draw things paint things write things make things, number 313 … very stable super sunday

Almost a week late to a party I didn’t attend.

Superbowl Sunday! I celebrate by sleeping in. 'Til 7:30! Which is like noon in this middle-aged life. On Sundays I like to read the news over breakfast (a holdover from those analogue days when I’d treat myself to the weekend paper) but I have to stop when I see that they’re expelling Buffy Sainte-Marie from the Order of Canada. I guess this expelling business saves someone from having to go to an eighty-three year-old woman’s house to pry the Jubilee medals from her desperate, clawing hands. Is there an Order of Canada SWAT team for this kind of thing? What an unsavory, petty and unnecessary business. A total of eight other people have been previously removed from the Order of Canada, and they were all fraudsters, anti-Semites, sexual predators or general maniacs. She is hardly in this company. I understand the allegations against her but this disregards everything else that made her good enough to bestow the honour upon (and to put on a stamp!) in the first place. It all feels very Maoist to me. Very campus politics.

Anyway, there’s snow to shovel, and the fifteen year-old in our house, the one with the gym membership, will still be asleep for hours (growing that brain, I’m told). I wear over-the-ear headphones when I shovel, and work to a playlist that does not include any Buffy (she’s better driving music, I think). My top five snow-removal (very different from love-removal) songs are:

Lola, by The Raincoats
Rhythm is A Dancer, by SNAP!
Dum Maro Dum, by Asha Bhosle
Take Me Home, Country Roads by Mountain Man
Werewolves of London, by Warren Zevon

Our resident Gen Z finally does wake up around noon, trashes the kitchen and then drags herself off to the bus and the gym. She goes to Ireland next month, for ten days of spending my money, so lately I’ve been asking her questions about the Emerald Isle. In our last exchange I asked her about some of Ireland’s immediate neighbours.

England? she guessed.

Technically not correct but I let it go. Anyone else?

New Zealand? Switzerland?

I told her to look at a map.

Wow, she said. I had no idea that Russia was so big. I thought it was the same size as Germany.

Yeah, amazing, I said. Are you sure you’re not American?

I spend the afternoon finishing and mounting some collages. I call them ‘crushed collages’ because the effect is of things squished into each other, or like a ball of life crashed from the sky and flattened on impact.

While I work I listen to all sorts of podcasts, from all ends of the political spectrum. I listen to serious people trying to analyze Trump’s foreign policy. Some of these people think he is a genius. Perhaps even a very stable one. Others say he may be crazy but there's a method to his madness. Myself, I think he's just making it up as he goes along. I don't think he or anyone around him knows what they're doing. At all.

Anyway, sooner or later these commentators/analysts usually betray themselves by letting it slip that the animating force behind most of their ideas is a profound dislike of Obama, so all the dumb opposite stuff that Trump does is great by default.

How this explains Trump’s turning on Canada with punitive tariffs and casual slander about becoming the fifty-first state is beyond me.

But if his goal was to get our attention, he has it. Outside of patronizing local vendors and looking for other Canadian shops on Etsy, I never really thought much about buying Canadian. But now I have an app on my phone called Shop Canadian that lets me scan any bar code to find out where the product comes from. Canada, Mexico, South America, Europe — all good. And I think a lot of people are suddenly doing the same.

Look, I have American friends, and they are very good people, but if the United States is going to go full-metal Handmaids for a few years, then the world needs to make other arrangements as best it can. Pay no attention to the very stable genius behind the curtain! And perhaps it’s good that we look away. Perhaps it’s good to start unwinding from a dangerous relationship (when you ask a bear to dance, you can’t just stop because you are tired, or don't like the music). Perhaps an untrustworthy friend is no friend at all. Perhaps it's good that we start looking for other solutions. Perhaps it’s good that we take a serious look at removing our own internal trade barriers. Perhaps it’s good that we wake up to the value of our own, unique institutions — like our Canadian public broadcaster (only less dumb television dramas about cowboys and more regional radio doing more news and reporting in more locations please). Perhaps it’s good that we can see, firsthand, the potential backlash (and result) of being too performative (much cry and little wool) in our politics. Perhaps we should get back to the real issues of class and economics (keep pushing to the middle, in all issues, and all sorts of problems solve themselves). Perhaps it’s good to look up words like oligarchy and kleptocracy. Perhaps it’s good to think about who we are, and what we stand for.

Perhaps it's good to ignore the Superbowl altogether.

The cat has a toy structure which is three connecting tubes, or tunnels, for crawling through, to attack things, or just be a nut, and she often parks herself at one of the entrances and just peers into the darkness. To me, this seems as good a metaphor as any for wasting my time watching a jingoistic symphony of violence and gambling bacchanalia of end-of-empire decadence.

Also, there's more snow on the way.

Good luck to everyone who is still calling it the Gulf of Mexico this week,
djb

I don't need a certain number of friends, just a number of friends I can be certain of.
— Alice Walker

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