The other day my wife Rachelle Maynard posted this on a Buy, Sell and Trade Facebook group she belongs to:
LIKE NEW BLUNDSTONES 7.5 Mens or 9.5 Womens
$150
Don’t spend $250 on a new pair of Blundstones your husband will never wear because they’re just a little bit hard to slip on. No. Don’t be angry he’s only worn them 3 times and doesn’t truly appreciate the kindness of your gift. So just buy these instead. They are in near perfect shape. They come with a box and everything. Pick up near Bloor and Spadina.
Comments:
Sahara: Forgive me, but your husband sounds like a bit of an asshole.
Anne: Nice colours!
Emily: I agree with Sahara, your husband sounds like a real piece of work. He better look like Daniel Craig is all I can say! LOL!!
Sahara: I once heard about a husband who took his wife to a Lord of the Rings movie marathon on their wedding anniversary! He thought if she saw them all at once, in order, then she would love them like he did. CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE?
Dina: I would cut a bastard if he did that to me on our anniversary.
Betty: My husband is also an asshole. #MeToo
Stephanie: Sounds like he has pretty small feet! LOL!!
Emily: Men are trash.
Jen: You know, I have absolutely no doubt of my innate superiority to my husband, and pretty much all men, in fact, yet I still end up feeling oppressed. How the hell does that end up happening?
Nicki: Smash the Patriarchy!
Robynne: Would it be possible to come by on Tuesday around 4:00 to have a look?
Elena: My husband is also a jerk. #MeToo
Misha: I started to notice that whenever I walked into the room my husband would slam his laptop shut. He said it was fantasy hockey. Turns out he meant porn. Dirty, disgusting porn #MeToo
Treena: I would dump his small-footed ass. You can do better Rachelle. You deserve better. We all do.
Lisa: I swear to God, my husband can’t even figure out how to work the remote. Why are they all so fucking incompetent??? Why do we have to do EVERYTHING??? #MeToo
Beth: The fucker doesn’t deserve boots.
Maria: Make him walk barefoot in the snow. #MeToo
]]>Donald Trump is the living embodiment of a cliffhanger.
I swear, everything the man does compels us to astonishment. And once this happens he has us trapped– as the complicit media knows all too well. Almost obediently, we’ll sit there in anxious anticipation, eagerly awaiting his next act as if it were an episode of Breaking Bad. Trump, always the catalytic agent, exists to propel narratives forward. Where that story came from or where it might be headed is entirely immaterial, all that matters is that in that moment you cared, and the more passionately you cared, the better for him.
Since his election my media streams have been rivers of fire. All day long people have been screaming at one another and making the boldest declarations. It reminds me of the Olympics, actually. Some sport I will have never heard of might pop up, and after a brief, mechanical explanation of what it is and a few minutes of watching, I’ll feel like an expert.
And so it goes with politics. We may not speak the language, we may not have visited the country, we may not have any friends who are native to the place, but in very short order, we still have really, really strong opinions about what should happen to it.
Whenever I find myself assuming this role and asserting some far too sure political view, I remind myself that I have trouble keeping my own house in order. What’s my economic plan for the USA? Hell, what’s my economic plan for my family!
The world is infinitely complex, and our ability to understand it is miniscule. Our chances of being wrong about something are far greater than our chances of being right, and it’s important we keep this in mind, particularly when judging those we disagree with. I mean, if you’re awake enough to understand that not all Muslims are terrorists, then you should be awake enough to understand that not all of your political opponents are racist morons.
One’s politics are a very poorly articulated version of the sort of person one might be in the world. Typically it says more about how we’d like to be seen, than how we actually conduct ourselves. And it is just so hard to live a pure life in this society, we must always keep in mind that it is upon monstrous deeds that most of us have happily, blindly, built our lives.
The furious, pre-apocalyptic tensions defining the USA right now are typically lumped into two categories. There are the coastal city-states that house the progressives and elites, and then there is the rest of America, a kind of seething, primitive horde—think Orcs.
I try to look at it more like the future pitted agains the past.
Every year our world changes more than it has in all the generations stacked before it. A lot of people are disoriented and terrified by the velocity at which their lives are now moving, while others are grateful that time has finally caught up with them. And when one traditional way of life is subsumed by another, there is usually a violent reaction, and I think that’s what we’re seeing– the past trying to claw the future back in place, and a resentful and protective future stomping back.
So be kind if you can, for everybody is feeling like they’re hanging off the edge of a cliff.
]]>In an effort to bolster awareness of this and to encourage it’s citizens to help in creating a “city within a forest,” the city has mapped out all of it’s 70,000 trees, given each one a unique ID number, and invited residents to write the tree of their choice, with the tree actually writing back.
Here are some of the letters that people have sent in to trees:
“You’ve got to stop leaving your tree garbage all over the goddamn place! Every day you’re dropping crap on my driveway and I’m sick of finding it on my car and having to clean it off all the time. Knock it off or I’m going to chop you the hell down, I mean it!”
“For the last seven years you’ve stood outside of my front window. Each day I sat at my desk working and you were always there, my constant companion, and over time you became a symbol of my little house. Whenever I was really looking forward to getting home, and then would see you from down the street, I’d just relax, knowing I was almost where I wanted to be. You always had a calming effect on me, and after all these years living in Melbourne I feel like you’ve been my best friend. I’m moving to London now, and I think I’m going to miss you more than anyone.”
“You happen to be at a really convenient location, in a park right between the pub and my flat. I must have pissed on you a hundred times over the years. Did it bother you that I did that? I never thought so. I figured you understood, and I always liked that moment or relief, leaning against you, my forehead and arm resting against your trunk, just the sound of my piss being absorbed into the ground. It was a timeout, you know? Anyway, I just wanted to thank you and let you know that you’re a bloody great tree!”
“My name is Randy and I’m in grade three. I really like trees and think they are important. You offer shade, help to make air and let animals live in your branches for free. Can you talk to the animals? Also, can you talk to other trees, and like in Lord of the Rings, will you be able to one day rise up and help fight against terror with the rest of the world? Thank you for all you do for the planet! You’re a hero!”
“Back in 1996 I carved my girlfriend and my initials into your trunk. He name was Marie Bell and we were just graduating from high school. Things didn’t last very long, as we both went our separate ways after school and lost touch. Anyway, I recently moved back to town to help look after my mother, and now I pass by you nearly every day. You always remind me of young Marie Bell, and so after nearly two decades of barely ever thinking about her, I think about her everyday. I wonder if she ever thinks of me, or even remembers that night I carved that heart around our initials.”
Dear Bitter Writer:
What are writers really like?
Ansell Pitt
Dear Mister Pitt:
Writers are the worst.
I’d be hard pressed to think of any single grouping of people, be they bound by profession, religion, ethnicity, sexual fetish or disease, that are worse than writers.
Writers are grubby, small, aspirational and hateful people.
The only thing that they loathe more than themselves are other writers. The success of other human beings, even in some cases animals, is toxic to the writer. If you happen to fall into conversation with one about something that is “good,” or something that you “like,” the writer will quickly, as if in a panic, change the topic to something that is “not good,” or something that they “don’t like.” They will do this in the way that a squirrel might scurry off up a tree when it gets startled. Writers feel diminished by light and joy, and will seek to suck as much of it as possible out of any given day. Never, ever ask a writer to make a speech at a wedding.
Think of this way:
If all the writers on the planet were jammed into one insufferable country, it would be torn apart by civil war and terrorism.
And then likely bombed by every other county in the world, too.
It would just be that bad a place.
Dear Bitter Writer:
Hello, love the very helpful blog! My question is book cover designs. What would go on it? Should the character be on the cover or should the cover relate to the content in the story? Thank you.
Samantha Bell
Dear Ms. Bell:
Are you some kind of a moron?
Look, if some other moron is willing to publish your stupid book, you should let them put whatever the fuck they want on the cover!! As a writer it is essential that you learn to be a sycophant. You must shamelessly align yourself with whatever the prevailing tribe is, and ceaselessly, but with as much elegance and perception as you can muster, lather all editors and associated “literati” (gag!) with compliments. Tell them how much you love the little, European scarves they’re always wearing and how cool their frames and tattoos are, and for God’s sake, if they want you nude and fully penetrated on the cover, you let them know how much you love their “edgy vision” and ask how many orifices they want penetrated, damn it!
1. Operation Jesus Walks With Me
2. Operation Syrius Shit
3. Operation Assault on Mordor
4. Operation Bash Assad
5. Operation We’ve Been Drinking
6. Operation Destroyacus
7. Operation Mediterranean Diet of Death
8. Operation Twerkstorm
9. Operation Arab Sting
10. Celebrity Death Strike
“Do you have air conditioning?” I asked.
“Dah,” he responded in a blunt, unfriendly East European accent.
“Would you mind turning it on, please?”
“It is expensive for me to run AC, it take more energy, you know? So I keep windows open for breeze, OK?”
“Look, I’m sorry, but I’m dying in this heat, and the regulations say that you have to turn it on if the customer asks for it, right?”
The driver, irritated, snorted.
“What?” I asked, also irritated.
“You are weak, little man who can’t take sunshine?”
“Yes, that’s right. I am a weak, little man who can’t take the sunshine,” I sighed.
The driver pretended to laugh, shook his head and said something in a language that I presumed to be Russian.
“Have it your way, little mister boss.”
He then powered up the windows and contemptuously snapped on the AC.
We drove in black silence for the next five minutes.
I hated his fucking guts.
I hoped his native country got obliterated at the Olympics.
Food poisoning.
Nightmares with toys.
No Internet.
Being dunked-on while playing pick-up.
All these pestilences I wished upon him.
As I sat there concentrating my hatred, I began to pick at my fingernails. This is a habit that manifests when I’m angry, and in this case I managed to peel off several crescents of nails, which I then stored in my pocket. This detritus felt disgusting so I opened the window and tried to throw them out of the car.
The driver, his furious eyes staring at me from the rear-view mirror, shouted, “You demand AC like little dictator and now you put window down! You have no manners in my home! You waste my money, it is now five dollars extra!”
“C’mon, don’t be such a prick, I was just throwing a piece of fingernail out the window. Would you rather I left if on the seat?”
“You are disgusting man.”
“Like you’ve never picked at your fingernails.”
“You know who you are? You are like Gollum from The Hobbit. That is you.”
“That tattoo of a bear you have on the back of your neck looks gay.”
The driver slammed on the brakes.
“Gollum throw body waste out of my car, I throw Gollum out of my car. Get out now or I break you into pieces.”
“Really, are you serious?”
The driver looked at me, his eyes softening.
“Maybe I am not myself. My boy is sick and the doctors say he might lose hearing. It is awful and I cannot sleep, imaging his world without music, and then people like you come in and complain about small, small thing and I blow top. You be quiet and sit still, say nothing and I will take you home, but remember, say nothing!”
