He was so excited.
He ran from enclosure to enclosure, his universe animating with such velocity and intensity that he simply could not contain himself. Pointing his finger with eyes that could not be more open, he would identify and offer commentary on every marvel he saw.
“Look! An Alligator!!”
He looked back at us utterly astonished, his mind expanding in ways we couldn’t even imagine. “Come mommy, come daddy,” he encouraged, his feet flapping on the ground as he ran ahead to the next wonder.
There were perhaps a hundred alligators, maybe more, and each one was an impossible occurrence as they materialized before Jones. And when we came upon the albino ones, each one so immaculately white as to look make believe, he almost exploded.
“WOW!! GHOST ALLIGATORS!!!
While Jones was marvelling over them I turned to the Komodo Dragon across the way. It looked as if it was made of chainmail. It noticed me looking at it, and while remaining immobile, it trained a lizard eye on me and stared right back.
We looked at one another for a spell, and I thought of the current running through it, of that electricity that at any moment could spark into unimaginable ferocity, as swift and inevitable as a natural disaster.
And then there were the giant pythons. Dead-eyed, coiled and intestinal, they lay still in the heat, as if creatures that had given up their external form in order to live their pure essence. Jones gasped before them, “SCARY!!” he shouted in a voice that wasn’t scared at all. To him it’s still just a word, something that describes a kind of exhilaration. What does he know of mortal fear? He’s never lost faith or confidence, waited for a doctor’s report, or seen something he loves diminish before his eyes and then vanish.
No, he remains a vessel of light, and as if to accent this there was unanticipated birdsong all around and above us. It turns out that in this park the alligators serve as a kind of protectorate, sheltering all the birds arriving there for mating season from predators. And so amidst these ancient reptiles there were all manner of birds, thin as twigs and bright as targets, living easily amongst them.
I had imagined that the park would be full of children like Jones running about, but mostly it was full of seniors, all armed with cameras with giant lenses, all hoping to capture that moment of first life when the fledglings peck through their eggshells and into this world of light and shadow.
]]>Although it wasn’t total in Toronto, there was about 75% coverage and a friend of ours decided to invite some people over for a picnic and watch it from a blanket spread on the grass.
I never much thought about it, but I suppose eclipses have always made me a little nervous. Beyond the typical anxiety about accidentally looking up at the sun and having your sight destroyed forever (as if a punishment for seeing a Goddess disrobe),
or the fear of suddenly being seized by a compulsion to look up at the sun and having your vision destroyed forever, there is also the certainty that somebody is going to draw an apocalyptic line from the prophecies of Nostradamus to the activities of Donald Trump, always leaving you to wonder, “Is this going to be it, are these my last moments on earth?”
And so there was a slight unease in the city, as if something in our organized, convenient and mechanized lives had been thrown just a bit off kilter. What we had always relied on, what had always remained fixed in our lives, was about to shift out of place.
Looking up through the glasses at the retreating sun was weird. It seemed like clockwork, the perfection of the orbs, the synchronicity, all suggesting something made by design rather than accident, and I found that I could not watch for too long. I suppose I was worried about my eyes, but I think there was something larger to it, as well—I had to look away. It was all too big and mysterious, boundless in all directions.
And on the street passing by were people we’d call over to have a look, and they did. Cars stopped, strangers smiled and people gathered around our little blanket.
It reminded me of a city-wide power failure. Released from the secure and known, people were at a kind of liberty, uninhibited and accessible in ways that Tuesday afternoon Torontonians typically are not.
And as the eclipse reached it’s full extent, you could see that the light in the city had changed. It had grown thinner, like somebody had started to turn the dimmer down, and the air felt cooler and lower to the ground, as if a fog was rolling over the streets. I noticed that I didn’t hear any birds at all, and the recognition of this secondary vanishing made me feel like I was on the edge of something.
And so it was that we watched.
All gathered together, by chance and design, each one having traveled through bad weather and heartbreak, each one certain there would be more to come. And at this spot we took comfort in one another. Each one of us so small– our lives precarious, vulnerable and now, in the midst of something that reached so far beyond us, so very much the same.
This is his first press conference:
************************************
3:24 P.M. EDT
Elmo: Hi everybody!
Guess what Elmo is thinking about today!!
Afghanistan!!!
Afghanistan starts with the letter A!!
Do you know what else starts with the letter A??
Attitude! Elmo hopes all of you people in the press have really good attitudes today!!
President Trump is ordering another 4,000 troops into Afghanistan. President Trump took over a mess, and now America, and her global allies and partners, are going to make things a lot messier! Elmo loves to make a mess! Do you like to make a mess? America will be making a mess of terrorists in order to clean up the mess the previous administration made of Afghanistan! So remember, America will not be nation building, America will be killing terrorists!
Terrorists are bad!
Yay, America!!
Can you guess what else Elmo is thinking about today?
Anybody??
No?
Ha, ha! Maybe you want to dance with Elmo? Elmo just loves to dance!
( Elmo dances)
Oh, Elmo so tired from dancing, Elmo almost forgot what Elmo was thinking about! Elmo remember! Elmo was thinking about Fake News!
Boo, Fake News, Boo!
Fake News is just about as bad as the terrorists!! Poor President Trump, he just wants to make America great again, and he has to fight terrorists AND fake news!! Such a hero!! Elmo loves heroes! Let’s all stand up and clap our hands for heroes!! Yay!!!
Elmo wants to say that although it is true President Trump briefly sized up the sun during yesterday’s eclipse, the President is not blind and is in perfect health!
That was fake news!! Elmo hates fake news! Elmo thinks that President Trump has such energy he might live forever! He is healthiest, most patriotic President of all time!! But even if the President had suffered significant blurring and fading of his vision during his encounter with the sun, which he hasn’t, there have been many great blind people in history! Do you like history?? Elmo loves history!
History says that America is great!
History also says that Daredevil was blind! And even blind Daredevil could still destroy all his enemies!!
Maybe Daredevil will visit Afghanistan?! Elmo thinks that would be so much fun! Wouldn’t that be fun?!
Remember to check Twitter to see when Daredevil might be appearing in Afghanistan!!
History also says that the great poet Milton was also blind, as well as musician Jose Feliciano!
And look, here’s Mister Jose Feliciano! Would you play a song for Elmo Mister Feliciano?!
Yay!! But first, Elmo thinks it is important to say that Mister Jose Feliciano is from Puerto Rico, not Mexico as many seem to think!
Elmo loves you Mister Jose Feliciano, thank you for the beautiful song!
Such a fun press conference!
Before Elmo leaves today Elmo wants to say just a few words about Jerry Lewis. That man kept us all laughing for over half a century, and his incredible charity work touched the lives of millions. Jerry lived the American Dream—he truly loved his country, and his country loved him back. Our thoughts are with his family today as we remember the extraordinary life of one of our greatest entertainers and humanitarians. Thank you, Jerry. You will be missed.
Elmo loves you all!!
Kiss, kiss!
]]>This is a newsletter posted to the Super Yacht Community message board after the demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia :
*****************************************
Recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia have shaken not just the USA, but the global community, too, including those of us who belong to The Super-Yacht Community.
Many of our members have been rattled by the proletariat uprisings in the US and across Europe, and have been wondering whether or not being a white supremacist is really grounds for termination.
First off, everybody should just stay calm and keep in mind that the vast majority of the people in the Super-Yacht Community are job creators, not job leaches (consumers), and so we really don’t have to worry about getting fired.
If you don’t have a job at let’s say, The Bulk Barn, then Black Lives Matters can’t take it away from you for wanting to protect history, can they?
Regardless, The Super-Yacht Community has never been an insensitive or selfish group, and we’re well aware that many of the people who help to sustain us ( Ferrari repairmen, avocado specialists, bikini makers, personal assistants, personal physicians, personal nutritionists, mindfulness coaches, topiarists, helicopter pilots, addiction specialists, nannies, hunting guides and taxidermists, high-end sex workers, off-shore bankers, professional sports teams, etc.), are still vulnerable to loss of employment and social standing due to unfashionable political beliefs.
For instance, supermodel and beloved Super-Yacht Community member Tanya Mityushina has a brother named Dimitri.
(Dimitri is the one on the far right holding the “Nog Ar Nog) shield.
He worked as a DJ at a nightclub in Miami called Waves of Fire. Here, Dimitri enjoyed multiple revenue streams and unprecedented sexual opportunities. This young man was going places, but unfortunately his image was caught on camera while he was exercising his freedom of speech at a demonstration in Virginia and this (as well as his spirited thoughts on eugenics) resulted in in his termination.
In order to combat this lynching, we at the Super-Yacht Community have decided to start a Go Fund Me for Dimitri so that he might buy his own nightclub. It is to be tentatively called Tsunami Inferno, and it will be twice as large as Waves of Fire. We are looking at a target of $25 million to help Tanya’s brother get back up on his feet, so if any of you have an spare properties lying around downtown Miami, please feel free to donate!
On a melancholy note, we within the Super-Yacht Community (no longer officially affiliated with the Illuminati) and are deeply saddened that we recently lost one of our own. Glen Campbell was a great member of our community and a transcendent talent who truly made the world a better place. He will be missed.
Pace et requiem est, Rhinestone Cowboy.
And finally, please remember, if America burns there will be plenty of economic opportunity for our community.
Nisi eliphaz,
The SYC
PS: Also, keep in mind that everybody is welcome aboard Bono’s Super-Yacht “Kingdom Come” for a barbecue next week in Fiji. And yes, Ivanka will be there, so be prepared for a little larger press and military presence than usual.
My most recent invention is a dating service called Hater Mater, where people are paired based on the things they dislike rather than the things that they like.
This is the preliminary questionnaire I have written for people using the App:
1. On a scale of 0-10, how much do you hate the sky?
2. Please choose the stupidest fucking sign in the zodiac.
3. Order these celebrities in the sequence in which you would most want to see them surreally injured in a crossbow incident:
Amy Schumer
The Ikea Monkey
Ethan Hawke
The entire cast from Orange is the New Black
Eric Trump
Adam Driver and Terry Richardson
4. On a scale of 0-10, how much do you hate the ocean?
5. Which Margaret Atwood novel gives you the worst stabbing stomach pain?
6. What do you hate more, squirrels or birds? (Please elaborate)
7. Do your parents hate you more than you hate them, or do you hate them more than they hate you?
8. Is you best friend kind of an asshole?
9. Do you find chopsticks to be infuriating and stupid and pretentious?
10. Do you often find yourself fantasizing about making over-rated Canadian author Margaret Atwood cry?
11. Which part of this passage from a celebrated Margaret Atwood novel do you despise the most?
“Who are you? And I mean really. Who are you?”
My gut tells me that if I tell her right now, in this moment, it will not be well-received. “A friend,” I say, my gaze lowering to her lush mouth and lifting. “And the man who wants to kiss you. Really kiss you. Can I kiss you, Myla?”
“You’re asking?”
“Yes. I’m asking. After all you’ve been through-”
“He hasn’t destroyed me. He hasn’t beaten me and I don’t like that you think he has.”
“I don’t think he’s beaten you.”
“He hasn’t,” she insists. “I’m not giving him that power and damn it, you better not either by treating me like I’m broken and fragile. So kiss me if you’re going to kiss me or let me go, if you don’t want-”
I cup the back of her head, and slant my mouth over hers, my tongue sliding against hers, stroking, caressing, and the taste of her, one part hunger I welcome, but the other part, the torment, I intend to drive away. I deepen the kiss, my hand pressing beneath her tank top, finding warm, soft skin. My fingers splay over her rib cage, while my mind reminds me that no matter how big she talks, she wants this escape for a reason. She has been abused, used, hurt. “
12. “Everybody loves a parade,” true or false?
13. Is Real Estate for fools?
14. When you hear the word “Mindfulness” do you want to build an attack drone or buy a magic killing sword?
15. What do you hate more, having to use a sink or writing with a pen?
16. Which superhero would you most like to beat-up in a fight?
17. Do you hate it when people say, “Good Morning!”
18. Are relationships insanely unrealistic and entirely impossible?
19. On a scale of 1 to 100, how much do you hate non-Spanish speaking people who pronounce Nicaragua as ‘Knee-ah-rah-hah?”
20. If you heard that Margaret Atwood opened a restaurant and that all the sandwiches were named after her poems, would you immediately vomit?
]]>The woman who mops the floor of my room is so fair and blonde as to be practically transparent. I am somehow embarrassed whenever she comes in and has to clean around me, and I hope to compensate for this weird power imbalance by being excessively friendly, and she’s kind enough to indulge my need for small talk. She has a thick eastern European accent and far away, sad eyes hidden behind blocky glasses. As she wipes down the plastic casings of the rails on my bed, she says, “Look, you see?” I don’t, and have to look closer. “My superior leaves little marks with a pen so she knows if I have cleaned properly or not. You see it now?” I nod as she wipes it away and say something I think is funny and disparaging about her superior. “No, it is her job, the cleaning must get completed and she must make sure it is so. We all must do our jobs.”
I feel like a child in the face of those words. This middle-aged woman who used to be a professor of accounting in the former Yugoslavia, now in a scratchy blue uniform cleaning floors in a hospital a million miles from all that she had known and loved and earned. My heart could break for her– her country vanished, her life now so improbable and alien. And she looks at me. She knows what I’m thinking, or at least she thinks she might know. She pauses for a moment, “It is true that life is hard, but we must live it, no? We must live it,” she says, as if we had both been forced to leave our native land.
1:40 P.M. EDT
MR. SPICER: Good afternoon. First off, yes, it’s true. Arby’s will officially be designated “America’s Roast Beef, Yes Sir!” After expert negotiations, President Trump will be signing an executive order this afternoon that will establish a formal marketing partnership between Arby’s and the United States of America. We hope and expect that this will prove mutually beneficial to both parties for years to come.
On a personal note I want to say that I worked at an Arby’s when I was a teenager growing up in Rhode Island back in the 80’s. We used to have quite a few vacationing gays come in looking for an affordable and delicious meal, and although most people were scared of their disease, I never had a problem with them.
I found them to be a very tidy people. You could always tell which table they’d been eating at because it was just so clean.
Anyhow, Arby’s makes the best sandwich in America, as President Trump knows, and if you’re ever driving by an Arby’s you should stop and try one of their Roast Beef Gyro’s.
The classic thinly sliced roast beef is topped with lettuce, onions and tomatoes, cool creamy tzatziki sauce, and authentic Greek seasonings all hugged by a warm pita. Nothing says “I am an adventurous eater and interesting person” like eating a gyro at Arby’s.
$4.29.
A great deal. The kind of deal that only President Donald Trump could negotiate for America.
You’d be an idiot not to buy that gyro.
A real, goddamned idiot.
On another note, drug abuse has crippled communities across this nation. In 2015, more than 52,000 Americans — that’s 144 people a day — died from a drug overdose. And a lot of those people were white. Keep in mind that this all happened under Barack Obama’s watch. I’m not saying he orchestrated this White Holocaust– although we have received a variety of intelligence reports indicating that might be the case– I’m just pointing out the facts so that you can make up your own minds.
Okay press monkeys, let’s play a game.
I want you now to imagine that terrorists killed 144 predominately white Americans each day. Imagine them in their orange jumpers. On fire in cages and stuff.
If that was the case there wouldn’t be a terrorist left on the planet under this administration. We would have killed them all. And their families. Even their pitiful animals. But as you know, you can’t always drop a bomb on your problems, perhaps even more so when those problems belong to your own people, and so President Trump is working on a joint initiative with Pfizer to create a new and safer opiate for all the despairing Americans who lost their manufacturing jobs to illegals. Pfizer, an exemplary company with revenues exceeding 50 billion per year, will be familiar to many of you in the press corps because you gobble Zoloft and Viagra like candy.
If it wasn’t for Pfizer, half of you would be on the street.
In other new, President Trump has Tweeted Direct Messages to the King of Saudi Arabia, the Prime Minister of Japan and the Acting President of South Korea concerning the United States’ military strike on the airfield in Syria, and oh, look, there’s Ivanka!
What a vision in a floral print!
Stunning, just stunning.
That Ivanka Trump line is really something else!
Let’s give her a round of applause!
Okay, we’ve run out of time and the questions will have to wait for another time! Please help yourself to the Arby’s spread at the back of the room! Thank you all very much for attending!
]]>
It’s a bad movie, a very bad movie, and bad in a way that only a movie made in 1985 can be bad. If you’ll recall, Rocky ends up in Russia to fight Ivan Drago, the invincible Soviet super villain played by Dolph Lundgren.
Various dramatic things happen and Rocky wins, as he does pretty much every second movie. What’s striking about it, beyond how awful, cliched and child-like it is, is how vivid and oppressive the American propaganda is.
America has never been particularly subtle about propaganda, and this movie is no exception. It’s an Us Vs. Them proposition, the Soviets are all passionless robots and functionaries living under a cruel and despotic regime, and the Americans, well, they have heart, man, they’re real!
About five years after this movie was made the Soviet Union collapsed beneath it’s own rotting weight. This meant that The Cold War was over, and once again all that was good and free and just and true had won. However Operation Desert Storm, in which the US invaded Iraq, immediately commenced, and ever since, the Middle East (in one form or another) has been the enemy of the West.
After seeing Rocky IV, it struck me that America was always at war, it was as if they HAD to be at war, as if it was a necessary and functioning part of the system. “The Military Industrial Complex,” as it is conspiratorially called, is a huge business in the US, accounting for hundreds of billions dollars. It is a primary economic driver, one from which so much else flows, and it surely looks like it now exists as an essential part of the economy than some subordinate wing of government used to defend abstract principles like justice.
Recently, on December the 2nd there was another mass shooting in the United States, this time in San Bernardino. It was the 355th of the year.
As the news broke, politicians assigned some assistant take to their Twitter accounts and Tweet out their feelings. The event, immediately politicized, had one flavour of politician crying out for gun control, while the other flavour of politician offered “thoughts and prayers.” It turns out that the “thoughts and prayer” crowd had all accepted donations from the NRA.
Granted, this is no scientific study, but it seems to confirm something that we already knew.
On the face of it, the NRA and the on-going weapon crisis is utterly mysterious. Why only in America? Why haven’t they done anything to try to solve this problem? I mean, from 2004 to 2013, there were 316,000 firearm deaths in the US set against 313 deaths from terrorism, but the resources are where?
In the US, politicians and thus policy, are bought.
That’s the way the system works.
War, be it with the Communists or the Terrorists, is very profitable, as is the production and sale of guns. It’s the sort of thing that should actually be put in the Constitution, just so everybody is clear about profit, rather than freedom, being the guiding light of the nation.
Until the anti-gun lobby starts to give representatives money commiserate with what the NRA does, then we are going to have to expect these trends, and all these deaths, to continue.
Every culture, language, disposition and illness imaginable was there, all lumped together. There were police officers guarding jittery prisoners, old, African women wearing tribal dresses spitting into clay pots, thick-necked Eastern European men with narrow eyes, a furious construction worker with a broken arm and a smirking teen with an infected belly button piercing. Nurses, tough as nails, stood like fire hydrants and shouted down anybody who tried to intimidate their way past triage, while cocky EMT workers, like bodyguards, struck poses around them.
A few affluent people who felt they didn’t belong there looked inconvenienced and glowered busily on their cell phones, every once in awhile looking up, hoping to find the eyes of somebody else who shared their dissatisfaction with customer service, while dotted amongst were the homeless, some of whom were just looking for shelter. They were aware of the disgust the entitled felt about sitting amongst them, and one of them, a holy and ruined man of 60, was an oracle. He issued forth a stream of undirected words, each one burning with some combination of genius, madness and menace, which then hung in the room like the smoke of prophecy.
Toronto, like a lot of cities, or at least by virtue of the way a lot of us assemble in cities, is a de facto gated community. Here, the gate was open. There was something almost Medieval about the scene, the squalor of it, our suffering so intimate and visible, our secrets now manifest. There was no separation of our humanity or of our innate and arbitrary vulnerability—we were all just there, hoping for intervention and mercy.
This, of course, is the destiny of each one of us, but it’s rare that we catch a glimpse of it. We don’t see or share in the suffering of other people on a daily basis. Those people, the sick, scared and wounded, are behind closed doors, and we just imagine that they don’t exist, or that they inhabit a land we will never visit, but this isn’t true.
I was driven to the ER by a cab that day, and I could see the driver’s eyes in the rear view mirror, concerned, looking back at me. (It turns out I had a respiratory virus that was making it very difficult to breathe.) I’m sure he could see that I was scared, and gently he began to speak to me, “It is okay, you are going to be alright, my friend, I can see that. You are going to be fine. Okay? No, I do not need your money. It is my pleasure to have the opportunity to help.” He smiled at me and nodded his head, “Yes, go now, get better, you have a life yet to lead.”
It was as if a saint had taken me in transit, and his blessing, his encouragement was a beautiful miracle unto itself.
]]>
It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen a video of this kind, and each time that I do have the same visceral, almost emotional response. Instinctively, like my primal core has suddenly been activated, I know that something’s wrong. I know it in my bones.
The stripped and ruined landscape, stretching endlessly around you, is awesome in the worst sense of the word. It’s a sincere horror, and looking down at it you feel like you’re viewing a crime scene where acts of unspeakable cruelty and evil have taken place. It’s like that lofty view, which grants such scope and perspective, completely alters one’s view, orienting it toward the eternal. I know that I’m coming in at a pretty high pitch here, but it’s truly how it makes me feel.
The oil being extracted from the tar sands, as I’m sure you know, is very costly to process, with the emissions created from developing it being 12% greater than conventional oil. It couldn’t be dirtier, and each barrel of oil requires three barrels of water to produce it. The question of whether oil is more valuable than water is a fundamentally ridiculous one, and that this question was even open to rational inquiry will be seen as a tragedy in 50 years.
The Athabasca Tar Sands are utterly massive. Covering about 140,000 square kilometres of boreal forest, it’s larger than countries like England, Greece and North Korea. The land will be obliterated, as if from a nuclear apocalypse, and the equipment and structures that are used to mine the oil are so large that they command their own weather systems. It’s a dystopian vision, as if a predatory alien culture had descended upon the planet and began to ruthlessly drain it of all resources while maintaining absolute indifference to whether the host organism lived or died. (There are two smaller Tar Sands, Peace River and Cold Lake, each about a fifth of the size of Athabasca.)
The Prime Minister of this country has said that he won’t do anything to address climate change that would cost Canadians any jobs. The Tar Sands, ruinous and retrograde in so many ways, is a job creator, and so in the face of all other reason it goes forward. However, one glance at the razed, apocalyptic world it inhabits, this kind of Mordor, and even a child can cut through all the rhetoric, economics and complex global politics to see that what’s taking place is plainly wrong.
