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.