miss next universe

It's a beautiful day, little windy, maybe.

here's one gauntlet

Saturday Night magazine has a profile of Mark Kingwell in it this week. I wouldn't normally read Saturday Night, it being a general interest magazine and also Canadian, but it comes for free with Saturday's National Post, which I wouldn't subscribe to except for the fact that it's cheap when you've also subscribed to the Edmonton Journal, which I wouldn't read except I have succumbed to the socially motivated anxiety that pervades us all, to know at least a little bit about what the fuck is going on. And so, Mark Kingwell.

Mark Kingwell writes about what it means to be a citizen, spcifically a global citizen (if it's not an oxymoron to be specifically global), which means he alternates between leading you to the conclusion that the only appropriate response to the world the way it is today is to mail yourself third class to a kibbutz and build a shelter from the bubble wrap you packed yourself in to get there, and suggesting that knowing your way around a wine list is an absolute imperative. That he's right both times doesn't make me any more fond of him. Not that I wouldn't be fond of him. If we met. Or not that I didn't like his weekly pieces in the National Post (yes, back to that). They looked funny next to Lorne Gunter's pieces. Or rather underneath. I always wondered if that was ideologically motivated. What I'm saying is that his book The World We Want, which I read half of, wouldn't be out of place being excerpted in an especially piquant issue of Esquire, say one of the ones with Scarlett Johannsen on the cover.

So. Mark Kingwell. What do you do in the face of all of that? Global citizenship. It says in the profile I just read that he gives ten percent of his income to OXFAM and such. Which is great. Just great. I have tenants who are waiting for me to replace the screen on their sliding door. We owe money all over town. Well just to one person, but she lives all the way across town, so technically it's true. She lives twenty blocks away. My car makes loud noises like a jack-in-the-box being wound past the tension of its spring every time we turn right. Is it left? My VISA is a dead talisman in my wallet, like a faded Silver Star in the drawer underneath my soaking dentures. Ten percent. How the fuck is that even possible? The article also goes into detail about his growing collection of local (Toronto) artists' work. I know what art costs.

Knowing at least a little bit about just what the fuck is going on is also an expensive habit.

Ever think of that?

sorry, this post is kind of a sausage factory, part two

(This one's gone too. Not that there was anything as mean on it as was on the first. But it's just a terrible idea.)

like a turd launched from a cannon

I'm entertaining the possibility of yet another "promotion" at work. It would mean another three to four hundred dollars a month, and since money seems to be continuously scarce I am really considering applying for the position. If I do, I'll get it; I know who else is applying, and none of them have the experience I do.

It's a horrible job, however. The working conditions are pretty much the worst of anywhere in the plant thanks to the unreasonable levels of dust and the huge, sometimes back-breaking, amount of cleaning involved. They are working on replacing all of the equipment and once they finish, it may actually be a good deal more hospitable. But it won't be done till the fall, and while they're working on it they have to shut down the induction fans, which means it's even more awful than it usually has been.

Then there's the hours. I'd be back on the four days - four off - four nights - four off schedule. Shift lag makes me grumpy. The last time I worked that schedule I was barraged with near-crippling bouts of depression that came and went like clockwork.

But the money would be good. Much better than what I made back then.

I need to get a goddamn tarot reading or something. I have zero clues as to what I should do.

Fuckin' time for bed.

"media" means middle, not crotch

I'm just going to say two things about the Belinda Stronach thing. Firstly, the footage of "stricken boyfriend" and ex-fellow Conservative MP Peter MacKay mucking around in his uncle's garden and giving a sotto voce interview in rubber boots the day after her defection was simply darling. This guy is completely full of shit, whatever else the rest of this means.

Secondly, many, many people have crossed the floor in parliament before, and without the priviledge of being compared to Brooke Shields's character in Pretty Baby. The national media has got some major soul searching to do. It may sell papers to insinuate that Stronach, one of the more attractive politicians on the Hill, is some kind of a slut. But isn't that a tack best left to Sun Media? Doesn't it more behoove a "newspaper" that takes every opportunity to slather tits poised jauntily amidst a car exhibition all over the front page as often as it can? It would seem that way to me, but just such insinuation is sure a popular colour in the National Post's editorial palette today. I'd like to strongly advise that Mr. Jonathan Kay and his crack staff of masturbating interlopers such as Bruce Garvey and cartoonist Gary Clement have a serious look at how today's op-ed section makes them all look.

architectural gonorrhea

The rain is moving across the city in plates. I am smoking a cigarette on the balcony, with the Trail of Dead cranked from the living room. The thunder is dull at first, and the city whoops back at it from the street. Lightning tests us. Everything is louder than it should be. My music is shredded into wisps ten feet out into the grey air.

There have been a lot of fires in Edmonton this summer. It was maybe almost two years ago now that the old Albert's restaurant on Whyte Avenue burned, and at the time it seemed so unreal, a giant error. Then in a month-long whoosh: The Aberdeen, Hub Cigar, and now the Garneau Mews. Everyone's musing aloud in public over what will be the next place to go. It seems increasingly unlikely that it will stop here.

We're all wondering. All these fires have been in the city centre. The air is charged with conspiracy. Edmonton, having just gotten its compulsive sprawl under control (or else it's finally spent, the boxes having surrounded us now, you can't leave the city in any direction without seeing them), is giving its core up to a lot of pink condominiums. Real estate prices are also on fire, and the pressure to convert is intense.

Just up the road from our apartment, there's a few pre-war vintage houses that the occupants are frantically trying to have declared historical sites. We have friends who live across from them in a row of houses that actually have protected status. When we went over there for dinner the other night, I saw "fire extinguisher" on the grocery list. Paranoia is escalating.

The city seems so fragile to me now. I remember, when I first had moved here to go to university, how the downtown was the skyline and the gnarled, confusing roads that twisted down the valley and either found a bridge or curled into moneyed residential areas of lush green and perfect driveways. It all seemed very imposing. Now that I live here and I see what is growing between the cracks of the towers, I'm really falling in love with the city.

Which is a shame, because with all of this development and all of these fires, this city is going to look like shit in ten years.

I feel like I've been robbed. I've lived here a dozen years, and I've only really started to find all the really good things about Edmonton. Now they're disappearing, or else they lie like tame dogs in the shadows of the ugliest fucking buildings you've ever seen.

filibuster

Salma and I were walking from the Clemenceau down to the beaches to have a look at the garishness there. Half-naked girls and men in suits, more of them (the suits, not the girls) less attractive than you'd think. We talked about so many things, such as what would a Woody Allen movie's cast look like if American culture were more thoroughly concerned with necrophilia instead of the "Barely Legal" nation it is now... We were briefly disgusted at the thought of topless corpses floating to the banks in some bizarre movie promotion. We agreed it would be in the best interests of everyone involved, however, all things considered. Spare Alexis Bledel the trouble of whining about having to take "prozac", whatever the hell that is. It woud really make so much more sense if it were just dead people - same beige apartments, same shots of the fronts of hotels, same restaurants, same dialogue, but rotting corpses propped up on chairs, and voiceovers.

We got around to John Bolton. I told Salma that just last year, around March, I'd been involved with the MIPTV2004 convention, France's Ministrie de Information Publique television marketplace. The idea was to try to convene a brainstorming session about marketing the U.N. People associate the United Nations with peace, health, security, better living. They want to know the stories involved, we thought. Let's get them on the small screen for everyone to see, was the rallying cry, our raison d'etre, if you'll permit me. Salma was intrigued. Whatever became of the conference? Well, Salma, I told her, let me just fish this little brochure out and I'll read from it to you. And I did, and I read:

Working in partnership with major broadcasters, the United Nations can help focus the world’s attention on stories about the issues that know no borders -- extreme poverty, displaced people, forgotten conflicts, humanitarian emergencies. This year the emphasis is on encouraging broadcasters to air more innovative programmes on HIV/AIDS and the other Millennium Development Goals.

The United Nations is fully committed to partnering with the world media industry in Sharing the World’s Stories. The United Nations audio-visual team is proactive and flexible, dedicated to working with other broadcasters, listening to and assisting them in communicating these important messages, providing free programming and in-kind services, promoting their work, and offering broadcasters the unique name recognition that only the United Nations can provide.

She swooned. "And this was right here in Cannes?" she asked breathlessly.

"Yes, darling. It's movie stars and endless designer drugs every May, but in the off-season we hold the spotlight on the world's miseries. It's very fulfilling."

"And what ever became of this brainstorming session?"

"Three simple words: more hospital dramas."

"House?"

"That one wasn't ours. You're thinking domestic. The United States is taking an increasingly dim view of the United Nations, as you know."

"Well, I never."

"Yeah, but we got back at them. The U.N. building is now staffed by sous-chefs who are philosophically opposed to the use of flour or eggs."

"Wonderful."

"Let's make love", I told her.

"Okay. I have to see this awful Egoyan thing, let's do it in the back row."

...still listening? Let me go on... um, let's see. Uh, I ain't no hollaback girl, I ain't no hollaback girl... wow, that's a catchy one, eh? What's your favourite colour? Mine's cerulean, or at least it was till last month when I had a corneal transplant...

parliament, from the French "parler", meaning to pout

I'm looking at that last post and I've decided it's clumps of horsepocky. Don't get me wrong: I haven't changed my mind about Harper and Duceppe. I think what they're doing goes against everything I feel about what parliamentary democracy is supposed to be. I just didn't explain myself well enough. I'm lucky noone reads this thing, or I'd have been shredded.

I should never blog when I'm in a rush to get out the door, basically.

It isn't that there is some protocol for a vote of non-confidence that hasn't been observed. The Conservatives and the Bloc obviously feel that they have a certain momentum towards toppling the Liberal party. They motioned for a vote, the vote took place, there were very few abstainers or absentees. The whole thing actually seems legitimate to me. Which contradicts what I said in the previous post.

What angers me about it is the fact that by pulling the non-confidence vote out of their asses, and consequently setting in motion a whole week of gear-grinding in parliament, the Conservatives have divorced the idea of an electoral mandate from the election we are soon going to have. Insofar as their impatience has had any effect at all, it has been to undermine the true value of the upcoming election. We'll be voting those bastards out of office, sure. But we won't be voting on policy.

Which is something that we could have had the opportunity to do, and insofar as this little premature evacuation has not had an effect, we still can.



What I am saying is that if there are any ideas heard over this coming summer about how to relieve Canada's crippled municipalities, create a potent defense strategy, creatively address the ever more rapidly growing divergence between the quality of life of our native population and the rest of Canada, posit a concrete strategy for foreign aid, or have any kind of effect on lots of other thing that we need to deal with yesterday, it will not be because of these childish dramatics we're witnessing now.

So some Quebec ad firms got pots of money for doing nothing. It's terrible, and it sickens me. But we have bigger problems than that to worry about, and if we're going to have an election we'd better take the opportunity to quit crying about our stubbed toe and see to the limb we've stuck in the buzzsaw.

(Why exactly Gilles Duceppe feels that he needs to take this stand before the budget is delivered is beyond me. His position on so many social issues would be well met by a Liberal-NDP budget. It shows a short-sightedness on his part that is distressing to see since he came off so sensibly in the last election's debates. Whatever. Separatist.)

This is not a Liberal apologia. It's perfectly valid to judge the governing party in light of what we know about them now, and it's reason enough to vote against them. But what does one who votes thus, vote for? Harper and Duceppe believe that this is not a very important question. If they did, they would wait for the budget to come down, and they would prepare a response to it.

The budget's release has already been bumped up. Not soon enough for some, I'm sure, but have you seen those things? They're huge. Making one has got to be pretty labour-intensive, and there's probably a lot of interns who are going to be broken in pretty harshly as it is.

Meanwhile, above the fray and lately totally impressing the hell out of me is Independent MP David Kilgour. He missed the vote to organize a press conference urging the PM to offer more, especially in the way of troops, in the Darfur region. Genocide: number two newsmaker this week!

We all need to calm the fuck down. People are waiting for us to get our act together. They'll wait a little longer, but we should, you know, make sure and do it. N'est-ce pas?

hey, where the hell are you all going?

Look, let's say (just for the sake of argument) that my boss is an asshole. Truthfully, I have a regiment of rotating bosses and as far as I can tell they're nice guys. But let's just say.

Let's suppose that he's got this nasty habit of calling his friends to come pick up truckloads of compost (which is our product) without paying for it. Actually we are all encouraged to do this; there's not a huge market for our product and offering someone a small amount of it for free is actually a positive marketing tactic, but I'm trying to create an analogy here, people. Let's say that my boss is calling his friends to offer free loads of compost under the table, and he's not supposed to do it.

Now let's say he's found out. What is the appropriate course of action? Almost certainly the guy should be fired, that's for starters. If the theft has been systemic and rampant, maybe criminal charges should be brought against him.

But what about me? What's my role in all of this?

Do I get to stop showing up for work? Can I go play squash instead, because my boss has been found to be corrupt?

Now let's say that the police are investigating my boss, and the charges have not been found to be substantiated, yet. There's a committee working on discovery, trying to decide whether or not the guy deserves to be fired. Their decision isn't due for a while, and in the meantime people are still putting their garbage out in the garbage bins and the trucks are still bringing it to us.

Do we get to have a vote at the morning safety tailboard meeting, and decide (unanimously or otherwise) that because our boss has been accused of theft, we're justified in not going to work for a couple of weeks?

Fuck no.

Matter of fact if we tried that, our being fired would not be the recommendation of some committee. It would be instantaneous, it would be justifiable, and it would probably be the decision of that same boss.

But here we have these two shmucks and their rogue's gallery of opportunists who have declared a work stoppage because they don't have faith in the ruling party. Actually what they don't have faith in is the rule of parliament itself, but they seem incapable of distinguishing between the Prime Minister and the system of checks and balances which are designed to punish his transgressions.

Fine. Let's have another election. I like them, they're fun. I like going to the local school gym and ticking the little boxes and folding the paper and sending my voice into the paper void that rules the part of my paycheque that I never personally see. We should have them once a month.

Fine. He's corrupt, his cabinet's tainted, let's start over. I don't like the idea of the balance of power resting in the hands of weasels.

But let's do it right, and let's respect the institutions we're trying to protect. Let's at least look like we have some respect for the idea of government.

Finally someone recognizes it

Yesterday some guy at work called me an "impressive man". Jesus I laughed my ass off over it all day. He was totally being serious. Hours afterwards, I was running the bobcat, loading biosolids onto a belt, literally yelling out loud in a fake British accent, "That golyadkin chappie, he's a most impressive fellow! I hear he makes sixteen dollars and sixty cents an hour, and he loads poo onto a belt with a wheelie-bucket! Good show, that! Quite an impressive man, I say!" There was noone around, or they would have thought I'd lost it. Doing donuts and spinning the bobcat around on the slick floor as fast as it would go, giggling like mad and yelling "An impressive man! An impressive man!"

My girlfriend just reminded me that though I am an impressive man, I am still gay.

my retirement looms

Just to boost the coffers a bit, I packed up about fifty or sixty cds and made the record store rounds with them yesterday. The first place I went is the first place I always go, but I think I'm going to break that habit from now on. It's a very good place to shop for records but I find selling them there just a pain in the ass. The guy who owns it is really, really knowledgeable, and is probably one of maybe four or five guys in the entire city who get a chance to hear pretty much every notable release that comes out.

Just so you understand, I'm not talking about the new Coldplay album. Think Kammerflimmer Kollekteif.

So I'm there in this mecca of hipness, which I remind myself that the only reason it exists is cause the fella's got rich parents who gave him seed money. Plus the guy's got hours and hours of time to listen to these albums almost completely undistracted by customers, so of course he's absolutely soaking in the underground to an extent that very few people can afford to do.

Musical snobbery is a class game. You bet your sweet petunia it is. Technology may have opened up access to all the music there is, but the navigational tools remain expensive. I don't just mean computers. One issue of Wire magazine costs about twelve dollars. That spreads a large enough blanket over the avant garde, but there's still a pretty large semi-commercial nexus you have to keep a thumb in and there's no one magazine that's really doing a good job of it anymore so you have to juggle. Magnet, Alternative Press, CMJ: they cover some of it some of the time, but are burdened with humorless and myopic writers that make investigating music an absolute chore. But you gotta slog through that stuff, too. In fact for the really ear-to-the-ground stuff, you have to read (ecchh) lifestyle magazines like Tokion or what have you.

Which reminds me: I gotta go pick up a copy of Arthur.

And that's just the print culture. You do, eventually, have to go and buy the albums. Yes you do. Yes, yes you do. You're not really an audiophile if you think that downloaded music is good enough.

And what's your system? Mark Levinson? B&W? Krell? Do you have a good room? Do you have a needle?

I am just not capable of being in this race. Also, I have embarassing albums I want to get rid of that noone will ever take from me: The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin, for instance, or the John Lennon anthology Wonsuponatime. I'm stuck with these things.

Still, I head down to the place with a boxful of the things, and it's embarassing, because out of the sixty or so that I took he bought about eight of them. What's more, he said that they were the only ones he could maybe move.

The next place I always go is basically just across the street, and they're a lot less discerning. And there's no embarassment. Their customer base is a bit larger than the fifty coolest kids in town, so they can have a bit of non-hip, ages-old dross in their inventory because some real music lover (note italics, please) might actually buy it. R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction, embarassing as it may be to own, is in fact a good album and would sell in a non-hipster environment.

End result: made about eighty bucks. It helps. Next week I'll ply a bit at the pawn shops.

not panicking.

Got the two hundred. Roommate guy exists. He's on workman's comp or something, so his part of rent will be third party cheque also. Gyllenhaal's working under the table at the KIS club, although frankly unless he's dealing himself there's no way he can make his restitution deadline. Plus he hasn't been in anything good onscreen in years.

I realize that chances are good I'm the only one who cares about this, and any readers I've managed to accumulate are waiting for me to drop it. I also realize I sound like a greedy landlord. In response to the first self-levelled charge, suck it, self. You have no readers. In response to the second, I'm pretty financially desperate at the moment. When things get regular I can go back to being the coolest landlord ever. Right now I need to be prepared to bring a little meat to this weenie roast.

In the next ten days I get: 1) paid from work, 2) full upstairs rent, 3) full downstairs rent. That will be enough for me to sort out some major debts I've been sluffing for too long, a couple of them for the last time since we have no power or gas bill to pay anymore. It won't be enough to make me totally solvent, but you know how when you're living really close to the bone, your clothes just sort of hang wrong? That will stop happening.

Things are still a little less stable than I'd like. But it does appear yesterday's post may have been a slight overreaction.

Anyways, my girlfriend wants to go for a walk or something. Ah, the inconvenient joys of downtown living.

FUCK.

I've really got myself into it now. Jake Gyllenhaal is a complete fraud who intends, clearly, to have a free ride on my back. He gets social assistance, see, because he's addicted to drugs. He's already stolen his upstairs neighbor's tv, vcr, and dvd player. They have come to an agreement that he will pay her back within a month or he'll be charged.

Once he's charged I can evict him, and let me tell you: I am positively salivating at the thought.

His social assistance is four hundred and two dollars a month. His rent is four hundred.

I don't think he's going to pick up a tv, dvd player and vcr for two bucks anywhere.

How in the hell does he plan to do this? Easy: he doesn't. He intends to stay in my house for free. Because he knows, when you really get down to the glass marbles of it, how goddamn difficult it is to evict a person when they don't want to go. It takes forever.

It's not like I can show up at his door with the police on the sixteenth of May and forcibly remove him. We don't get to that point till a lot further down the road.

Which is as it should be, you know. Caveat emptor on the guy with the assets to protect.

But it sucks.

I just feel like this whole thing has been a con job on me from the very beginning. The day that I showed up with the rental agreement for him to sign, his parents being there, they probably weren't his parents. They were probably starving actors putting me on for a ham sandwich.

He probably killed his parents and had sex with their bodies.

And where has Melissa been in all this? Stiffing me for rent. She has some new roommate to share the rent with who I haven't met yet and who hasn't gotten in touch with me, but he's got two hundred dollars for me, which is, like, it doesn't cut it but man do I need it now.

I am fucked. We will probably have to give up this apartment and move back in to the house. We need money.

hey, squegee kids! listen up!

The higher I rise at the place I'm working, the more of a dead-end place to work it seems to become. If this place were to disappear tomorrow, a couple dozen guys would be fucked - they'd have to start over again as labourers someplace else. There are very few transferable skills you can pick up when you work at a composter. What are you going to do, go work at another composter? There isn't one. Maybe in the States, somewhere. Someday, maybe there'll be more.

It's possible I might be a candidate for plant operator if a position opens up - it helps having had the cross-training I've gotten from applying for all these different jobs, and it helps more that I've done them all pretty well. That move would mean a nice big raise. Still and all, it's a dead-end job. The guys who have them are wondering what the fuck they're doing with their lives.

I'm not going to blog about work anymore after this post. Not because I'm scared I'll get fired (I haven't really cussed anyone out or given away any trade secrets) but because it's not very satisfying. It's where I make my money, and it seems like I'll be stuck there for at least a year yet, but it's got nothing to do with me, if you know what I mean. I say this even though, after a year and a half of working there, I have a job I actually enjoy. It's fun moving that big old loader around. It just doesn't feel very important.

The composter has actually done great things for my self-esteem. It was quite a shake up for me to have finished a bachelor of commerce degree and gotten absolutely nothing out of it. The first job I had after I got the degree was one I probably could've gotten straight out of high school, and I hated it and I was terrible at it.

The jobs I had after that were pretty much impossible to enjoy or feel much pride in. Mostly they involved a lot of driving, stocking magazine racks or newspaper boxes, at night or early in the morning. No boss, just a bleary guy tossing bundles from the loading dock. Finish as soon as you can and crawl into bed before the rising sun fucks up your interior clock too much.

Then I figured I wanted to be a teacher. An after-degree program was two years, which I stretched to three, and then at the end of all of it to find out that it's basically beyond me to control a classroom of twenty-three nine-year olds, well wow. It just emptied me right out. Thirty-one years old, and I haven't got an inkling, I thought, what the fuck do I do now?

Now I'm thirty-three, but it's different. I've learned things, not just about composting, but about my brain. I used to think I was so stupid that I would never figure any job out. I'd just get fired from all of them and I'd live with my parents till I was forty and then I'd kill myself with pills out of shame.

Now I know I can adapt. Now I know that I am nowhere near as stupid as a lot, a lot, of people.

Five years ago I would never have typed that last sentence. Everybody's equal, I wanted to believe. Sure, the guys my dad drinks with when he's in the small town bar might not know a thing about Japanese business practises or the Discourse on Method, but they sure as hell knew a lot about trucks and tractors. What did I know about trucks and tractors, in spite of being a farm kid? Nothing. So who was I to feel superior?

Now I know that real stupidity is not a lack of knowledge. It's not even a learning disorder. Real, true, incorrigible stupidity is not knowing how to learn. It's even worse than that. It's not wanting to learn how to learn. And do you know how many people are just not interested in any damn thing you have to say?

There's lots.

And now, after working here for eighteen months, I understand that I'm not one of them. I am capable of a lot of different things. How many of the guys I work with would you guess keep a blog? I'd wager none. But I'm picking up the techniques and the routines of composting just as well if not better than anyone else there. Just because I know a few big words and like to write, it doesn't preclude me from being able to get down in the shit and work. How many bloggers have a job like mine? Not many, I'll bet.

And yeah, it tells me that I'm in the wrong place and in a way I'm kind of wasting time. But the fact that I'm picking it up, and I'm succeeding, and I'm respected - all of this is new to me. It's helped me to trust myself a lot more. And when I leave, I'll be ready to get into whatever's going to be next without carrying a sense of dread, a horrible shame, a fear that I'm going to be found out as someone merely passing himself off as intelligent but who is in fact an utter fool. Thanks to the composter, I'm through with that stuff.

Je suis un telephone!

Our telephone is back in service. This is after a good six or seven days of dealing with an endless consecution of Telus agents, who seem to fall into one of two categories: the absolute moron or the competent but apathetic appeaser. God I'm angry with them. They had better comp us, and it better be good. We look like assholes right now.

"You seem to be sort of bankrupt --morally as well as financially." "Don't they usually go together?"

It's May Day. It's also the Sunday morning after a fine and frivolous Saturday night. She and I had seen a portion of the evening's goodly musical revue at the local, and stayed for perhaps just the right moment to decide to leave, being then slumped together in affection on a bench at the nexus of the club, the very middle between those who care that there are bands playing music to the east and those who do not to the west.

Today there are business dealings - Jake Gyllenhaal has something for me to sign so his social assistance agent can draw up the papers to have me paid a regular rent in direct deposit. Melissa has a roommate who has some money for me, which will help me greatly in the effort of retaining a hepafilter for the apartment or if such a thing cannot be retained, a man to kill and remove the cat that finds it so despicable that I should be allowed to breathe once in awhile.

I do a lot of complaining. But the fact is that I live fairly well. I try to be somewhat ascetic in my lifestyle; I don't throw money around irresponsibly. But I do throw it around responsibly, and that is more than a lot of working people in this province can do. I live a life perched right on the exit sign, it's true, but I'm still in the dancehall with the rest of the haves.

It's still kind of cold out at night, and I believe the last statistics for the City of Champions stated that there are a thousand of us who do not have a home to slump drunkenly home to. Alberta's minimum wage won't be rising till after the summer, so we still have a few months to subject the working poor to starvation wages. We have a great shortage of affordable housing in this city, and we have so much goddamned money to spend on it.

I don't mean to begin haranguing anyone, least of all myself. But this is May Day, and we should all do well to remember that we are part of a community, whether we want to be or not (I believe you have to fill out a stack of forms and go to other great lengths to secede from one, and if you have, you certainly are not capable of reading this). Let us all extinguish our old hearths, and come to the town square for a share of the new summer's fire.

And for god's sake, keep your television off today. If for only one day a year.