Hockey cards are here. The town is in a ferment. Hockey cards. Long lineups jam MacDonalds’ all over town.

Last week the weather turned ugly: shock and awe weather. Freezing rain and blinding whiteouts. Cars and garbage cans, signs, power poles, mailboxes and stray pets were encased and frozen. Then covered up in feet of thick, crusty snow. Clinging to the vestiges of sanity, I took to tearing out walls. Plaster dust built up like the snowdrifts that had us besieged, and the basement began to look like Port au Prince. The good news came late. The ice has killed the bird flu, according to the Department of Plague. The virus nests, weighed down by icicles like so many toxic chandeliers, collapsed, crashing from under the eves of barns and bus stations, shattering like glass and exposing their nested young to the frigid air. Cleanup crews toured the city to general delight, sweeping up the broken remains and carting them off to the incinerators at the edge of town. The signal fires were lit one last time, and the smell of their smoke mingled with the pungent smell of burning viral husks. Our leaders now appear in public with their faces exposed. The gas masks that they have been wearing since fall tucked into briefcases held in the background by their aides.

The crows come behind the west wind that sweeps in gray and chill an hour after the sun goes down. Black clouds of them, hundreds, silhouetted against the crepuscule. Rising out of the rookery behind the mall on the other side of the river and rustling low on their way north, toward empty Parliament.

On the Corner John’s Gollum has disappeared. Last seen climbing over Barhaven’s back fence around midnight last Thursday in pursuit of a lost garbage can lid, which it had been using as a Frisbee. Spinning it through the air at night, trying to dislodge sleeping raccoons from the trees maybe. Nobody’s saying anything, but it was the prime suspect in the disappearance of Barbie’s cat a couple of weeks back and nobody would be sorry to see the last of it.

Dear Leader has dismissed this pesky parliament; perogied it away with a wave of hand, gone in a puff of greasy smoke, leaving the spiky cathedral of our little democracy echoing empty and dark through these winter evenings. The whiff of bacon hanging on the chill air in the empty corridors the only reminder that it ever was. Holed up two blocks west in his well-fortified HQ the loyal leader of the opposition has taken to scrawling his edicts in Russian on the back of peeled-off beer bottle labels and throwing them out into the street between the iron bars that cover his window. His inner circle are to wear suits with matching ties. MPs shouldn’t talk about weed anymore. The crows are to be fed cranberries to maintain their loyalty.

So a few weeks back a city cop got offed—stabbed whilst enjoying a nice cup of coffee in his car. Tragic, dying in the line of duty like that. Protecting the citizenry from the manifold evils of the citizenry. A parade was held. Seven thousand cops, paramedics, commissionaires and so on shuffling through town to the beat of various drummers who clearly couldn’t hear one another. The paramedics couldn’t march. They looked awkward and more than a little self conscious. The city cops, shoes shiny-ed up and tummies pulled in over Tweedle-dee belts, did a little better. The feds did best, in their Tintin pants and crimson jackets left over from some movie about the Crimean war. Clipping along through the icey air.

Flag waving civvies lined the streets, local TV showed up and some scribblers from the Daily Bugle, tumescently awed by the stretch and pull of all those dress uniforms, waddled along next to the marchers, trying to press the exciting squeak of leather into their sweaty notebooks. Even the Tac-squad was there; stoney-faced boys in blacked out Suburbans, dreaming Blackwater dreams of firefights and enhanced interrogation techniques as the glorious seven thousand shuffled slowly past.

The whole thing put me in a bad mood.

Where’s the pompous eulogizing and endless marching when some Indian kid gets tossed out of a cop car to freeze half to death in the Winnipeg snow? Or a Polish guy gets tasered to death in an airport?

The Plague has descended on this par-frozen city like a fisher’s net upon a school of blind mullet. Every morning we feel it threads biting a little closer about our necks. Every evening we thank the St. Peter that we at least are still breathing water.

On the Corner John has built a gollum of organic compost and mud scraped from the inside of his wormery’s lid. He supposes that it will protect him somehow, and it roams the neighborhood by night, snuffling at the garbage cans and uprooting bulbs planted during the warm days of the early autumn, when we had faith that we would live to see them flower.

From another time or another place we could have decamped, I suppose, to the countryside. Holed up in some picturesque spot and abandoned ourselves to the pleasures of good food and storytelling. But the countryside here is infested with Catholics who huddle in their rags amongst the corn stubble, the blood of infidel babies smudged about their mouths. Mumbling imprecations against the heathen city dwellers, Porkers, Pork-eaters, Swine lovers, who brought down the virus wrath of their angry, airy God. So we stay put, protected only by confiscatory public-transit rates against an invasion of these corn children, but sitting prey for the Plague.

“Zionism has won!” declares “dovish” former education minister in Israel (Ok, he said “Zionism has already won”). Niiiice. He was commenting on the removal of the word “naqba” from a third-grade history text for Arabs in the Israeli school system.

No word in the piece on what it might be replaced with, but sources who have no idea what went on are suggesting that “arrival of civilization from the west” is the leading contender at this point. They add that “final solution” didn’t even make the short list.

A week of contemplating the rain soaked scenery of one of Canada’s several Occupied Territories has left me refreshed but a little addled. All that home made booze seems to have scrambled something upstairs, if you know what I mean. Referring of course to the Gulf Islands, home to a small indigenous hippy population. Watched over by a small contingent of Canada’s finest (hey, you need to complete high school to get into the RCMP!), these quaint folk spend their days in various traditional pursuits. We were proud to be invited to a nit-combing bee while we were there. We turned down the pot circle, though, as well as the grievance rehearsal. We did catch the first day of a dream catcher conference, however.

Today, back home, I cleaned a tennis ball that T picked up in the park. Watchful dad that I am, I didn’t think he needed to ingest any more dog spitaki than he already has.

It’s raining again. Pouring down in thick, unwavering perpendiculars and collecting in tepid puddles that shimmer dully in the late afternoon. Nothing exciting about this rain. No thunder and wind. Nothing to suggest ferment in the heavens. A very Canadian rain, I guess.

I made a wormery in the backyard by filling an old laundry sink with topsoil and adding in half a pound of vicious worms specially bred on a farm on the outskirts of town for their nasty appetites. They squirm and thrash hungrily when you toss food into them. It’s like having a shark tank back there. I put a lid on the sink so that it wouldn’t fill with rainwater and drown them, and I think the constant dull drumming of it coming down is driving them mad.

Happy Canada Day eh? Downtown crammed with potbellied whities in red t-shirts pushing strollers toward the Hill for their free hotdogs, or returning, ketchup-smeared spawn snoozing quietly with little flags clutched in their fists. The greater part of the Canadian Air Force, half a dozen or so antique trainers, wandered listlessly back and forth overhead, circling the faux-gothic towers of Parliament like a murder of wayward crows looking for their way home.

Nothing like a little nationalism manufactured by some Reform-crony owned PR firm.

Sources report that Dear Leader spent much of the day in the clock tower with an old Winchester 30-06 clutched to his chest, scanning the crowd below and muttering that “the old goat’s gonna get it today.” Despite rumors that he might put in an appearance, however, Preston was not spotted amongst the silver-haired crowds who flocked to tour the seat of Canadian federalism on this auspicious day.

The upshot of the Michael Jackson autopsy seems to be that, under the clown outfits, he was actually ET – a hairless little thing with no obvious connection to planet earth. Well, whatever. ET gone home. But why is everyone being so nice about him, now that he’s dead? What is it about a massive coronary that brings to flood the milk of human kindness?

I once knew a guy who kept a ferret in his freezer. It was dead, and was before he put it in there (just to put your mind at ease, and put to rest any ideas you SPCA types might have). He was a big guy, with a beard and a Harley, which he kept in the kitchen during the winter. Perhaps so that it could be close to the ferret. I didn’t think of that at the time, but there it is. A theory formulated in retrospect. Out there now for consideration.

One day in January, somebody drove the Harley across the kitchen and through the wall into the garden.

I just found some old black and white prints from the days when I knew this guy. They show my sister standing in the rain by the sea, looking into the camera lens like a raccoon eyeing the business end of a 12 gauge, and some long-haired types who were in a band. One of them, the chubby one with the THC glaze on his eyeballs, was her boyfriend at the time. He played bass.

The photos were taken by the guy who drove the Harley through the wall. He claimed later that he was just trying to lay a little rubber into the lino, but that his hand slipped. No matter. It all worked out well enough in the end. The Harley was on the road come spring, and the ferret eventually got a decent burial in the garbage bin. My sister left the bass player for the photographer. No wait. It was the other way around.

Procrastination. If only I could get around to doing more of it, I’d be a fucking professional. Unfortunately my time gets soaked up playing Quake and drifting across the internet, half reading half baked bullshit that doesn’t have anything to do with anything that has anything to do with me.

So there’s this feature on WordPress that will tell you what search terms a visitor, referred by a search engine, used to find the site. Now, I’m not going to name any names, but one of you who visited in the last 24 hours found this site by searching for “amputee whores.” You know who you are.

I’m reading Adam Smith. He’s that charming little Pict with a huge big nose, eyes that bulged like a frog and a lisp who thought the lazy hand of under-worked lay-abouts was guiding his nation toward prosperity (seriously – check out his ideas on how the steam engine came to be developed). Now, chronic sloth that I am, I’m all for the idea of some kind of dictatorship of the lazy, but I find it hard to take seriously a book titled “The Wealth of Nations” that hails from an ex-country best described now (as opposed to its glory days, back when it had trees) as the Newfoundland of the world.

Apologies, of course, to our deep-fried Mars Bar-eating friends from north of Hadrian’s Wall.

Fine and fair enough. But speaking of that crowd (economists, not Scots), is this Milton Friedman blaming some already rather over-targeted people for the evils of communism?

“…the groups in our society that have the most at stake in the preservation and strengthening of competitive capitalism are those minority groups which can most easily become the object of distrust and enmity of the majority – the Negroes, the Jews, the foreign born, to mention only the most obvious. Yet paradoxically enough, the enemies of the free market – the Socialists and the Communists – have been recruited in disproportionate measure from these groups.”

Do you think Henry Kissinger missed that part?

Like Meatloaf says, “all I can do is keep on telling you, ‘I want you, I need you,’ but [sorry Henry] there ain’t no way I’m ever gonna love you. Now don’t be sad, it’s because two out of three is bad.”