soundtrack

…

“Cindy, I want to talk about you trying to hurt yourself this morning.”

Miss Bailout, the school psychiatrist, isn’t really a trained doctor. She just got tired of teaching logic and math to bears who really needed health and guidance.

“Um, Miss Bailout, I didn’t really try to hurt myself. I was just conducting an experiment and using myself as the guinea pig.”

Miss Bailout pauses to study Cindy’s body language carefully to scan for more information than spoken text which – she has learned – is relatively easy to fake.

“Cindy, you ran up ANWAR Hill and jumped a passing oil truck. This experimentation explanation isn’t going to convince your parents when you get home, and it doesn’t convince me very much either.”

“Oh my god! Don’t tell my parents about this!! We just moved to our fifth igloo in two years, and dad’s coming out party really freaked my mom. This could drive them over the edge!”

Miss Bailout nods and smiles professionally: “Don’t worry. The school doctor says you don’t even need any medical follow-up. Except… well, except I think you should have some psychological follow-up, and that’s why I called you in to my office. Tell me what motivated you to risk your life to scare a truck driver.”

“Okay. Well, last week, we learned in Modern World Problems about how humans destroyed the world and got attacked by all the other animals as they were all going extinct. So that got me thinking: what if we polar bears do the same thing? What if we get so enslaved by our own daily routines that we forget about the really important but banal facts of life? What if we get so scared of nature and of dying that we end up destroying the earth with our technology and consumption?”

Miss Bailout scrunches up her eyebrows and pulls on one of her long whiskers. “Well, I guess that could happen, Cind. But even if this does happen – and I hope it doesn’t – how could jumping onto an oil truck and laying across the windshield help prevent it?”

Cindy speaks quickly, as if she has been writing a manifesto. “If I can show everyone that I’m not afraid of dying, then maybe everyone can see that it’s alright to die, and so they’ll let everyone and everything else… live.”

The school psychiatrist scribbles something into her black velvet binder.

After a long pause, Cindy hands back her youth distress questionnaire: “Listen, Miss Bailout, I just want people to know that fear is worse than anything you can be afraid of. Humans, with all their fears and defenses, were just dinosaurs part two.”

Miss Bailout rises from her seat and walks towards the door to let Cindy out. “It’s true that humans and dinosaurs were similar. But not us, Cindy. Dinosaurs didn’t have guidance counselors like us Pee Bears!”

**Miss Bailout makes the volleyball team’s Pee Bear sign with three fingers**

soundtrack

…

American TV’s Effects

A lot of people wonder why so many Canadians – 30,000 or so – volunteered to help the USA terrify Vietnamese farmers out of their own home-grown communist system. I’ve often wondered about this myself. But I just finished reading a blog by a vet from Halifax, Nova Scotia that helps explain why these Canadians willingly went along.

It turns out that what a lot of people don’t know about that anti-Asian pogrom is that the Vietnamese actually started it by bombing Halifax with experimental chemicals. This was in the late 50s. Brutal Vietnamese chopper pilots – stoned on LSD and government-spiked coffee – dropped canister after canister of flammable, poisonous, and neurotoxic products smack dab in the middle of the city. And they deployed these evil poisons even though the people of Nova Scotia had done them no harm.

All Powerful Elite

The Vietnamese at the time had a totalitarian war machine. Their mighty soldiers – perhaps the best equipped and best brainwashed on earth – had been lead to believe that Nova Scotia was planning to take over the world, and this would mean that the people of Southeast Asia wouldn’t be able to live free anymore. They learned this by watching movies and listening to radio.

Of course, we now know that this was Vietnamese bank-funded propaganda whose intent was to lure local cannon fodder off to Nova Scotia to seize control of the banking there. For anyone paying attention, the many Credit Unions bombed as military targets were an obvious clue. But most people were so caught up in the wartime frenzy of burning flesh and burying family members that they didn’t notice all the money people slipping in and out of limos.

Alas, the bottomless pit of money that is the Bank of Ho Chi Minh can always buy the latest tech in propaganda and brainwashing. The Vietnamese soldiers were so psychologically altered by their basic training and their mass media consumption that they no longer saw the people they were killing as Haligonians, Canadians, or even as people. Instead, they referred to their victims as snots – as in “nasal discharge.”

On her CB radio, a Vietnamese-speaking nurse overheard Vietnamese pilots shouting things like “Pair of snots at 4 o’clock!” followed by the sound of a bomb falling, and then laughter. Her theory was that S.N.O.T. stood for “Stable Northamerican Opposition Target,” but I’ve never seen this independently confirmed anywhere.

Happy Endings for everyone

In the end, the Vietnamese Army lost their war against Catholicism (that’s what their soldiers were told they were fighting against). But in destroying all the Credit Unions and killing all the political leaders of the province, the Bank of Ho Chi Minh ended up controlling the provincial economy anyways.

And that’s probably why so many Canadians volunteered to fight these people on the other side of the earth: to protect Credit Unions.

soundtrack

(dedicated to all fathers)

My dad’s store makes me think of the rubbery smell of vinyl and the pain of paper cuts. The only time I’m allowed to go there is when I have a doctor or dentist appointment. When this happens, I have to wait there for a ride home. No choice.

I’m ten and in Grade Five, and I just had my first multiple dental fillings. Boy, was I scared. It’s hard to face normal life events like this when you have no older brother or father to say he’s been there. I never know what to expect or how to react.

My old man had all his teeth pulled out in his twenties, but I never heard about why or how. I guess a lot of words must have gotten pulled out along the way as well.

Right before the appointment, my mother assured me I’d be fine (her exact words: “Stop bein’ such a jeezus sissy!”). The dentist ended up snarling at me and calling me a baby because I cried in pain at the needle. Dr. Hickstein’s hands shake like a petit mal epileptic seizure and I think he tore my gums to shreds during the freezing-slash-interrogation part of the fillings appointment. “You’re a baby!” *slash!*

So now it’s 1 pm, and I’m injured and weak at my father’s shop, and I start to tell him about the experience. “Shut up and go sit in the front of the store,” he tells me with a hint of anger before I can finish the story. I keep forgetting it’s still World War Two: dental secrets can sink ships.

So, I slowly get up – embarrassed to be treated like a dog in front of human strangers – and sadly limp to the front of the store with my tail between my wegs. This is the furthest part of the store from the office – an outpost, almost in the display window. It’s raining, so no one is walking by.

For the next four hours, I look at wallpaper sample books all by myself: patterns and textures and colors and shapes. I guess I’m supposed to be learning that work is boring and lonely. Only one customer walks in during the whole four hours. As a form of solitary confinement, looking at wallpaper samples for four hours is probably worse than watching TV in a bungalow for the same duration.

Every once in a while I hear my dad laughing along with others coming from the office. I wonder what they’re laughing about? I wonder what subjects the men are talking about? Will I ever know what to say to other guys?

Patterns and textures and colors and shapes.

After a few years of these treasured educational visits to the store’s wallpaper counter, I decide to become a graphic designer whenever I grow up. My father laughs at my first attempt at imagining being a grown up, saying with playful sarcasm: “When I was 15, my guidance counselor said I was gonna be a paint salesman.”

The burn of the sarcasm helps me understand my low place in the universe.  I will forever be the Steel City Fruit.

(Note. Any resemblance to real human beings is unintentional. This story - like other Steel City Fruit stories – is purely fictional.)

soundtrack

(dedicated to all fathers)

A few months before I turn nine, I find Dad home on an early Saturday afternoon. That’s weird cuz he usually has sports and stuff when he’s not working or running errands or on business trips or on his way to deliver milk.

Even weirder – he’s looking for me! He wants to take me somewhere in the house. My pulse starts to race cuz this kinda thing never happens to me. My father wants to hang out with me – spend some time. It’s like the Children’s Wish Foundation. Does this mean I have leukaemia?

He takes me down the basement into his small trophy room, past the shelves of plastic Dollarama-style trophies honoring his accomplishments in the golf, hockey, baseball and pingpong fields.

Next to his hero den, he has a hockey net and two sticks all set up. He pushes a stick in my hand while beaming a proud smile like Mother Teresa, and asks me to take a shot on him while he plays nets. I take a weakling, girly shot at him, and he lets it easily slide in for a goal.

“Nice shot. What’s your name again?”

This is bonding or something, so he lets me get a few more shots in. Feels like I’m improving. I can already control the stick a bit better than 60 seconds ago. I think this might be…

And then it’s over. The phone rings, and he’s gone like a summer hailstorm. Saved by the bell.

It turns out that my three minutes of fathering was inspired by a ten-minute speech from a guidance counselor at my school the night before. At a Parent-Teacher Night, Mr. Pendergast told my mother: “Qatzel fears guys his own age and older. He has virtually no male-bonding skills.” And that’s how I got my one hockey game in with the old man.

Looking back, I think that guidance counselor really made a difference in my dad’s life.

The next day, my sister and I played Barbies and imagined a big, happy world made up entirely of fashion designers and hairdressers. And that’s how I became the Steel City Fruit.

(Note. Any resemblance to real human beings is unintentional. This story - like other Steel City Fruit stories – is purely fictional.)

__________________________________________________________

soundtrack

The Qaturday Audience needs distraction to mask the everyday moral repulsion that is a permanent feature of modern society with all its hateful technologies and social rules.

Qaturday provides an outlet – a third place – for the audience’s awkward sense of not living a dignified natural existence. It provides the robotic social-climber with an instant nature fix, without demanding that he alter his modern behavior in any way that might actually help other animals (and his own species) to survive with dignity. In this way, Qaturday is like binge eating to forget about a weight problem and cholesterol: it’s only therapeutic insofar as denial is.

The Qaturday audience is lonely and lost, and finds solace in the monotonous voice of mass media, in the zany meaninglessness of Qaturday images, and in the static helplessness and cuteness found in each pic. Helplessness is an accelerant for feline cuteness, and this elation comes in a rush of empowerment, so helplessness is something humans like to project onto their domestic animals. They enslave their pets, thus rendering them helpless… for maximum cuteness and maximum thrills. Pethood is about human thrill-seeking and not interspecies coexistence. Human societies are organized on the pet model as well.

Pet owners project their own helplessness onto their housepets by forcing these captured beasts to live vicariously for their masters’ pleasure. Since this is the miserable state of most humans of all classes, a little controlled role-reversal at the end of the day feels soothing – harmless revenge on a creature that God probably intended for humans to torture anyways.

There’s never enough time for the complexities of philosophy or of thoughtful education among the Qaturday Audience. The  zero-attention-span of the 9-5 caffeinated workaday requires some kind of distraction from real life/non-fiction. So the time-starved cubicle-bot seeks out Qaturdays that provide cuteness, zaniness, and an adequate dose of irony to conceal the incompatibility of the juxtaposed images. And all of it instantly and with the illusion of thought behind it.

These cats don’t know what they’re saying to the Qaturday Audience. Much like their homo sapien audience, these cats have been programmed to have “opinions” that have nothing to do with the actual needs or instincts of the featured cat models. The Qaturday Audience recognizes itself here, but only on a sub-conscious level. On a conscious level, the Audience is completely unaware of anything except its fabricated “need” for entertainment and cuteness.

And it is in this artificially implanted “need” that Feline Cuteness Hegemony finds a willing host to set up a base from which to conquer your independent thought.

…

__________________

The Qaturday Mail Bag:

Q: Isn’t caturday just pix of cats with funny words added by human beings?

A: This is like asking if Las Vegas is a city where you can play cards. Yes – but it’s much, much more.

Q: What if the words in the caturday aren’t even funny?

 A: There is an important paradigmatic difference between serious caturdays, and unfunny ones. The unfunny ones are often unserious as well.

Q: What is Qaturday?

A: Qaturday is the fusion between mankind and its animal origins.

Q: What does Qaturday demand of the audience?

A: It demands that its audience abandon most texts and most of its fake history in favor of a return to nature, to instincts, and to letting the environment decide things, rather than trying to change the environment.

soundtrack

…

Kirk’s cat Issy has two sons who were born only three minutes apart. Little GW and BW look a lot alike, and as kittens, they were identical except that the cow patches on GW are grey, while the ones on BW are black. This is how they got their names: grey and white GW, black and white BW. That the grey one, GW, is older is just an accident of nature.

One Friday after Home Economics class, Kirk and I drive out to Big Pond to pick up some of the most insane marijuana we have ever smoked: Rapeseed Bud, it’s called.  “It can fuck you up pretty bad,” Sidney Normandson told us at the high school dance.

After picking up a measured ounce of Rapeseed Bud from a dealer in a church basement, we drive for a short 30 minutes and pick up Sidney, and then drive the hour back to Kirk’s place and fire up the power-hitter.

A quarter ounce later, we’re all trashed, and Kirk goes into an acute body stone watching the Expos play the Yankees on television.

GW and BW are sitting cherub-like next to Sidney, when suddenly Sidney gets a hypnotized look in his eye, jumps up and walks out into the kitchen really focused. The curious little cat brothers follow him into the kitchen.

In Home Ec., we’ve just discussed the difference between nature and nurture, and heard the teacher say that upbringing could change someone’s mental and physical development. Since the two cats seem close to identical, Sidney explains to me that he is going to torture one and spoil the other, and see if it really makes a difference. It’s like an experiment – science.

He looks so concentrated and stressed that I don’t dare try to stop him even though I find this experiment really sick. There’s just no point in resisting his psychotic need to control: I don’t have as strong a character as he does – even Kirk and I acting together can’t make him budge.  Whenever I disagree with Sidney, he calls me a wimp or a faggot and then threatens to hit me or humiliate me in public. I don’t want to be on the receiving end, so I go along.

Even though he’s wasted on the Rapeseed Bud, Sidney’s mind is knife-sharp. He spots a blow dryer and a bag of high-end kitty treats sitting on top of the fridge next to a case of empty Pop Shoppe bottles.

With Kirk still engrossed in the ballgame, Sidney drops some savory treats onto the kitchen floor, and both GW and BW go running together.

Sidney intentionally throws them separate treats. And as soon as the cats are far enough apart, he attacks GW with the blow dryer yelling things like: “I’m gonna kill you, you little slut!”,”Soooh-eey!” and ” You’re not worth shit, you pissbag!” followed by a few long minutes of : “Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!…”

He leaves all the treats in a pile in front of a fatter and fatter BW and then chases GW around the kitchen yelling “Antichrist! Antichrist!” and then cornering him next to the sink. He plugs the blow dryer into a wall socket, turns it on high, and points it right at the cat’s ear. Wrrrrrrrr! GW curves his back, hisses, and tries in vain to beat back the hot air with his little paw. I’m paralyzed myself, just like GW, and my paws are about as strong as his when it comes to fending off Sidney’s hate-turbocharged charisma.

Through the entire kitty nightmare, Kirk watches baseball and notices nothing else. “Bottom of the fifth, and still no score….”

Finally, the experiment ends with GW running outside and hiding for a few days.

As soon as GW runs away, Sidney pops his smiling head into the TV room and says: “Hey Captain Kirk, want some crackers and cheese?” For Sidney, crackers and cheese are the cigarette afterwards.

“Yeah, I’m getting major munchies,” Kirk lazily replies smiling a dumb, affable grin.

This is the start of a beautiful thing for both of them, and every time Sidney visits with some Rapeseed Bud, he gets out the blow dryer and chases GW while Kirk watches TV.

To this day, I’m not sure if baseball-body-stone Kirk has figured out how GW got to have such a special personality. He probably doesn’t know or care why BW is so relaxed and confident, while GW – post blow dryer – is a skinny loner who rarely seeks the affection of other cats or people.

Sidney used to fear his father who must have beat him up pretty bad for him to give it back to GW so hard. And now the two formerly inseparable brothers – GW and BW – have no contact with one another though they used to sleep in the same cardboard box…

soundtrack bis

soundtrack

…

The Gay Homeland is fighting for its survival and perhaps for the existence of homosexuality itself!

The super-precise Dildo rockets that landed in Seattle, Cairo and London last weekend were not an unprovoked attack, as many homophobic media sources have claimed. The flattening of hetero-terror centers in these cities was a measured Gay Homeland response to the bitchiness emanating from these three capitals.

Since the day of its creation, the world’s only Gay Nation has been under attack by the forces of homophobia and hate. Following the signing of the Paul Lynde Act at the UN building  – straight terrorists began plotting as they sipped stale drip coffee.

Within months, heterosexists from Arabia and Europe began to claim “sovereignty” over the few square km of the earth’s surface reserved for Gays to live peacefully among their own kind.

Meanwhile, European straights have thriving cultures in Germany, Poland, Russia, North America and Australia, while the Arab straights belong in Jordan, Egypt or Syria. Agreements have been reached to help transport heterosexist tribesmen who find themselves at odds with the wonderful Gay State they find themselves trapped in. The Gay Homeland is a world leader in both human rights and refugee relocation.

Cleansing the Gay Homeland of straight assholes is not discrimination. Over 12% of the Gay Homeland’s population is non-gay, and while this number includes many babies, it also includes many refugees from the straight world who have come to bask in all the fabulousness.

The desert campground-style cities that have been provided to the 2.5 million straights awaiting relocation to somewhere more suitable have been referred to as “concentration camps” by straight media outlets with an agenda of hate. The straights in these camps live better and look better in video than most straights do in Our neighboring countries.

So when voting on proposition 78 – cutting military aid to the Gay Homeland down to a dangerously low US$89 billion per year – think back – to the first time someone threw a rock at you for kissing your new girl. Or the time you crawled out of the bushes to find that someone had slashed the tires on your small convertible.

And hey, wouldn’t you want your best friends standing beside you if you were the free world’s first defense against beach blanket bingo?

On March 12^th, vote “I don’t think so” to Proposition 78 !

A guest column by Gay Homeland Coolness Minister Rock Abercrombie and the NO committee for Proposition 78

soundtrack

…

It’s the hot spring of A.D. 16. Free Market Jesus – a sophomore at the pricey Sons of Gods Boarding School – reads his award-winning essay to the junior class.

FMJ: I’m a type-A, Alpha male overachiever. My virgin mother always told me I was meant to do better than anyone else. And as I slowly mature like fine wine, I’ve grown to prefer the dynamic and risk-filled adventurism of my corporation to the dull monotony of my surroundings. I love my corporation. Let me tell you why.

My corporation gives me the power and independence I need to really excel. And when I love my corporation so much that it makes others squirm, I get even more esteem and glamor. By submitting to the collective self-interest of a small group of people, I become the embodiment of my dreams and live out the novel that my subconscious mind has written for me to activate.

Currently the corporation I love is on trial for contaminating drinking water in sub-Saharan Africa. But we here in the corporation know we’re not guilty.

How is it even possible – let alone probable within the shadow of a doubt – that such a benevolent job-creating corporation as us could do nasty things to potential human resources? Maybe these Sub-Saharan complainers – who I never seem to run into at the mall, the club, or anywhere else – maybe these Sub-Saharans who don’t have well-paid jobs with the corporation are just jealous that we do. And I don’t blame them for being jealous; I’d be jealous in their place too. But jealousy can’t pay for clean drinking water now, can it?

The world’s losers mustn’t forget that the corporation tells us all that we need to know to do the things that are most beneficial to all the corporations we cherish. Without these large and successful corporations, who would we orient our earthly routines around? Our surroundings?

**crowd boos**

Our instincts?

**As crowd begins to boo again, teenage FMJ lifts a diamond-studded hand up to hush their paid-for participation. Then the applause sign comes on, and everyone claps as he disappears into a puff of periwinkle smoke with a strobe light accentuating an I heart my corp logo**

soundtrack

.

Mrs. MacIsaac has never had her female cats spayed or the males fixed. Instead, twice a year her brother – a wiry bruiser we kids call Uncle Brute – takes away the “extra” kittens.

Where he takes them, no adults will say, but Billy says he puts them in a garbage bag with rocks and throws them off the bridge near his house. I find this hard to believe; Mrs. MacIsaac has always been known for her kindness to animals. And humans too. So I figure Billy just says this to make his family sound tougher than it really is: working class bravado.

But when Uncle Brute shows up one Sunday to pick up a pair of fresh kittens, I stick around to see what happens.

On the TV that afternoon, there’s a boring documentary about the ethnic cleansing of the Acadians. In a way, I’m glad there’s nothing interesting on like WWF or a Bronson movie because it means less distraction from the kitten drowning we’re about to experience.

Brute arrives about three o’clock in his red pickup wearing a New England Patriots cap and oversized Moosehead tshirt. He already seems a bit drunk as he stumbles out of his vehicle, but  Mrs. MacIsaac nonetheless offers him a few beers for his nerves. After drinking the first one, he can barely stand up. His eyes start darting aimlessly around the room, and his speech is slurred and loud – which means we can hear every word he says from the next room.

“I’m too fucking drunk to drive, Wilma. Just bring me a friggin’ bucket,” he says to his sister, Mrs. MacIsaac, who never curses herself.

My pulse starts to accelerate so I focus on the tragedy that is unfolding on the TV. As Uncle Brute prepares the bucket… Governor Cornwallis has just brought in New England settlers to scalp the local natives  – the Mi’kmaq.

“Never mind the fucking basement! I’m taking this jeezuz bucket right into that goddamn living room so that everyone can see it with their own fucking eyes!” he shouts, a water-filled bucket in one hand and two pink kittens in the other. The kittens’ eyes are still shut while Uncle Brute’s are wide open and glaring.

Father LeLoutre has just told a crowd to burn down their farms  Then a New England Planter destroys a dike and more Acadian families drown. Then three commercials: dandruff shampoo, Toyota Camry, and Oxfam.

Brute sets the bucket down between my chair and Billy’s. We’re both in our early teens and sort of curious about things like Satanism and cruelty. But Billy’s little eight-year-old brother Herbert and his friend Peter are also sitting in front of the TV next to the bucket. They aren’t curious about cruelty at all. They’re Disney kids. Nervous little Peter hides his face behind the corner of the multicolored afghan he’s sitting on.

But there are holes in that afghan, so all of our eyes are on Uncle Brute’s hands as they submerge the tiny kittens for a few minutes. Even though the TV is still on, I can’t hear the sound anymore. I can only see Brute’s skinny tattooed arms holding the kittens underwater, and hear the silence in their tiny voices.

After about three minutes, Brute raises the lifeless blobs of pink fur up out of the water, as we all sit breathlessly waiting for the triumphal conclusion of our first live animal sacrifice. But as soon as Brute brings them out of the water, they start to cry like little babies. They continue to cry until Uncle Brute puts them back into the water, and this time, for a much longer five minutes.

On the TV at that moment… Robert Monkton has just lead a band of New Englanders up the Saint John River to kill the few remaining Acadians hiding there.

When Uncle Brute pulls the tiny furry bodies up the second time, they’re very, very dead, and we’re all relieved. In a way.

One sleepless week later, Mrs. MacIsaac has all her females spayed.

soundtrack bis

soundtrack

…

Suburban roots

The year was 1976 and he was still a child: the patriarch of Scabbish Practice Victor Simmy fell and scraped open the palms of his hands playing Frisbee with his seven-year-old cousin Purdy Peddy.

This palm-chaffing moment is referred to as The Scraping in the texts, and this event provides a focal point for Scab faith.

Scab followers keep the palms of their hands in a state of perpetual infection with open sores to remember all of the unnecessary pain that Victor suffered “but in the end, overcame through power.”  
(Events, Chapter 12, 18-46)

A Day in the life of Solar

Solar is a normal, healthy Scab and peels the scabs off the palms of his hands every night before his prayers and frisbee ritual.

Since his Scraping at the age of seven, he’s had a blacklight poster of a scab on the ceiling above his bed which he stares at while listening to Scabra music before going to sleep. He often dreams of finally being free – of finally having a life without palm scabs and pain.

And with each year, he detests Purdy Peddy more and more as he stares at his hands.

Customs and culture

The Scabbish – followers of Victor Simmy – can often be spotted traveling in wheelchair caravans with members who have lost the use of their right leg. The wheelchairs are for followers of the many subsects that have the right knee scarred at marriage and then  spend their married lives dousing this leg scab with contaminants. These festering knee scabs can get so infected that amputation is often required. The faithful amputees are called Leg Heroes and spend their adult lives living fairly well off of public grants for their sacrifice.

Scabbish people – like Solar in the above example – usually display blacklight posters of scabs in each room of their luxurious mansions, and it’s considered blasphemy for Scabs to name a child Purdy or to associate with people with this name or the family name Peddy. Cultures who use these names are considered unclean by many Old Skool Scabs.

Remembering the Scraping

Visits to the Scab Museums and Scabbish Victimhood Libraries help reinforce the link between the Purdy Peddy’s of the world and the non-stop pain that comes from the loss of a leg or from the everyday use of painfully scarred hands.

And because this trauma is relived over and over, there are many manifestations of secondary trauma including: paranoia, gluttony, violence, and other anti-social behavior.

Followers are taught that Purdy Peddy is ultimately responsible for these flaws.