A Star Is Born

This past fall I decided it was time to shake it all up a bit, make some new friends, get involved with my community in some way that wasn't just going to the grocery store.

I don't want to work for money anymore. Enough already. I have faith in the rest of you.

Keep at it, please, that GDP isn't going to raise itself.

Instead, I signed up for a class, then another class related to the first class, and so it was that two nights ago I wrapped a performance in a play by a local author.

Not me and I don't have the name handy but I hope it will be me next fall.

It was fun. So much fun I'm doing it all over again. No, don't try to stop me, it's too late.

I'm hooked.

Meryl Streep get out of my way!

Anyway, the original title of this blog entry was going to be "Leaving Normal", and it was the result of being online more than was good for my well-being. We all have our rabbit holes, and mine was increasingly bleak. It's easy to lose perspective, though, which is the real problem for some of us social media users and political junkies. So to save what was left of my sanity, because it's looking pretty... not good... out there, I knew it was time for something completely different.

Real life!

Well, fake real life!

Shakespeare, who I read online the other day may have been plagiarizing Emilia Somebody, was absolutely right. Turns out, the play really IS the thing! Who knew?

Originally, my idea was to take the scariest class I could think of, which was Improv. But once started, Improv seemed right up my alley and not scary at all. Meanwhile, an Improv classmate assured me acting would be the fright I was looking for and so I took her advice and signed up for an acting class.

I didn't realize at the time, even though it says so right in the course description, it meant putting on an actual play in front of a live audience, or I never would have done.

Also, I really only took it to learn how to adapt my book into a play, not inherit TWO ROLES when two different people dropped out for this or that reason, including the classmate who'd assured me acting would be the fright I was looking for but she'd be there to calm my jitters.

It was. Oh indeed it was. But why didn't I have even an inkling how cool it is to take on a different character and act out a fiction for the sole purpose of entertaining a live audience of friends and family? Times two because two very different characters: An insecure young stage hand who accidentally outs herself during a monologue to the director and an assured and bawdy costume designer paired with an older censorious one trying to outfit the wrong actor for a community theatre production gone off the rails.

Terrifying!

Also, just what I needed, I guess, because I feel so much better than I did going into it all.

It's the people, of course, the social interaction, sense of purpose, feeling of accomplishment.

The power of the arts?

And now, bonus, I have a template for turning "That Looks Good on You - You Should Buy It" into a play, the process of which I plan to blog on Kathryn Writes Here so it actually happens.

(The play's the thing but only because the audience is REALLY the thing.)

So stay tuned. In the meantime, get out there and be with other people in whatever capacity you can. Hell is us, yes, we can be, sometimes. More often, though, we're the antidote to it all.

Finally, a fun story about men vs women that sums up a lot of our (women's) suffering while men live out their lives reasonably content to be anywhere at all while not doing much of anything.

A fellow improvisor asked me what I was doing for Christmas. After a long involved story of explanations, rationalizations and justifications as to why I basically don't do anything for Christmas anymore (oh except for making a grabillion dollars and hours of labour worth of organic granola to give as presents) I returned the favour and asked him what he was doing for Christmas.

"Nothing", he answered.

It was during a break in our Improv class, ffs - I could've gone with, "Christmas? Wtf is Christmas??"

Oh well, lesson learned. I'm sure there will be a next time.

Until then, though, have a Merry Merry and Happy Happy!

Mea Culpa - Again

Today I went out after class for a 0 alcohol Corona, which was excellent, but the table ordered two plates of nachos, and I'm really not into eating from shared platters of finger food, and I wasn't comfortable ordering a separate item for myself, so I didn't eat.

I realized later I'm not comfortable eating out with a group of people, but I want to be able to do it, so after I got home - and I got a ride, which was awesome - I studied the menu of the place we go to and picked out some sides to order next time.

It's crazy the hangups I've overlooked since forever, but I'm having breakthroughs all the time now. I've been expecting too much of myself, too, so am taking the time now to better prepare, ask questions, give myself the option of leaving if a social situation becomes too much.

A friend asked if my sociability is a performance and yes, yes it is. It doesn't make it any less real, or sincere, I don't think, it's just how I interact out in the world. Maybe you do, too. I hadn't thought of it that way until she asked, but yup, it's a performance.

Anyway, I called this piece "Mea Culpa - Again" because I wasn't going to blog about politics anymore and yet I did. Oh well, nothing for it now but to start over. So that's what I'm going to do. It's so tempting to bleat on about the choices of others but it's not productive or healthy and really just amplifies negativity at a time when we need to take pause, accept how it is, figure out where to go from here.

Stay hopeful, be proactive, make a better world happen however, wherever we can.

I want to be one of the helpers Mr. Rogers tells kids to look for in a crisis, not sitting in a corner shaking my head in hopeless despair at the choices other people make, and that's what I've been doing.

And dragging you down with me, so no, no more of that. We need to lift each other up, or at least help each other to stay standing.

This too shall pass.

One of the classes I'm taking I enrolled in because the very thought of it terrified me. And it was the exact right thing to do, not just because I'm tired of being afraid of everything, but because the challenge of it has turned out to be exhilarating, life affirming, fun.

But a couple of weeks ago, the instructor came to class with a long face and said something about the election, how upsetting it was, yadda yadda blah blah. One of the students (we're all 55+), a military guy, cut him off with a remark about not bringing it to class in a way that made me think he was sensitive to criticism of Trump. But later I realized, no, he just didn't want Trump invading any more of his life than he already does because he's everywhere and has been for a decade now.

We must protect our peace. Trump is where madness lies. Leave it to the politicians who signed up for it.

So, to protect my peace, because it's crucial, I'm way too sensitive to be taking this on - I'm only just learning how to order a side to eat in a group setting, ffs - I'm going to restart my pledge to not blog about politics.

And as of tomorrow I'm not posting about it on my Facebook page either.

Instead, I've got an important project to complete, which I'm going to do on my blog. It's turning my book into a one hour play, and since I need an audience to spur on my writing, I decided, hey, why not blog the process. I'll make it fun, don't worry. You'll like it. You'll laugh, you'll cry, your emotions will run the gamut.

Bonus, it'll be Trump-free.

Anyway, that's the plan, Stan, so stay tuned, and do what you can to stay positive, guard your energy, protect your peace.

Reframe It

This is really hard, isn't it, the thing with the neighbours, knowing we're next.

We are. The fix has been in since Stephen Harper was installed leader of a newly created Conservative Party of Canada, with help from the now bankrupt and Russian mob funded American NRA. He's an adherent of the same Christo-Fascism that's re-installed Donald Trump POTUS so his oligarchic mob can enact their white male Christian supremacist Project 2025.

I know I sound like a broken record, but Harper's groomed and radicalized disciple, Pierre Poilievre, very publicly showed his allegiance to the Freedom Convoy's occupation of downtown Ottawa, Canada's January 6th, during which he declared his run for "PM" and Putin readied to invade Ukraine.

Republicans there are Conservatives here and if you still want to pretend there's any daylight between them, well, fill your leaky boots. Trump, Musk, all the sexual perverts and con artists, Republican and Conservative alike, thumbs upped the Freedom Convoy, a Neo-Nazi attack on civilians and insurrection attempt all rolled into one.

Or, as its propagandists at Postmedia put it, a fun fair. Because that happened, too, gaslighting by coast to coast Canadian media owned by an American hedge fund.

I think I despise Postmedia propagandists most of all. As Bette Davis said, "You should only say good things of the dead. Joan Crawford is dead. Good."

Rex Murphy is dead. Good.

No wonder Pierre Poilievre wants to eliminate CBC. It's owned by Canadian taxpayers, not an American hedge fund. He's a fascist, you know. Your vote for your local Conservative candidate is a vote for fascism. Don't pretend not to know it. You don't have to hold your nose to vote Liberal, either, so stop pretending you're a hero for doing it. You can see as well as I can, there's only one name on the Freedom Convoy's Neo-Nazi hate flags, and it may as well be mine.

Or yours, stupid.

Oh alright, thank you for your service, sir. You voted Liberal. Help yourself to a Purple Heart.

On that note, though, it's pretty hard coming to terms with the fact the Democrats did nothing to prevent Trump from running for re-election, even after his very public leading of the January 6th insurrection from his bunker, filmed for our viewing pleasure, but don't believe your lying eyes.

I thought for a while, after the Mueller investigation came to naught during his first term, the Democratic Party's strategy was to let democracy play out instead, Trump's loss being the justice Americans needed to effect for themselves, and that once they were re-elected to the presidency, they'd act to bring about justice by any means necessary to do it.

Boy was I wrong. And there was a woman consistently warning of this on Twitter, back when I was on it. Her name is Cheri Jacobus and she was attacked by pretty much everybody, accused of being a Republican Party operative, Debbie Downer, Merrick Garland hater, even while she dutifully read the entire Mueller report aloud.

But she was right. There was never going to be justice. Everybody and his Uncle Sam is too compromised by Donald Trump for there to be any. It's all been an elaborate show of smoke and mirrors. I used to think it came down to protecting Bill Clinton, a frequent flier on Jeffrey Epstein's Lolita Express, serial compromiser of liberal Feminists, and ongoing saboteur of wife Hillary's political ambitions, but clearly it's much deeper and wider than just one rogue.

Forget Matt Gaetz, human trafficker, as Attorney General. Just re-install Merrick Garland.

And if you don't despise Merrick Garland by now, you really should.

By way of self care and social engagement I've joined a community centre. I'm taking acting classes - one of which is really an acting out class.

Very fun.

And I'm cooking, baking, sewing.

Oh and I'm back on our housing committee.

Being on our housing committee again is the opposite of fun but my acting out class is helping me deal better with the personal dynamics involved in this sort of grassroots volunteerism. Tricky when personal finances are involved, but also when the stakes are so small, inviting an inverse proportion of emotional investment.

But being on it is my way of acting local. Community engagement is community engagement, and I'm good at this type of thing.

One of our number is a Freedom Convoy groupie, an anti-vaxxer, and believer in all sorts of garbage, an honest to goodness angry nutcase with a chip on her shoulder the size of the empire state building. It's tricky for the rest of us, because she votes according to her feelings, not the facts, but she's just one of five.

As president, I finally confronted her, privately, over what she calls "personal boundary setting", but which is actually just attacking other committee members during meetings for imagined slights that have nothing to do with the agenda - or anything based in reality - and it went down really well because she responded by refusing to attend the next meeting.

We'd been tiptoeing around her random mid-meeting mood swings, but she likes going door-to-door to collect proxies for annual general meetings, so we focus on that, her usefulness in getting quorum, and put up with the rest.

It takes all kinds to make a world. She was appointed, not elected, and a neighbour recently said, "Oh well, she won't get elected so it should be over after the annual general meeting in a few weeks."

I reminded her of the recent re-election of Donald Trump, although she likely won't actually run, so yay. Nor will I for that matter. Time for fresh sacrifice.

But I called this entry "Reframe It" because that's what I'm doing to relationships past and present. I'm reframing them. They don't fail, we free each other up to form other ones. It's a play on learning to say no to some people to allow us to say yes to others, including ourselves.

I always told my kids, about their parents, it's not the people, it's the relationship. It's not about who's right or wrong, it's about compatibility. It's not about loving and caring, it's about not being on the same page anymore.

It's about saying no to one relationship so you can say yes to another, even if that other relationship is just to yourself.

One more time: Nobody leaves a happy relationship.

On the flip side: If someone wants to free themself from a relationship, let them.

The upcoming government of the United States is a kakistocracy, government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state, and it won''t really be a government at all. At least one of the appointees, Tulsi Gabbard, is an operative for Putin's Russia, and was at one time much beloved by (what I call) the revolutionary Left.

She'll be in charge of national security.

Pierre Poilievre, who is on the side of the Neo-Nazi insurrectionists of Freedom Convoy fame, should get along well with her, although he'd be more comfortable with a male traitor, given his very obvious dislike of women. I think the wife's a beard, but it's just my suspicion. I also think she's why he can't get a security clearance, but that's just my suspicion, too.

By the way, Matt Gaetz is supposedly resigning because everybody and her Aunt Louise knows about his sex with teenage girls, but what about the human trafficking and young man he brought into the US whom he claimed later was his son? I figure that's the real reason for his resignation. Americans are fine with old men having sex with teenage girls, never mind middle-aged men.

Cripes, Trump was sexually assaulting pre-teen girls at Jeffrey Epstein's blackmail orgies, which Republicans knew all about, and they nominated him for President anyway.

He likely sexually assaulted his own daughter when she was a pre-teen. Rape AND incest. Republicans don't care. Nor do Conservatives. Vic Toews had a sexual affair with his children's teenaged babysitter, later impregnating and marrying her. Stephen Harper appointed him Attorney General.

The Clintons invited Donald Trump to daughter Chelsea's wedding. Why? Why did anybody have anything to do with Donald Trump? He's only ever been depraved, a serial rapist and conman, a financial fraud, and whatever blackmail Putin has on him you can be sure the CIA and FBI have worse. So who are all these men in power protecting? Each other? What if video was shown to Americans of Trump sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl (a 12-year-old girl who then disappeared, by the way)? Would it matter?

Putin, the public face of the Christo-Fascist death cult intent on destroying Western liberal democracy, prefers little boys to little girls, sexually, I mean. He's a pedophile but George W. Bush looked into his soul and saw a mate. From what I read, Putin and his entourage behaved like barbarians on that same trip, drinking themselves stupid and trashing the landscape wherever they went.

Now Putin is the leader of both the Christo-Fascist world and the so-called free one.

Oh well maybe Pierre Poilievre will talk tougher to him than Stephen Harper did.

It's Not the Economy, Stupid - Part 2

I know I'd blogged about planning to move away from blogging about politics, but couldn't help myself after a Facebook friend posted: "It's not the economy, stupid".

So... Part 2. And then I'm moving on...

Because it's not. The economy isn't why Americans re-elected Donald Trump and it isn't why Canadians will elect Pierre Poilievre Prime Minister.

Democracy activists die in its prisons but Russia is openly gloating about Trump's win because, of course, Russia won, too. Ukraine will be destroyed, more Ukrainians will be murdered.

Likely NATO is over. Cue the celebration from some even in our own families and circle of friends.

Do we need more proof that former Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, works for Vladimir Putin? Why? Everything else about him has proven to be a lie. He's not modest, humble, disinterested in money, travel. Why believe his self-serving lie he ever talked tough to Putin? Just don't expect our media to say a word by way of contradicting him, though.

We're supposed to take the traitor's word for it, not look at what's he actually does. Donald Trump is Putin's Puppet. Stephen Harper helped re-elect him President of the United States. That makes Stephen Harper Putin's Puppet, too.

And Canadians will vote for his successor, the odious creep, Pierre Poilievre, and there's just not a whole lot any of us supporters of liberal democracy can do about it because there's no reasoning with the unreasonable. The US is the wealthiest multicultural democracy in the world and they just voted to re-elect Donald Trump, a fascist, president.

So what are you going to do to stay sane? I'm taking a couple of courses within the arts community, so surrounding myself with like-minds twice a week, and joining a community center to partake in all its many offerings to stay fit AND support my local community.

Also, I'm finally going to try my hand at some of the Great Canadian Baking Show challenges. I could feel it later, the last time I had to really pay attention to what I was doing in the kitchen, a shift had taken place in my body/mind. It's the concentrating on the doing. And I keep it all pretty manual because that's part of the process for me.

Don't worry. Although I've whipped cream by hand, I use an electric gadget now.

We have a new bakery in the neighbourhood and while I'm a regular for their bread I'm also trying out their other offerings visit by visit. I want to do more puff and filo pastry delights, custards, fancy desserts.

Thanks to the courses I'm taking I have a better idea of how to adapt my book to a play format. I have the parameters I didn't know I needed, but also a place for it to be performed once finished.

The creative universe is working out so that's where I'm going to put my focus while the political universe goes down the toilet.

We need to hold fast to each other, those of us of like-mind. We all have family and/or friends we just can't square that circle with, politically, and it's not nothing. For some of us it might even be everything. We've been told all our lives we have to stick with our original people, but no, we don't. I've seen the light on Bernie Sanders. I can even confess to having always known Hillary Clinton was a mistake. Joe Biden's insistence on "standing by" Israel while US and Israeli citizens alike demonstrated against its murderous retribution against Palestinian families for October 7 was catastrophic for democracy world over and helped re-elect Putin's Puppet, Donald Trump.

But not Ukraine. Our standing by Ukraine is not a mistake, it's vital. I can't argue with people who disagree on that. I won't. And if they insist, well, I have to protect my peace.

Even family and/or friends who think it doesn't matter, or worse, welcome the re-election of Donald Trump - whether because they believe Russia was in the right to invade Ukraine, or the Democratic Party is in the wrong for this or that, or Kamala Harris is just a younger Hillary Clinton because she's a liberal Feminist and not the firebrand on the Left we really needed - I don't know that I want a relationship with them at all.

How do we break bread with friends and family on the other side of WWIII?

I don't really know why I was suffering nausea attacks but it's been a while since I've experienced one. Maybe it's just accepting people as they are, but maybe it's recognizing my first responsibility is to me, and speaking up for myself. I wasn't ready to go out, celebrate, on Mother's Day in 2022, after which I had my first attack. I'm far too sensitive for that.

I'm no less sensitive now but I'm smarter about looking after myself.

Be smarter about looking after yourself, too. Don't waste your time and effort and sanity arguing about politics online or off. Leave Twitter to its fascist owner. Change the subject if a family member or friend tries to suck you in to their nonsense. Leave the scene if you want.

Most importantly, protect your peace. This is hard. And don't let anybody tell you different.

It's Not the Economy, Stupid

A Facebook friend and artist posted this morning: "It's not the economy, stupid."

She's right, you know, and don't let the finger-waggers tell you any different.

Americans live in the wealthiest multicultural democracy in the world and they just voted for fascism.

Some say Joe Biden's record in office following Donald Trump's garbage run rivals that of FDR, and that's with the opposition party being chock-a-block with insurrectionist traitors trying to destroy government from within.

Remember Bob the Steelworker here in good ol' Canada? He makes good money in a unionized job at the heavily government subsidized plant in Sault Ste. Marie, my hometown, and he hijacked a federal government announcement of yet more subsidization in Algoma Steel, this time via an electric furnace to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, to boohoo about his personal economy.

Oh and call out a female neighbour for "not working" but now getting government subsidized dental care.

It was billionaires backing Donald Trump. Millionaires voting for him. Wealthy suburbanites, profitable business owners, new immigrants, old immigrants, neo-Nazis, soccer moms, social conservatives, atheists, Christians, college students, retirees, the list goes on and on.

Stop trying to make sense of it, is my advice, because it doesn't make any.

Two Cents

Well that's a gut punch.

But does it feel as bad as his win did in 2016?

I say no. I think we knew, deep down, this was going to happen. Our societies are not doing well and the time for centrist politics is long past.

Gord help me the Bernie Bros were right. No, Bernie wouldn't have won, either, but he would've at least taken the fight to where it needed to be fought.

Opportunity lost but lesson hopefully learned.

Go Left, go Left, go Left.

I didn't watch any of the coverage last night because I'd seen enough on CBC Ottawa local evening news, with reporters on assignment interviewing Americans living in border towns, to realize my hope that surely Americans wouldn't be reckless enough to re-elect Donald Trump was just more wishful thinking.

Did I always know he'd be back? Back? He never went away. So tell me, please - whatever was the point of Merrick Garland? What about Joe Biden? President for 4 years and didn't alter the Supreme Court one iota to protect women from its rapist judges Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, whose wife Ginni is a January 6th insurrectionist, ffs.

And will Joe Biden continue to stand by genocidal war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu now he's lost the White House to him?

Will Kamala Harris?

Robert Mueller, Jack Smith, the list of supposed saviours of democracy goes on and on.

Was it all just smoke and mirrors?

It's sad. I'm sad. And I'm more than a little scared.

Because in spite of what normal politicians will say, part of their job being to calm the waters, this is not good, not good at all.

Looking for Normal

"The peace comes when it doesn't depend on the other person."

That's advice Gabor Mate gave to a mother of an estranged adult child. I've blogged it before but wanted to put it out there again, this time as a sort of general "to thine own self be true" bit of advice.

I've been told all my life I shouldn't care what other people think, but it's really just another way of telling me I'm living my life all wrong. So I'm going with "to thine own self be true".

Is inner peace even possible in a world at war with itself?

Last night we watched famous people grappling with what other people think of them on Netflix. First up was Ellen "the meanest person in show business" DeGeneres in "For Your Approval". She's hilarious, of course, but it's her openness about what was an awful time in her life that makes her latest standup so brilliant. Because, of course, caring what other people think is part of the human condition. Certainly it's part of the female human condition. And being Ellen, she knows how to bring the funny to everybody thinking she was the worst.

Next up was "Will and Harper", a documentary of Will Ferrell and his friend, Harper Steele, a former SNL writer transitioning at 61 to womanhood, taking a road trip across America to visit Harper's old haunts. It's such a moving film, and it's their vulnerability, Will's as much as Harper's, that makes it so. Watching them both try to be who they want to be, and are, is inspiring but also really sad because it's so unnecessarily hard. Will sees it as his job to protect Harper from the America she loves, the dive bars and lonely places, and at one point he cries, worried he's let her down, let himself down.

As for Harper, there's a scene where she confesses how difficult make-up is. She wants to be pretty but as she says, it's so hard with her masculine face. I wanted to tell her it's age, make-up and being pretty gets tricky with age, but I've had a lifetime of living as a woman and making myself pretty with make-up to get to this age where I don't wear make-up at all anymore. She's playing catch-up in her 60s.

And, of course, there's social media, where basic human decency goes to die. 

I finally read "The Myth of Normal", referenced in so many of the interviews I've watched of Gabor Mate on YouTube. It's basically a 500 page indictment of how we've been made to live, particularly in the US and Canada, and what our priorities have become, thanks to social constructs like patriarchy, capitalism, gender, and so on and so forth and more of the same etc etc, still going strong.

For instance, Dr. Mate argues normal is communal and cooperative, how we lived for thousands and thousands of years, not individualistic and competitive. And I particularly like his take on addiction, although addiction isn't the right word for our various behavioural disorders, I don't think. Distractions? His method is one of compassionate inquiry. Why do we behave the way we do? What problem is our behaviour solving for us? What childhood wounds are we soothing with happy hour?

I have to admit, I really had to park my biases to fairly consider his take on our world. And although he claims none of this is about blame or judgement, as a parent who used the sleep program to put her toddlers to bed, it does feel a little personal. But maybe he isn't referring to the sleep program of the 90s, intentional, reassuring and re-settling of toddlers with minimal interaction, but rather of the 50s and 60s, when we were left to cry ourselves to sleep.

I just read an article on CBC's website about the sleep deficit too many strung out parents are experiencing, too, along with their toddlers keeping them up all night. For my own part, I doubt our third child would've been conceived if I hadn't done the sleep program with the first two.

Also, I couldn't help but notice he doesn't extend his no blame or judgement, because we're all experiencing generational trauma, to Liberal politicians, and his singling out of Justin Trudeau and Hilary Clinton, alongside Stephen Harper and Donald Trump, struck me as both unfair and problematic. He name drops, too, and some off-putting ones like Russell Brand and Marianne Williamson, which, in my opinion, he needn't and shouldn't do. It only takes away from the rest of his teachings, backed up by study after study after study, and makes him appear infatuated with celebrities who flatter his political leanings.

There are way too many studies cited, because Dr. Mate is nothing if not thorough in his research, and I diligently skipped over every single one.

But I still came away from "The Myth of Normal" more enlightened than when I went in, and realizing how wrong it is our round bodies are being made to fit into the square holes of an economy that not only doesn't work in our best interests, and never really did, but is actively hurting our health and well-being while destroying our collective habitat.

I forget if he mentions WWIII, I don't think so, but I have friends now at odds on social media over which is worse, Russia committing genocide in Ukraine or Israel committing genocide in Gaza, with some even pitting Ukrainian refugees to Canada against Palestinians trapped in Gaza, so now a real life get together with people who used to be up for one is no longer in the cards. For my part though I want to expand my social circle, do more connecting in real life, more breaking of bread, starting with Facebook friends in Ottawa.

My plan is to eventually hit the road to meet and greet beyond our capital city.

Anyway, that's where I'm at right now. I hope you find yourself in a good place, too. We really are all in this together.

Just the Scraps, Ma'am

Climate change, thanks to our greenhouse gas emissions, is costing Canadians billions of dollars, and our premiers and Singh and Poilievre are busy pandering to voters, the poorest of whom get a rebate on the carbon tax we pay, by pretending the federal government has it all wrong putting a price on pollution and including all of us in the fight against climate change with industry carrying the load.

The odious little shit, Pierre Poilievre, pretends not to believe in climate change, and the rest of the parasites in the Conservative Party go along with it, because he doesn't care about anybody or anything except money and power and neither do they.

But he's going to be the next Prime Minister of the Great White North because he's successfully fuelled the irrational rage of Canadians from coast to coast to coast.

Remember when the world stopped due to the pandemic and we got a break from greenhouse gas emissions proving we could do something about climate change if we all cooperated in the effort?

Whoever advised Trudeau to cave to those over-represented Maritimers should be beaten with a board with a nail in it. He should've told them to get stuffed because he'll get no gratitude for it. Those old seadogs will kick him to the curb for the Christo-Fascist gun lobby calling itself the Conservative Party because, even though they've been subsidized up the wazoo since Confederation, they don't want to pay taxes, help in the fight against climate change, etc etc etc.

CBC reported last week that car manufacturers, the same ones who make their cars so easy to steal our publicly funded police spend all our money trying to track them down, are making cars so big they have too many blind spots, and so we need regulations now due to too many blind spots in over-sized cars.

Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth and promises of more "red tape" reduction from the Russian propaganda amplifiers calling themselves Conservatives because they don't give a shit how many kids are killed by adults who can't see them while driving to the grocery store.

We've had a friend's car until he sells it, which he'd best do before our legs stop working, because yesterday, instead of riding our bikes to the bakery for bread, we drove.

Anybody who owns a house or condo is sitting pretty and don't you think for a second they aren't. Ours has doubled in value since we bought it 14 years ago. I don't really want it anymore, but it's cheaper than renting and I'm nervous about the party representing the interests of the Freedom Convoy neo-Nazis, the Conservative Party, raiding our Canada Pension Plan when Canadians elect them to a majority in 2025 because we are, apparently, the stupidest nation on Earth.

When Premier Loon of Alberta mused about taking Tarsands Inc's share of the CPP, the Lying Lie-face, the execrable Pierre Poilievre, shut down any conversation of him doing the same once in power, so now we know that's exactly the plan.

An older Facebook friend posted a cartoon of Singh saying "here's where I get out" while he opens the door of a car with Liberal written on its side going over a cliff. Haha, get it? A national childcare program, dentalcare, pharmacare, investments in clean(er) energy to help prevent the destruction of all life on Earth = driving The Economy! The Economy! off a cliff. Meanwhile, military personnel and veterans complain nonstop about our government not spending enough on them while they vote for the traitors in league with the white supremacists we fought against in WWII, aka the Conservative Party.

The Freedom Convoy was a three week white power rally thumbs upped by every Russian asset from our Official Opposition to Trump's insurrectionist Republican Party.

FFS the Conservatives entertained both domestic and foreign neo-Nazis in our Parliament. Where I come from, the heavily subsidized Sault, you've got one neo-Nazi in the party, you're all neo-Nazis.

Pierre Poilievre is a neo-Nazi or he wouldn't hang out with Diagolon Accelerationists. Period. End of.

But speaking of the Sault, and neo-Nazi party supporters, Bob the Steelworker, a Teamster, is so, so, so angry at Justin the Prime Minister. Why? He has a good job with benefits at the government subsidized Algoma Steel plant, but he doesn't like that his female neighbour will get dentalcare because, according to him, she's lazy and doesn't deserve it. Now, I'm not saying Justin should've just clocked the entitled little asshole, aka privileged little shit, but I am saying maybe Justin should travel with The Old Monster, aka former PM Jean Chretien, to give Millennial Bob's head a shake.

The Sault, like every other city, is in a healthcare crisis because healthcare is the responsibility of the corrupt thug and illiterate moron, Doug Ford, and Doug Ford works for the Muskoka Mafia, not you and certainly not me.

More of us don't have a doctor than do and nobody who has one is going to move or do anything to jeopardize their good fortune in this lottery of a healthcare system Canadians have paid into for generations, only to find it AWOL in our older age when we need it most.

Who are you idiot oldsters voting for this garbage?!

And why the hell aren't young women voting? I would be too scared to have a baby now. I really would. My heart goes out to all the young women willing to brave it, but Geez Louise, vote, dammit.

Want Doug Ford to give a shit about you? Be rich and own a cottage in Muskoka or be a crooked cop. Crooked cops LOVE Conservatives. It's the loot bags at all those weddings. Good luck to the investigators of the Greenbelt criminality dodging Doug Ford's crooked cop friends in the mix.

In the early days of the pandemic first responders, mostly cops and their unions, showed whose side they're on and it's not the good guys' side. Sunshine listers, angry about... ? Where I live I see the struggle. A skinny woman, a couple of decades younger than me, taking a couple of buses, carrying a green garbage bag as big as she is full of empty beer cans, the hardest working person I saw on the bus the other day, a woman Bob the Steelworker, Conservative Party supporter, would call lazy, undeserving of dentalcare.

Well bonus, Bob, she had no teeth.

He's been radicalized, you know, and it's women he's been radicalized against. He wants us pushed around, pushed back, and he wants it done by the state, that's why he's so angry at Justin, Feminist-at-large. Bob believes we're the why of the problems he's been brainwashed into believing he has, this Teamster with a good job and benefits - again, at a heavily subsidized workplace courtesy the rest of us - grousing about paying taxes and having a government that uses them as they're meant to be used, spreading the wealth to citizens of fewer resources.

And now we have New Democrats, yammering away about "working people", like Bob the Steelworker, who has long since been voting for Putin's Conservative Party, because all he cares about is himself. He doesn't give a rat's ass about anybody but himself. And by the way, those New Democrats include the much ballyhooed Wab Kinew of Manitoba, lined up in lockstep with a party born of guns, the Bible, and white nationalism, because that's what's going on with the Conservative Party just as it is in the United States with Donald Trump and his Republican treason weasels.

Everybody and his racist grampa will vote to bring down the Liberals over a program every economist worth their salt would say is sound and every environmentalist worth theirs would say isn't nearly enough even to mitigate the catastrophic effects of climate change.

We are paying for it in the billions and electing the Conservatives to the government of Canada will only make our lives that much more expensive but also so so so cheap in every way that matters.

The fact is, we haven't been paying what it costs to live here in decades, and all we'll be doing by electing yet more Conservatives to public office is making our lives worse, and making a mockery of the only true measure of a society's worth, which is how it treats its most vulnerable citizens.

Sometimes I wonder if we're at a point in this individual vs the community race to the bottom we're in that we just don't want the world to go on for others after we ourselves are gone from it.

Bob the Steelworker and other tales

I'm from the Sault, home of Algoma Steel and a lot of railway tracks, none of which are for transporting people from one place to another. There used to be Greyhound but it's gone now too. Other than drive yourself or take a flight I don't think there's any other way to come and go from the Sault.

My mother has gone to her great reward, as she used to say, so although my first friends are still there... well... maybe next year I'll make the trip. It's a long haul and I've done it a thousand times from Toronto and a thousands times more from Ottawa.

The Sault has seen better days.

Back when I was growing up, pogey was the name of the game. Get enough shifts in at the plant, get laid off, collect pogey. Rinse. Repeat. Not girls, though. Girls were only allowed to do office work. That is until Sandy challenged Algoma Steel's discriminatory practices and got hired to work in the plant.

I think, like Devonshire House at the University of Toronto, it used no girls washrooms as the excuse as to why no girls allowed.

My cousin was the first female employee, I believe, to work on the "cat walk" guiding molten steel through the plant. My brother worked in Coke Oven #7 one summer. His skin had turned grey by the end of August.

My mother used to say to the other high school teachers who complained about how much more money they could make working at the plant, "So go work at the plant."

We lived across the street from the president of Algoma Steel, although there was a field between our middle-class 'hood and his gated enclave. He kept guard dogs and I once ended up caught between a screen door and the inside door, the dogs ready to rip me apart. If his wife hadn't been home I'd likely be dead. Later I heard my mother tear a strip off him for having guard dogs at all.

She was fearless, my mother.

He was a miserable man who left his unhappy wife in later years.

I believe in the 80s there were accusations of Algoma having been making bad steel and so losing contracts as a result but I have no idea if it's true. It has certainly downsized over the years, as has the Sault, now dealing with the same crisis of poverty and addiction as every other city in Canada, the US, and around the world.

Something I noticed in the 90s when I was visiting every year with my kids was a lot of "Jesus Saves" stuff, not a thing when I was living there in the 60s and 70s, not that there's necessarily a connection between evangelicalism and the crisis of poverty and addiction, but social conservatism doesn't seem to do much for our collective standard of living.

Too much voting for the afterlife, not enough voting for the life right here and now.

By the way, if not for government bailouts of one kind or another for Algoma Steel, the Sault would be a ghost town.

So I watched with some annoyance the video of Bob the Steelworker, by way of a bunch of made-up self-serving neighbour-slandering bullshit, flip off Justin the Prime Minister, in the Sault to promote the latest government investment in Algoma Steel, replacing coal with electric power to reduce emissions.

I mean, not only was Bob the Steelworker, well paid and with excellent benefits, thanks to years of government largesse to both Algoma Steel AND Sault Ste. Marie (ffs, Lotto HQ is there), flipping off Justin the Prime Minister, he was flipping off everybody who has not only invested in his very privileged existence in Sault Ste. Marie, but flipping off every generation to follow in his workboots.

But there it is, right? The difference between Bob the Steelworker, well paid, excellent benefits, a young middle-aged beneficiary in 2024 of decades of taxpayer funded bailouts, er, investments in Algoma Steel AND the Sault, but for whom the government must do even more while he pays less, and those of us who aren't Conservative and understand the only true measure of a society is how well it treats its most vulnerable members.

Anyway, of course Justin the earnest Prime Minister stuck to the script with Bob the full-of-shit Steelworker, but wouldn't it have been fun if he'd called him out instead?

Maybe even put him in a headlock first and administered a few noogies?

A Sault girl can dream.

Nitty Gritty Conspiraditty

Just the facts, ma'am.

We only ever had Stephen Harper's word for it that he talked tough to Putin.

After losing the election to Justin Trudeau in 2015, his party created in 2003 having failed to cheat hard enough to win it, Stephen Harper was installed as Chair of the IDU. From there he helped elect Putin Puppet, Donald Trump, President of the United States.

The "F*ck Trudeau" Freedom Convoy that attacked us, civilians living and working in downtown Ottawa, in 2022, while simultaneously blockading our international borders, costing Canadians billions of dollars, was given the thumbs up by Donald Trump, leader of the January 6th 2021 insurrection in the US, Fox News, Russia Today, and leaders past and present of the Conservative Party of Canada, at least one of whom is also an American citizen who likely voted for Donald Trump, not that a Canadian reporter has ever asked.

In spite of rumoured moderates in the Conservative Party, all its MPs voted in lockstep against invoking the Emergency Act to end the Freedom Convoy's three week attack on children, their pets, new mothers, their babies, palliative care patients, their caregivers, etc etc etc. The attack also featured gallows, cranes with nooses, unattended gasoline, fireworks, Hells Angels, drunk/high men marauding about harassing people wearing masks, hijabs, shopping for groceries, and lots and lots of flags, not one of them Ukrainian, many of them American, Confederate, a swastika or two, and "F*ck Trudeau". 

Meanwhile, mid-attack/insurrection attempt, Pierre Poilievre, thumb shaking with excitement at the violence unfolding in Centretown, an ONDP/LPC riding, declared his run for "PM". His blatantly corrupt leadership campaign (because haha democracy's a joke - get it?) was officially endorsed by Stephen Harper from his post at the IDU, the official laundromat for global fascism. Later Pierre Poilievre would march in solidarity with insurrectionist James Topp, his handler? Trump's man, Paul Alexander, since caught out by the FBI as part of a Russian disinformation campaign, over his shoulder.

Oh, I almost forgot. Right after the Emergency Act was invoked, sending our attackers back to Alberta, home of the Freedom Convoy's neo-Nazi organizers, Russia attacked Ukraine.

I guess if you didn't experience the Freedom Convoy attack, or if you fell for the lie that it was about truckers and vaccine mandates, it's hard to understand the effect it had on those of us who did. But there was a public inquiry into the invocation of the Emergency Act, and plenty of us have told our story. For me it was the knowing so many of our publicly funded police and politicians were complicit with it that I'm pretty sure led to the panic attacks I would experience over the next couple of years.

I know people who've been sucked into believing Russia's propaganda with regard to Ukraine, who believe there's no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, the Conservatives and the Liberals, who don't like Trudeau for this reason or that excuse. Lord knows he can score on his own net like no other politician I can think of, but I also know it may as well be my name on all those fascist hate flags as his.

So yeah, go sit on a pine cone and rotate if you're helping elect a Russian Op - because that's what the Conservative Party of today is - to my Parliament.

Not Fair

In my unqualified opinion the old lady of women's gymnastics, Ellie Black at 28, had the most artistic floor routine, but I'm very suggestible and the commentators referred to it as a powerful comeback story so there you have it. Sold. Ellie Black for MY gold. Also she's Canadian and I get very nationalistic during the Olympics.

Otherwise, I'm a citizen of the world as tasked to us by Justin Trudeau's old man, Pierre.

Gymnastics in my day used to be dominated by the Russians, and I remember Seventeen magazine featuring beauty makeovers of Olga Korbut and the rest of the team. It was so exciting. I poured over that issue, could hardly wait for it to come out.

Seventeen also featured a column by Susan Ford. I remember one in which she wrote about Jack? dodging the Secret Service to go out on the town. I wonder. Did she really write it, do you think? It seemed real.

Just mentioning Olga Korbut I wonder if that's when the Iron Curtain started to part. Americans loved her. Everybody did. We all wanted her to win gold at the Olympics. I remember Jim McKay of NBC? crying when she fell during her unevens? routine. She was actually 17 but looked younger, especially alongside her teammates, who were credited with more grace and artistic expression.

Olga Korbut's acrobatic ability changed gymnastics, and while some would say not for the better, I think it was inevitable, all the way to Simone Biles, who is simply spectacular.

The Soviet Union used to handpick little girls to train as gymnasts based on their body types. I remember too the controversy of their athletes being supported entirely by the state, while ours weren't, and how unfair it was. It really was and yet our athletes still managed to compete against the Russians, often enough winning, too.

Years after Olga Korbut starred at the 1972 Olympics she was living and working in the US, coaching gymnastics, and got picked up for shoplifting. I remember reading about it and feeling bad for her. Also old. This was years ago.

A former Facebook friend was part of the pile on of Simone Biles during the Pandemic Olympics in Tokyo (when she decided against competing due to how she was feeling). I told him it was racist and he should stay out of it but he argued it wasn't and doubled down instead.

He'd convinced himself she was just afraid she wouldn't win, so rather than lose, she quit. I said no he was reacting to the fact she's black and a superstar, look around at your co-arguers, I said, other white male Conservatives who couldn't give a rat's ass about gymnastics suddenly all in with concern for its future.

Gawd he was frustrating.

He's not here to see it but no one is questioning she's the best gymnast in the world now, maybe ever, and at 27. Also 4'8", all muscle, no torso, so kind of an unfair head start, physically, although I suppose those early years in foster care even out any natural advantages she may have.

Intersex people occur in the world population at about the same rate as redheads.

I birthed one of those, a redhead, although she's darkened considerably and you wouldn't know to see her now she's actually one of that rarefied breed.

I don't know how often a runner like Usain Bolt shows up but other men couldn't come close to beating him until I guess someone did or he retired. I haven't kept abreast of men's track after Donovan Bailey. I got tired of the hype, as if the men's 100 metres was all that mattered and everybody else was an also-ran, although I hope Andre wins gold. I like his attitude, as in, he's not an arrogant jerk.

I don't know where Gloria Steinem stands on women being on the front lines of the army but she used to be opposed, given the misogyny not just within our armies, but societies at large. I believe she updated her public position due to women ourselves wanting to be on the front lines, but I imagine she maintains her private reservations. I fully support women being on the front lines and always did, but I respect Gloria's reservations back in the day. She's a much better Feminist than I can ever hope to be.

Easy for her, of course. She was 80 or something when she got married to a man and she doesn't have kids. I think it takes a single childless woman to be the best Feminist. The rest of us get compromised along the way in our roles as wives and mothers.

Once I accused my former Facebook friend, who was sympathetic to the men's rights politics of the Right, of resenting women because he wanted to be one, that he was jealous, while also blaming us for "male pain" as he put it. I must have shocked him because he didn't argue, even saying maybe he was.

I think it's at the core of the new Conservatism, resentment, jealousy, blame, men looking at women and seeing us enjoying liberal democracy, the freedom to not get married, not have kids, invade male-only domains like the army and boxing, also medicine, law, and engineering, and instead of celebrating with us, they want the state to end the party, send us home, no more independence allowed.

Let us pray.

Unpopular? opinion alert: I don't think there should even be such a thing as women's boxing. I'm certainly not interested in watching it, but I'm not interested in watching men's boxing either. I don't consider it to be an advance in Feminism at all, women's boxing. On the other hand, I consider it an advance in Feminism that men's gymnastics is enjoying a bit of a moment. I know I never paid it much attention before but this go 'round I was riveted.

I look back on my childhood Olympic dreams, dreams that powered my nightly runs and saw me through those lonely pre-teen and teen years before I found a tribe and started having fun, and I'm glad I didn't know then what I know now, which is that if I'd lived in the Soviet Union back in the day, I wouldn't have stood a chance of being selected by the state for track or gymnastics or even swimming, because I don't have the body type to excel at athletics.

I also would've probably died of homesickness, anyway, one famous achievement of my youth being I cried so much at overnight camp I had the orphans from Sudbury crying they wanted to go home too.

The dedication it must take to get to the Olympics I can't imagine but every time they roll around I love how politics is eclipsed by performance and it becomes all about the athletes, athletic achievement, and a handful of human beings doing what the rest of us can barely imagine is even possible.

Not fair at all, any of it, but I still celebrate it every time.😀

Freedom

Watching the Olympics, athletes from all over the world competing against each other, puts me in mind of the pandemic, and how we were all in it together, some of us not making it, including a friend who got COVID in late 2022 and died in early 2024.

Did he die of COVID? No. Did he die when he did because he got COVID? I think so. He was immuno-compromised, and thanks to a propaganda campaign by anti liberal democracy operatives, latched onto by every opportunistic Conservative politician from coast to coast to coast, he was against vaccine mandates.

Freedom.

We don't talk about it nearly enough but thousands of Canadians are still experiencing the effects of having had COVID. A lot of them don't have doctors either because the pandemic decimated a healthcare system that was already under strain.

Under strain. More like under attack. I would lose my mind.

My friend who died told me about the many nurses he interacted with believing the vaccine was causing COVID. I told him nurses had been heavily targeted with misinformation, but he was more inclined to believe them than me.

One of the most attention whoring of the Freedom Convoy assholes is in custody in Ottawa for violating his bail conditions, which they all do regularly. One of our housing association residents, a retired nurse with whom I maintain friendly relations, is all in with their anti-vax nonsense. I don't know why I can tolerate it but I can and she seems to know better than to bring it up.

Freedom.

Another housing association friend is moving away because she's afraid to live here now. She and another friend, women living alone, experienced attempted home invasions this summer. A couple of thugs hammering on their doors at 2:00 a.m. One friend has them on camera saying, "When she opens the door just push your way inside." They were wearing gloves. She called the police, turned over camera footage, so we'll see.

The apartment building down the street just managed to get rid of a drug operation keeping other tenants up at all hours, anybody who could having moved already, but the single mother of three I see all the time still lives there. We were in a similar situation several years ago when I lived downtown, the kids coming every weekend. They called me the Mayor of Crackhoville.

A friend at the pond just got back from a planned two week vacation in Jasper that only lasted one day before she was evacuated. We were talking about climate change happening whether we acknowledge it or not. Instead of refunds for some activities she was told to come back in October. It sucks, but I get it.

Another friend told me about an elderly resident of her building with dementia probably ending up in a nursing home in Timmins, where he knows nobody, because that's how it is now. People don't matter.

Army reservists have PTSD now thanks to being deployed to our nursing homes during the pandemic.

Freedom.

Barbara Ehrenreich, one of my favourite authors, wrote about toxic positivity and sometimes I feel like I'm surrounded by it, the pressure to get over it, on with it, back to it. I'm not depressed or negative or even down. I'm just not going to pretend everybody and everything everywhere isn't fucked up.

The pretence there's even a normal to return to is crazy.

Trigger Warning

Triggered

After a lovely lunch out, at which I ate all my pizza and drank a Spark non-alcoholic beer - even Farm Boy has non-alcoholic beer now that's indistinguishable from all the expensive craft beers I used to drink due to a hi-falutin' substance use disorder - I decided on a whim to take a break from the Olympics and listen to Gabor Mate.

So glad I did.

I've heard him say it a hundred times, it's not about the trigger, it's about the explosives we carry around inside us.

Finally, it clicked. It's not you, it's me.

Then I watched another video, this one on attachment vs authenticity, a video I must have viewed a dozen times over the past couple of years, and how the need for others to care about us can get in the way of the need to be true to our values, who we are, not who we've adapted ourselves to be.

It clicked, too. It's not our fault, it's not anybody's fault, it's tricky not losing ourself in the various roles we take on, are assigned. People pleasing is a survival tactic, being who other people want us to be, ignoring our values to avoid confrontation, to fit in, be wanted, loved.

I enjoy hearing the stories of Olympic athletes who walk away from the dream, sometimes for a decade, and come back, gut, heart, brain in sync like maybe they weren't before. Anybody, really, who switches it up like that, goes on a journey, returns knowing who they are, what they want, how to be.

Millennials joke about adulting, but by adulting they mean acquiescing to the demands of a capitalist system increasingly beyond the regulatory capacity of government, a capitalist system stacked heavily in favour of their retired parents, trampling our world's heritage sites, cruise by cruise.

I feel propagandized to want a life that doesn't make sense to me.

Millennials also wander around our cities like zombies, using bolt cutters to steal bikes, the lowest form of theft, so low our police services ignore it in favour of chasing down stolen cars.

TVO's Steve Paikin did The Agenda from my hometown of Sault Ste. Marie, where the addiction crisis is so much in evidence.

Nobody knows what to do about it.

Dr. Mate wants us to use compassionate inquiry to understand addiction, whether it's our own or someone else's, starting with the problem the addiction initially, at least, solved. So not a harsh, "Why do you do this?!" but a curious, "Why do you do this?"

When I said to my ex's boss at a party, "I drank to make myself interesting", he joked, "I drink to make you more interesting, too."

Is boredom pain? I think it is. Loneliness. Those of us who take public transit here in Ottawa, who live downtown or go downtown often enough, see people of all ages, but certainly Millennials, drugged into oblivion, lying on the sidewalk, unconscious. Are they trying to keep themselves alive or trying to kill themselves?

How did we let it come to this?

Ottawa police who aren't busy chasing down stolen cars have set up shop in the Rideau Centre, a show of solidarity with business owners in the Byward Market. I think my panic attacks, which would happen after a meal out downtown, were my gut, heart, brain upset by the juxtaposition, me eating in the restaurant, unhoused addicts lying on the sidewalk outside it.

Where I live people are moving because they're afraid of the men wandering around at night, testing doors, often carrying bolt cutters. I just found this out today from my neighbour I complain about on the regular, who has his eyes and ears on the street, so maybe I'll give it a rest.

In both cases my (female) neighbours had to call police to get them to leave, that's how aggressive they were, and apparently even then they took their time moving on, taunting them all the while.

I see a lot of sketchy looking guys riding pretty nice bikes these days. It makes me mad. Hard to sympathize with them when they're causing other low income people such distress.

I grew up being told I was a citizen of the world. Well I don't feel like one. Nothing is sitting well with me right now. Gut, heart, brain, they're all out of sync and I'm trying to remember a time when they weren't.

Anyway, thanks for reading. I figure I may as well put it out there. Maybe it will help somebody else feel like it's not just them. Below is a painting from 1914 called "The Drinker" by Erich Plontke depicting addiction and despair. A Facebook friend posted it so I thought I'd share it here.

Angry Young Men

Watching Danielle Smith's crocodile tears at her press conference with regard to the forest fire that's devastating Jasper National Park a terrible thought occurred to me.

What if her cutting of Alberta's fire fighting services was deliberate, as in, not just reckless, but calculated?

The ground is so dry out West fires smoulder year round now. So it's not as if even a sociopathic loon like Danielle Smith wouldn't recognize the need to invest even more in Alberta's fire fighting services.

Instead she cut them.

I don't know why, but it's as if we don't want to remember how the Conservative Party of Canada came to be, but it was birthed by Alberta separatists, its creator, Stephen Harper, signatory to the Alberta Firewall Letter, his 2003 creation one of guns, the Bible, and white nationalism.

And lest we forget too, his disciple, Pierre Poilievre, helped him cheat his way to a majority in 2011, his #1 priority being to destroy our gun registry as per the want of the American NRA, most likely the funders of his leadership campaign way back when.

Stephen Harper, Prime Minister, was a sore winner, a surly, vain, and arrogant autocrat, the opposite of advance man, Tom Flanagan's p.r. of humble, modest, policy wonk.

He vowed to make over our country ffs, travelled - extensively - with a personal stylist.

HE WAS RUDE TO OBAMA!

It's all been one big lie.

We can only imagine what a sore loser he is.

So... what if his Conservative government of Alberta - because he's the boss of all the Conservatives of Canada, this humble, modest, policy wonk - is really in the business of sabotaging the government of Canada, its goal being sovereignty on behalf of the same fascists behind the US Republican Party, and the same fascists he works for at the IDU, the same fascists at the NRA who funded his leadership campaign way back when?

Stephen Harper is in the business of electing Donald Trump and sabotaging the election of Kamala Harris. He's the enemy of liberal democracy just as Vladimir Putin is the enemy of liberal democracy.

We only ever had his word for it he talked tough to Putin and his actions completely belie his words.

The Freedom Convoy came out of Alberta. As does Pierre Poilievre who marched with its neo-Nazi insurrectionists, a very public show of whose side he's on, complete with Trump's man, Paul Alexander, over his right shoulder.

Handler?

The Conservative Party even worked to eliminate Pierre Poilivre's (alias Jeff - just as J.D. Vance has changed his name, so to has PP - rite of passage to radicalized tool of global fascists?) only real rival to ensure his leadership victory - complete with video endorsement from, of course, Stephen Harper.

Boys from Brazil came to mind.

We who experienced the Freedom Convoy's attack on us, the torture and terrorizing of citizens living and working downtown, the denial of access to public services, the sabotage of our economy, also witnessed the complicity of our publicly funded police, Ford Nation, and the Conservative Party of Canada, its leaders past, present and future - along with Donald Trump - giving it the thumbs up.

Shortly after the Trudeau government invoked the Emergency Act to clear it out, Russia invaded Ukraine.

This was meant to be an entry about angry young men, many of them in our publicly funded military - vote Conservative and for tax cuts? stop pretending to give a shit about vets - somebody somewhere having convinced them they're victims, victims of discrimination by refugees, transkids, liberals, democrats, feminists.

Young women.

Because that's what this is - a war on young women.

And the fascists are using young men to wage it.

Cat Ladies and Other Tales

Apparently, J.D. Vance is only 39.

I thought he was in his mid-50s.

I guess that might explain his sophomoric politics.

I'm not sure what explains his desire for a male only society, female citizens shut away at home with children, but he wears a lot of eyeliner, eye shadow, lipstick, foundation, and blush for a man accusing Drag Queens of leading America's youth astray.

Does he want the US to be a Christian theocracy to rival the Islamic theocracies US Republicans and Russia's Vladimir Putin have been in a Crusade against for decades now?

Lest we forget, Stephen Harper's desperate gambit to prevent Justin Trudeau from winning the election of 2015 was to drop the mask and go full on Islamophobic in hopes Canadians would respond favourably.

Another man who wears a lot of eyeliner, eye shadow, lipstick, foundation, and blush, by the way.

It's creepy, a well-documented rapist with a predilection for young teen girls, like 12 and 13 year old girls, Donald Trump, by his own admission sexually attracted to his own daughter, Ivanka, and since she was a baby, is the standard-bearer for the Grand Old Party, his young apprentice, J.D. Vance, rounding out the woman-hating sexual predator ticket with sophomoric outbursts aimed at women who don't have children.

Not men, though, just women.

Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance's billionaire Peter Pan sugar daddy, doesn't have children, while his other billionaire Peter Pan sugar daddy, Elon Musk, has a dozen of them but isn't in any way a father. 

Hope his baby mammas raise 'em right and they grow up to be Liberal Feminists.

Anyway, Republican voters will fall once again for the bullshit that awful men like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump care about them and their kids.

They don't, but fortunately, cat ladies do, and they're trending upwards in great style.

Biden Time

So I've been watching Emma McAdam (Therapy in a Nutshell) videos on YouTube, scatter-shotting her 30 week course on anxiety, and last night I skipped way ahead to the 29th week, which reminded me about purpose and meaning being found in giving back, bringing to life ourselves what we want from it, and from others.

Belonging, connection, caring.

I want people to behave more responsibly so I've decided to help out on our housing association again. It's something I can do that I'm good at, like blogging, but more practical and local community oriented.

I've been engaging a bit with a couple of Facebook friends on the situation facing the Democratic Party right now with regard to Joe Biden and whether he should step aside. It's interesting because I'm quite partisan and have a heaping helping of confirmation bias but I've actually come around to adjusting my opinion on this.

They say the best time to plant a tree was 50 years ago. The second best time is now.

So to make the analogy, the best time to start laying the groundwork for a transition in leadership was in 2020. The next best time is now. Yes, it's late in the day, and it will be a scramble and a gamble. But so is doing nothing. And at the end of the day, Americans who believe in democracy will just have to unite around whoever replaces Joe Biden, and get out the vote to defeat Donald Trump.

Again.

And they'll have to make up for the Republicans, who no longer believe in democracy, who are indecent, and who cheat, in order to put Kamala Harris over the top. Because yes, go big or go home. Trust in the American people to want leadership, not despotism.

Have faith.

It's hard, though, isn't it. Our housing association had a coup of sorts a few years ago now where a fellow (a Rightwing bully and vocal Trump supporter even though Canadian) muscled out more decent members and installed a couple of his cronies to more or less do whatever the hell he wanted, joint use agreement be damned. I'd worked with him before and always managed to rein him in, with the help of another member, but it was too hard to do anything about him from outside the committee and the other member was long gone to Toronto.

In the end our association managed, all of us together, to get him out, fire the property management company that had benefited financially from his reign of terror, and restore order, although a lawyer advised us that the unauthorized changes he'd made shouldn't simply be reversed, as it wouldn't be righting wrongs, it would be making yet more unauthorized changes.

Whatever.

So we lived with what he'd done and life carried on. Some people were mad but some people are always mad, and a new committee and property management company, which I helped hire and which turned out to be much worse than the previous one, managed to take us through the pandemic until last fall when the committee mostly resigned and a new committee was elected in its place, shortly after which most of them resigned so that now it's half unelected volunteers, of which I've offered to be one.

Everybody and everything everywhere is fucked up and we aren't giving each other the due we deserve for trying to sort shit out and restore order. Living in Ottawa I can tell you we ceded public space to the likes of the Freedom Convoy and we're having a hell of a time taking it back because the decent among us have mostly retreated to our private domains, naively believing the public one isn't our problem.

It is both our problem and our solution so we need to get back out there and reclaim it.

Yes, Joe Biden did his duty well, but the people calling for him to pass the torch are doing their duty, too. I know what I see, in spite of my own denials, and I see the Joe Biden referred to some time ago now in a written report by a doctor as elderly and confused. A Joe Biden who slurs his speech so badly he's too hard to understand. A Joe Biden who can't turn his head without turning his body. A Joe Biden who moves like Tim Conway playing an old man in a Carol Burnett Show sketch.

A Joe Biden who's tired and cranky and instead of taking a nap is insisting on running for President of the United States.

It's the obstinacy, the anger, the feeling betrayed - the paranoia - that gave it away for me. Joe Biden, Mr. Reasonable, isn't being reasonable. He's not the only one who can defeat Trump just because he managed to do it in 2020. And so the task of convincing him to make as gracious an exit as possible is being left to people other people are excoriating for taking it on, as if Democrats can't be trusted to vote for a ticket with the accomplished Kamala Harris as the nominee. Meanwhile, I'm reading my young middle-aged Facebook friend in Texas vow he'll vote for the elderly man with signs of dementia over Trump, thanks, and do his best to convince others to do the same, and not sit it out or pretend it's hopeless because the task at hand is saving democracy.

Like I say, it's hard, but once I checked my partisanship, my confirmation bias, I felt a lot calmer about it all. Also, recognizing it's not up to me to save America, it's not even up to Joe Biden, it's up to Americans. Meanwhile, I can do something to improve my own little corner of Canada, which will go a long way towards making me feel better.

Emma McAdam points out that when we stop doing what makes us anxious it just confirms to our brain that what we were doing was dangerous. Well being on the committee isn't dangerous, going to see a musical at the National Arts Centre isn't dangerous, taking the train to visit relatives isn't dangerous, meeting friends for lunch isn't dangerous, doing my part to take back public space isn't dangerous.

The stuff of life isn't dangerous.

My belief is Joe Biden will step aside and I hope he does so graciously and with a humble apology for not having done so sooner because he needs to do what he can to absolve of blame the people he's put in the position of appearing to push him out.

My hope is Democrats rally around the new ticket and people get involved on the ground to get out the vote like democracy depends on it because it does. Meanwhile, I'm going to go back and forth viewing Emma McAdam videos on YouTube and put into practice her advice on dealing with anxiety by doing a little more each day to bring to this life what I want from it.

I survived a pandemic ffs. The best time to pay it forward was yesterday. The next best time is right now.

Please Somebody Alert CBC

I haven't watched any of it of course but I imagine our media coverage of the Republican Convention in no way suggests it's actually a fascist hoedown, a proudly broadcast threat to liberal democracy and statement of solidarity with the well-documented murderer of Russian democracy activists, journalists, and opposition leaders, Vladimir Putin.

Even CBC is both-sidesing democracy and fascism for some reason that escapes. Kind of makes me wish Trudeau would axe it now instead of waiting for Poilievre to do it. 

But I lit on something while looking at a photo of J.D. Vance, the Republican Party's chosen running mate for Donald Trump: He, too, wears make-up, including eyeliner, lipstick, and blush.

Look at a photo of him. You can see it. It's not the usual make-up of men on tv either.

It's the make-up of women.

A while ago, looking at a photo of our former Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, I noticed he wears a lot of it, too. You can plainly see it in the photo gracing the website of global fascism's laundromat, the IDU.

That's what I figure the IDU is, anyway, as I can't discern any other purpose for it.

He's my age, pretty much exactly, and I don't wear any make-up at all anymore. If anything, he's wearing even more than he did in middle-age, and that was a lot. It was so much, in fact, he had to bring his personal stylist along with him on his many travels while he was Prime Minister.

(And this is where I interject to say everything we were told by his advance man, Tom Flanagan, turned out to be bullshit. He's not modest, he's not humble, he's not a policy wonk. He's vain, arrogant, and a reckless idiot who locked us into a terrible trade deal with China. He didn't hate travel, he loved it. And money. He loves money. And I'll eat my hat if he ever talked tough to Putin because every single one of his actions indicates the exact opposite.)

Now, there's nothing wrong with men wearing make-up, of course, but I think it's noteworthy that they do when they're such haters of Drag Queens (as is their ideological leader, Vladimir Putin) and so, so, so jealous of women they essentially want to eliminate us from society, as is the goal of Men Going Their Own Way, the women-haters Pierre Poilievre recruited to his Conservative Party leadership campaign.

Do these men hate women because they want to BE women? Do they hate women because they're mad at mommy for however she didn't measure up?

Or do they hate women because we can choose to reproduce ourselves.

Or not.

Certainly it would explain their zeal in punishing us for our life creating choice by taking it away and putting themselves in charge of whether we do or don't reproduce.

Please note: The flip side of men eliminating abortion is men making it mandatory.

Nazis.

Please, somebody, alert CBC.

It's a Sad Sad Sad Sad World

I'm a book collector, as it turns out, and have several bookcases housing my eclectic collection. Many of the books I've read, but many more I haven't. And I'm starting to wonder if I ever will because in addition to my private collection, I've become a regular borrower of library books. And because library books have due dates, I read them.

I know, I know, the due dates aren't like they used to be, but I feel guilty if I don't abide by them anyway. Besides, I can't borrow more until I've returned the books I have.

Also, I love the library. It's my happy place. And free.

In the past few days alone I've read three library books: "The Dog of the North" by Elizabeth McKenzie, "The Last Remains" by Elly Griffiths, and "Fight Night" by Miriam Toews.

Staff picks are always a good bet but I think only "Fight Night" was a staff pick. The other two were just random selections that helped take my mind off myself.

And all the women-hating fascists running for public office nowadays.

I don't worry about having so many books, although I'm going to whittle them down a bit, most likely divesting myself of nostalgic keeps after lighting upon the following, "The less you have, the more you do."

That little gem came to me when I was assessing all my "learn to draw" and "learn to knit" books.

Who needs more than one of each? It's not like knitting and drawing have changed over the years.

I've gone back to watching "Therapy in a Nutshell" videos. Also, of course, Gabor Mate, who, when he speaks of being free means freeing ourselves from our egos, working through our trauma, being who we are, not who we think we should be.

I listen to him in interviews and he never puts a word wrong. He can also correct an interviewer's question to make it and his answer more helpful.

Emma McAdam, of "Therapy in a Nutshell" offers practical help, and last night's viewing was about willingness, the willingness to feel our emotions instead of trying to keep them at bay. I was thinking of a friend but then realized it's me, too.

I'm sad. Loss is hard and I've experienced, am experiencing, loss. We all are. But we live in a culture where we're supposed to get on with it, deny our sadness, drink it away, toughen up, harden ourselves to it.

Then we wonder where our aches and pains come from, why when we eat well, sleep well, get plenty of fresh air exercise, we still have "issues".

For a long time I thought of myself as a victim. It happens in divorce and is why they say the best likely outcome is one in which nobody is satisfied. But I've been turning that around, owning my responsibility for it, and it feels good.

Why not be the hero of my own story?

I had to reassure a friend the other day, I'm in the best shape of my life, and I am. I do an excellent job of looking after myself, thanks. But I can't, I won't, pretend I don't feel how I feel anymore. You shouldn't either.

It's okay to be sad. We're living in a sad sad sad sad world. Be sad.

A Swing and a Miss

Hurricane Beryl caused a broody mood around these parts but it seems to have passed through now. For the past couple of weeks I've been dealing with a fungus issue in my heel but it seems to have cleared up. No sooner did it clear up though than I stubbed the toe next to my big toe and either broke or sprained it.

A friend at the pond (where I likely picked up the fungus) told me about a guy he knew who broke his toe, then got shingles, then developed congestive heart failure, then died. All that time he wouldn't got to the hospital. Refused.

I get it. We still advise each other to make an appointment with our doctor or go to the hospital like it's the olden days and not 2024. I'm so sorry if you need medical care. None of this is fair or makes any sense.

Go to the corner store I guess and drink yourself stupid on cheap beer.

Doug Ford doesn't drink himself so don't expect him to give a shit about your liver.

Last week, while NATO was meeting to harangue us about our military spending, Russia bombed a children's hospital in Kiev. So I think we should withhold any spending on NATO at all until NATO admits we're in WWIII, calls Russia's nuclear bluff and attacks it with everything we've got.

Also, our provinces seem to have endless money for police. Why not hook our police forces, I mean, services, up with our armed forces? Just nationalize them and let people find their own stolen cars.

Or get a fucking clue and stop buying them until car manufacturers make them theft-proof.

I am so fucking tired of paying for suburbanites to drive their gas guzzling tanks to and fro like they have zero responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions destroying life on Earth.

I've been weaning Facebook friends, one of whom is a devotee of Twitter. She joined an attack on a journalist at CBC, a young woman. Liberal Twitter, as it's called, regularly attacks journalists when it doesn't like the news they report, claiming a Conservative bias, just like the fascists claim a Liberal one.

I call Conservatives fascists now because they share a party with them. It's my opinion that Conservatives were always on the side of fascism, but because they were our neighbours and relatives, and we were supposed to maintain cordial relationships and not discuss politics, we pretended they weren't all about reversing civil and human rights for anyone who wasn't white, male, and Christian.

Fuck that. Republicans are why Donald Trump in the US and Conservatives here are why Pierre Poilievre - who may as well be Rob Anders, ffs.

So far, I'm proud of my Facebook friends for not pretending we have to care somebody supposedly took a shot at Donald Trump, although I'm not buying any of it yet. A recently deceased Facebook friend would be appalled, but he never understood how indefensible Donald Trump is.

I accused him once of being a Conservative and he was so mad it pretty much ended our friendship.

But I was right. It's bred in the bone, isn't it, as Robertson Davies would say. I denied I'm a Liberal for years, but I am, so now I just own it. My New Democrat colleagues at Queen's Park would regularly accuse me of it, being a Liberal. And really, I was only there because of my undying love for Bob Rae, who turned out to be a Liberal, too.

Americans terrify me now, millions of them all in with fascism. But maybe this latest Trump stunt, attempt on his miserable godforsaken mobster life, whatever it was - and again, I'm not buying any of it yet, maybe ever - will turn off the (inexplicable to me) fence-sitters and they either won't vote or will vote for the demonstrably frail Joe Biden.

No, stop with the excuses and own it. Joe Biden is frail. Believe your eyes and ears. But we're in a war whether we want to be or not, so whether he runs or someone else does, it's either fascism or democracy.

Dear Alice

I've read a lot of Alice Munro stories over the years, as well as about her, and including interviews with her. And I'm not sure, but I think at one point I was surprised to learn she was a mother. And again, I'm not sure, but I think once I did, Alice Munro became less about being a writer and more about being a mother who didn't seem even remotely interested in discussing her role as a mother.

It wasn't just me. It was me, her interviewers, and every Tom, Dick and Mary who wrote about her.

And the reason for this, I think, is because Alice Munro was so vague on the subject of being a mother, so reticent, because the reality of her life didn't match at all the expectations we all had, that naturally, being a mother her children were her priority.

So how did she fit her writing around her children?

Meanwhile, the idea that a man might be her priority, and not her children or her writing, never occurred, although my guess is a re-reading of her canon and it would fair leap off every page that it was ever thus.

I do know I found her vagueness about being a mother - because she was nothing if not vague about it - endlessly frustrating. I don't care if you're one of the greatest short story writers in the world, I want to know about you being a mother now that you're being so mysterious about it. What kind of mother are you? What about your kids? What's it like for them, you being their mother?

Well, now we know, don't we, because her daughter, Andrea Munro, has told us.

It wasn't about being a mother at all, not even a bit. It wasn't even about being a writer.

It was all about being a woman with a man.

It's an Alice Munro short story if ever I read one.

We can be shocked about Alice Munro's betrayal of her daughter to the man who sexually abused her, not to mention the other little girls her second husband Gerald Fremlin sexually abused, sure. But anyone my age knows fully well, Alice Munro was not unlike a lot of mothers of her time, a time before reliable birth control and no fault divorce.

And lest we forget, there's a reason we had to bring in a law that an adult in a position of authority must report any suspected sexual abuse of a child by another adult in a position of authority.

Which brings us to Jim Munro.

When Andrea Munro returned home to her father Jim Munro's house after her summer visit to her mother, she told her stepbrother about her stepfather Gerald Fremlin's sexual abuse of her. Her stepbrother told her to tell his mother, her stepmother, which she did. Her stepmother then told her father, who, for whatever reason, didn't tell Alice Munro.

Then Jim Munro continued to knowingly send his daughter every summer into the sexually abusive hands of her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin.

No one seems to be asking, so let it be me, but what kind of father was Jim Munro?

But no, everyone is correct, of course. Alice Munro standing by her man, a man guilty of serial child sexual abuse, including that of her own daughter, is the worst. It's not just rejection, although it's certainly that, it's betrayal.

I grew up knowing I was planned because my mother made a point of telling me when I complained of probably being an accident since my parents already had a girl and a boy.

"Actually you were all planned so you'll have to find something else to complain about."

And I know she was telling the truth because otherwise she was pretty much Red from That 70s Show.

Well, a lot of people my age and older weren't planned, and they grew up with resentful mothers and absent fathers, people who should never have become parents, fathers who would sexually abuse them and mothers who would betray them, and on and on and on it went and still goes, although not so much now we have more choices.

It's sad, and we all feel let down, but what, for the love of all that sustains us, does any of it have to do with art?

On the Bright Side

A meteor could hit Earth.

But did the Republican Party really need their Supreme Court appointees to put Donald Trump above the law, in law? I mean, he's been committing fraud and treason in plain sight for years now, and although he's had financial penalties applied against him, it's not like he's ever had to actually pay them, not out of his own wallet, anyway.

Seems to me the ruling putting presidents above the law is likely in response to the recent unanimous decision by a jury of ordinary Americans in a criminal proceeding that Donald Trump was guilty.

Shameful betrayal of those jurors but I guess we should have know this would be coming.

My question is, why would anybody who isn't Donald Trump want him to be above the law, in actual law, and not just as he's always been for whatever reason he seems to have been, raping, libelling and defrauding countless of his co-citizens?

No sooner was he found guilty in a criminal court by those same co-citizens than his toadies on the Supreme Court ruled against them. Why? What's the deal?

Who other than Donald Trump benefits by him having an exemption from ever facing any real consequences for his rampant criminality? Four years of a Democratic presidency and still no justice for the millions of Americans defrauded by this piece of shit mobster.

So what the hell is going on? No sooner do we think there will be just a modicum of justice than <whoosh> the rug is pulled out from us again. If I were those 12 jurors I'd be wanting to sue everybody who's anybody. They put their lives on the line and for what.

Something is rotten in the big ol' swamp south of our long and unprotected border and it's not just Donald Trump.