BEHOLD THE COLD DECISION

Everyone has a room to cower in. A room where you control the thermostat. An eternal room of comfy claustrophobia, a room infinite in time, but finite in space. A dimly-lit room with a hardwood floor and a Persian rug, and a window to the wintry world outside where you can watch snow fall and animals freeze and die, and enjoy the view. It’s amazing what you notice when you allow yourself to look. A room of complete temporal dilation and fruition of cross-section NOW consciousness, a room of bright colors for large pupils.

I'm gonna shake hands with God, and incorporate myself into its climate-controlled gestalt, a cool blue shimmering heavy jelly, off the scale of the Geiger counter, beckoning at me to join the roiling tumorous mass.

Or, I’m gonna get my ass kicked – bitch-slapped – bubble-burst – innocence shattered – citizenship of TINA utopia (there is no alternative) revoked, and all the rest. The best-of-all-possible-worlds will become just another electron in the cloud of probability, a Schrodinger’s cat, haunting the flimsy certainty of reality. And we will be seen for the trivializers we are, and subsequently submit to the shrill and stoic cry that LIFE IS SERIOUS, and turn flat faces up to the rain, and purify ourselves of pretensions, and choose an ideology to live by because we have to make a choice, just because we can’t be like the ass, standing in front of the haystacks, starving because we don’t know which to choose – and this is somehow purpose, because we say so, just because – cause A is A, and everything follows from that, okay? Dig?

The Canadian Land of the Dead

I turned my back on the great canadian tv movie. Its patriotism was poison to me, I couldn't consume.

This land ain't my land. This land ain't your land. At least the haida and the mohawk and the huron and the ojibway and the newfoundland redskin origins had some sense of its sanctity. Ours is second hand, a sunset on a postage stamp, an embalmed inuit. And the 49th parallel is arbitrary - signed on the dotted line, serrated continent. We should drink Pepsico, keel over, and let the indians repopulate. Maybe they can take their names back too.

Old Europe is our distant trim cousin. We gorged ourselves on petroleum ether and timber. Brewed beer for the fatherland. A succession of rich guys rule from Sussex drive. The gloss of a series of renaissance resonance flakes off parliament like paint. Mob hitmen slink out of suburbia and slum in the ghettos, sink into the quicksand of poverty, clip extra-mafia dealers at discount rates. The eye on the pyramid cap was sewn shut, the castle of silling rave flickers on from dawn til dusk outside public view or popular imagination. The conspiracies are safely enclosed in the X-files DVD collection. Shopping carts haul them out of superstores and into houses. Psychiatrists reanimate their spiked-water plans from the '60s for the duration of a conversation, then prescribe us pharmaceutical grade placebos, calm us just enough with new age lullabies, soften us up for the nuclear strike.

I sit on a beanbag, locked away in my fallout shelter, still on the electrical grid, belly full of cheesecake. I just got back from shoveling snow, a socialized task fitting into the ministry like a square peg in a round hole, ice chip surplus down the money hole. I was appointed, not carved out of the market like a good go-getting entrepreneur. I'm fellating pink platitudes and hitting lenin again, taking a big hit off the blog bong, injecting myself with friendly opinions, micing the echo chamber, amplifying it, putting it into html, java, C++, Pascal, Arabic, Hebrew, Swahili, morse, horse, Houyhnhnm, and most humourously of all, human.

America is the human's human, the humanity of humanity, the synthetic of ecology, for better or worse, we'll see. He who gets the first weapon in space wins!

Naomi smiles slyly at our country in a wireless feed to CBC, tells us condescendingly the pussy’s in the mail. We are frigid and our thoughts are frozen. But the globe is warming and the ice is cracking. Glacial statues will become mercury and it's nothing but a scene out of terminator two, tragedy, farce, and the preposition marx forgot, the dialectic hegel never dreamed, the stillborn democracies in deserts with population centers

Negative Nancy gets a kitchy carebear valentine for christian christmas and discovers the true meaning of existentialism. Luc DuMont chews on just enough blotters to hit the acid sweetspot and laughs himself into a merry void of pretension. Young Jonathan spins in a circle until he tumbles onto the couch. He’s a dancer. Cobain goes off the nod, picks up a guitar and plays a grim cover of an Eby song, then stuffs a stick of dynamite down his throat. His biggest fan pushes the plunger.

Gramps sleeps. Stew chews on Stendal's faux-cynical christmas story over molson ale. The pixies play on a new tape deck imported from twenty tears in the past on the chronoblivion black market, but its presence is not thought incongruous. The pixies are enjoyed by a wider demographic than has ever previously enjoyed them before. Even gramps stirs from his slumber and listens. Mumbles to us about his punk days.

Where is the light? There are little lights all over the christmas tree. Maybe they'll suffice until St. Nick puffs out of the crackpipe. Throw another rock on the fire. Stoke your lump of coal. Stroke your neighborhood calico. Close the borders. This land is our land now. Let's monopolize christmas this year. Keep Santa in house, under house arrest in the tundra, surrounded by a herd of genetically-manipulated killer caribou cavalry and mounties with m-16s. Keep him drugged on a drip, protecting our airspace with a missile sleigh for this grand secular holiday, bombing the Baldwins for New Years’ night. It's what Brain Orser would do and we know he's the winner after all. The Gold Metallurgist, our demon king, one nation under figure-skating Satan. After all, all empires fall. Egyptians, Romans, Limeys, Americans, and even God’s country. And this is the Canadian land of the dead. We've got our respawn points lined up. See you in Buddy Cole's bar, comrade canuck.

The Industry needs qualified people

Hungover

on no hour's sleep
I'm here in class
to learn a trade.

I have caffeinated water to keep the

creeping chaotic unprofessionalism at bay

it wants to come out but

I will suppress it

and relax in

tense manic calm

a mighty plastic edifice

a can-do attitude.

In front of me

the instructor demonstrates

his awesome grasp of traffic control trivia

happy as a pig in shit.

Above me
is a skylight
a window to the heavens and their cast of
cheerful cottonball unsui

the ghosts of professionals who succeeded

in phasing out.

Light cumulous lumps

call ~

I answer.