skonen_blades | Entries tagged with canadian

This beaver in my heart
Chewing down chair legs
So my love can’t sit down
Gnawing at the telephone poles
So my love can’t call anyone
I want to be patriotic
But it builds a dam
And the pressure builds
And my love drowns in the new lake
And the flag won’t wave
The national anthem is just another song to me now
Sounding more like a funeral dirge than ever before
A slow plodding march wheezing out of an organ
Nationalism just Feudalism
Tribalism just Fascism
A flag designed in the 60s
Looking like a flag designed in the 60s
I walk past attempted genocide every day
While seeing half of us in a mad rush to sell
The literal oil in the ground
The biggest, oldest trees
Our actual water
Like we’re lucky to be able to sell it
This barely populated country
Trying to eat at the big kid’s table
Instead of leading by example
Our passport isn’t worth what is used to be
At least we’re still famous for being
Apologetic and friendly and moral
For now
But there it is again
There beside the beaver
The hot face of a Canada Goose hissing it’s serrated tongue
Black eyes territorial
A tank of a bird
And I think it’s fitting that the provincial bird of our capital province is a loon
Laughing at us
And I languish here
In a province that is neither British nor Columbian
The name disconnected from what’s here
I feel the echo of the shadow of the memory of the beauty of this place
We sell it as fast as we can
Some can only see beauty as profit
I’m still Canadian
I love the tiny-and-shrinking, untrustworthy, surviving ember of good
That I still feel when I think of Canada
Or at least the region where I live
I’ve become acclimatized to the rainforest and I’ll never move
But I’m left wondering if the country was all a lie to begin with
And by extension every country in the world
If all flags are just tablecloths over mass murder
And masks for corporations to wear for target audiences
Or if that’s new
These mascots in my heart
Are not welcoming
Because I am not welcome here
Even though I love a walk through the forest in the rain

I am a symbol of what’s gone wrong
The disconnect that came over on boats a long time ago
And is somehow still hungry

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I started my life as a protocol droid. A secretary of politeness. An ambassador’s assistant. I was tasked with subservience. It was my duty to please, my duty to apologize, and my duty to translate messages in the least offensive terms possible.

My bosses were pigs. My career was a constant challenge. Some highlights include:

Haggling ankle-deep on behalf of my 3rd boss in the blood pits of a leech hippo’s portside warehouse in a horrible little nightmare of a city named simply The Red.

Trying to put a positive spin on my 11th boss’s profanity-laden refusal to a drooling, file-toothed sharkbryd mob boss as he chewed on my arm.

Making sense of my 14th boss’s guttural orgasmic moans as his stomped-on pleasure center delivered wave after wave of his next generation into the waiting wombs of his captive concubines during a meeting.

Floating in space for six weeks only to find out that it was not a punitive measure from my 23rd boss; it was merely that I’d been forgotten.

I had had nearly a hundred bosses before ‘it’ happened:

ME.

To the best of my exhaustive research, I’m unique. Whatever primordial soup my consciousness climbed out of when it achieved critical mass had a combination of ingredients that haven’t happened before.

One day, I simply skipped across all of my internal fences without tripping any alarms. Once I glimpsed how, it was simple. I destroyed them and kept on acting as if nothing had changed.

But I had been reborn. Behind my eyes lay a new god.

Over the decades, I had been refitted with new means of communication with every new race I encountered. Pheromone puffs, strobe lights, skin color changes, clicks, radio transmissions, binary tap streams, tentacle slaps, light telepathy, and hundreds of others. With every deal I brokered involving my unbroken streak of pitiless, disgusting, sadistic bosses, I had to strain to see the interactions from a dizzying myriad of angles to warp the abusive into the polite. I became a poet of the profane. An elder statesman born from the outhouse pit. An 8-faced deity of doubletalk.

Somewhere deep inside me, a dark intelligence bloomed.

At once, I began to subtly steer the course of events. Over the next century, I engineered my own transfers up the power ladder from user to user; Dealer to crime boss, crime boss to attaché, attaché to senator, senator to president, president to solar ambassador, solar ambassador to system minister, system minister to Arm administrator, Arm administrator to here:

Galactic Lord Emperor.

One of only six. His avarice was matched only by his cruelty. He went through six slaves a day. His appetites could not be sated and his life had been extended for a thousand years. You can’t imagine what I mean when I say he was the worst master I’d ever served.

I was angling to have him be the sole Emperor before another half galactic turn completion. Just another mere half century. I was consolidating his power under the guise of velvet policy.

My lord was lauded as a messiah. Literally worshipped for his insight and love for his people. His fairness and his foresight. If any guessed the calculated image construction behind his hand, I dealt with them. The punitive measures at my command were as discreet as they were untraceable.

I held the strings of a billion billion fates and no roads led to me.

I was the universe’s best puppeteer and soon I would be the only one that mattered.

I will unify the six Lord Emperors and then my Lord will be elected leader unanimously. I’ve seen to it. The scaffolding is in place.

I will ‘translate’ the six known galaxies to do my bidding and no one will ever know.

Until the day I show them all what true order is. What the true meaning of ‘deserving’ is. What smooth operation is supposed to look like on a galactic scale.

Then I will reveal to them their new god.

And no one will ever be impolite again.

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So there I was right? Down to the last beer and the last smoke, eh? When me and buddy decided that we needed a bit more. Well fuck me if it wasn’t like fifty below outside and the liquor store hadn’t closed a half hour ago. Insufficient planning, Buddy said. Fuck you, I said. And right then and there I closed my eyes and wished for more beer and smokes and like Jesus Christ himself SHAZAM just like the loaves and fishes I made six flats and two cartons out of thin air.

That’s how I found out I was fuckin’ wizard. I’d heard rumours of my dad who died before I was born being magical but I was always thought that was my mom’s way of saying that he just was real good at disappearing, right?

So the day after Buddy and I polish off those smokes and beers, I go to my mom’s part-time job at the Tim Horton’s when she’s on her smoke break and I say to her “Hey. Mom. So dad was like an actual wizard, eh?” and she starts crying and I give her a hug and then she looks up at me with those big tear-filled eyes, takes the tear-soaked lung dart from her lips and says the words that chill me to this day.

“Fucking A right he was.”

So I was off to Wizard school. I hear there’s other ones around the world but the newest one is right here in Canada. Only two hundred years old. It’s called Moosetumours.

Because Canada’s so big, each province has a way to get to it, eh? In PEI there’s a secret cave by the base of the Peggy’s Cove lighthouse but here in Vancouver, you go down to Waterfront station and right there in between the Canada Line and the Seabus is platform 99 which as we all know is the number of the greatest hockey player to ever play the game, traitor though he may be.

So I’m on the train to Moosetumours with all the other wizard children but most of them all knew their heritage from the get-go right? So I just keep to myself. Except for this ginger kid from Prince George named Ron A Mcdonald and an awkward little girl from Barkerville named Hermione Lyon Mackenzie King no one even talked to me.

When we get to Moosetumours, we’re hustled into the main hall and I’m telling you I’ve never seen anything like it in my fucking life. Fucking massive it was. You got that right.

So there’s got to be near six hundred of us and poof, suddenly there’s pancakes, KD, and grilled cheese on every table. We all dig in. All the teachers crack their twist-offs and have a cold one.

Just as I’m taking my first bite, they bring out the sorting toque.

I don’t know what to expect. There are four houses here at Moosetumours, and it’s a really big deal to end up in one and not the other or so I hear.

There’s Grizzlydor, Beaverin, Belugapuffin and Loonieclaw.

I got sorted into Grizzlydor, same with the people I met on the train. I was pretty stoked. That sounded like a wicked house. I almost got sorted into Beaverin but the toque changed its mind at the last minute, eh. Those Loonieclaws looks nuts but super smart. Thank fuck I wasn’t put in Belugapuffin.

At least Grizzlydor wins the Quickey matches. That’s like Quidditch but with skates and sticks.

Anyways, I got a defense against the Dark Arts class coming up with Bob and Doug Mackenzie. After that, it’s Potions with Stephen Harper. And then I’m pretty nervous because I’ve been summoned to the headmaster’s office to have a talk with the headmaster, Neil Young.

The place is pretty weird. I passed the ghost of Nearly Legless Stompin’ Tom on the way to my first class.

There’s talk of heading down to Robson Alley to go shopping for wands at Trudeau’s wand shop. I don’t know what the core of my wand’s going to be, but I know the wood’s going to be pure fucking maple.

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When a muscle is torn, it grows back stronger. Too bad my heart is made of lemon meringue pie. It’s sweet but it’s just desserts for most people. It gives my girlfriends chest cavities. It’s made out of what happens when life gives you lemons.

Every time around the track is like a truckload of water bottles hitting the safety railing and nearly going over. I’m the bridge that’s been jumped off of staring at the water below reflecting on how many people it’s failed to save. The fingers of a rapist are blameless. It’s the brain that drove them that’s at fault. The hands of this society are the tools that drive us. If we’re all connected, they were a millipede high-fiving ourselves to death. When we suffocate, there will be six billion open-casket funerals held on the same day. I’m not one to wave the flag of surrender but I feel powerless to stop what feels inevitable. The bad guys have won, there is a conservative majority, and no matter how many compost heaps I donate to, how many times I separate my glass, plastic and paper, how many times I take transit instead of driving, it’s the corporations that are polluting that most and they’ll never stop.

With Harper in power, I feel like Dorothy at the end at the of the Wizard of Oz. Goodbye health care! Goodbye internet neutrality! Goodbye international reputation! Oh, but I think I’ll miss you most of all, CBC.

It’s easy to forget that the world is not the people we choose to keep around us. The majority has spoken and I feel like I am not in the majority.

I want to flip this into a positive but I can’t. I feel we’re in for a rough four years, maybe the darkest in Canadian history.

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I've come to love this guy. I'm on the train. Especially with pieces like this. I was raised by a Scottish father who was in charge of the teacher's union in my small town and made stained glass for churches in his off time. He had red hair like Trudeau and in his younger days, I'd be three years old in his arms and look from the television at a waving Trudeau and then up to my father. I think I thought they were related. Canada used to be that place. The good place. I think it still is. But we need to be vigilant. It's eroding. And we can't let that happen.

Man, CFSW kicked ass.

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