***********************************************

Notice what you feel:

I am walking back from daycare and I have my eyes closed. It is the morning, still fresh, and I am noticing the fine, barely perceptible sparks of rain that fall on my face. It feels like something mysterious and alive, something benevolent. I am noticing my breathing, how I labour with it and have to consciously inhale through the prongs in my nose. I feel the oxygen tank on my back, how it pulls against my body, my muscles tightening, growing tense. I open my eyes, now concerned that I may be veering blindly toward someone on the sidewalk, and I see my street, a ribbon separating the red, brick homes on either side, and the impossible leaves all around them, jewels spilling from a treasure chest, wet and almost shining.

Notice movement:

I am in motion. All of me, everything contained within and without, and all the world around swirling like mists. Everything in constant motion, even the rocks, everything in the process of degrading and reforming, everything sightlessly churning. I push Jones down the street in his stroller and an airplane passes loudly overhead, contrails streaming behind. Jones yells and points, his pupils expanding in the wonder of recognition. A cat slinks out of a bush and looks at us, considers things, and then begins a cautious journey across the street, each step the brushstroke of a great artist. We pass by a woman walking two dogs who pause to rummage through the rubble of some broken jack-o-lanterns on a lawn. They look up at us like the shadows we are, and then we arrive at daycare and a bird, unseen, chirps smally from a tree before emerging and rising beyond us in flight.

Twitter was not at all what I thought it would be.

I envisioned a virtual water cooler where all sorts of people–many who didn’t work in an office– might get together during the day to exchange witty banter about what was going on in the world. I imagined a kind of democratic paradise, too, maybe like the ancient Greeks, a place where there was equal opportunity for everybody to be heard, and the quality of an idea was not contingent upon the status of the person bearing it.

Of course, it turns out that Twitter is a tire fire, and I simply could not have been more wrong.

Twitter and it’s 140 character cage, ( now upped to 280 characters ) did not spark conversations, it destroyed them. Instead of attempting to actually investigate ideas that you didn’t already own, people went on search and destroy missions, each Tweet a drive-by shooting aimed at a rival gang. Twitter was a weapon, a device used to amplify and distribute propaganda, and whenever a person was handed this weapon they immediately, without even knowing it, became a soldier in somebody else’s army.

Twitter was not a place you went to freely express yourself, it was a battlefield.

Just under a quarter of Americans are on this battlefield, and from what I can tell the preponderance of people using the platform would be loosely defined as a kind intelligentsia, those with sufficient space and security in their life to spend X-amount of time each day looking to make corrections in the lives of others. These people are driving the culture wars that are currently dominating our cyclonic news cycle, and that, in turn, is driving the political discourse. This means that the vast majority of Americans, more than 75%, are being led down a road paved by this influential, minority group.

Yet oddly, we seem more concerned about conspiratorial fictions then this beast in which we live.

No matter, the people behind Twitter know how dangerous and influential the platform has become, and in an effort to make it less pernicious, they’re now considering taking away the Like function.

Twitter is an obviously hierarchal structure, a place where status is measured by Likes, followers and retweets. The more of these you have, the more influence you wield. It’s practically a board game. The goal is not to learn about other people and their ideas, it’s about acquiring and exercising power. ( Exhibit A: Donald Trump) But it’s not the real world, not even close. The vast majority of humans live outside the gates of Twitter, yet they are directed and depicted, by those within. A technology that was meant to be radically democratic has somehow ended up being kind of totalitarian.

For instance, China is creating a Social Credit System which is intended to measure citizens social and business reputation. It’s a Black Mirror episode, a world in which everything you do is judged and catalogued by others, and it is upon that which your ability to function in society is dependent. In fact, Twitter had something very much like that which they called Klout, a complex numerical measurement of your influence. This is the unfortunate principal on which much of our social media exists, and if Twitter liberates us from it, they will be striking a great blow in a war most of us don’t even know we’re fighting.

In my imagination “The Internet” descended from the deep reaches of the universe and settled upon our planet like a mist. We began to interact with this powerful and mysterious entity without any real understanding of how it was going to effect us, or even if it was going to effect us. Most of us just assumed it was going to make things better, amplifying potential in a good, rather than harmful way.

However, it hasn’t exactly worked out that way. The astonishing gifts we’ve enjoyed have come with tremendous penalties, the primary of which might be a massive, unacknowledged mental health crisis.

I don’t know about you, but I have never seen as many declarations of anxiety and depression in my life as I now see on a regular basis online. It’s not at all uncommon for me to have multiple chat windows open at once, each one a conversation with a friend in crisis. This is highly subjective of course, and that people now have the means and social sanction to communicate their feelings might be something to celebrate, or, as my intuition suggests,  it could be something in the disembodied interactions we’ve been reducing ourselves to that’s causing this articulated spike in mental health problems.

It seems that the more we inhabit the abstracted realm of The Internet, the more certain we become of our beliefs. This is highly ironic to me, because we all know that amidst the spin and swirl of disinformation, fake news and uncanny algorithms, we should be as skeptical of claims to truth and certainty as we’ve ever been.

Take the White Power symbols that have been in the news.

As you may be aware, the symbol that you always thought meant “OK,” might now mean White Power.

This transition took place about a year ago on 4Chan, where it was conceived as a conscious lie. What I mean by that is that it wasn’t a White Power sign. The intent was to take an existing symbol and change it’s meaning, thus confusing the public and media and further eroding the idea of public trust.

Regardless, once this meme was in the blood stream there was no way to know what the use of the symbol meant. Did the person know it was a white power sign? Were they just saying “OK!?” Were they making a joke? Were they communicating racist ideology?

The first instance of this that I saw was of White House Advisor Zina Bash during a Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

Based on this image, people thought she was a White Supremacist.

Bash is of Mexican and Jewish heritage, and this photo that was widely circulated was a high resolution screen capture of a video, so she was in motion, not in a fixed, posed position. Claims that she was communicating a racist message seemed to me ambiguous at best. But people I know, like and respect saw this photograph, and others like it,

as crystal clear evidence of racist intent. Where I saw nothing but ambiguity, they saw none.

It felt like looking at the Neckar’s Cube, like some optical illusion was at play and the mechanics of our brains were prohibiting us from seeing the same thing.

There was simply no consensus on what was real. We were living two different stories when looking at the images. Where I was looking at what was directly in front of me, my friends were looking at circumstance, or perhaps subtext, seeing this single image as part of a much greater and evolving narrative.

Perhaps I am antique in my thinking, but when I see stories like these, I look for a kind of “courtroom proof.” If I have doubt, I am unwilling to prosecute the reputation and livelihood of the person being judged, even if they might still be suspicious to me. Maybe that makes me unwilling to act, and if so that is a sin I will one day have to answer for. Regardless, online a “thing” is true if it has momentum, if it supports the continuance of a passionately held belief, not if it meets some “clinical” standard of proof.

As our shared sense of truth and morality fall away– and disagreement leads to suspicion, if not flat-out contempt– we fearlessly share our certainties, but shamefully keep our uncertainties sheltered within, anxious that we’ll be attacked rather than supported by those whom we would love, and that, well that’s making us all feel a little jumpy and untethered.

******************************************************

I’m not going to give you any guff.

Ayahuasca is no walk in the park.

Like politics, it’s not for the faint of heart. Only the strongest will survive. You’ve got to be fearless to meet Mother Ayahuasca, and when I looked around the yurt at the lost and dirty hippies sitting around chanting and smelling like carrots, I knew I was the alpha and that I was going win. I knew that Mother Ayahuasca was going to choose me.

Now you’ve probably heard that the potion the little witch doctor guy gives you tastes horrible. That’s a fact, but if you’re smart like I was, you’ll just pour a little bit of chocolate milk into the cup and Presto! It’s still not the best thing you’ll ever taste– kind of like something you might get served on a Cuban cruise ship– but you can take it if you’re disciplined.

Anyway, after a couple of hours of trying to organize the hippies and teach them about the free market, I started to experience visual augmentations to the lights in the yurt. The lights seemed to get more vivid, like they were right up close to my eyeball. The yurt was getting hotter, too, and the hippies, with all their chanting and puking and moaning, were getting more irritating, so I took my shirt off and lay down for a power nap. With my eyes closed I saw all kinds of geometric shapes and started to experience things I’d never experienced before. I felt what it was like to fly through the jungle like a toucan. Eyes looking at opposite sides, I felt what it was like to crawl on the land and slip into the water like an alligator, I felt what it was like to sneak upon a prey like a puma, I felt the energy of a bull.

It was awesome, like playing football or throwing the shot put a mile.

I really felt like I was in the zone, so I started to do some push-ups. I think I was up to around 75 when Mother Ayahuasca appeared to me. Pretty average looking. You hope she might look like Cheryl Ladd or something, but that’s not the way it works.

Anyway, she looked at me, like really deeply into me, as if she was trying to intimidate me or something. Fat chance. So I stared right back at her. There’s not a staring contest, in any dimension, that Doug Ford can’t win, dammit. This seemed to throw her, so she spewed a whole bunch of snakes out of her mouth, but it takes more than that to scare a Ford.

Eventually she turned into a lake and invited me to go for a swim in her waters. Now I’m a happily married man, but I did as I was told, and I tell you it was like one of those Vulcan mind meld things. Suddenly, the sacred herb told me everything all at once, and I knew how essential strong governance and fiscal restraint were, not just to my life, but to all life. 

As it turns out, fortunes are being made reviewing consumer products on-line, and with that in mind I have launched a site ( The Sanitarium) which I hope will dominate the Hand Sanitizer Review landscape and make my family obscene amounts of money.

This is my first review:

**************************************

Welcome to The Sanitarium!

How do you think you’re going to die?

Terrorism?

Sex accident?

Wasting disease?

Climate catastrophe?

The truth is it’s possible you might die from any one, or any combination, of the threats listed above, but according to science we are most likely to perish from some super bacteria that will come like a thief in the night and kill all of us who had not been properly eliminating infectious agents from our hands.

It’s no stretch of the imagination to say that not only is choosing the right hand sanitizer a matter of national security, but it’s also a matter of life or death.

Choose carefully, my friends!

Sanzer Hand Gel

Wow!

The first thing I noticed about this hand sanitizer was just how amazing the ad is! It’s almost as if Sanzer isn’t promoting good hygiene at all, but is instead offering serial killers some great and fresh tips on how to dismember and store victim parts. It really makes you wonder what it would feel like to chop off somebody’s fingers and put them on display, you know? No matter, regardless of intent, Sanzer sure knows how to get your attention, but still, I had to find out, is the product as good as the ad?

Experiment:

Remove the raccoon that is trapped in the garbage bin in the alley with my bare hands, apply Sanzer hand gel, and then wait 48 hours to see if I get sick.

Notes:

1. Sanzer Hand Gel really stings when it comes in contact with any open wounds.
2. Sanzer Hand Gel does not remove the choking stench of raccoon and blood from your hands, clothes, hair, memory or glasses.
3. Sanzer is flammable, and if squirted while holding a lit barbecue ignitor directly in front of it, will work as a kind of flame thrower. Unfortunately, fire is of little use in deterring raccoons, so Sanzer’s effectiveness as a weapon is not universal. ( This product may not meet your Apocalypse Bunker Hand Sanitizer needs)
4. Fourty-eight hours after the application of Sanzer Hand Gel, my hands and arms were still swollen and oozy, but my fever was under control and the violent and dark thoughts had begun to subside, thus earning the product a solid 7 out of 10.

I don’t much like the food here at Pulmonary Rehab.

The hatred of hospital food is pretty much a universal, and so I imagined that all the other residents would share my point of view. But no, I was dead wrong. The people I spoke with liked the food, even the simulated pork thing that had been pressed to make it look like ribs.

The reasons for this are simple enough. Many of the people here– by virtue of their condition– are unable to work and have little money. Many of them are older and live alone, lacking the will, funds or ability to attentively feed themselves, and are thus entirely grateful when a meal is delivered to them three times a day. This food, regardless of its quality and regardless of whether it’s “Instagrammable” or not, is a good thing.

Its presence is a relief, a daily stress crossed-out.

People enter into this program eroded and depressed, little more than shadows of who they once were. On Fridays we’re allowed to go home for the weekend, but not everybody does. Some people are too sick or live too far away, but others stay because they have nothing they want to return to.

One man, heavy with sad eyes, said to me as he settled in before the TV, “Why would I want to go home and just sit there, staring at my four walls? I like it better here.”

Sometimes people forget just how breakingly lonely illness can be.

But soon enough, people are reanimated. Men who wouldn’t make eye contact when they entered are shortly cracking wise, singing along to the oldies while working out, and women who hadn’t played cards in years are laughing together over Euchre.

Collected from disparate lives and thrown together in common cause, we get to know one another gradually, through the honesty of proximity rather than the spin of words. You see the pain first, because you know the pain, too. But gradually, that’s chipped away to reveal the person lost inside, the person capable of joy and wonder. It’s a gift, this, and all of us here gathered beneath the mortal cloud of our illness become family, and will linger as family long after each one of us has stepped out the door and receded back into the mysterious worlds from which we came.

Sitting on the sidewalk between the mailbox and garbage can was a man selling pens. He wore a red ‘Fly Emirates’ hat, had a distended tongue that protruded through his mouth, a tracheotomy tube sticking out of his throat and loosely bandaged hands. He was so low to the ground and positioned in such a way that it was difficult to tell if he had legs or not, and he gave the appearance of some wax creation melting into the grey concrete.

A chopper sounded unseen in the sky above, likely landing on the roof of the Children’s Hospital right around the corner. Somebody, all sorts of people even, were in the midst of the worst, most unimaginable day of their lives.

A handsome business man with an immaculately trimmed beard strode by as if on a catwalk. Standing about 6’3, he was resplendent in a perfectly fitted suit that he’d accented with a pair of beautiful Italian shoes and a pocket square. He spoke calmly into his phone as if he was in control and absolutely  everything  was  going  exactly  as  planned.

Walking toward him was a blonde woman who was just as thin as a blade. She was concentrating so hard on looking unattainable she seemed angry, like she was off to eliminate an enemy. Dressed expensively, she was so deeply articulated by fashion that it was hard to imagine anything existing beyond exterior.  Behind sunglasses and confident on high heels, as inky as a shadow she smoked–an image to be captured rather than a person to be spoken to.

It seemed that these two people, these two vectors of power and beauty, had been moving their entire lives toward this moment of collision, but they passed without incident or plot, and the man selling pens on the street beneath their indifferent gazes cast such a stark contrast as to feel like a biblical thunderbolt. 

Moving his mouth to no effect, he held out a pen to everybody who passed, but nobody stopped or even noticed him. Not a single person. He was beneath their sight line, both figuratively and literally, and may as well have been living in a completely different world.

A woman on crutches was standing near him. You could tell that she wasn’t sick– that she’d just had a minor accident and was still living in one world and not the other. But still, she was angry. She might have been angry about a lot of things. She was limping about very dramatically, exaggerating, exasperated that that the cab stand was 20 meters away. The beggar, wordless and unseen, waved a car over for her, and as one materialized, she limped furiously past, never noticing the blessings of the saint kneeling before her.

The site enables people to trade all manner of goods, absolutely anything you have lying around or might want to cook. If somebody likes what you posted, they send you a message and the bartering begins.

This was my first post:

Posted by Michael Murray
Toronto Division

Genuine Sialkot Pro Field Hockey Stick

Made in India, this vintage field hockey stick is a real gem! Nicknamed “Sally,” it was used by high school Goddess Victoria Reid during the season that saw her team, The Lisgar Lancers, win the Ottawa city championship in 1983. Victoria scored a record 36 goals with Sally!

The stick, which feels solid and sure in the hands, is also rumoured to have been used as a murder weapon. So if you’re looking for a little bit of security around the house and are still unsure of guns, this is what you’re looking for, as the stick’s hooked nature guarantees that irregular and jagged wounds would be cut into any invader. I hate to give up this wonderful piece of history, but my wife insists, believing it to be cursed. Ha, ha. Let me assure you, Sally is not cursed, just brutally effective, as many squirrels and at least one homeless man rooting through our garbage for empty wine bottles can attest. It is also important to note that Sally never has conversations with me. I don’t get “different” around her, and you won’t get “different” around her either, just stronger, more violent and a little unpredictable!

All reasonable trade offers will be considered. #Sports #Hockey #Vintage #Murder #Weapon #ProbablyNotHaunted
Response from Dealer Dave
Toronto Division
Bullshit.

I don’t believe your story for one second, but I need something to use for my son’s birthday pinata and your field hockey stick sounds like it would work. I have a Chinese bootleg CD of the U2 album How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, would that work?

Response from Michael Murray
Toronto Division

No, a crappy U2 CD will not do.

Do you have any wine?

Response from Dealer Dave
Toronto Division

No, I am not giving you wine for a piece of wood. I have a CD by the Tea Party, would you prefer that?

Response from Michael Murray
Toronto Division

No deal!! Sally says no!!!

Response from Cindy84
Toronto Division

Your dog is super cute! I also like your carpet. Would you be willing to trade either one of those instead of the creepy stick? I have gift cards…
Response from Make$2000AWeekFromHome
Toronto Division

I’m impressed, I have to admit. Seldom do I come across a blog that’s both equally educative and interesting, and without a doubt, you have hit the nail on the head. The problem is an issue that too few folks are speaking intelligently about. I’m very happy I found this during my search for something relating to this.
Response from Redrum
Toronto Division

Interested in the weapon.

Do you know what became of Victoria Reid?

Response from Michael Murray
Toronto Division

Heard it was a suicide, but even after all these years there’s still a lot of controversy surrounding her death. Th CBC is said to be making a mini-series on it called, “The Possession of Victoria Reid.”

Sometimes she comes to me in my dreams.

Response from Redrum
Toronto Division

I work at a packing plant and have meat to trade. Lots of ground beef. One pound of ground beef for the weapon?

Response from Michael Murray
Toronto Division

I’m worried about food safety. I got Listeria once and will not go through that again. Do you have any wine? Sally likes you and wants to serve you.

Response from Redrum
Toronto Division

I have a half-full box of Jackson Triggs Merlot.

Response from Michael Murray
Toronto Division

Deal!

He was one of the boys I grew up with in Ottawa, and he was a great guy. Modest, kind and good at everything, he was well liked, the sort of person you always wanted around. Parents watching him grow felt proud, confident and happy in the future that was unfolding before him. He was like all the other pure and wonderful boys we grew up amidst, and whenever I saw him, I saw the happy reflection of all of us who grew up together in that neighbourhood, smiling back.

He jumped from the Alexandra Street bridge last week, falling 120 feet before landing in about six feet of water and then pulling himself to the rocks along shore. Using the word miracle, the police officers said that they had never seen a person survive such a high fall into such shallow water.

The Alexandra Street bridge, which was built around 1900, connects Ottawa to the city that lies directly across the river, Hull, Quebec. I cannot express to you just how important Hull was to teenagers growing up in Ottawa during the 1980’s. At the time, Ottawa was a very conservative, even timid place. There were rules that governed everything and an almost soviet conformity enveloped the city like a cloud. However, in Hull the drinking age was 18, you could buy beer at corner stores and bars stayed open until 3:00am. We flocked there by the thousands, crossing the Alexandra bridge like we were a part of some migratory pattern.

For me and my friends, sheltered, underaged kids who only knew optimistic, suburban existences, the unfettered liberty of Hull was a small glimpse into what we imagined the realm of adults could be. It was a place full of potential. Every time we crossed that bridge we felt that a “first” might take place– the narratives of our lives just then beginning to take shape. It was a never-never land where we could dip our feet into the future, while still returning home each night to the safe nest our parents had constructed.

To this day the bridge has the steely permanence of an antique.

Cantilevered, it vibrates when you pass over it, as if an echo of all the trains that once crossed. Our transits, often by foot or bike, were always made at night. With the water in view beneath the cross-hatched metal and the wind, now feeling slightly alien and hostile pushing at you, a feeling of vulnerable and solitude presided. With untethered blackness above and beneath, and the ghostly hum of the bridge moving up through your body, you were in limbo, as if moving from one realm into the next.

It was here on the Alexandra bridge, perhaps feeling lost between these two worlds, where our dear friend decided to step off. He did not do it at night, but during the prosaic, naked day. What was taking place in his heart at that moment must have been indescribably mysterious and painful, a motivating state of mind that’s bleakly impenetrable to the rest of us, who only by the grace of God, have remained on solid ground.

May he forgive himself everything, and find peace in this living world where he will be forever loved. And may he always remember that he pulled himself to shore. The miracle of his life was of his own creation.

The first image that I saw from the hostage crisis in Sydney was this:

My eye was immediately drawn to the lovely, young woman on the left, her eyes closed as if she could not bear to watch the nightmare she was now living. Softly, it seemed, as if growing faint with disbelief, she and another woman were forced to place the gunman’s sign up in the coffee shop window– just above a cheerful and familiar stencil of Merry Christmas— for the entire world to see. Something very different and beyond our comprehension was replacing the world we knew and loved, and it didn’t matter whether the white Arabic lettering on an ominous black background (making it look like some sort of pirate flag) was authentic ISIS or not, it felt like ISIS and that was sufficient.

To me, this photograph could only mean one thing, and that was that something beautiful and loved was going to be slaughtered before our eyes. Somebody’s perfect child, somebody who was falling in love and building a life, was about to die in the name of a politics few could truly understand. This young woman immediately became a stand-in for every high school girl I had ever known, every waitress or barista I had a secret crush on, in short, every glowing and ascendant person who made my day, or even just the idea of my day, a little brighter.

Halfway around the world in Pennsylvania, another tragedy, one much less publicized, but also containing a thread linking it back to the Middle East, was unfolding. Brad Stone, a marine who had been deployed in Iraq but was now walking with a cane and suffering PTS, was murdering his family. He killed 6 people and seriously wounded another before stabbing himself to death in the nearby woods.

Man Haron Monis, the deeply trouble Iranian-born refugee who caused so much havoc and fear in Sydney, appears to have been so completely deranged as to be almost divorced from politics, but whatever madness possessed him drew him to adopt radical and violent ideologies. Stone, who had fought in Iraq, returned damaged, beyond the nation’s capacity or willingness to salvage. Both of these men proved to be murderous examples of the collateral damage associated with whatever Orwellian title you want to give the ongoing conflicts (War on Terror, Clash of Civilization, Oil Wars) in the Middle East.

Such violent, tragic outbursts are not political statements against policy, but are the vivid, real life consequences of the policy. If a land is bombed and destroyed by an invading nation, both those that do the invading and those that suffer at their hands are damaged in irreparable and unimaginable ways—the experience poisons the soul. There is no winner in such a war, except for the economic machinery that profits from it. The rage, pain and loss of those on the ground can never be measured or contained, and will forever bleed back into the world, manifesting as a furious, sucking whirlpool of such force that everybody is affected.