I admit that “perfectly good excuse” thing sounds a little defensive, and it didn’t work with Miss Smedley, either, but it’s been AGES since I’ve posted something.
This blog, the tainted well from which I drew the idea and some of the content for my book —the cranky, anti-social triplets named PeeDeeEf, Epub and Paperback who’ve just clawed their way out of my man-womb — has been sorely neglected as I bore down, deep-breathed and screamed for an epidural in the form of heaving great cartloads of e-money jabbed into my aching bank account. And I was rather looking forward to a little break just to have a good guy-cry and let the mental stretch marks heal…
Acolyte on duty — ! I require a full-body-to-body application of your finest replenishing cream with colloidal factors and vitamin e, and don’t forget the light touch and upward, circular motion this time!
{You know, and can I just say, seriously. Millennials! Pretty as sin, but self-absorbed — !}
Unluckily for both me and him, the nightmare DUG-UP-FORD is He, who thicks man’s blood with cold — who you might mistake for the exhumed, reanimated corpse of a gratefully forgotten former “Mayor” of Toronto, but who is actually the Dug-Up Ford who’s now become the leader of the Conservative Party in Ontario* — having pulled on for his full-body fat suit, in the manner of Hannibal Lecter, the suppurating flesh-envelope of that thankfully dead ex-Mayor brother of his, Rob — (should have whacked that bleached, beached whale a few more times with the edge of my shovel, make note for next time) — has replenished my tanks of gall and bile with premium fuel, and I will not spare you the full force of my smug, elitist, downtown Toronto gay sensibilities as I labor for Dug-Up to follow his sibling into the political grave he so richly deserves. Stay tuned for THAT one.
If all else fails, I’ll call up Maggie Atwood, who just barely escaped being fired as a cultural icon by Robbie Baby Bobby Booby, getting tattooed all up her arms and then forced to run the proposed Front Street Ferris Wheel in a pair of dungarees, and we’ll throw her collected works at him — in hardcover, mind you — until enough sharp corners have caught him in the temple that he keels over, or at least learns some respect.
In any case, I recommend Scarberia General Hospital reinforce the floor in the furthest corner of one of their public wards, prepare two of their largest beds, then push them side by side ready to receive der Führer des Ontariolumpenproletariats. The prognosis is poor.
There’s no need to find out what his “platform” will be. I present for your delectation the complete, hard-core conservative playbook which, when you boil it down, comprises the only two ideas they ever have: Lower taxes, tough on crime. It’s their little-black-dress-with-string-of-pearls of policy: Goes absolutely everywhere, darling, and they always feel pretty when they throw it on.
Good ol’ regular, disgruntled, middle-aged-to-elderly heterosexual white guys, str8-tards, in a word, from Don Trump to Dug-Up Lump, wherever they may lurk, in suits or sweatpants, bespoke Ferragamo or Payless trainers, all share the same reductionist philosophy and the same resentment of their betters.
Yeah, you heard me, betters, because five kajillion Dug-Up Fords do not supply genetic material of sufficient quality or quantity to replace one little fingernail of one Margaret Atwood.
Ms Atwood has a legacy, a body of work, an international reputation. They study her work in universities, for chrissake; write Ph.D. theses about her novels and poetry. (The only thing you’ll find written about the Fords, apart from fawning articles in The Sun, are City of Toronto conflict-of-interest investigations.)
Margaret Atwood, through a lifetime dedicated to literature, to a life of the mind, to wrestling with big ideas and creating big tales that enlighten and engage and entertain a receptive worldwide audience, did much of the heavy lifting over the course of five decades to put Canada on the cultural, indeed any, map.
But with one good, disingenuous awww, shucks Margaret Who, a Dug-Up Ford tells us that, sure, those effete Toronto elites get that high-falutin’ stuff, but not good, decent, down-to-the-salty-earth regular hockey-playin’ guys!
And yet you Trumps and Lumps, despite your postures of humility and down-home folksiness, have to angle your heads to get them through a doorway, so highly do you not-so-secretly esteem yourselves. And so you are impatient: with rules, with the rule of law in particular, and with restrictions and with consultations. It’s your show, isn’t it, baby?
Why do you guys even run for public office, when you so patently despise the word “public” in any form? The reason for the rule of law, the rule of anything, is that we’re all in this together. And it’s your job as a leader to have a vision for your country or province or city, to understand all our concerns and then to realize that vision through decisions that are in the public interest, not in the interests of you or your bank account, or the interests of the person who paid for your election, or of the lobbyists who lobby you as mayor but also as owner of a business. That’s called conflict of interest.
That contempt for the public good is what your disgusting, disgraceful, pushin’-up-daisies crack-addled brother displayed when he elaborately and disdainfully took himself out of the city for Pride, thus making it acceptable to disrespect and marginalize the LGBT community. It’s not all about you, your people, your company or your ego.
You know what I hate most about Don, and Dug-Up and all their ilk? People like them make it cool to be stupid. And I hate that so many people in the Greater Toronto Area are suddenly going to be so friggin’ cool.
~
Otherwise, I have been laboring like a raft-full of Roethke’s on Ritalin laying out my book in EPUB format and whatever the Kindle version is called. Oi ve voy! says I, which is Dutch for “more tedious than tulips!”
The formatting task is exquisitely complex and, while I must deploy Word 2016 styles with the precision and consistency of a 21st-century Gutenberg or the conversion program will spit out my book like a two-year-old with a mouthful of puréed spinach, e-reader-readers can blithely toss out my painstaking layout and design and substitute purple text on black, in columns, in effect redesigning my book.
Then one cold white night I got cold feet about Amazon and Barnes & Noble and my one go at fame, so I took out all the “f-words” and replaced them with “frigs” and “fuddle-duddles” (expecting a call from Justin’s lawyer as I assume Pierre held the copyright in perpetuity on that one) and just made the ideas more dirty; plus I keep re-writing everything and making it “better”, which I will have to force myself to stop doing or I will be found six months from now at my computer mummified in a brittle exoskeleton of dust, Peak Freen biscuit crumbs and cheap native cigarette smoke.
(By the way: about one hour after I finished deleting all the f-words from the body text of my book and replacing them with kindergarten-level swear words, I logged onto Amazon and saw the title—the title, mind you—of that week’s number one bestseller: “The Fine Art of Not Giving a Fuck”. So that’s why I shot myself.)
As a by-product of creating my book I’ve also discovered my own distinctive style of creating digital imagery and illustration from boring old AP photos and selfies, which has produced some humdingers.
Please note that “humdinger” can fall on either side of the positive/negative divide. (Titanic survivor: “That was one humdinger of a trip, eh?”) Few of these images will be in the paperback version, and for sure not in color, so, hellooooo — collector’s item.
Fun fact of the day:
On this day, March 13th, in 1781, English astronomer William Herschel discovered Uranus.
And I say, join the crowd, Bill. Join the crowd.
δ
* [update, June 20th, 2018:
[Doug Ford is now Premier (think “Governor”) of Ontario.
[No, wait: not just Premier. “The People’s Premier”.
And if there’s two things we know in Orwellandia, it’s that god made little green apples for collective farming, and that anything that’s labeled “for the people” is guaranteed to be so NOT for The People and so very much FOR the one percent who’ve managed to manipulate, fool and bully The People into squandering their votes, possibly in the last election for a while. Next up: fun and games. Don’t adjust your set.]
Which only goes to prove my point. You little man-slut, you!