After more than 460,000 miles, the 2022 edition of The Amazing Race came to an end last night with husband and wife duo Justin Trudeau and Sophie Gregoire being crowned the winners! CBS spoke with Justin and Sophie to ask about their experience!

CBS: “Congratulations on your victory! Can you tell us how it felt when you won The Amazing Race?”

Sophie: “Oh, it was unbelievable. We were so physically and mentally exhausted at that point that it was just music to our ears!”

Justin: “This was really, really big. I think the only thing I can compare it to was surviving the Black Trump Virus back in 2019 when it wiped out almost a third of the world population.”

CBS: “What do you think was the secret to your success on The Amazing Race? ”

Sophie: “I believe the biggest thing was that we really thought through the Roadblocks and the Detours. At first we were really impulsive, just jumping in very aggressively, you know? But after our encounter with the underground tribes of Cannibal Island, we realized we were going to have to take a more strategic, measured approach.”

Justin: “Look, I’m very competitive person and I always expect to win. Before Peoplekind’s first contact with The Radium, I was the leader of a great nation, so I had the ability to build consensus with the tribes of Cannibal Island, and working together as one, we were able to destroy some of the other competing couples, namely Adam and Bethany.”

CBS: “That looks like a Canadian flag you have stitched onto your bindles. You were President of Canada in the Before Time, weren’t you?”

Justin: “Prime Minister, actually, but yes, it is true. We were known for our tolerance, diversity and inclusivity.”

Sophie: “Canada, toujours dans nos cœurs!”

CBS: “Indeed, we were all very sorry to see Canada burn during the dimensional shifts. So many fine comics used to come from there.”

Justin: “ Yes, Shaun Majumber, Rick Mercer and Russell Peters to name just a few.

CBS: “So what was your favourite moment from the Race?”

Sophie: “Oh gosh, definitely, the Bollywood Challenge we won in Global Sector 6. So much fun!”

Justin: “Absolutely, it was a real game changer.”

CBS: “So as a successful team, what advice would you give to future contestants going on the show?”

Sophie: “You must make all of the scheduled blood sacrifices to The Radium. It doesn’t matter if you’re exhausted or wounded, you still have to perform the entire sacrifice. Correctly. And if you don’t, The Radium will know! Look what happened to the mother son team of Dot and Danny.”

Justin: “I would just add that even though it’s important for you to respect the survivors of all the Global Sectors you visit, you really are better off shooting first and asking questions later. ”

CBS: “Do you have any special plans for the Oxygen Credits you just won on The Amazing Race?

Justin: “For now we’re not going to change. We’re going to just continue hunting and gathering, but eventually we would like to be able to acquire a flesh slave.”

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 year, in an effort to be a little more sensitive to those who might be upset by the images, Sports Illustrated hired me to write Trigger Warnings to precede each photograph:

Trigger Warning:

Viewing of the following image of totally inaccessible supermodel Tanya Mituyshin may trigger traumatic memories of the time you saw high school goddess Marie-Therese Vitzhum in a bikini at a pool party when you were in grade 10. You might recall how out of your league she was and how she seemed like she might have been from Europe, or some angel galaxy that was as far from Ottawa as anything could possible be. You might recall feeling bony, insufficient and pale, watching as she sat piggyback on the shoulders of the muscular Randy Rafter, her breasts pressing against the back of his head as she leaned forward laughing. This image of Tanya Mituyshin could trigger such memories, creating a constant, deeply haunting reminder that you never mustered the courage to speak to MT– as she was known to her friends– and how regardless of the status and success you might achieve, you will always feel like that overlooked and scared 14 year-old boy.

Trigger Warning:

Viewing of the following image of supermodel Hannah Davies may trigger traumatic memories for people who have had difficult relationships with fishing nets in their past. This photograph could spark a deeply repressed memory of the time your friend, as a “prank,” threw a fishing net over you down by the boathouse while attending a cottage party, and instead of fighting to escape from the net, you lay in a fetal position and quietly wept for your mother, certain that you were about to be murdered, as you had always had premonitions of death by fish net.

Trigger Warning:

Viewing the following image of supermodel Gigi Hadid may trigger feelings of profound resentment and homicidal rage in people with a history of despising life in a society where Gigi Hadid, a glittering, young celebrity, is considered an achievable model of feminine beauty. Recollections of unreasonable and cruel demands may flood over you as you navigate the aisles of Shopper’s Drug Mart, your mind flashing red to every cultural message that has ever helped make you feel that you were somehow just not enough. You’re just trying to get some shit done after a long, grinding day behind your desk at the Ministry of Transportation, and then there’s Gigi, smoulder-glowing out at you from the pages of a stupid magazine, and suddenly, before you know it, you’ve kicked the hell out of an entire display stand of kale-and-beet-infused shampoo and punched-out a pharmacist, Club Optima points be damned.

According to various reports, he is currently wandering around the remote BC island of Alert Bay, howling at the moon as if he’d just had his massive, mythical heart broken.

The news stations that deliver such stories do so with a smirk, as if it was on par with a Dachshund Super Bowl, a little bit of fun to indulge in at the end of a tough new cycle. Santa Claus stories packaged for children.

And yes, of course, unhinged obsessives touched with a kind of religious fervour and pranksters, make up the undying core of Bigfoot promoters. The sober mainstream asserts that Bigfoot does not exist because there is no proof or evidence that he does, and to believe anything else is to indulge in fantasy.

However, I would argue that this is a position of arrogance. We are inconceivably small in this universe. It’s impossible for us to process how small this pale blue dot is in the vast darkness of infinity.

There is more that is unknown than known in this world and beyond, and more that is invisible than visible. Our tools for perceiving the universe (sight, sound, smell) are pitiful. As humans, everything we know and sense, is created and processed by the mystical chemistry of our brain. It is literally true that the universe exists inside of our head, and it is worth keeping in mind that a different universe exists inside the brain of a spider. As a species, we apply our technology to expand our tools of perception so that we might better understand some of the things that lie beyond our natural ability. In short, we see very, very little.

Imagine you were a lobster living on the bottom of the oceans floors.

If you could be imbued with a consciousness like a human, there is simply no way that you could conceive of living on the same world as a creature like a human being. Physically, you could hardly be more dissimilar.

Your skeletal structure exists on the outside not the inside, you shuffle along in the bottomless dark of the cold seas. Humans, bipedal giants. You cannot imagine a world beyond water. You cannot imagine air, this transitional plain, or that there is a world yet beyond that, a terrestrial land where humans live in palaces, farming and managing your species and then devouring them as a delicacy. Such a thing would seem ludicrous and completely beyond your imagination, but we know that it is true. Perhaps, in the great expanse of time, distance and dimension, a similar analogy can be made, only with us as existing as the lobster and something else as humans.

In searching for Bigfoot we seek his proof on our terms, not his.

He must exist as we understand things to exist, not as he may exist. He must be visible to our eyes. But what if like radiation, or the wind, he’s not visible to to us? What if he’s not quite of this world we live in, just as we, are not quite of the world the lobster lives in?
The older I get, the weirder the universe becomes, and the more ridiculous it seems that we profess anything with certainty. The people who believe in Bigfoot are no more flawed in their methodology than those who claim his existence an impossibility, and so I am content to imagine his howls at night, a reminder of the limitless mystery both inside of us, and beyond.