- It’s late at night and I’m at my laptop playing WordCrack on Facebook.
I’m killing it. Words are just coming to me as if by magic. I’m easily the best WordCrack player who has ever existed. I am happy and at peace, surging through my life with the confidence and brilliance of an elite athlete. And then, amidst all the letters in the scramble, I see the name Jones popping up. I know it means something important and that it’s my duty to highlight and score the letters in order to keep my son safe, but when I try to do this, his name vanishes and appears somewhere else. I’m desperate, frantic in my attempts, but his name keeps eluding me, and then suddenly my time is up and I’ve failed. My score is zero. With a sense of dread I walk toward the nursery to check on Jones, but I know he won’t be there, that he’s gone, and that it’s my fault because I wasn’t a good enough WordCrack player.
2. Laetitia Casta and I are on a beach.
“Do you want me to climb up that tree and get you a coconut, mon cherie?” I ask her.
She says that she does and I shimmy up the tree with the greatest of ease. As I start to shake the tree, Laetitia does a cute, little dance for me down on the beach, “You are such a nimble, little monkey!” she says.
I can feel the sun on my face and the salt water breeze wafting through my hair. I am young and invincible. I shake the tree trunk a little bit harder, hollering like Tarzan, and this makes Laetitia laugh, and a coconut breaks free and begins to fall toward the beach, but instantly, it turns into Jones. I scream and throw myself after him, and I am falling for an eternity through a kind of darkness, never catching up to him, and then I wake up in a cold, poisonous sweat.
3. Rachelle, Jones and I are playing Risk.
I have amassed all my troops in Quebec and have assured myself victory, but Rachelle and Jones make a pact and gang-up on me. I try to be good natured about this, but inside I am burning with anger and jealousy. In short order they eliminate all my troops and knock me out of the game, laughing together as they do so. I start to scream at Jones, “You’ve always loved your mother more than me, always!!” And then I wake up feeling like an asshole, trailing this weight of shame behind me all day long.
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He’s receded from public life and many have been wondering what he’s been doing. As it turns out, one of the things he’s been doing is applying to attend an Icelandic Writer’s Retreat in April. The application required that you write a short story or essay based on the following photograph of the Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center:
This is Doug Ford’s entry:
Sometimes a guy can go to a pretty black place. That can happen after you lose an election. When your whole life has been about winning, and winning hard, losing feels like a sucker punch to the gut. Not even football or pornography or yelling at people can fill the hole. Sometimes a guy has to go to therapy.
Therapy is for the weak, and Ron Ice, a very successful businessman and philanthropist, was not a weak man. He was a powerful man, a man who was a shot put champion at his high school.
Girls used to gather around to watch him throw the shot put. Ron was like a Nordic god and he did very well with the ladies, thank you very much. Those were good times for Ron, but now, with all the critics and small people yammering away at him after the election, all the people who don’t understand how to run a business, he realized he needed to clear his head, even if it was the weak thing to do.
Ron looked deep into his soul and realized that he wanted to broaden his horizons.
Iceland.
Iceland was the territory that Ron always started in when he was playing Risk.
It had access to markets in both the east and west, had plenty of challenging terrain to hide in and there was little pollution. Ron would move to Iceland and start his empire there!
People loved Doug Ford in Iceland. He stood a good six inches taller than the rest of the population, and as he still looked like a Nordic god, people began to worship him, “Look!” the villagers would cry, “The prophecy is true and the Ice King now walks amongst us! Ron Ice took the country by goddamn storm.
One day ISIS terrorists took over the Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center where they planned to burn Christians in cages. Ron Ice would have none of that. Ron drove down there in his jeep, got out and just walked into the place. People were in awe of what big balls he had. When the terrorists saw him they all started yelling and getting excited in that language of theirs. They waved machine guns around, but Ron was as cool as ice.
He just stared at them, a penetrating hate stare, and then he began to yell, his mighty eyes bulging, and when he did they all put down their weapons like subservient kittens and were arrested.
Ron Ice walked out of there, got back in his jeep and drove up to the misty green hills of Norðurland vestra, where he had some property and a condo, and from where he would soon launch his internationally successful printing business Ice King Labels and Tags.
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