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Rachelle: You’re still mad about losing at Ms. Monopoly, aren’t you?
Rachelle: A resignation is a loss.
Rachelle: Yes, it is.
Rachelle: I know.
Rachelle: It was clear you were thrown off your game when you weren’t allowed to use your special dice or your customized Hat marker.
Rachelle: You didn’t quit because it was unfair.
Rachelle: You quit because you knew you had no hope of winning.
Rachelle: Yes. Times change.
Rachelle: That was the POINT of the game.
Rachelle: It was designed as a twist on the original, inverting the societal hierarchy we labour under, giving women $240 every time they pass Go, while men only get $200.
Rachelle: I have no idea what Jordan Peterson would say about that.
Rachelle: Who is he, anyway?
Rachelle: Boy, that’s an awful lot of links to YouTube videos.
Rachelle: Okay, okay, okay.
Rachelle: I’ve heard enough.
Rachelle: Fine. Equal opportunity and equity are different things.
Rachelle: So that’s the reason you quit Ms. Monopoly just when you were about to lose?
Rachelle: Okay. Resigned.
Rachelle: Principles.
Rachelle: Oh yes, we certainly do need more community leaders like you, Pickle!
Rachelle: Quitting a board game with friends and running off to “catalogue your comics” was indeed a brave and principled stance!
Rachelle: You bring honour into our home with your actions!
Rachelle: No, that’s not right.
Rachelle: You do not support our family by scavenging the garbage cans of Toronto for comics and then never bothering to resell the soggy, disgusting ones you retrieve.
Rachelle: You know it makes the neighbours very uncomfortable to see you doing that, don’t you?
Rachelle: Pickle, they have no idea what you’re looking for.
Rachelle: They’ve started to leave their empty wine bottles in front of our apartment.
Rachelle: I can’t believe you didn’t notice.
Rachelle: On Monday there must have 30 of them!
Rachelle: No.
Rachelle: That bottle increase had nothing to do with the film festival, and everything to do with the neighbours trying to charitably address your disturbing, garbage-picking ways.
Rachelle: Yes, it is nice of them.
Rachelle: Most people are nice, Pickle, it’s true.
Rachelle: I honestly don’t know if Cate Blanchett is nice.
Rachelle: I can’t imagine you having dinner with her.
Rachelle: You’d lose all composure, drop your cutlery, knock over glasses. That sort of thing.
Rachelle: My guess is Jennifer Lawrence is nicer.
Rachelle: I suppose you’re going on another celebrity watch today?
Rachelle: Okay. Just don’t be creepy, and remember to pick-up some coconut water! Must get back to work! xo
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As many of you will have heard, I have started a weekly Podcast with Heidi, our Miniature Dachshund.
This is an excerpt from our most recent episode:
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Me: Before we start today’s Podcast I have an announcement to make. On our last broadcast Heidi made some remarks that were very hurtful to some beloved members of our community.
The appalling statements she made might even be considered an act of violence in and of themselves, and let me say unequivocally that we here at The Breakfast Club have always, and will always be, great allies to all of our friends in the SCBDB community. Your struggle is our struggle, and we will not tolerate any sort of hate speech, calls to violence or prejudice against you and those that you love. You are our family. We love you and stand beside you. I want to take this time now to formally apologize to all Squirrels, Cats, Birds and Dumb Birds who were wounded by Heidi’s words. We are profoundly sorry.
Although Heidi has been a mostly loyal dog to my family for nearly a dozen years, I simply cannot excuse her behaviour, and so she has been removed from the Podcast, effective immediately, and sent to live up in the country with my wife’s parents where she will undergo prolonged sensitivity training.
Taking her place will be Margaret Atwood, one of the supporting actresses from the hit TV show The Hand Made Tale.
Atwood: The title of the show is the Handmaids Tale, and I was the author of the novel upon which the successful TV show was based, not a supporting actress in it.
Me: Please don’t interrupt.
Atwood: You have more important things to say, do you?
Me: Nuts! Now I’ve lost my place!
Atwood: Yes, of course you have. A straight, middle-aged white man with no discernible talents suddenly adrift in a changing world. One day you wake up to discover that you’re not one of the good guys at all, but are actually an enemy of the people, an enemy to all those you never heard, saw or even thought about in all the decades you stomped so blindly through this world. Now that the shell of your status has been cracked open to reveal your mediocrity and fear, it must be so very difficult for you! And how have you responded to this sea change, Michael, to being revealed so nakedly to all whom you ignored? With hostility and defensiveness, of course, with a desperate attempt to portray yourself as a victim rather than a victimizer. So yes, I can see how you might feel that you “lost your place.”
Me: I WAS PATROL OF THE WEEK IN GRADE SIX!! I WAS AT THE BARRICADES KEEPING THE WORLD SAFE FROM TYRANNY, GODDAMNIT!! NOBODY CAN TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME!!
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The system, it turns out, was a terrifying fail, and as a result of this the government has decided to refine the system before launching it anew in a few months. I, along with a number of other writers, have been hired to help write clear, effective messages for the probable alert scenarios the government is most concerned about. These are some of the alerts we have been working on:
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Emergency Alert #1
Emergency Alert #2
Emergency Alert #3
Emergency Alert #4
Emergency Alert #5
Emergency Alert #6
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It was a hit.
A really big hit.
It became pretty hard to keep up, and then, after one reader misinterpreted my thoughts regarding the use of fire while giving a reading, I decided to step back to spend more time with my family. Regardless, the letters kept coming, and so I feel I owe it to my loyal fans to resurrect the column, which is what I’m doing right now.
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Dear Bitter Writer:
You’re likely aware of the Twitter Challenge in which women were asked to, “Describe yourself like a male author would.” The point of this, of course, was to illustrate how men objectified women, but what I would find really interesting with you– as an impossibly mediocre white man in possession of a level of confidence that outstrips your very modest competencies by an incalculable magnitude– is to have you describe yourself. I have included a photograph in case you should need a reference point.
Lynn from Montreal
Dear Lynn:
In Havana he was known as “ La muerte incómoda.”
It was a term of respect, of great respect, in fact, and more than a little fear. What had Michael Murray done to earn such a nickname from the gentle people of Cuba?
Well, that’s a long and complicated story that will reveal itself in time, but for now we should just imagine the man as he sat there, commandingly, in the barber’s chair. His face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, and his most striking feature was his opaline green eyes, which could be both alluring or intimidating, as the situation required. A part of his barber’s apron fell open from the cooling breeze of the fan and revealed the shirt he was wearing. There were little baseball players on it. He looked up, his eyes clear and even as he wiped some sweat off his upper lip, “ ¿Cómo está mi calva haciendo allí?” he asked the trembling barber. And in that moment Murray’s beauty was revealed the edge of a very sharp knife.
Dear Bitter Writer:
It recently came to my attention that an author at a major publishing house threatened to slap a reviewer who didn’t like his moronic, insulting book, and I was wondering if the publishing house was going to punish him for it, or if white male authors can do literally anything?
Karen in Toronto
Dear Karen:
Have you seen White Male Author: Infinity War, yet?
Easily the best of the franchise. Just fantastic.
At any rate, this movie goes a long way to answer your question. In it, Thanos
attempts to destroy Planet Earth, and after incapacitating both The Avengers and The X-Men it seemed that victory was certain. Right at this despairing point in the movie, White Male Author showed up and blasted him with his laser pulses.
He then flew around Thanos so quickly that the wind currents kept him pinned to the ground while the other superheroes freed themselves from the Polaris Fog that Thanos had used to trap them, and then all together were able to cast Thanos back into the Canyons of Zorg. So it’s clear that although White Male Author is VERY powerful, certainly superior to Spiderman, he might not be as invincible as The Hulk or The Thing.
At any rate, even though White Male Author is very, very powerful, I don’t think he can do literally anything.
]]>What stunned my class most about the book was the casual attitude the characters had toward slavery. I mean, how could they not know that slavery was an evil? Nothing could have been more clear to us, nothing. Slavery was pretty much the most evil thing we could think of, and it was mind-blowing to imagine that this wasn’t vividly reflected in the experience of our ancestors.
And so we figured that people back then must have been hateful and stupid monsters, willfully acting in their own best interests at the cost of others. And so we judged everybody in the book, imagining ourselves morally superior to the louts, trolls and insane people who populated the past.
But this didn’t make any sense.
There was absolutely no reason for me to think I had a more finely developed sense of morality than anybody who came before me. There must have been some decent people who participated in slavery and had no idea that what they were doing was wrong, no? They were simply living in the world into which they were born, and to them slavery, like the weather or landscape, was an unexamined fact of life rather than a conscious act of moral will.
This seemed clear to me. I was not unique. I was like everybody else, and that, of course, is a very scary thing to admit to oneself.
Technology has accelerated and amplified our culture in ways that are inconceivable. Every year it seems that the world has changed more than in all the previous millennia stacked before it. It’s dislocating, and I often think of technology, in particular our online lives, as an emergent dimension we don’t yet understand or know how to interact with. Whenever we’re uncomfortable or bored with our physical lives, however briefly, a smart phone serves as a magic wand we can wave to take us to this other realm, and put in that context, none of us should be surprised to find discontent, even anger there.
Our desire for social justice has far outstripped our ability to deliver it, and in many ways I see ideological conflicts as dimensional clashes rather than moral ones. By the standards of today, so much of what we as a society did just ten years ago seems appalling, but as we judge it’s worth remembering that ten years ago we had no idea what we were doing was wrong or unfair. We were just operating within the framework of time and place. So how then to police this if every generation, indeed, every person, is going to be witlessly complicit in ghastly acts ?
Of course, revolution is not about justice, it’s about change.
And as the future and the past battle for supremacy in a ruined present, it seems that the only way it can end, the only way it has always ended, is like in a Shakespearean tragedy—everybody on stage dies, and then, the world purified and laid bare, is seized by those, now done with watching, who had been waiting in the wings.
