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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I’ve never been able to tell who lives in this sprawl of a place, but sometimes I’ll see a girl sitting on the fence or a maybe couple of them standing about smoking furtively. Somehow, they all seem a little sideways, possessing wild, impulsive eyes suggesting that at any moment they might throw a rock through a window or give somebody a hand job behind a tree. There’s just something that feels very delinquent about it all.
The other day there were two girls, both dressed for a humid summer night rather than a cool, windy day in March, standing in front of the place, One of them became intrigued by the idea of our dog, Heidi, a Miniature Dachshund. From the other side of the street she began cooing and flirting, more stripper than schoolgirl, trying to get Heidi to cross over to her, but the dog sensed something wrong in her and grew rigid, barking. And such is this girl’s life, desperate for warmth but always being rebuked by confusion and hostility.
In the line-up in front of me at the LCBO stood an elderly woman– once elegant and the belle of the ball– and her withered husband, now being pushed about in a wheelchair by a Filipino domestic. They were buying a bottle of wine and bickering, getting lost in the small details. The world around them, the people waiting in line, the cashier, the nanny, everything fell away, and there was nothing left but the furious minutia of the moment, this moment to which both of them had travelled together for so long and so far.
A little further along I sat down on a bench and a nearly homeless man, thin as a rail and with the sort of tattoos that looked self-administered, stopped to chat with Heidi. He put his nose right up to hers, his lips pursed, and then he kissed her on the snout. He kept his face there, waiting, and Heidi licked him back, and it was evident that this small, beautiful moment illuminated his day.
Silently, as if an idea rather than an actual person, a young woman in a U of T track jacket ran by us. I could feel her whoosh, like being startled by a deer, and looking up I saw her blonde ponytail bouncing and then vanishing forever around the corner. And then on our way home a guy bounded out of his apartment and smiled at us. Exuberant, he was quickly 20 yards ahead, stretching as he walked, his arms as wide open as possible, as if to gather in the entirety of the day that awaited.
