A beautiful woman in a sundress,  her hair still wet from the morning shower, was trying to unlock a door. The sun was falling upon her, the wooden porch, the entire red brick face of the home. She didn’t have the right key and was struggling with the lock, with how her morning was assembling itself, and she tossed her head back in frustration. Tiny, almost imagined droplets of water were cast from her hair and caught in the sunlight, and everything seemed to stop for a moment. 

And then a raccoon, having slipped from night into day, emerged from behind a tree. With his detached animal knowingness he stared directly at us. Jones, astonished, squealed at the miracle, while the raccoon, keeping to the shadows, disappeared back into the night of some protective greenery. Up at the corner, at the mulberry tree and raspberry bushes,  so many berries had been crushed on the sidewalk that they looked like paintball splatters. There were berries hanging above us and growing from the earth beneath us, and it was like we’d passed into a different realm and were now moving through a fertile, green tunnel. As I was picking a raspberry for Jones, a woman sprinted by us toward the subway. Plugged into her iPhone, with a knapsack on her back and a briefcase in one hand, she was ready for the big meeting, ready to present the best version of herself to the world. She was moving fast, like an athlete who still retained her running form from college, days that had recently started to feel further and further away. 

An older man, immaculately dressed in wardrobe that looked from another century, ambled up the street coming to pass a college-aged woman wearing a bright yellow dress. Her face was still new, and she carried with her a pronounced, heaving limp that was mysterious and beautiful and sad, and when she smiled past us, there was the unexpected scent of clove cigarettes and skin cream. A butterfly then appeared and it was a sign. Perhaps a spirit guide, and Jones declared that we must follow it, and so we did– everything around us like still lingering dreams from the previous night, only now beginning to fade into the waking day.

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

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:

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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.

The first thing we came to understand is that you have to cede a lot of control and adapt to your baby rather than have your baby adapt to you. It’s also been important for us to discover that there are a billion different ways to raise a child, and any attempt at raising the child in a glittering, TV commercial kind of way is doomed. For instance, our Doula was an ex-cop who took smoke breaks throughout Rachelle’s labour, and shouted things like, “Push like there’s no goddamn tomorrow, push till you feel like you’re going to shit, then push ’til you feel like you’re going to shit and puke!” It wasn’t what we expected, but it worked.

When we found ourselves overwhelmed, disoriented and exhausted after the first week of being parents, we reached out for the help of a night nurse who would come in once a week and look after the baby while we slept. We found a man named Jim through an ad on Craig’s List. He had a super reasonable rate ($75 and a bottle of wine) and seemed very nice on the phone, so we thought we’d give him a try.

These are the notes he wrote for us (feeding time, amount fed, etcetera) when he was caring for Jones:

August, 23

11: 15 pm— James is a cute, little bugger. Sometimes when he’s sleeping it looks like he’s punching at somebody. Think he’s going to grow up to be fighter. We gotta give him a fighter nickname. I like “Little Fister,” but it’s your baby, so it’s your call!

11:45 pm—Had quick shower.

11: 50 pm—Crying like it’s the goddamned end of the world. Solution? Bottle. Four ounces of the good stuff. He loved it, just like a little wino. Got him to burp, then changed his diaper (Hoo, daddy!) and told him stories about the greatest hockey fights of all time until he fell asleep at about 12:30 am.

12:35 am—Didn’t see any cheese in the fridge. Not a big deal, but just thought I should let you know. Always good to have a lot of cheese in the house.

1:00 am—Now watching Netflix and completely into the totally awesome Deep Impact, which is a way better end-of-the-world flick than Armageddon. Can’t believe how young Leelee Sobieski is in it! She looks like a little child! Hard to believe she grew up to be a sex bomb. Not that long ago, somebody hacked into her cell phone and spread her “personal photos” all over the internet. Did you see them? Me neither. I’d never look at stolen material. (LOL!!)

2:00-2:30 am—Smoke Break: Left some Loggins and Messina on in the nursery to help calm little Jimbo. (Note: You have raccoons in your backyard)

2:45am—James crying. Fed him four ounces of milk, changed his diaper (just pee!) and then soothed him while watching the rest of Deep Impact. By the end, James had stopped crying and I’d started!

3:15 am—Put James to sleep. As a point of interest, this is the time in the Amityville Horror movie when the father killed his entire family while they slept. Always gives me the creeps this time. Weird thoughts.

3:20 am—Washed hands.

I don’t believe that this crime was committed by a hacker collective known as The Impact, as has been reported, because The Impact can be nothing other than the name of a (white) B-Boy dance troupe from back in the 80’s.

At any rate, I think that the bloody-minded terrorist group ISIS, who really knows how to tear at the fabric of Western society, was responsible. They want to expose our corrupt ways and force our children to watch us shriek at one another while washing dishes after dinner. But no, no, I am not going to let terror win. When our leaders called upon us to shop in order to fight terror, I shopped, and now, when it is clear that we must continue our adulterous ways in order to stave off terror, I will be adulterous. I am for the troops, and with that in mind, I have just joined Ashley Madison.

This is my profile page:

RaccoonDrumCircleSexMachine

“Renaissance man”

Age: 36 (Leo)

Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Height: 6’0″ (183cm)

Weight: 190 lbs (86kg) – Average/medium

Languages Spoken: English

My Limits are: Undecided

Status: Attached Male seeking Females

Gender: Male

Ethnicity: Caucasian (white)

Smoking Habits: Not specified

Tell me more about yourself:

I love puppies and animals in general, although I have never cheated on my wife by using them as sex slaves. By the way, raccoons are my favourite animal, and I am pretty sure they’re my spirit guides. Sometimes, I like to dress up as one for sex.

Besides that I do martial arts; extreme martial arts. And Parkour. I also play the drums, and it’s like I play the drums better than Satan, it’s like I’m having sex with those drums, it’s like a drumgasm! ( LOL!!) I’m also taking some college classes, one on zombies in popular media, because I love zombies and meeting young women who would normally be outside of my sphere. I work as an Uber driver (another great way to meet women and find out where they live) whenever my wife starts screaming at me about whether the forks are clean enough or some other bullshit.

Preferences and encounters I am open to:

I am on a quest– not just for sex with a female partner who is not my wife, but for all things. I will do and try anything. Some people say that I am fearless, as fearless as an urban raccoon. Would somebody who isn’t fearless spend just over a week in the woods searching for Bigfoot? I don’t think so. A person with fear would cringe from that challenge, but not RaccoonDrumCircleSexMachine! I went to the woods. Will you go to the woods with me?

What really turns me on:

Honesty would have to be number one, and a close second would be to see a Bigfoot man and a Bigfoot lady going at it.

What I am looking for:

I like chicks who dig passionate drummers, as well as submissive Goth types who are into role playing, but mostly I just like really hot babes. Here are some examples:

No Asians please.

“This city has a serious raccoon problem. I’ve had some standoffs with some raccoons, seriously. I’m a big guy, powerful, a football player, and when I holler the trees shake, but the friggin’ raccoons, they just look at you. They’re not scared anymore. It’s a severe problem we’re having in this great city, and it’s only getting worse. They’re getting braver and braver by the day. I’m not a big raccoon fan, I’ll tell you that straight up. We have to kill them.”

As I have a personal relationship from the Mayor stretching back to our college days drinking together, he’s consented to give me a short interview exploring his feelings about the raccoon.

Me: “Rob, can you tell me about your most powerful raccoon experiences?

Rob: “ When I was in grade seven a raccoon climbed the fence and tried to enter into our family pool area to steal some food. Biggest mistake that raccoon ever made. Remember, I was drinking and getting high in those days, and when I saw that raccoon, I saw red, it was like I protecting the QB, you know? I started to chuck rocks at him, and I think the third one hit him square in the face, knocking him out. He was bleeding, and it was obvious that the merciful thing to do was kill him, so I bashed his head in with the ghetto blaster. It was messier than I would have thought, and one of the girls there, one that I liked, started to scream and cry and I knew getting some with her wasn’t going to be easy that night, and it was then that I realized the city had a really serious raccoon problem.

About a year later, and this lasted most of high school, I started to have these debilitating raccoon nightmares. Had to drop all my math and science and economic and history courses, the stress was so bad. I don’t want to talk too much about it, but it was like I was the last man on earth and all around me were these predatory ghost-raccoons trying to steal my stuff and eat my manhood. There was a bed-wetting issue for a while. You know, I wouldn’t have been able to admit that before, but rehab has taught me to be honest, so yeah, I wet my bed up until I was 18 and I’m not ashamed of it. It’s the fault of the raccoons, my fucking spirit enemy.

You might imagine how I hated them after all the years of nightmares and boring immersion therapy, and so Doug and I took it upon ourselves to just kill as many as we could. Using golf clubs mostly, we killed the hell out of them. We were athletes and we just felt compelled to win, you know? It was a, what do you call it? A holy war thing. We used to make necklaces out of their little fingers and then wear them to school dances. I guess you could say I’ve always had a special relationship with the raccoon.”

What follows is Rob Ford’s response:

“The pandas? What do I think of the pandas? I think I goddamn love pandas!! (Takes reporter and places him in genial headlock while giving him a Noogie.) Ah, just fudging around, look, to be serious with ya for a second though, I got to say that I’ve always related to the panda. They’re big, strong and fiercely committed to their people, just like football players.

And you know, they’ve always got the eye black on, so you just know that they’re ready to go into battle. I’d be proud to go into battle with an army of pandas, and Jesus, if I had a team of football playing pandas we’d be as undefeatable as the free market! Just think about it. We wouldn’t lose a single game. Not. A. Single. Fucking. One.

Anyway, I have to give props to our communist Chinese friends for loaning us these pandas and letting them live in freedom for a few years. Hopefully, once the pandas get a taste for the independent, small government, big city dynamo that is Toronto– it’ll really get them turned-on. Guns ‘N’ Roses turned-on. Toronto is like an awesome guitar solo, you know?  Toronto will make the pandas hot, really hot, feeling all sexy like they’re watching a yoga class!  Does it to me everyday. The city girl make me hot, man, hot, sweaty hot. But Geez, it’s hard to imagine that pandas don’t like sex, but it’s a fact of science. Weird, that. So it’s my hope that Er Shawn is like the Jennifer Aniston of pandas and Dammy can’t keep his paws off of her. It’ll be Panda Time all the time, and we’ll become an industry leader in panda breeding. That means more jobs. More jobs for people who never even dreamed that they might one day get to see panda sex. (High-five)

Toronto is the city, stinkin’ rich in Asian culture and with a great Chinatown full of real cheap eats (and a spitting problem that I will take care of) where dreams can come true.  We’ll be known as panda city and we’ll have those little warrior bears all over the place! It’ll be so cute it’ll make you barf, and listen, I bet you my bottom dollar, that when my fucking downtown fucking casino opens, that the whores will be two for one and that all those baby pandas will clean up the raccoon problem that has plagued this city for years! If I, or any of my constituents have raccoon shit in their eaves troughs again, the whole frigging species is going get it. Raccoons, consider yourself on watch because Rob Ford and the pandas have a plan, and you aren’t in that plan.

And you know, this might sound all freaky or something, but I’ve had a lot of funny dreams involving pandas. Can’t quite explain it. I once wore a panda mask on Chat Roulette, didn’t even know why. Saw the video after the fact. Anyway, seems like fate that my city is going to be the city of panda sex–wild, eh? ”

Yes, I’m alive.

????

No, nobody is eating my face.

You don’t believe me?

You think the killer has my iPhone?

Of course.

If I was a face-eating killer I think I’d stop to text with the victim’s husband.

It’s only polite.

You want me to prove I’m myself?

Ok.

How would you like me to proceed?

My favourite animal?

OK.

Satan.

Yes, he is.

How do you know Satan isn’t an animal?

They call him the Beast and in pictures he has horns.

Is 2.

Is 2.

Another animal?

I like baby sloths.

Your remind me of a baby sloth.

Ok.

I’m glad you believe it’s me.

Why r u so spooked?

Yes, the news is scary right now.

Lots of weird murders.

That Magnotta is a bad man.

It is like the world is ending!

Really?

You think our downstairs neighbours are face-eaters?

What do you think a face tastes like?

If it tasted like chocolate, I might eat one.

No!

No!

I am not going to eat your face!

Or tear out your still beating heart.

I don’t have the zombie disease.

Alright, you devise your escape plans.

I hope it involves a speedy boat!

And maybe a giant bird.

I’m not making fun of u.

But be realistic.

U don’t have a driver’s license.

How r u going to escape the zombie apocalypse?

Honestly, u’d be the first they ate.

I know you used to be good at sports.

But that was a long time ago, honey.

Zombies won’t know about your “reputation.”

They just want to eat your face.

You just bought a boat on-line?

An inflatable raft?

Yes, I’m sure it was a good price.

And that you will float to safety when the apocalypse comes.

Can zombies swim?

Well, maybe you should look into that.

Yep.

Yes, I bet they would post the video of your face being eaten on-line.

No, not as an example.

Just so they could admire their work.

They’d savor you, I bet.

Well, they’d probably come up from the basement where they’ve been living.

Through the open window where you have the AC.

Is the AC on now?

It’s not even hot.

Jesus.

You are a money waster!

You’re wasting money and making yourself vulnerable to zombie attack!

Yes, they’ll come through the open window!

And you won’t even hear them because of the AC racket!

And then your face will be gone!

Yeah.

The dog probably licks your face just to clean it for the zombie attack.

Gotta go now!

C u soon.

Just finishing a beer with the girls.

Please cancel your boat order.

xox