How much more chaos can we endure?
Is all of life heading for chaos? Maybe it’s just the Robitussin for my autumn chest cold, but it does seem that the world has become formally irrational.
The Toronto police won’t come to my house if the burglar alarm goes off unless there is an eyewitness, a neighbour who has actually seen the boots of a balaclava-ed burglar disappearing through the basement window. But that’s crazy.
Cops will no longer arrest alleged shoplifters, instead leaving it to the store and some dodgy operation that will send suspects demands for money for a crime that did not legally occur. There’s the crime, obtaining money with menaces. It makes no sense.
I hired snow shovellers for the first time last winter and they broke my driveway in three places. Of course I will shovel it myself as I should have, but how do you break a driveway? And why would they clear a lawn? You don’t shovel grass, everyone knows that. It’s silly.
None of this would have bothered me before, or made me think “nothing works.” But the U.S. has a mean idiot for a president crusted with corruption and with the social skills of an asbestos oven mitt.
He threatens world annihilation, starts trade wars, kidnaps and gasses tiny children at the Mexico border, allegedly offered to give a $67-million Moscow penthouse to a former KGB officer named Putin, lives in bathrobes while waggling his channel changer, has one suit, one coat and a yellow bouffant, eats MagicErasers all day, is coddled by trash like Scott Pruitt and Ivanka Trump — is she Asma Assad or just a poor man’s Clara Petacci — and throws paper towel rolls at hurricane victims.
I read Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk. It reveals a U.S. federal civil service full of dedicated, underpaid people who gather extreme quantities of information for public use. Weather data is so detailed that it can register your pool draining.
Trump’s greasy appointees are sealing off this golden information from public reach and using it to power and profit their own private companies, like AccuWeather. How is this tolerable?
Canada’s West has fire, flood, abandoned oil wells and toxic tarsands tailings ponds, yet Alberta is hell-bent on building pipelines rather than greener energy. The PM is trapped. Nothing works.
We are living in a Jackson Pollock drip painting, chaos spattered large and small, where little is rational and some rough beast is slouching toward us “moving its slow thighs.” Is that Donald Trump, Doug Ford or Jason Kenney?
I have always predicted that drought will make the U.S. invade Canada and every fire reminds me of this. I hate this so much that I lose myself in urgent trivia and Benylin All-in-One. Bali Bras is discontinuing the 3235, for which I comb the huge subterranean world of discontinued lingerie and china patterns.
The German chancellor is falling and Britain is sawing off both of its legs under the impression they will grow back.
So I take shelter in minor complaint. I can’t see my credit card bill online. I won’t name the card (hint: sounds like “BD substantial”) but if Loblaws can organize hills of green beans and tankers of toothpaste, could their credit card not refresh its website without blowing it up?
I spend hours being hung up on, talking to call centre people crisis-hired straight from a halfway house without time to adjust to civilian life. They get fretful, then angry. “If you do that, we might as well give up on this whole thing,” one older gentleman told me. He meant being on speakerphone.
Christmas parcels are stuck at the border or in a Canada Post parking lot. I like Joseph pants so I bought six pairs, which meant that when I gained 2 kg I became pantless. Joseph won’t take my calls so Farfetch is sending me a discounted pair from a boutique in Andorra, the principality between France and Spain best known for its postage stamps, as you know.
This seems mad. Where are the Rohingya? Germany is reverting. The hornbeams won’t shed their leaves in fall, yet we are offered soothers like travelling pants and unwanted extreme column fodder.
Nothing works.