I am now boycotting all of Trump’s luxury properties and hotels,

and have donated my, “You’re Fired!” t-shirt to charity. I don’t just believe in talking about change, I believe in being the change, and so instead of complaining about fascism on my Facebook page, I’ve started to picket the Trump International Hotel and Tower.

This is my journal:

Day 1:

Too cold. Stayed home and watched A Very Murray Christmas on Netflix. An instant classic.

Day 2:

Still chilly, but realized that the world isn’t going to change itself, so dressed in layers and headed down to Bay Street with my picket sign.

Teenager on subway asked me what my sign said.

“You’re a Chump if you support Trump.” I said, adding, “You’ve got to fight the power, you know? You have to BE the change!”

The teenager said, “Your sign says, “You’re a Trump if you support Chump.”

I looked at the sign and saw that he was right, and then asked him, “Well, if you knew what it said in the first place, why’d you ask me?”

The teenager shrugged.

Stayed on subway until it arrived back at the stop I had started at and went home.

Day 3:

Pleasant day. Maybe 10 degrees.

Took an Uber cab to the hotel and began my protest.

The first person who walked out of the hotel was a woman wearing a beautiful sundress, a winter scarf that must have fallen from heaven and a cowboy hat. She smelled like the most impossible music and was so blindingly gorgeous that I dropped my sign.

As she stepped into a waiting limo, I cried out, “I would build a wall around all of Mexico for you, I would make America strong again!” but I think maybe she was mute, as she did not respond.

I don’t remember much else from that day

Day 4:

Woke up and meditated hoping to receive wisdom and light to become better protestor.

I then went down to hotel committed to be the best protestor I could be.

I began to pace in front of the building chanting, “Dump-Trump, Dump-Trump, Dump-Trump!” Although I got the words mixed-up quite a bit, several cars honked, which I took to be signs of support.

Had lunch.

Feeling in the zone, I began to protest again but then got a text from my wife reminding me to pick up my blood pressure medication, and so I went off to the store to make sure I got there before it closed. Took my blood pressure while waiting. 120/70.

Not bad! Got my pills and a lotto ticket and headed home.

Day 5:

Took Uber down to hotel again. Talked to the driver about fascism. He agreed about its dangers. (I feel I am changing the world one little bit at a time!)Gave him a five star rating.

Today I proved an inspiration. As I believe we have to unite as one against Trump, I was delighted when a street person joined in my protest. She might have had her difficulties, but she was a very spirited, loud and creative chanter! Said her name was Parking Lot, because that’s where she did most of her work, and that Trump was a “Fuck Roach.”

On our first day at our new school my friends and I wore crisply pressed overalls and carried Charlie’s Angels or Star Wars lunch boxes, each one containing a meal which a mother had lovingly and thoughtfully prepared. We knew nothing of pessimism, and the kids waiting for us there looked at us like we were a different species, as if emissaries from a past they had never known.

Exponentially cooler than we were, these kids all seemed so much more grown up. I was in awe of how independent and worldly they acted, as if totally free from childhood. They hadn’t just hit puberty they’d shot past it. They knew all about sex and drugs and rock n’ roll, and when they fought, blood was drawn. In short, they radiated everything that I, still prepubescent and utterly innocent, was not, but very much wanted to be.

At this time, as teenaged life was accelerating mysteriously toward me, I watched my first episode of Saturday Night Live.  I was probably eleven years old, maybe twelve, and all I knew about the show– mostly gleaned from my sister who was four years older than me– was that it was on late, and was racy and dangerous in the kind of way that adults, or at least parents, didn’t quite approve of.

The first sketch I watched was called Night on Freak Mountain, which was awful in all the ways that are typical of Saturday Night Live. It didn’t matter, though. It was about drugs, and it was late at night, both of which to me seemed inexhaustibly cool. (Later, it was Mr. Bill who ignited my grade seven imagination, probably because I still related to toys.)

No matter, it didn’t spark a love affair. I never became a dedicated fan or made a point of watching the show, and for the most part, like a lot of people, thought it lame. In fact, as far as I was concerned, it was the opposite of cool, but if you’re of Generation X, SNL served as a kind of water cooler around which you invariably orbited, and whether we liked it or not, it was imbued with a gravitational force that ended up bending our lives.

Although I had no intention of watching the SNL 40^th anniversary special on Sunday, I ended up doing so, and quite simply, it made me happy. It played like a history of the pop culture of my life, and seeing all the people who composed its landscape was touching. Sweet, celebratory and maybe even a little bit sad, the show was like returning to my old high school or university campus, a precinct that really only exists in memory. And so I toured the grounds, marvelling at all the familiar places and feeling refreshed by the faces of all those I had once known, and those that had receded from memory, too, everything once again feeling vivid and limitless.

The Leafs are on TV, but they’re losing again and nobody much seems to care, instead, they focus on the consoles in front of them, concentrating on the trivia game unfolding on the monitors above the bar.

“Which film features a man living the same day over and over again?”

The guy to my right, who is still in his FedEx uniform, is startled to attentiveness by this question, “Groundhog Day, Groundhog Day!” he shouts as if sounding an alarm.

The other men, slowly and silently, reluctantly even, nod—tell them something they didn’t know.

To my left is a man who smells like cigarette smoke and is wearing the sort of sweater that invites fascination and curiosity. How old is that sweater? Was it a gift? If not, what was it that attracted him to it? He’s the most animated person in the bar, giggling nervously and speaking quickly, his eyes always darting. He and the bartender, an efficient but world-weary bald guy, have a rapport, a banter, and they’re trying to stump one another with arcane Simpson’s trivia and forgotten players from the OJ trial.

Mark Furhman!

Nicole Simpson’s dog was a white Akita!

Can I borrow a feeling by Kirk Van Houten!

All night the conversation jumps about in this way. They’re no longer the people that they became, but are now floating free, inhabiting a nostalgic landscape where they remain limitless and ascending. O, there are just so many details to untangle and isolate, to cherish… Episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, what country was the best to build your base from when playing Risk, and later, the naming of all the Replicants from Blade Runner, each one uttered with tenderness and respect, as if each one a kind of miracle, like a love from the past who was never to be seen again.

We’re related, although the mechanics of this familial connection remain distant and unknown, and we only met once at a huge wedding about 15 years ago in Chicago. I thought we got along entirely brilliantly, but he proved reluctant to continue any sort of correspondence or relationship with me after the fact, growing more and more biting and bitter–as many aging actors who have never won an Oscar do– as the years passed and my career took off while he played the voice of Garfield in some movies.

At any rate, as some sort of promotion associated with the Toronto International Film Festival, Friday was declared Bill Murray Day and I was asked by a local publication if I would use my “special access” to the faded star to secure an interview. This is the result:

Dear Bill:

It’s your cousin Michael here, the funny Murray. Remember me? I was the one wearing the bowtie at the wedding in Chicago in 1998. I requested I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing by Aerosmith at the party and because you were a really big ham and sang it to the wedding couple in that cheesy-we’ve-all-seen-it-a-million-times-way, it became “their song” and everybody thought you were a hero.

Nice one, Bill. Anyway, it didn’t end well for that couple. Botched murder-suicide. Not that you’d care.

I have some questions that a newspaper wants me to ask you, okay?

Here they are:

1. What was it that attracted you to the role of Garfield? Was it because you were horny for Jennifer Love Hewitt? She’s less than half your age, you know.

2. What do you think of the massive nude celebrity leak? Was it a good thing for democracy?

3. Why wouldn’t you ever enter any of my fantasy baseball leagues?

4. Are you sick of making movies with Wes Anderson yet because an awful lot of people are sick of seeing you in movies by Wes Anderson?

5. Do you know any of the details regarding Traci Murray’s alien abduction back in 1987? She didn’t have any tattoos before, but three after—very puzzling. It is a great family mystery and you should perhaps consider making a movie based on it once you’re finished with the Garfield trilogy.

6. You’re a big golf fan. Would you say that’s your greatest embarrassment? If not, please explain.

7. Are you “above” correspondence? My mother always said that your side of the Murray family always thought they were “special.”

8. Did you know that I won the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest?

9. Have you won the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest?

10. You made some pretty controversial remarks about Jewish people back at the wedding, would you care to take this time to elaborate upon them?

At the core of the velocity and visual charisma that characterizes his films there’s always a sense of sadness, of a longing that can never quite be realized. However, that sorrow, which is always gently romanticized, never comes to the painful fore but is used more as a prop, with the characters ultimately marching eccentrically past their emotional baggage to their self-determined destinies.

Some people see this as a failure on Anderson’s part, proof that he will never become an adult director but will always fuss about in a kind of Never-Never Land where nostalgia, loyalty, ardor and boyish courage take the day. For me, that’s enough, and I’m content in middle age to settle into the soft spot of these modern fairy tales for boys.

However, I’d heard great, almost hysterical things about The Grand Budapest Hotel, with critics and friends hailing it as a masterpiece and Anderson’s best, most accomplished work yet.

For me, coming in with higher expectations than I would typically have, the movie was a mild disappointment. It was so precious and stylized that it may as well have been animated, with the familiar cast of actors playing little more than cardboard cutouts that Anderson had dressed up in costume and quirks.

His tyrannical directorial hold made it a somewhat airless affair, and the movie, which rolled like clockwork, ended up being a parade of constituent elements without ever actually evolving into a movie. The technical virtuosity that governed it rendered the experience like watching a miniature play through a keyhole, and the typical emotional, nostalgic and romantic resonances that Anderson usually creates in me were absent.

No matter, I liked the movie, but it could have been bigger and braver, more about people and less about the gorgeous and strange myths they lived.

I grew up in the Age of Letterman, and I have to say that I view his pending retirement as good news. Over the years my encounters with the Late Show have become sporadic and accidental. It wasn’t just the format that seemed dusty, but Letterman himself looked a little bit old, sometimes even disheveled, and his performance recalled a different era, the man having somehow morphed from being the smartest, edgiest guy in the room to a beloved uncle repeating jokes after Christmas dinner. It wasn’t pathetic, just a little bit sad, like noticing somebody you love age and becoming a smaller, more vulnerable version of himself.

Once a revolutionary who brought irony into the mainstream, he now seems lost in time, usurped by all his competitors who have an organic sense and mastery of social media. Of course, when Letterman started, he was the undisputed champion of improvisational videos, bits that would have played brilliantly on the Internet, but the fact that he was both before and of his time, is no matter,

Back then he was a jolt of electricity into very calm and predictable weather and as a teenager I immediately related to him. He had an anarchic, Frat Boy sensibility, and liking him as opposed to another, lamer option, was a defining tribal characteristic. You wanted to wear the Late Night t-shirt the same way you wanted to wear the t-shirt of a super-cool alt band– it meant something about who you were and how you saw the world. Every night, we all gathered in our university residence to watch Late Night before heading off to our parties. It was a cultural drawing point and it sincerely brought us together.

Letterman has had a massive influence on our cultural landscape, his style and intolerance for the pieties and hypocrisies of celebrity culture– even though he lived within it– have pointed the way for so much of the comedic culture we currently revere.  Now in his late 60’s, it is time for him to go, and it’s very bittersweet. He was a giant, one with a unique gravitas and ability to cut through the bullshit, and I will miss him– as I miss the days of my youth–more than I can say.

But truth is festival not about two-leggers but about movies.

This is list of movies Heidi going to see.

1. The Master.

Sound scary, like about bad two-legger who hate dog and maybe make dog slave, but actually about Scientology and star that guy who everybody say good actor. He kinda fat. Forget name. Complicated name. Heidi into Scientology for a bit when she found out that Christ God say dogs have no soul and no get into heaven! Heidi left church after that! But Scientology weird and expensive, so Heidi ran away after achieving OT II.

2. Rust and Bone.

Heidi LOVE movie about bone!! Hope it about meat bone not chicken bone.

3. Love, Marilyn.

Documentary on famous two-legged sex bomb Marilyn Monroe. Heidi always relate to Marilyn! When she said, “I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best,” she could have been talking about Heidi. Poor Marilyn, she was like candle in wind!

4. Hyde Park on Hudson.

Bill Murray favourite of Heidi. He would make good pack leader.

5. Amour.

Heidi no know what this about but given free pass in park when playing fetch. Seat filler, I guess

6. Looper

Star Bruce Willis!!! Two-legger travel in time and shoot himself! Movie made of awesome! Yippie ki-yay, motherfucker! Also star Joseph-Gordon Levitt. Heidi like to lick him, Heidi lick him long time!

7. Silver Linings Playbook.

Heidi dreamer. Believe every cloud have silver lining, so Heidi want to see movie about silver lining. Heidi favourite silver lining leftovers.

8. Bad 25.

About Michael Jackson! He King of Pop and friend to animals! Good father to Bubbles and when he Moon Walk, Heidi think anything possible! Poor Michael, he die far too young. Hope doctor who kill him with horse medicine go to jail forever! He very, very bad dog!

9. On the Road.

Star that bitch Kristen Stewart from Twilight. Can’t believe she cheated on Robert Pattinson! Even though Heidi always on Team Jacob big time, still think Kirsten Stewart bad bitch! Where her pack loyalty? Heidi go to movie just to bark!

10. Argo.

Heidi know dog named Argo.

Only reason Heidi want to see movie.

Also have free pass.