Dear Diary,

These people are obsessed with personal space, and, come to think of it, personal hygiene. “If you’re close enough to smell,” says the Canadian, “you’re too damn close, bye.”

They may have created a nation of slobs who can wander listlessly into Timmy’s (see Encyclopedia Canadiana, Tim Horton’s) wearing bagged out sweatpants and a t-shirt that advertises their favorite hockey team without attracting the least opprobrium, but try having the least whiff of sweat coming off those sweatpants, or the least taint of a hockey game on that Sens t-shirt and BAM! You’re out there door. That’s Whitey, of course. You can tell the first generation immigrants: they’re the one’s wearing the well-pressed shirts, the ones with the haircuts, the ones towing behind them a short string of little slobs in sweats and t-shirts who look acutely embarrassed by Dad’s tidy clothes. Must be tough when the kids go native.

Meanwhile, It’s only the insane who invade your personal space. That’s one of the ways we pick the wackos out from the crowd: they stand too close. Some wild-haired nutball with a plastic hospital band on her wrist (probably had a Camembert-helmet and a shingling hammer tucked into her purse, and a plan of righteousness clinking about in her head as well) sidled up way too close to me in the IKEA cafeteria yesterday. Had a huge wart on her chin and a crazy glint in my eye. The very closeness of her quite put me off my meatballs. I can’t speak to the smell because some deep-seated Canadian dive-reflex had closed off my nostrils at her approach.

Well, Diary, nothing much else happened. Chowed down the meatballs with an extra scoop of loganberry sauce and drove slowly home on the six-lane highway that runs through the middle of this spread out town of suburbs. Joined up with the eastward bound flock of SUVs that carries the sane and the productive home around that time of day. These are the ones with better things to do than be down at IKEA eating meatballs in the middle of the afternoon, and I felt like I’d joined an episode of Space Opera Galactica, where our hero slips in undetected amongst a cloud of art nouveau Cylon attack ships. Difference I guess is that instead of styling space attack chariots, these guys are piloting suburban personal-space protection chariots. Staring out the windows at them, couldn’t help wondering at the blind, mute instinct that keeps them all moving along like that; slow and ordered, in those long lines. Like ants or soldiers. Like caribou migrating (I mean, like, back when they could migrate, before someone came and threw roadblocks across the migration highways), like, I don’t know, metaphors kind of petered out like a tired bunny rabbit about there.