We are standing in front of our apartment on a hot and humid morning, and it is the first time in over a week I have been well enough to take him to daycare. We welcome this return, although we do not speak it. It lives in our eyes, in the way we look at one another. Everything once again in the right place. A bird chirps brightly from above and I ask Jones what it said.
“First he said hello to me then he said hello to you.”
We wave back, and as we walk up the street Jones tells me his dream from the night.
“I was a baby and I lived in Mommy’s hair.”
It is a beautiful image, and I feel like a light has just entered into my body. Jones happy and striking poses on the sidewalk, and then a crack of thunder above and around us, big drops of rain falling slow then fast. We hurry for shelter, finding some on the porch of a large, old house. The house with the raspberry bush. The house where the owners used to invite us in and give us things from their garden, before they moved away and the property became so mysteriously and beautifully overgrown.
Sheltered, we feel like we’re in a turret or a cave. All is brick and stone and dark cement. The rain is harder now and it’s exciting, cathartic. Everybody on the street soaking wet, everybody feeling vulnerable, yet freer than they’ve felt in a long time–all relieved to have the order and artifice of their day washed from them. And Jones begins to sing and dance. A scene from Singing in the Rain. His smile is big and silly and true, and the rain pours off the sloped roof above us like a waterfall– the fortune, the miracle to be alive within this baptismal moment.
Doug Ford, the Conservative Premier of Ontario, is known for many things.
He is the brother of Toronto’s late, fun-loving mayor Rob Ford, is the canny businessman who led Deco Labels, Flexible Packaging and Cannabis Dispensary to a top 12 business ranking in the greater Etobicoke region for three of the last five years, and is an avid hockey fan who coaches a Peewee team in Etobicoke. What follows is the speech Ford gave to his players between periods during a recent game:
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“Great moments are born from great opportunity. And that’s what we have here, today, boys. This game sits before us like an undervalued property waiting to be bought and turned into condos by an alpha businessman! Do we have the necessary capital to make the purchase? You’re damn right we do! Do we have our mortgage rate advantageously negotiated?
I can’t hear you!
I still can’t hear you!!
I. SAID. DO! WE! HAVE! OUR! MORTGAGE! RATE! ADVANTAGEOUSLY! NEGOTIATED!
That’s better.
You’re damn right we do!!
We have the best flipping mortgage rate in the entire city!
We have all the talent and all the character we need to take this game from the Tornadoes, we just need to stop playing like a bunch of goddamn Midwives out there! You’re were playing like little girl witches out there in the first period. Sweeping your sticks about like ladies with brooms instead of chopping with them like they were axes. It’s like we’ve been cleaning up after the Tornadoes, not dominating them, and the Deco Labels, Flexible Packaging and Cannabis Dispensary Devils don’t clean up after nobody!!
Jesus H. Christ.
Defranco, please tell me I did not hear you interrupting me with a stupid question asking what a Midwife was. I will bench your skinny ass. Don’t think I won’t. I would welcome the opportunity. You just try me, Defranco. I dare you.
Yeah.
That’s what I thought.
Not so tough now, are you, you pitiful little puck bunny.
Okay, now that Midwife Defranco got his question out of his system, we can get back to strategy. Boys, I want you to think of the Tornadoes as a greenbelt that we are going to raze in order to develop. We are going to chop those little bastards down. We are going to throw their nests from their trees and shit in their brooks. We are going to show them what it feels like to be developed by the Etobicoke Deco Labels, Flexible Packaging and Cannabis Dispensary Devils! We are going to bring the full might of the free market down upon their socialist heads!
ARE WE OPEN FOR BUSINESS?
YES!
YES, WE ARE GODDAMN WELL OPEN FOR BUSINESS, NOW LET LOOSE THE HOUNDS OF WAR, BOYS, AND TAKE THIS MOMENT AND MAKE IT YOURS!!!
]]>Public shaming of members of President Trump’s administration has become the latest act of resistance against the government. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant, Environmental Protection Agency Chief Scott Pruitt was lectured and videotaped while dining out, Kellyanne Conway, a consultant to Trump, was mocked in a grocery store, and most recently Stephen Miller, a particularly loathsome advisor to Trump, threw out $80 worth of sushi after the bartender followed him outside of the restaurant and told him to go fuck himself.
Here, in their own words, are other Trump officials relating their stories of being heckled in public:
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Mira Ricardel, Deputy National Security Advisor:
“ I was called a ‘Shit Donkey’ by some tall woman when I went to see Ocean’s 8 at the Cineplex. It completely ruined the movie for me. This is not the America I know.”
Kevin McAleenan, Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection:
“ I had just finished collecting the quarters from the washer and dryers at one of my rental properties and was walking back to my car when I felt a little sting on the back of my neck. When I turned around I saw that some old man sitting on a stoop had just spit a sunflower shell on my neck. He then fired another, and that one hit me in the leg, and as I reached for my taser he called me “a traitor to my nation and to humanity,” before twitching out.
Wilbur Ross, Secretary of Commerce:
“ The woman working on my feet during my morning sports pedicure was extremely rough, almost violent while exfoliating my heels. And make no mistake, it was intentional. I can tell. And when I admonished her and told her how lucky she was to be living in America, she said something under her breath in a foreign language. I called the manager and had her fired, but it’s getting intolerable, this lack of civility.”
Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education:
“ I was at the Illuminati sex party in Novgorod and right after the sacrifice, a man wearing a goat’s head refused to have sex with me saying, “Children in cages aren’t my thing, you Trump skank.” I had my mask on so I don’t even know how he knew who I was. Jesus, I don’t even want to think about what they’re saying about me at Martha’s Vineyard!”
Peter O’Rourke, Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs:
“ I was at a Bryan Adams concert with a few of my paintball buddies and while I was out on the floor enjoying the show I saw that they put my picture on the giant screen with the words, EVIL TRUMP FLUNKY across it. Not cool, Bryan, not cool.”
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It was a microburst, and the whole thing was over in about three minutes. There was a sudden blast from above, around and beyond, and it felt like the Mighty Thor had just hammered the earth and summoned forth all elements of sky.
The wind was haphazard and suicidal, as if careening out of control down a hill, and it gathered the falling rain in unequal, horizontal batches and then smashed it against whatever surface stood before it. The big tree in front practically shattered, and as it scattered before us, we could see one of it’s massive branches wheeling through the sky, and then in just a moment or two, it all stopped, and everything was quiet and strange and wonderful.
The power was out, and all the people living up and down the street came tenderly from their homes to marvel at the fallen landscape around us. Jones, so small and alive, jumped in puddles and walked amidst the rent trees like the jungles they were.
There was a clear, cooling wind that felt like it was coming off foreign waters, and people gathered before their homes to share their stories.
In this densely populated part of the city, we catch glimpses of our neighbours rather than actually know them, but with the storm all obligations of habit and place and order seemed to vanish. We were free of that, sort of, and it was like we could no longer pretend we were strangers.
The neighbour who never waved, the organized looking one with the yoga mat and unfriendly ponytail, well, she waved at us for the first time. Buck, the almost-old man who lives alone next door, the one I thought was an asshole until I discovered he was partially deaf and never heard me saying ‘hello,’ was like an 11 year-old. Excitedly, he rode about on his 30 year-old CCM bike, returning wide-eyed to say things like, “You should see Bernard Street! Trees everywhere!” Dogs now on walks, pulled comically massive branches along behind them. Couples, happy to be without power, happy to know they were lucky enough that being without power was a fun little, adventure rather than a life-altering catastrophe, headed out for dinner. And the basement tenant, as thin and mysterious as a pirate, came up and surveyed the scene. After deducing how to solve the most immediate problem, he got a small handsaw and began to wordlessly cut the fallen branches of the tree, quickly clearing a path on the sidewalk– the ash never once dropping from his cigarette.
All of us now, after something so unexpected, powerful and unknowable, felt a sense of shared, mortal vulnerability. The stable, trusted world we had imagined had been revealed a flimsy thing. Lucky for so many reasons, we all lingered together outside, comforted by the other, like ancients around a campfire, small and humble beneath an endless sky.
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The other day I was in a cab heading east on Bloor Street.
It was a beautiful, sunny day in autumn, a lucky day, even, but I was preoccupied by petty grievance. The driver was a smoker, and in order to air out his car before he picked me up he’d opened all the windows. You’d think I’d appreciate this, but I couldn’t get past the heavy, permanent smell of smoke, and the open windows were just serving as conduits, breaches through which all my seasonal allergies might stream. Somewhat unkindly, I asked him to close the windows, which he did, and with that it was like a wall went up between us.
As we approached Varsity Stadium he reopened a couple of the windows I had asked him to close, but before I could protest, music thumped into the car. A marching band–glittering in red and undulating like a flag– was in the stands performing the Battle Hymn of the Republic while a football game unfolded beneath.
Somehow this ignited a million unanticipated things at once, and we drove through the music with our heads out the window, as if it was weather we thirsted for.
On the field U of T was playing Queens and the crowd sounded like a tiny ocean. The athletes, all perfect, all aimed from birth to this moment in time, stood about like gold and blue statues. And one of them was going to make the best catch of his life, something he would return to again and again over the course of his life. Somebody else was going to get injured and never be quite the same. And in that crowd another person would see a beautiful young woman smile and feel nourished. A woman in a wheelchair felt the sun, and parents from small cities and towns, drove in to see their now grown children– now so terribly missed, now just beyond their protective reach.
The driver, whom I had forgotten about for a moment, startled me by speaking.
“I am not from here, so none of this is familiar to me,” He gestured toward the football stadium. “But still, when I hear that music and see all the people, it calls me in my bones. It is a kind of nostalgia, but for what I do not know.”
Sadly, this state of affairs continued after she happened upon a garage sale ( http://michaelmurray.ca/garage-sale ) Rachelle and I were having, and then kind of exploded the other night on Twitter when I got involved in a debate about condos she was having with another Toronto writer. I interceded in the middle of the debate, and these are the tweets that passed between Atwood and I on that night:
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@margaretatwood: The un-rich have owned their houses for decades. Why should a development go right up to their lot lines and kill their beloved trees?
@michaelmurrayca: Have you seen an un-rich!?!? I hear they have teeth where ears should be and can only be killed by Dragonglass or gentrification!
@margaretatwood: Oh. It’s you.
@michaelmurrayca: I am an un-rich, you know.
@margaretatwood: Yes, I was able to deduce that from that little garage sale you had.
@michaelmurrayca: Made almost $80 at that sale.
@margaretatwood: Why, that must be more than you made on your book!
@michaelmurrayca: Unlike some authors who quickly sell-out to tv, I have some integrity. It’s not all about the money, Margaret, some of us are artists.
@margaretatwood: There is no hyphen in sellout.
@michaelmurrayca: I hear that they’re making The Handmaid’s Tale into a reality tv show.
Kind of like The Bachelor. You must be very proud.
@margaretatwood: Yes, as proud as your wife and son must be of you and your ability to provide for them through your “art.”
@michaelmurrayca: You remind me of Cersei Lannister.
@margaretatwood: You hate powerful women, do you?
@michaelmurray: Yes, very, very much.
@margaretatwood: Do you also disapprove of civic mindedness?
@michaelmurrayca: I am for whatever position you are against.
@margaretatwood: So you are in favour of killing trees, then?
@michaelmurrayca: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
@margaretatwood: So the fact that you’re totally uninformed about this condo development and the devastation it will bring to the local environment, that doesn’t prevent you from jumping in with an “opinion?”
@michaelmurrayca: I’d say it’s more commentary than opinion.
@margaretatwood: Tu tetras, homo parum de moron.
@michaelmurrayca: Oh, la-di-da! The grand dame speaks French!
@margaretatwood: Yes, I do, but the Tweet you are referring to happened to be latin. Like they speak in Mexico.
@michaelmurrayca: Were you called Margaret Fatwood in high school?
@margaretatwood: Oh my, I had forgotten about your biting wit.
@michaelmurrayca: In high school I was called The Enforcer.
@margaretatwood: It was ironic, I take it?
@michaelmurrayca: I was practically a god in high school, you have no idea!!
@margaretatwood: You miss those days, don’t you?
@margaretatwood: In spite of all the sport’s teams you never made, the low C’s you struggled to achieve and all the pretty girls who wouldn’t even glance at you, those were still the best years of your life, weren’t they?
@margareatatwood: Yes, I thought so.
]]>My most recent invention is a dating service called Hater Mater, where people are paired based on the things they dislike rather than the things that they like.
This is the preliminary questionnaire I have written for people using the App:
1. On a scale of 0-10, how much do you hate the sky?
2. Please choose the stupidest fucking sign in the zodiac.
3. Order these celebrities in the sequence in which you would most want to see them surreally injured in a crossbow incident:
Amy Schumer
The Ikea Monkey
Ethan Hawke
The entire cast from Orange is the New Black
Eric Trump
Adam Driver and Terry Richardson
4. On a scale of 0-10, how much do you hate the ocean?
5. Which Margaret Atwood novel gives you the worst stabbing stomach pain?
6. What do you hate more, squirrels or birds? (Please elaborate)
7. Do your parents hate you more than you hate them, or do you hate them more than they hate you?
8. Is you best friend kind of an asshole?
9. Do you find chopsticks to be infuriating and stupid and pretentious?
10. Do you often find yourself fantasizing about making over-rated Canadian author Margaret Atwood cry?
11. Which part of this passage from a celebrated Margaret Atwood novel do you despise the most?
“Who are you? And I mean really. Who are you?”
My gut tells me that if I tell her right now, in this moment, it will not be well-received. “A friend,” I say, my gaze lowering to her lush mouth and lifting. “And the man who wants to kiss you. Really kiss you. Can I kiss you, Myla?”
“You’re asking?”
“Yes. I’m asking. After all you’ve been through-”
“He hasn’t destroyed me. He hasn’t beaten me and I don’t like that you think he has.”
“I don’t think he’s beaten you.”
“He hasn’t,” she insists. “I’m not giving him that power and damn it, you better not either by treating me like I’m broken and fragile. So kiss me if you’re going to kiss me or let me go, if you don’t want-”
I cup the back of her head, and slant my mouth over hers, my tongue sliding against hers, stroking, caressing, and the taste of her, one part hunger I welcome, but the other part, the torment, I intend to drive away. I deepen the kiss, my hand pressing beneath her tank top, finding warm, soft skin. My fingers splay over her rib cage, while my mind reminds me that no matter how big she talks, she wants this escape for a reason. She has been abused, used, hurt. “
12. “Everybody loves a parade,” true or false?
13. Is Real Estate for fools?
14. When you hear the word “Mindfulness” do you want to build an attack drone or buy a magic killing sword?
15. What do you hate more, having to use a sink or writing with a pen?
16. Which superhero would you most like to beat-up in a fight?
17. Do you hate it when people say, “Good Morning!”
18. Are relationships insanely unrealistic and entirely impossible?
19. On a scale of 1 to 100, how much do you hate non-Spanish speaking people who pronounce Nicaragua as ‘Knee-ah-rah-hah?”
20. If you heard that Margaret Atwood opened a restaurant and that all the sandwiches were named after her poems, would you immediately vomit?
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From @realDonaldTrump:
Ron Glass died! Black guy on Barney Miller. Very fussy and wordy. Maybe gay. Easy to overlook. Just 71. Still in the prime of his life. Sad.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Florence Henderson died! America’s original MILF. Did I? Wouldn’t be classy to tell, but as Flo is dead– yes, many, many times. Once with Marcia, too.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Leonard Cohen died! Think it was a nut allergy. Might have to ban nuts. We’re losing too many of the good ones to them.#WarOnNuts!
From @realDonaldTrump:
I am in perfect health. No nut allergy. Can eat nuts by the handful. Shame about Crooked Hillary’s health. So very sick. Tired all the time. Crooked Hillary next to die?
From @realDonaldTrump:
Jose Fernandez died! Great, great pitcher for Miami. Un hombre sincero. Had box seats for his last start. Great service. Stunning waitresses. They love me in Florida.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Sharon Jones died! Pancreatic cancer. Nasty. I stand with the black people, who love me, love me so much, during this sad, sad time. I will fix your broken inner cities!!
From @realDonaldTrump:
Pat Harrington Jr. died! The janitor guy on One Day at a Time. Decent show. Maybe not the best. Preferred Three’s Company. Chrissy? She was a 9, for sure. Body and face.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Actress Suzanne Somers played Chrissy. Blonde and jiggly. I won’t lie to you, I had sex with her many times. So many times you wouldn’t believe.
From @realDonaldTrump:
One time we did it in the linen closet of a 5 star restaurant. She was a great piece of real estate, that lady. Outstanding. #WomenLoveMe.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Muhammad Ali died! Great showman. Brought lots of people and money into the casinos. Huge amounts. He got so shaky in the end, though. Sad.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Former Miss New Jersey Cara McCollum has died! Saw her naked more than once in the change room at the pageant. Body a solid 9. Face? Maybe a 7 on a good day. We mourn her passing.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Prince has died! He was never my thing. Straight or gay? Hard to tell. Always changing his brand. Very confusing for the consumer. Made him a bad businessman. #BuyTrumpBrandWater
From @realDonaldTrump:
David Bowie died! Had a glass eye. Was married to a Somalian supermodel. Guy was way out there. Tried to get him on Celebrity Apprentice but there were scheduling problems.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Gene Wilder died! Alzheimer’s Disease. Couldn’t remember a thing in the end. I am in perfect health. My mind is like a platinum trap. Ivy League educated. So, so very smart. #HighestPresidentialIQOfAllTime
From @realDonaldTrump:
Chyna has died! Drug overdose. I have never taken any drugs in my life. Unlike Crooked Hillary who is on HUGE amounts of meds. She’s all weak and shaky like Ali was before his death. Don’t think she has long.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Chyna was a great lady wrestler. Really tall. Kind of homely, but still able to turn a profit in porn. Gotta admire that.
Always thought Ivanka could dominate the industry if she chose.
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Recently, he’s gone so far as to start referring to the man as Saint Donald, and as absurd and even ironic as this strikes the vast majority of the populace, people have been reporting miracles involving Donald Trump for quite some time:
A golfer who lives in Anaheim claims to have seen an apparition of Donald Trump floating above the 13th green at the prestigious Trump National Golf Club. Normally, the golfer would have laid up and played for a par, but the Trump apparition seemed to be telling him to go for it, and so he did, holing the 260 yard shot for an eagle. “It was a damn miracle,” Chip Anger said, “I’d never done anything like that in my life.”
It was reported the Donald Trump came upon a Miss Universe contestant taking a bath and that she tried to entice him to bathe with her.
However, she was not Donald’s type, as he does not like small breasts, and so he refused, but not wanting to leave the young woman devastated, he turned her bath water into Trump Super Premium Vodka.
An evil and disgruntled contestant on The Apprentice had been making designs to assassinate Donald Trump, as she was certain she was to be the next who was to be fired. While in the boardroom she poured some poison into his glass of Trump brand water, and sure enough, just as Donald uttered the words, “Ereka, you’re fired!” his glass of water spontaneously shattered.
A man’s wife would not have sex with him. She would not even stimulate his genitals with her hand, and was planning on leaving him, so this man asked Trump for some advice on how to bring back her love. And Trump blessed a Trump brand steak for him, and said: “Serve your woman this steak, and after she has eaten of the Trump brand steak and tidied up, her lust for you will be huge.” And after the man had done that, his wife gave him great love, and it remained that she could not be far from him and was always eager to please him.
One day while some of his luxury condo dwellers were busy enjoying their opulent homes of burnished marble and luxurious platinum, all the power went out. When Donald Trump was told of this problem, flames, like flashes from a flint when struck, leapt from his tiny, vulgar fingers and all electricity was immediately restored.
It’s just not quality.
Melania is posing naked for a classy magazine.
I’m really happy about this because I want everybody to see what I have and they don’t, so I’m at the photo shoot making sure everything goes Trump perfect. I’m giving Melania instructions on how to pose, and as she’s doing exactly what I tell her to do, I try to Tweet a picture with the words,“Twice with this one last night!” but discover I can’t get into my Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump.
I am building a wall. It’s a great wall, a huge wall. It’s going to be the best wall ever. And then somebody, A Mexican, approaches me and tells me that there are scuff marks on some of the imported marble. A Mexican. What does a Mexican know about imported marble? Nothing. Enraged, I pummel him with the might of an angry white nation, and when I’m finished I’m covered in Mexican blood, which is just disgusting. I try to wash it off but can’t, and the more people I hire to wash it off, the thicker and stickier it seems to get.
I am in the penthouse of one of my many, many luxury apartments. I’m there to evict the deadbeat tenants by forcing them to jump off the balcony. One of them refuses. I wake up in a cold sweat.
I am waterboarding Ted Cruz’s wife because she won’t change her last name to something American.
In spite of her pain and terror and screaming and begging, and that her top was so wet it was completely see-thru, the experience was not nearly as sexually exciting as I had expected it to be. Woke up feeling empty, a sensation that trailed me all day long.
I am Captain of the Starship Enterprise.
I’ve rented out three decks as luxury condos, converted the Holodeck into a casino, crushed the Starfleet union and am running a real estate training program for my promising officers. Federation mismanagement had been costing the tax payers a fortune, but with me at the helm, the Starship Enterprise was making a fantastic profit and had never looked better. And then we’re doing a routine patrol of Quadrant 4 when a Klingon Bird of Prey suddenly materialized before us. As I was negotiating with their Captain, I noticed a stain on my uniform. Laundry had screwed up again!
In this dream I am a boy, lost and alone in the woods with no business plan.
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