic to the voters who felt alienated by a triumphalist Democratic campaign seemingly tone deaf to their experience....but to hitch their wagon to the star of a compulsively lying abusive egomaniac? It's unconscionable, and I am completely unable to empathize with anyone willing to throw their lot in with the Reichsleitung of the American Nazi Party.

In fact, it's become impossible for me to shake off the feeling that this is the twilight of the age of liberal democracy itself. Eight years of progress - and so much more besides - are about to be wiped out by the DC Chapter of the Klan, backed and enabled by hopped up little weasels like Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus. In all likelihood, we are living in what will be remembered - at best - as the start of a lost decade that will be the subject of books written for the next century...assuming the written word survives that long.

At any rate, the repercussions of this election will be felt by everyone. The world turns its lonely eyes to Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel as perhaps the last vestiges of sanity and good government left in this world, but already synagogues, mosques, and black churches across Canada have been vandalized. Marine LePen is re-energized in the Presidential polls in France. The unchecked racial aggression unleashed after Brexit continues unabated as Theresa May sits at Number Ten and unprecedented, wide scale harassment of anyone who looks vaguely brown has exploded across entire continents. It's all coming apart at the seams.

Enough.

Enough mourning. Enough uncertain confusion. Enough complacency. I should confess something perverse to you now, dear readers, before we go any further: in addition to the depression and disappointment and malaise, there's a small part of me that's excited, aroused even; spoiling for a fight. The Bush-43 era helped me discover and define my own liberalism, and now some deep part within me has been given new purpose.

Perhaps it's an opportune combination of time, experience, and not caring if an aggravated alt-right shithead from Twitter wants to try and blow up my car (joke's on him, I don't own a car), or perhaps it's the potential to feel useful again. Whatever it is, I am suddenly energized. When Clinton was going to be the next President of the United States we stood on the verge of a new golden age in liberalism, but now it turns out we're going to have to go back to fighting for it.

So let's fight, then. There's nothing I enjoy more than a good righteous shout in the dark, and frankly the more outnumbered I am the better I feel doing it. It's time for courage, grit, and new battle cries. These people are either monsters or in league with them and they deserve nothing less than for us to hound them to their graves, oh yes indeed.

If There Is Hope, he wrote, It Lies In The Voters

[Editor's Note: Unfortunately we are unable to definitely establish the authorship of this piece as we have not been able to establish contact with Mr. Mills for several weeks. Our intern Alfonso was able to barter under a locked door with a sobbing man we assume to be the author for this Public Service Announcement, trading it for a copy of the National Enquirer, stale pizza, and fresh lube]

We have finally arrived, it's finally happening: After two years and about seven billion (!!!) dollars the General Election of the United States is upon us.

For a political junkie this is four years worth of Christmases and Birthdays all rolled into one. Cable news outlets have been perfecting their insane graphics packages for weeks, bets have been made, bars rented, and cigars cut. The lights, the sounds, the magic walls and interactive maps...to the wretched souls like myself who are chemically dependent on it, election night coverage is as satisfying as an addict's first hit of heroin or an Obsessive-Compulsive stepping into a NASA Clean Room.

I still retain enough human DNA to feel the same way about this interminable election as anyone else, and to be ready for it to end so I can finally sleep. And yet the end of this campaign still feels like the end of my entire way of life, the whole year has been building to this point and now it's come; soon it will be gone. It's going to be hard to imagine life without a new daily campaign scandal or feverish poll update...like suddenly waking in a foreign country where you don't have a home or a job or speak the language.

So I suppose wherever you find yourself tonight while the returns are coming in, cherish it. Let all the high definition mayhem and excitement fondle your primate amygdala and be dazzled. Hell, you should probably do your best to enjoy it since it might be the last chance we ever get to see one of these.

Make no mistake, Friend, the winner of today's Presidential election will either be an incredibly and uniquely qualified political professional with decades of experience or a deflated sack consisting of the worst Twitter trolls brought to life; the kind that spew Infowars-style nonsense about Reptillian body snatchers and declare all opposition either cucks, cunts, or "the REAL racists!". Whatever success the Trump campaign sees tonight - win or lose - will be the inevitable byproduct of a country full of nominally normal and reasonably intelligent humans, who simply can not be trusted as a society to hold rational conversations about subjects like guns, healthcare, or immigration. It no longer seems possible to have a serious and important conversation about public policy without at least half of the country threatening to murder or rape the other half.

This would all be fine, funny even, if it was taking place in some tiny, far flung eastern European republic with zany ways and a quirky culture, but America is too deeply embedded in the very heart of the rest of us for the effects to be detached and separate...to just be a silly tragedy that's happening to other people. I'm not sure I can live in a world where Donald Trump can win the Presidency. Surely such a victory would render the West irrelevant, and mark final decline of liberal democracy.

To be honest I wasn't sure a universe where such a blowhard could even get the nomination of major party deserved to exist, but at least it looked like he was headed for a thorough thumping in the electoral college then. Until a week ago. Now it's a crap shoot, good God.

Ah, but I'm jaded and cynical. The media circus is at full volume, the pundits have been out in force, and a thug like Donald Trump is now what passes for a politician.

If there is hope it lies in the voters. If. If you can vote in this election then DO. If you can't, then hold your loved ones close and stock up on canned goods. I, having spent the weekend preparing my body with vegetables, quiet meditation and prayer, intend to debauch to excess until I collapse, spent and exhausted (if this is the end of Civilization than I intend for it to be an ending with some magnificence - like the fall of Rome, if only those poor saps had perfected chemical stimulants and extra large nachos).

I'm going to need to get it all completely out of my system before I can start to rebuild my life and find new meaning, assuming there is new meaning to be found and we don't just wake up in the hellish reality TV show that would be a Trump Presidency.

If there is hope it lies in the voters, yes. But only if they vote.

Final Terrors

Yes, I admit that it sometimes takes me a month to pound out a quick update on the state of global affairs, but I have a good excuse: I've been putting together my Halloween decorations.


Meet Ted.
Say what you will about the fact that I'm a neurotic and antisocial drug-addled alcoholic with few prospects and no hope of ever leading a normal life, but I still know how to scare the shit out of people.

Children are terrified by his triple chins and beady eyes, which are ghoulish enough to make your blood run cold; adults are mortified at the prospect that he'll marry off their younglings to his new pussy grabbing best friend, Donald Trump. The cat is terrified every time his balloon head explodes.

Unlike the real life version - which is full of misery, human excrement, and the pompous ambitions of a sophomore debating team captain - my Ted Cruz is made up mostly of towels and string. The ingredients have been stuffed into one of the fat-guy suits from my closet 50lbs ago, and the head is full of hot air. I suppose in that respect it isn't completely different from the original (ho ho!).

It has been clear for some time that this election is so bizarre and beyond the realm of normal that the usual coping mechanisms - gin, cigarettes, relentless masturbation - simply can't keep up with the increasing ferocity and continuous intensity of the campaign. It seems that self destructive physical violence is required to keep from going completely mad. So I've myself a stress relieving punching bag and placed in my desk chair so it can dutifully phone bank for the Fascist candidate for President.

My God - is it not astounding? As soon as Ted "the principled morally righteous conservative candidate" Cruz endorsed Trump, down came the other shoe. Recordings of Trump talking about groping women (and a squadron of women corroborating his bragging) were perhaps the single most damaging events of this election, having finally shown white men in swing states that Trump has, in fact, been this offensive the whole time.

But it's not just the "locker room" talk that's tanking the Republican campaign: confusing and disjointed debate performances, a serious shortfall in organization and fundraising, and the propensity for Trump to latch on to something - Paul Ryan, Miss Universe contenders, the Washington Post - like a mad dog and shake until Kellyanne Conway can get Chris Christie to sit on him and calm him down, all contribute to the most self-destructive political behavior in living memory.

So the crowds are starting to thin out, and the staff are starting to disappear. There are still 16 days left before the election, but it's hard to see how Trump pulls the show out of its tailspin before it hits the ground hard and bursts into spectacular flames. The debates are now finished, and he's handily lost all three of them. His organization is pulling out of states where a Republican should be competitive, while Clinton is putting new money (at the end of October!) into places like Indiana and Missouri...and is polling within the margins in Texas even as I write this.

New, lurid stories of sexual assaults now flood the news everyday and Trump seems to have finally slipped over the edge, existing now entirely in his own dimension that not even his running mate or campaign manager or children seem to be able to see. No wonder the RNC has decided to stop spending money on him - mounting a desperate attempt to salvage the Senate and House instead, and many GOP candidates in both of those races are desperately trying to saw off whatever limbs they still have handcuffed to the Presidential ticket they have spent years building.

At least there's only two weeks to go; the home stretch of a 3 year long marathon. Then we can pick up the pieces of our broken hearts and American dreams, and chuck them into the fire along with the rest of this year's disappointments.

Rotten To The Core

Imagine having to go through life as Ted Cruz.

I mean really: Waking up every morning into a world full of people who hate your rotten guts, where your allies think the world would be a better place if you were dead and your enemies revile you so much they made Donald Trump their nominee for President.

It must be just terrible for your twisted reptilian brain to constantly spend time thinking about how all decent people cross the street to avoid eye contact with you, but will stand and cheer when you're eventually horsewhipped naked on the floor of the United States Senate, and knowing - deep down in the place we keep just for our innermost thoughts - that they're completely right to do so, and that you'll come crawling back for more.

What a goddamned Human Turdbag; the man has no backbone - no skeleton or structure to speak of at all. He's just a sack full of shit and grease and shame.

It must be even harder to go through life being married to him. Jesus, somebody's married to him!

I'm almost sorry for Heidi (or at least the kids). Their family life became a subject of lewd conversation after Trump set his tabloid-owning ratfuckers on their marriage. When Trump threatened to "spill the beans" (whatever that meant) and tweeted unflattering pictures of her, we watched her husband fiercely call Trump out as though he really knew how to play the role of a Great Protector. It must have hurt to watch an elderly father and grandfather get dragged through Trump's tabloids himself in the bizarre, feverish JFK conspiracy theory the Republican nominee repeated with delight.

Indeed, it must have made it a proud moment in the Cruz household every time Ted used his well-practiced steely eye on the camera and threaten to whip it out on national television over the latest personal insult from Donald Trump.

And surely it felt more than a little vindicating for the Cruz family to watch a Republican Convention full of hopped-up fascists and brain-dead D-list internet trolls jeer and boo as he struggled to save the shattered remains of his party's soul by encouraging them to vote their conscience - as if any of them had a conscience to begin with. He almost managed to emerge from that catastrophrovention as a doomed hero, giving the last dire warning before complete electoral defeat.

Ah! But the horserace has a tendency to turn heroes into sniveling villains and the certain doom isn't quite as certain now, so yesterday Ted Cruz oozed out of his obscurity of the past few months to endorse Donald Trump before presumably being sent off to be fitted with a gimp suit. Maybe this at least means Chris Christie is no longer the lowest bitch in the harem and can finally move out from under the staircase.

For the last of the unplucked Republicans this is the sort of betrayal they surely must have expected from the Human Turdbag. But his wife? His father? His children? How do you spend a year being subjected to the vilest insults from the vilest Presidential candidate in living memory and then pretend it never happened and everything is fine when there isn't even any political advantage to gain by it?

All this from within the party of "family values" to boot. Hah! There's more honor and family loyalty among starving rats.

You burned the bridges both ways, you fucker, and this is going to hound you. It'll hound you until the day you die and there's a bipartisan petition to dump your body in the sewer.