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?