Relapse

Before I get into it I want to put down here a comment I made on a Facebook friend's post about thinking young and keeping on dancing as we age:

While I still feel like I'm 12, I'm respectful of being 64.👵

In other words, just because I can doesn't mean I should. Take time. There will be even less of it if I trip on the way. Prioritize sleep. Stay hydrated. Eat when hungry. But keep up with the world and how younger people are faring with it. Look after myself so I can be here for others.😇

We oldsters need to reclaim the commons, stand up for the public good, so get your placards ready.😎

I enjoy reading all the lifestyle change stories of the over 60 crowd, too. My goal is to feel like I've had psychedelic therapy without actually taking psychedelics. Comments welcome.💁

So two weeks ago I was revisited by a panic attack, although I'm not sure panic attack is the right name for what I'm experiencing and have been for over a year now.😱

It's more like a reaction to a buildup of feelings, too many feels, some of them resurrected from  childhood. Gabor Maté would say it's trauma, both bit T and little t. He might also say it's a lack of boundaries.🙅

I over-identified with a little beastie and it tipped me over the edge.😿

TMI alert but putting it down in writing helps me connect dots, and I'm well past privacy after a couple of decades of online dot connecting. It's my public service, an indecency I can perform that decent people would rather not.😇

I said yes instead of the no! no! no! no! no! a thousand times no! I was screaming in my head and the result was having to purge from my stomach every bit of the dinner I enjoyed a few evenings into my people-pleasing yes instead of a people-disappointing no! no! no! no! no! a thousand times no!. On the upside, I didn't have to make myself sick, it came up naturally, and probably only lasted an hour or so, with a shorter lead in as well. I felt less alienated than previously and maintained the awareness throughout the unpleasantness that it would pass, and I would feel better soon. On the downside, I had to make quite the dash to the bathroom.😬

It's no one's fault, but it's my responsibility. So live and learn. "No" is a complete sentence.💪

Also, I am enough, I am enough, I am enough. You, on the other hand, might be too much.👸

It's tricky, feeling like I'm enough - as is - when I no longer work for money (or haven't in a while, anyway) don't drink, smoke pot, eat meat, fish, seafood, poultry - mushrooms. Suffice it to say that going out on the town isn't like it used to be, that's for sure. I'm a day person now, too, and unless it's lunch out, I'd rather be at home, winding it all down. I like going to bed. A lot. My dreams are very revealing, sleep as important to me as fibre.💃

Drinking, inclusion, adulthood are all very intertwined in our culture. It can be an effort to not feel left out the social scene when one doesn't drink (anymore). Seasoned teetotallers would advise finding a new social scene, which is maybe what the pond has become in spring, summer and fall, and something else could be in winter.😎

I'm not sad, or feeling deprived, I'm relieved. Happy, really. But the panic attacks (purging attacks, really) are upsetting my apple cart, an unwelcome, but I guess necessary, reminder all is not well within. Being a Sober Sally is a good re-start (I even enjoy it!) to a process of introspection, that's all.😷

I helped a friend at the pond recently. She's up at night worried about a proposed rent increase. She's been in her home for years, so the landlord is trying to bully her out. But she's feisty and an able researcher so I told her, "don't take it personally, take the personal right out of it, build your case as a civic duty".💁

It's advice I'd have to be a completely different person to follow myself, but she got back to me a few days later, delighted with her new perspective. I couldn't believe the headway she'd made, although I could because, like I said, she's feisty and an able researcher. Also, she doesn't have the internet to distract her from the work of life that needs doing, not opining on to other tweeters.👵

Having left Twitter (and now you have to log in to even read it) I've no longer got the distraction of it and am reading more - whole books! - but still having trouble keeping up with the day-to-day maintenance of life. Decision-making is less fraught but still fraught enough I have trouble sweating even the small stuff. I can decide to leave a marriage (well, after 20 years of having one foot out the door, my ex and I having about as much chemistry as any two people who don't like each other can - love/shmove) but deciding what to make for a non-meat dinner is a challenge every day.😖

Normally Anne Tyler errs on the side of staying married, so read "The Amateur Marriage" for a different take. I devoured it. One of the characters could have been an estranged sibling of mine, a friend's estranged child, maybe even one of my own. We'll see. Reading the book I was struck by how desperately we try to keep our families together, keep everybody in the fold, in spite of some members not wanting to be in it. I left a marriage for good reason but you'd think from the reaction of my family and his I'd run off and joined the circus. Growing up, my older sister and mother were at war with each other, the spoils my dead father, whose tragedy they each wore like a banner. Reading the book I remembered a time when my brother, younger sister and I were at home with Gram, my mother and older sister both away, and how nice it was. And yet later I would try to convince my sister not to cut us off, in spite of her behaviour, which was awful, my mother uncompromising. Why? Why do we want relationships with people who don't want relationships with us? Why does it feel like our failure when a family member chooses to drop us? Why does it feel so personal and yet like collective punishment? Is it ego? Why do we step in, some of us, to take responsibility for the choices of others, while others of us can let that relationship go, move on, oh well, onward and upward.💔

Years ago I decided to try a trick I'd read about and wish an enemy, who was preoccupying my life, well. Sincerely. Wish him success in his endeavours. And it worked. He no longer preoccupied my life. So why haven't I tried that trick with a loved one, never mind just a friend or family member, an actual loved one, wish him well, success in his endeavours?😘

Ah, and there it is, why I blog.😉

Thanks for reading.💗

Life in a Time of Great Stupid🙈🙉🙊

Subtitle: Looking a Gift Horse in the Butt😀

So the other day, home from my daily bike ride and swim in a publicly owned fresh water swimming hole, I realized this is it, I'm living my best life. That thing we're supposed to do? I'm doing it.💃

I basked for a moment. Then, not one to tempt fate, I moved on to worrying about all the bad stuff that could happen, any minute, to snatch my best life living away, like being denied access to said publicly owned fresh water swimming hole.😱

I know, I know. I'm not living my best life if I'm worrying about the future. Also, I'm still regretting the past. Like why did I persist in relationships with men who prefer living alone as evidenced by their decades since of living alone? Women have terrible judgement and are always looking for projects to cram into our bustling lives, making over a man being one of our favourites. If a man wanted a woman he'd have her. One? He could have a dozen.👵

Also, the air quality in Ottawa today is at "try not to breathe" (Quebec's forests on fire, as Western Europe is about to appreciate) so any best life living has to be done indoors.😟

Yesterday, when the air quality in Ottawa was also at "try not to breathe" (we're off the chart used to measure air quality so we can only assume every breath is hazardous now) I organized fabric into "to sew" piles and decided I'm done weeding out clothes. Everything stays. I'm going to start dressing to go out again (once we can safely breathe the air). Live my best life by example in all my best thrift shop scores.💃

Last... week? month? year? I read an article in the NYTs, free for some reason, featuring a middle-class couple, GenXers (not Boomers) with two daughters, 20 and 13, who purchased a vacation property, a "simple cabin" on an island. Alas, the "simple cabin" was sinking, due to lack of a foundation (the cabin, not the island, although that island of garbage the size of Manhattan floating around the Pacific doesn't have a foundation and it's not sinking). And so thousands of dollars later and with the help of friends and rellies, the day was saved, and now this couple owns two properties in which to expand their middle-class living.👪

I'm not envious, nor am I pointing fingers. As I say, I ride my bike to a publicly owned fresh water swimming hole every day, publicly owned bike lanes almost all the way. In terms of keeping it simple, which this couple reportedly wanted to do, it doesn't get much simpler. Although eventually I want access to the much larger privately owned fresh water lake beside the much smaller publicly owned fresh water swimming hole, but I'm good for now, placard at the ready should it be required. Fair warning, City Hall.💪

So yes, I'm not pointing fingers, or picking on anyone in particular, because owning a couple of private properties, especially a waterfront cottage, is middle-class life for a lot of Canadians and has been for decades now. Plus vacations away from those properties, including abroad. Or at least to Disneyland or maybe an island resort. Whatever. We're surrounded by expectations, our own and others.👪

Cripes, if not for our once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, we might never have experienced the relief, ever so briefly, really, of not having to live up to them.😷

I know people who've had to sell their cottage (we call it a camp in Northern Ontario but I've been in southern Ontario and/or Ottawa too long and say cottage now like yooz guys) because they could no longer abide the trespassing by other cottage owners (their property included a tap for the fresh water spring feeding the lake) and their various and sundry contraptions motoring around the lake, a lake that includes a public beach anyway. Also their kids were grown up and maintaining the property became too much work, the expense no longer worth it, and so on and so forth and more of the same etc etc.👎

Now cottage owners living on land are even having to contend with cottage owners living in the lake, in shipping containers, of all grotesqueries. And since the lake is actually publicly owned? I guess we're all having to contend with it.👎👎

As Roseanne Roseannadanna would say, "It's always something."👿

Meanwhile, we publicly owned fresh water swimming hole people live with the threat of it being taken away from us if it gets too popular with we the public to whom it belongs. We're made to feel afraid the wealthy neighbourhood it's in can deny us access at any time, its designation as a conservation area (there's a condo development around it and I hear more lawn mowers, leaf blowers and chain saws there some days than I do in my not urban but not suburban either 'hood, and there's weed spraying pretty much everywhere) used to close it off to us, while the private condo owners around it maintain their private access. So we all adhere to the 7:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. hours like good little interlopers and do what we can while we're there to keep it clean and quiet.😇

And it works. Everybody who goes there to swim loves it. Some people don't even swim, they just sit on one of the three benches and gaze out over the water for a bit. Or chitchat with strangers who are then no longer strangers. There aren't change rooms or washrooms and only a tiny beach once the water goes down (the city stopped pumping water into it, claiming it wasn't doing anything to keep up the water level all summer) so it's not a place to hang out for any real length of time, although people still try, while us regulars encourage a "swim and go" attitude - by example. Also by grumbling amongst each other about beachgoers. And since us regulars go pretty much every day, we see more of each other (literally!) for at least four months of the year than we do anyone else in our lives.💞

It's the best part of life here in our nation's capital.💘

But because it's publicly owned, and we live in a time of great stupid, so many of us believing we need to protect ourselves (from who? each other? the future? the air?) by owning as much property as we can afford (or not), we live with a knife over our heads, i.e. the threat our publicly owned property can be taken away from us at any time, as we have no indeterminate right of access. Why? Because we live in a culture that prioritizes individual wealth over public health, i.e. a stupid culture.😡

And so it was that just as I realized I'm living my best life I also realized how much better it would be if I wasn't holding my breath all the time (I mean metaphorically, although I'm keeping it shallow these days, even indoors) worried we the public will one day be denied access to our own fresh water swimming hole.😬

I'm tired of it. Because it's not just our swimming hole under constant threat of being privatized in one way or another, it's everything publicly owned. And instead of standing together to protect our publicly owned property from being privatized, like healthcare, we're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to own cabins on islands.💪 

Like I said, life in a time of great stupid.😐

You Say You Want an Evolution

Facebook friends have been posting an article about our evolution, taking us back 4 billion years, past apes and reptiles and what look suspiciously like the silverfish I used to spot in the bathroom of my apartment in downtown Ottawa, to self-replicating mRNA molecules.👾

Kidding, self-replicating RNA molecules. No m.😜

Not kidding, I'm a Creationist now.🙏

The thing is, the article concludes with the prediction of a "Great Averaging", to come at some future date. As in no more diversity, just same/same human beings.😕 

This was confusing to me (hence the confused emoticon) because I assumed we were already there, and have been for quite some time, same/same, diversity a word we use to cover made up stuff like culture, race and gender. Our gang colours, as it were.👥

I mean, sure, we're individuals, but so are my grandcats. We're as "same/same" within our species as they are in theirs.😼

Cripes, ants and bees are more diverse than we are, more diverse even than our grandcats, who can at least be Siamese, British Shorthair, Manx, Snowshoe, Singapura, Bengal and so on and so forth and more of the same etc etc. Meanwhile, ants and bees have actual Queens. We just call other same/same humans queens - or kings, so they can pad out our news hours and/or murder us with impunity.👸

But even CBC knows, deep down, King Charles III is the same under his bejewelled crown and ermine robes as Joe Sixpack and Sally Housecoat from Tallahassee, who are the same as Malala and Cher and back around to his cast out son, Prince Harry, and Prince Harry's wicked step-mother Camilla.👺

Also, how many Wallises and Dianas and Meghans, how many Camillas, ffs, will it take for CBC to admit Buckingham Palace is just Coronation Street in drag.💂

Speaking of CBC, last evening's Ottawa newscast, already chock-a-block with ads featuring lone cars/jeeps/trucks racing through empty cities/deserts/wilderness, graced viewers with a several minutes long interview featuring a woman who recently purchased one such vehicle. She advised viewers if we, too, want to purchase a new vehicle, we must go to a dealership and beg a sales associate to let us buy whatever's available on the lot, no matter the price - or - fuhgeddaboudit.🙅

I only wish I was kidding but the interview went on to include a check in with a sales associate at a car dealership who confirmed, yup, what she said - or - fuhgeddaboudit.🙅

I also learned the Stanley Cup was finally won by somebody, somebody else bought the Senators (the hockey team) and somebody something the Raptors.💤

But back to the "Great Averaging"/end of diversity (which I still contend was always here). We used to refer to death as the "Great Leveller", but Twitter long since overtook death and now Artificial Intelligence has overtaken Twitter.👽

Just look at how happy Yoko Ono's John Lennon was to be alive again and singing alongside Linda McCartney's Paul at Glastonbury last year, like Wings and Silly Love Songs never happened.👻

When has a rich man not spent his humanity trying to buy divinity? 

But I'm lucky because I have faith, in spite of having been president of our housing association, and on my way to swim at a pond, I pass an elementary school and see children playing with each other, same as it ever was, running around, making noise, puppies at the dog park. Some of those children transcend their entirely made-up gender, as do some of the pond goers, also same as it ever was. Some are neurodiverse, too. Again, same as it ever was. But because we're well into a time of "Great Averaging", and our individuality is still and always will be the essence of our humanness, we all just want more and ever more recognition of it, the freedom to live well as our unique selves within our entirely made-up, diverse or not, various and sundry gated communities world over.💃

A while ago, before I read the article, I was watching TVO's The Agenda. Steve Paikin was interviewing an expert on gender. Eventually he asked the question, with regard to boy vs girl, how much of this gender stuff is nurture and not nature. Her answer? "All of it."💣

His response?👀

It was mine, too, not because I didn't know it already but because it was so succinctly put. Finally. So forget the "Great Averaging", in spite of having been president of a housing association, I'm putting my faith in our "Great Humanizing".😇

Making Do

I've been watching videos on trauma, trying to piece together why I started having panic attacks last spring, and my takeaway so far is to pay more attention to what I'm doing, and thinking, because thinking leads to reacting, and what I think and how I react is within my control to change.💁

I can think myself into quite a state, I've noticed, now I've started paying attention to this hamster wheel brain of mine. Allowing myself to try out prescription medication to address baseline anxiety was a significant step for me, having always been suspicious of pharmaceuticals, instead aggravating my condition with beer and pot.😜

I was and am as guilty as an anti-vaxxer of believing against all medical evidence to the contrary the health measure to mitigate the effects of the illness is the danger and not the illness.😷

Of course, the first behaviour I changed when I started taking the medication (fluoxetine, as in, Prozac) was to cut out beer and pot, and it's quite possible it's all I needed to do. Self-medicating may work for some, but not me. Your just enough is my too much, which I should know by now, but addiction's a helluva drug.😀

My preferred state isn't even mildly tipsy as it turns out (and this is what every addict wants, none of us want to overdose in an alley) but rather to be engaged in sober reflection while working on a crossword puzzle to take the edge off.💤

Contentment with how it is right now is the state of grace I didn't know I was looking for but here it is.🙇

Also, leaving Twitter, which is a big deal, to read novels has been helpful in "thinking it through", "it" being the stuff of life. Reading makes me think of writing and writing helps me reframe the stories of blame and guilt I tell myself into stories of resilience, thanks to being armed with a sense of humour.💃

Also my mind isn't darting around anymore and I'm better able to think the present through to everything not being my problem alone to solve RIGHT NOW!!👮

In fact, nothing has required my flight, fight or freeze response. Nothing. Not a single goddamned thing has happened since I started thinking it through to require my flight, fight or freeze response. Also, I'm having the most illuminating dreams, which I occasionally post on Facebook where it turns out I'm friends with an illuminating dream analyst.😎

Hell is other people, sure, but also comfort, joy and insight.💕

The other evening I was watching CBC Ottawa news and at the end of his weather report Vikta Paolo smiled, and maybe because I was alone at the time and so more engaged with his animated delivery than I would have been had My Blond Companion been watching with me, I smiled back.😊

I felt an immediate release of tension and a radiating warmth around my heart. It was instant, the fluctuation from one state of being to another, just by smiling in response to another person's smile.💥

(Dear men who tell women to smile: You smile. And stay away from women. Children, too. You know what I'm taking about.😠)

Then, still smiling, I hauled myself out of the chair and made a "Fridge Wars" dinner of this and that, praised by My Blond Companion later for its delicious ingenuity.👍

Somewhere back there I skipped my mother to turn into Gram, who claimed her greatest reward in life was making a good meal out of what she had on hand, especially when we ate it all, no leftovers.👵

(Don't worry. I don't need the affirmation to appreciate my creating the sublime out of making do. I've long been my biggest fan. In fact, I'm so good at it, I decided to make it my retirement plan.👵)

Gram was the source of much fascination in my youth. Her needs so basic, her wants in line with her needs. For years I only ever saw her in one dress, although she had two, and I saw her every day because she lived with us. But like a housekeeper, not a grandmother. It was hard to believe she was my mother's mother. Of course it was hard to believe my mother had a mother at all and wasn't just born being ours, coming home from work to check the mail Gram had put on the mantle before changing from her high school librarian clothes into her casual clothes to have a martini and watch Mike Douglas.💤

It wasn't until I was alone in her seniors residence apartment, during her stint in hospital before the nursing home, going through photo albums of her travels, rescued from the laundry garbage by another resident after she dumped them all there, I realized I didn't know my mother at all. You don't know yours, either, but like another person terminating an unwanted pregnancy or transitioning gender (especially if that person is an adolescent or child) that's none of my business.👤

(One more time: Patriarchs want fascism, not freedom.👺)

Even at the time I heard about the album dump I knew it was likely a reaction to not being able to see the photos anymore, her vision too deteriorated. But the lady across the hall rescued them because, well, I suppose she thought my mother would regret it later. I'm glad they were rescued, though, because when I saw the photo of the stranger who was also my mother, I understood both of us better. I don't know where they are now and I don't care. They really only meant something to her, and it makes perfect sense to me now that she would throw them out once she could no longer make out the images.💔

Anyway, it's with Gram in mind I'm determined to continue reframing the stories I've long, too long, been telling myself, banishing blame and guilt from the narrative, keeping it simple, putting a hilarious slant on all those old stories and sending them out into the world in another book. Later. Because thanks to Barbara Gowdy's "The Romantic" (2003), which I recently read, I've been inspired to write another book about my many office temp jobs. I want to do my part for the historical record, lest future generations think the 80s were all about snorting cocaine through $100 bills in the washroom at Bemelmens (Toronto, where I did not snort cocaine through a $100 bill in the washroom).💪

By the way, if anybody knows how to get in touch with Meredith MacNeill to read my previous and only other book so far "That Looks Good on You - You Should Buy It!" please let me know. She'd be perfect as me in the CBC television series adaptation, which would really help with my Making Do retirement plan.💃

Alberta Unbound

So Premier Loon it is. Again. Until the fascists pulling her strings at the moment decide to dump her and stick another puppet in her place as they've already said they will.👮

Way. To. Go. Albertans. Way. To. Go.❤

But that's not what this entry is about because this entry is about - finally - local breweries coming up with good beers for us Sober Sallys to enjoy when out and about in the small town disguised as a medium sized city that is Ottawa.😀

That's right. We went out on the town last night, my first foray out in the evening since I started having random panic attacks once home again, and didn't want to take the risk anymore.😱

Oh, by the way, an inside source told me Ottawans seeking help for panic attacks went way up after the Freedom Convoy's three week attack on us in February 2022. So if you're in the hospitality industry and still voting Conservative, you're a self-sabotaging idiot. Conservative politicians are all in with the international fascists behind the Freedom Convoy and they're hellbent on on destroying our Liberal Feminist society that made your business success, your much ballyhooed entrepreneurship, possible.💃

Good luck keeping it all going when there's no law/order because our publicly funded local police services are either unable or unwilling to uphold it. And take your pick because the fallout's the same for the rest of us. Meanwhile, I can't imagine what it's like for sane police officers working alongside the kind of lunatics in their ranks who support fascism. Heck, Freedom Convoyers don't even need washrooms they're so prepared to live without our Liberal Feminist society's amenities. They just drop their drawers and poop wherever.💩

Now where was I? Oh yes, out for zero alcohol beer (funny how if it's zero alcohol I only ever order the one) and dinner for the first time in months because the medication I'm on now ($51.25 per month, so Big Pharma wins again) seems to be working to lower my baseline anxiety such that I no longer have random evening panic attacks in which I end up having to purge all food and drink from my 5'5"/110 pound body.👵

Talk about lost business profits for you these past many months and forever going forward (from me, anyway) now I only order the one zero alcohol beer with dinner (I keep it small, just in case). But also the savings for me cancelled out by my first ever ongoing prescription since I stopped taking birth control pills many years ago now.💥

Oh yeah, another by the way, the international fascists funding the Freedom Convoy don't give a shit about the forest fires destroying so many communities in Alberta, not to mention our collective habitat. In fact, they want to burn our world down. Who knows? Maybe our first responders do, too. For sure their unions, police unions anyway, have made it clear they've had it up to here with our Liberal Feminist society keeping their white man members down, even though they've only ever gone up, such that they're regulars on the Sunshine List even if they're nowhere to be seen otherwise.👀

Gord help us, eh.😇

Woke in WWIII

Fortunately, I got what I needed from Gabor Mate because I have to let him go now. I know nobody's perfect, so not everybody's politics will align with mine😀, but Russia under Putin is a terrorist state, the Russian army's attack on Ukrainians a war crime, and NATO didn't make anybody do it, fascism did.😠

End of.😷

Politics sometimes comes to the pond, where I swim in the currently very cold water to calm the fevers, and recently another pond person went on an anti-COVID vaccine/anti-Trudeau rant. He's a very loud and opinionated pond person, a doctor of a certain age, so superior to other mortals, and on the occasions we're there at the same time he's often holding forth.💥

He'd been blathering at me earlier but I'd managed to find a bit of common ground in his blah blah, which was specific to the pond, because I've been practicing live and let live with my neighbour and so am almost a saint now.😇

But then a politically naive pond acquaintance😴 joined us and the next thing I knew he'd switched topics and was citing all manner of 💩 at my politically naive pond acquaintance😴 who, I could tell from the panicked look he gave me as I excused myself without a word, realized he wasn't in Kansas anymore.👺

Old me would have taken on the responsibility of rescuing him. New me exited stage right to change out of my bathing suit (there aren't any change rooms at the pond so you have to make do, meaning there's a lot of random nudity everybody ignores for the sake of propriety), got dressed and left, ignoring my politically naive pond acquaintance's😴 frantic attempts to make eye contact👀 in the vain hope I'd act like... his mother?👵 and save him from the quagmire into which he'd waded.😬

Sorry, relegated down from politically naive pond acquaintance😴 to offs-wake-up-you-idiot!👶 - the time for your political naivete was over when the Republican Party nominated Putin's Puppet for POTUS, ffs.👹 We're at war, and we've been at war for some time now. Our own Conservatives are led by a politician who publicly allied with an invading force of anti-COVID vaccine fascists while it terrorized us, ffs. And the good doctor, to whom I will henceforth grace with a mute nod and nothing more (there's zero point in engaging, he's beyond reason) is with the enemy.😠

One more time, there was only one name on the Freedom Convoy's black flags and it may as well have been mine. They had nooses ffs, downtown was lawless, our publicly funded police either unwilling or unable to restore the law. Those are facts. It was terrifying. And all leaders of the Conservative Party, past and present, along with Donald Trump and every other fascist from here to the Kremlin, supported the Freedom Convoy while it terrorized us for three weeks.😱

Long story (again) short, fuck your political naivete and wake the fuck up, please. We're at war. You're either with me defeating the Freedom Convoy and Ukraine defeating Russia, or you're with the Freedom Convoy defeating me and Russia defeating Ukraine.💪

End of.😷

Pundit Pause

I've been reading more and limiting my exposure to the news, and by the news I don't mean the actual news, I mean the political punditry from both politicians and journalists I've been subjecting myself to for decades now.👵

Liane Moriarty has helped in weaning me off the habit. I've read four of her books in rapid succession but just started a Barbara Gowdy for a change of pace. I've got a ton of books I've been stockpiling over the years - in case the Conservatives get into power and burn them all, except Dr. Peterpan's "Twelve Rules for Life" - but I still find my best reading bet is to check one out from the library. Even without a due date, which I believe they've nixed in Ottawa, I want to return it "on time", although I usually read a book in a few days. Liane Moriarty's are real page turners for me, too. She uses that trick of starting with the aftermath of whatever happened to cause all the fallout between the characters - the reader not knowing what it is - and then goes back into what led up to it.🙇

I don't call what I'm about to blog a conspiracy theory, although you might, but this theory - which is actually minus the requisite conspiracy - comes from me just piecing bits and bytes together to make sense of political behaviour that doesn't make it otherwise, not to me, anyway.😎

I think Pierre Poilievre is pretending not to want a security clearance because he knows he wouldn't be able to get one. Not with his beard, I mean, wife, and her family's sketchy background in tow, he wouldn't. And it's not just her family's sketchy background he's got in tow now, either, it's all his publicly known - so just imagine what isn't - associations in his post Harper government days - when I guess he did have security clearance: Diagolon Accelerationists, Men Going Their Own Way incels, Freedom Convoy insurrectionists, Neo-nazi militia wannabes, Bitcoin pyramid-schemers and so on and so forth and more of the same etc etc etc.💩

So I can't listen to or read about sundry goings on in politics anymore as if the Conservative Party he won the leadership of in a landslide (of cheating) isn't a freaky fascist man cult.👤

Girls to be included for breeding later.😬

By the way, Conservatives know climate change is real and man-made, they just pretend not to believe it's real and man-made because, unlike normal every day non-freaky-fascist-man-cult people, they welcome it. Climate change is their Liberal Feminist hating God bringing floods and fires to destroy life on Earth for anybody and everybody without the entry fee to their Ark or Spaceship or Immortality Chamber.👻

I'm not crazy. They're crazy.👀

So it was this past weekend that My Blond Companion was telling me about a piece by Andrew Coyne, something about needing a new party, when I realized I was in danger of losing what's left of my mind if I listened to any more of his obnoxious gaslighting.😱

Andrew Coyne's, I mean, not My Blond Companion's.😜

Anyway I quit Twitter because it's absurd but now I'm quitting political punditry because it's even more absurd. Every pundit from coast to coast to coast should be calling bullshit on Pierre Poilievre pretending he doesn't want to be read in on foreign threats to our national security so he can accuse the government of being one, too, when he could be read in and do the same thing.😈

Oh and I don't know how any pundit could turn the elderly Biden's suddenly very audible "loyal?" directed at Poilievre into just a random benign question about Canada's Parliamentary system. As if he was unaware of Poilievre's very public support of the Freedom Convoy thumbs upped by Trump and every other fascist from here to the Kremlin while Putin readied to invade Ukraine. Those fascist freedom fuckers blockaded our borders, ffs, costing our economy billions. They're also why our country isn't being read in on a lot of stuff, I'm sure.😡

Every time I think the dam is about to break and Canadian political punditry will finally stop its aggravating gaslighting, i.e. pretending we're still in Kansas, not Kookoofascistbananasville, along comes Andrew Coyne to suggest what Canada needs is a new political party.🙈🙉🙊

Wake me up if our punditry ever does.💤