Author: Michael Murray

I was pretty much unaware of Canada Day this year. I grew up in Ottawa and it was always a huge deal there. Just packed. The streets were always too congested to even ride a bike, and I always found it kind of excellent—as if sleepy, happy-to-conform Ottawa were an entirely different city. The anonymity…

A humid, still morning. Dreamy and unbelievably quiet. All the tumult, all the brute churnings of the world absent, almost unimaginable in this moment. Just shafts of sunlight falling through the trees into the backyard. Like endless, benevolent spirits. Pillars in a cathedral. Occasionally a bird makes some gentle sound, and then above the fence,…

The other night I saw a video of a few dozen protestors bringing down a statue. All of them pulling the ropes together, all in unison. The statue above them swaying, the crowd getting more and more excited. A catharsis about to be unleashed. And then the statue comes tumbling down, the general upon his…

Less than a year ago, back in The Before Times, Rachelle and I were lying in bed watching TV. The HBO show Watchmen was on, and the central plot line involved the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. The most vital, prosperous community in Black America was attacked– via land and air– by angry, resentful whites. An…

HULK OPENS UP ABOUT HIS EATING Hulk like to eat, it true, but only rumour that Hulk eat enemy. Hulk never do that. Hulk smash, but Hulk never eat what smash. Bad manners. Hulk have better manners than puny humans give him credit for. Hulk never wear hat at dining room table! Was total photoshop…

Tuesday morning and Rachelle is sitting out in the backyard working on her laptop. From the table she’s sitting at, she keeps an eye on Jones splashing about in an inflatable pool a few feet away. And the sunlight is rendering everything so vivid. The water Jones is churning, the shadow of the leaves whirling…

Jones has been watching scenes from Raiders of the Lost Ark recently. He has turned off all the lights in the room so that it better approximates a jungle temple. It is late in the afternoon and the blinds in the bedroom are drawn, but still, light glows from around their perimeter, diffusing into the…

The list, below, looking at the risk of Covid-19 and other factors, assigns a score for activities from 1 to 10, with a 10 being the riskiest and a 1 being the least risky. The score is an average of scores given by the health experts, rounded to the nearest whole number. Risk Level 1…

Blackout Tuesday played-out like a full-on anxiety attack for whites. Nobody seemed to know if they were posting the image correctly or not, and few of us had any black friends we felt secure enough to ask, so soon enough sincere white people were scolding other, equally sincere white people, about proper rule compliance and…