Queen’s Boulevard is hot. Damn hot. Sweat is prickling my back and I’m squinting. The sky’s overcast and the air is sparkling with moisture, but the sun is painfully bright. The white stripes of the zebra crossing fairly sizzle on the cornea. I’ve just picked up a notepad and a pen at store run by a thin East-Indian and I’m listening to a black woman singing in a low, gratchety voice as she pushes a shopping cart full of old clothes and empty cans through a shopping arcade. “Hallelujah” the word echoes off the glass windows where armless underwear mannequins pose, nipples improbably erect in the heat, like a posse of amputee whores. “Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah” She’s browsing the pink frilly panties.

A couple of doors down, the Chase Bank’s just been robbed. Either that or there was a donut giveaway: there’s a half dozen cop cars parked at in-a-hurry angles against the curb and a quarter mile of yellow don’t-come-here tape wrapped around the squat cement and glass building. A sixteen year old who just stepped out of PV-Pharmacy (rock bottom prices on hair products) in crack hugging pink shorts and a top she bought down at the underwear store marches up to the tape. “What just happened here?” She demands of the chubby cop there. I am thrilled to see him push the blue billed hat with the NYPD badge back on his head and wipe his forehead. I’m in New York.

We got here the day before yesterday, or before that maybe: the heat and the humidity are addling my brain. It’s like being steamed. The fibrous connecting tissues start to break down. Like broccoli, you end up as just so much mush after a bit. Canadians were built for flash freezing, not the long slow steam.

The subway is cool and clean compared to the street, and full of stereotypes. There’s a middle aged Jewish lady across from me. Salt and pepper hair all frizzy. Eating chips from a bag that she has inside her knapsack and reading a pamphlet on nutrition. “Be Kanye” reads the ad over her head. And above that “If you’ve been injured… don’t just settle for any lawyer.” A toll-free number and “Hablamos espanol.” Down a few seats a lanky black teenager, bandanna-ed head hanging between his shoulders, elbows on knees. A Hispanic family gets on and the little girl swings her brand new Barbie bag up on the seat next to the Jewish woman, who pulls a face and hugs her bag a little closer. Then, with the whole family moving in next door she decides to move away, three seats in the direction of the black teenager, to a new neighborhood. She spreads out next to a fifty-something with a beard and a fedora and baggy pinstripe. The little girl’s mother takes out a camera and starts to take pictures of herself. Her father pulls on a pair of Irvana Trump shades and stares out the window at the blackness. The little girl goes to sleep on her bag.

So comes the time in every new suburban dweller’s life when child and wife are packed into the back of the car, child strapped into his little backward facing safety seat, wife strapped into her forward facing wife seat—the one surrounded by children’s toys, wipes, diapers, bottles of water and snacks—and the first vacation is inaugurated with an endless round of almost leavings. We almost left, but then baby exploded in a squelchy flatulence and needed to be changed, and then fed. Almost left, but remembered the water bottles that we had forgotten on the kitchen table. Almost left, but had last minutes qualms about the number of diapers stuffed into the trunk and went back inside to get more.

Finally, though, we head out, air conditioning cranked against the midmorning swelter that is lowering itself onto the city like a dirty blanket. The baby is burbling to himself and drooling down his sleeper. Wife playing idly with a rattle.

Drifting south out of the city, the ‘burbs give way to farmland. Not that there’s much farming going on. A few fields of corn and some hay, first crop cut and bailed in giant round bails that look like slugs dotted across a vast lawn, and that’s about it. Barns unpainted, their wooden seams splitting in the heat, rooflines sagging and tractors parked like dinky toys next to little bungalows. In the early morning, the mist pools in the hollows here, clinging to the tree branches like cotton wool, and the lakes look like puddles of mercury, hard and bright in the flat dawn light. But we’re late and we’ve missed all that. The colors are hard and over saturated now, greens and golden yellows. It’s like we’re driving across a cereal box, which is fine I guess. The baby’s asleep and the wife’s burbling happily over a magazine.

We spent the evening with friends getting drunk by the river, eating pizza and worrying that mosquitoes would bite the babies. They didn’t but we retreated early to a couple of cabins to sleep off the beer and the driving, not that there had been much of either by reasonable standards but these are indolent times and nobody seems to have the energy to do much.

The next day we visit a park where they have recreated the suburbia of the ancients. Eighteenth century farmhouses, stores and mills saved from various floodings and disasters rebuilt and re-imagined as a village here, surrounding fields worked by chubby men lifted from the local welfare rolls and inserted into period costumes who pitchfork and scythe lackadaisically at the wildflowers. This, I think as I poke through an old house pursued by a crone in rebuilt crinoline who is posing as the revivified wife of a merchant dead and crumbled these last two hundred years, this is Canada’s chain gang. A simulated workhouse where nothing ever gets done. And this, I guess, is how we’re supposed to believe the past was: a clean place, staffed by people who didn’t really have to do to much to get by, but who had to wear funny clothes. The best part was an Amish family who seemed to have wandered in unannounced. I looked for their wagon later in the parking lot but didn’t see it. They strolled through the crowds of Japanese tourists with a sort of bemused serenity, a teenage daughter in an ankle length blue dress and headscarf three paces behind looking pissed off, a bottle of Pepsi in her hand.

It’s like living in a giant purse seine, or under a trapeze artist’s safety net: this thick black wire grid that is strung over the city. Not the mess of tapped-into and improvised wires that hang in giant spiders’-home balls and knots across the streets in Cairo or Beirut, but something better ordered, better maintained, and decidedly more sinister, these carefully knotted lines. They sizzle a little in the rain, but for the most part they work well enough and once in a while orange suited bears come by in circus trucks that lift them up into the netting, where they struggle with massive tools, oversized pliers you could pull an elephant molar with and titanic screwdrivers. They never talk.

I picked up a bbq yesterday. At last. A Canadian man without a bbq is like a bear without a circus, a pope without a funny hat. Wayne Newton without makeup. Across the Street John put it down on the curb, the traditional offering ritual in the neighborhood and I wandered over to see what the deal was. Seems he found a better one in an alley three blocks away and dragged it home. So I tucked his old unit under my arm and took it back to my own backyard. Put it by the back door to keep the rain off it.

In Qamishley, on the border between Syria and Turkey, the town’s electricity wires hang so close to the balcony of the only hotel that you could easily reach out and poke one with a coat hanger if you felt like it. They’re uninsulated though—just bare shiny wire hanging there—so the coat hanger business is contra-indicated, as they say. There’s a place in the market that sells old Roman coins, the kind the kids sell one at a time around the archaeological sites, by the kilo. All identical, all slightly mis-struck. They roast their chickens flatter than anywhere else in the Middle East. I don’t know if there’s a connection, but these things are squashed so flat that they look like they were killed with a roller. Which would be a nasty way to go, even for a chicken.

If there were truth in advertising, this sign would be hanging over passport control at Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. “Caution!” In large red letters. “No Diving!” It would save so much duplication around the country. “Welcome to Canada,” passport control guy hands you back your passport. “Please refrain from driving over 60, wearing bright colors, talking loudly and, of course,” and here he raises a finger to point at the sign. Smiles. “no diving.”

You can’t buy unpasteurized cheese in Canada. Not legally anyway. There’s probably a cross-border market in smuggled Camembert, though, and grey-market Brie and under-the-counter Stilton. What kind of country does that? No smoking in bars, but it’s just fine to strip-mine the tarsands, drive SUVs and pump 8-year-olds full of Zoloft, Ritalin and Prozac. Fuck me.

It’s 8 am here on a Saturday morning and everything’s just about as right and quiet as can be. The sun is just beginning to filter down through the leaves and the birds are chittering away from the branches, hoping to draw out some sleepy biped to sprinkle seed into a feeder. Upstairs, the kid’s asleep in the crook of his mother’s arm and down the street the Pie Lady’s working up a new batch of Blueberry Truffle. There’s a couple of students passed out on the lawn of the frat house in the other direction. Trouble is looming, though. I can feel it. Last week the groundhog that used to live under the fence between us and Next Door Neil was apparently evicted by a family of skunks that Down on the Corner John had himself just kicked out of their home under his porch. Like the old Yiddish saying goes “what comes around goes around” huh? So, groundhog last spotted on the sidewalk looking disconsolate, trudging eastward in search of a new home, bundle of clothes across his back and the young ones roped together with a length of discarded dental floss. All very sad, but my real fear is that he, and his extended family, will take up residence in some nearby backyard, perhaps Next Door Joan’s or Across the Street John’s and from there launch reprisal raids. I don’t know, come kick over our garbage in the middle of the night or drag out the contents of our composter. Could happen, man.

“No diving. Sir, I’m serious.” The passport guy is lecturing a thirty-something year old man who has just arrived on an American passport. He has his hair twisted up inside a bandanna and, worse, a pack of Lucky Strikes tucked into the sleeve of his t-shirt. “And that bandanna is going to have to go.” Behind him a pair of lesbians shift uneasily in their army boots. What can this mean? They exchange a sidelong, worried look.

It’s not so much that you can’t get drunk when you’re a parent, it’s that you can’t stay drunk. When you’ve got a kid, you have to sober up overnight. And, the way hangovers are these days, that’s pretty well the fun sucked out of getting drunk.

My copy of Robert Kaplan’s classic rewrite of some second year history textbook, Eastward up my own Ass, has notes in Turkish all over it. As though some sad-sack Turk was trying to discern through Kaplan’s ramblings, half-baked in someone else’s oven and sprinkled with comments that sound like a ten-year old writing home from a school trip, what it is that the Western Mind thinks of their country. Kaplan’s books really are the Desperate Housewives of travel literature: the entertainment lies in the glossy puerility of it all, and in imagining the navel-gazing wasteland of his readership. Jesus. Whining about rude border guards and breathlessly recalling the old world drama of a shoe shine.

A story I’m going to pitch to the New Yorker: this Canadian. He’s driving to New York, passing down through Pennsylvania one Sunday morning. Making the minutes tick over by tallying up road kill—12 skunks, 14 groundhogs, six deer and so on. The critter corpses are everywhere in Pennsylvania. Torn up bits of them spread down the shoulder and across the middle of the road with blood smears that look brown like bbq sauce on the tarmac. At one point he runs over something he thinks is a rib and it seems (erroneously as it turns out) to have punctured his tire. He stops and wonders at the pristine silence of the surrounding forest before pulling the bone fragment out of the rubber, flicking some fur from the radiator grill and getting back in the car. Where he turns on the radio and listens for a while to the Sunday types rambling about Paul and Jesus and some other old Jewish people. Stops at a Ponderosa Steak House for their all-you-can-eat (turns out to be more like all-they-can-eat, “they” being the whalelike denizens of the area, fat swinging from their arms like Tarzan on his way to work) breakfast buffet.

Pretty good huh? I’m thinking it’ll work pretty good for them.

Mike the barber from around the corner won 16 million dollars in the lottery the other day. Next time I see that bastard I’m getting back the 2 bucks I tipped him on my last haircut.

Suburban life, at least in our neck of the suburb, is all about renovation these days. We’re relatively close to the center of town, with its towering silver salary palaces, and the oil crunch has triggered something of an urban contraction. What that means, for those of you who find this opaque, is that out there in the sprawled out flat acreages of sub-suburb, with their pancreatic roadway systems of endless convolution and despair littered with lost pizza drivers, fucked up postmen and schoolkids on crack, Whitey and Whitey Next Door are coming out of their hypertrophic four car garage ranch style burrows to sniff the breeze. And what they smell is gasoline. Very expensive gasoline.

It’s something eerie if you’re out there to see it, beyond the 4-lane commuter belts, in the place where cardboard cracker box houses are endlessly repeated and big-dick SUVs adorn every driveway. Out there in the place where big-cunt family-mover wagons sit curbside like lighters along the quay, ready to haul the cargo of spawn down to the 7-11 for a Big Gulp of culture and onward to the movie store for more of the same. Eerie like one of those mysteriously coordinated migrations in which millions of lemmings simultaneously emerge from beneath the soil, their bedding bundled on their backs, to stare at one another. Then slowly, in pairs and then threes and fours, then dozens and finally hundreds, they begin to move. Up the street. Past the Coldwell Banker signs. Blind to the open house invites. Determined. On the move.

So the crackheads (the grown up crackheads, the ones who found there way out of the sub-suburbs, who graduated from Dad and Mom’s to live in the peeling plaster dives with steel reinforced doors a hundred yards from the Cathiolic Mission downtown) and the junkies, and the welfare bums, are scrabbling through dumpsters these days for stainless steel fridges and utility sinks to install. They’re shoe-horning en suite toilets into the guest bedroom (formally the shooting parlor) and scraping the bloody urine stains out of the plaster in the dining room. “Let the bastards come,” they mutter as they sweat, “let them come.” For these track-marked beasts know full well that soon enough they will be making the trek in the other direction: that only time divides them now from the day that they ignite their stolen barbecues between the faux-Grecian columns of suburbia like hirsute extras from Planet of the Apes sneaking onto the set of Caligula for an after-lunch fuck.

We sweat miserably through the night now, flopping about on sweat-moist sheets dreaming of Red Sea beaches, palm trees and cold beer. We wake in the morning with heat hangovers. Bitch out wives for imagined slights and snap at babies for taking up more than their share of the meager coolth that dribbles out from the air conditioner.

The basement is a haven. It’s dank stone walls are holding back the heat and for the moment there is something holy about this dripping, dark cave. When I do the laundry I linger over the machine, taking as long as possible over the operation and emerging chilled ten minutes later, my head full of funny thoughts.

If I have a habit I’m ashamed of, it’s downloading holy scripture. I’ll download anybody’s sacred word—I’m a screed slut. I recently picked up the King James Bible, Chinese Ho Ho version. It sounded so much more fun than the English. One of my favorite downloads is the “pocket Quran.” It worries me that maybe otherwise devout followers will turn away from their mosques for the more private practice of “pocket praying,” but I guess this is their problem and not mine. It pissed me off, however, to find out that Islam 6.9 only runs on PCs. Anybody know whether the latest update to Islam runs in Leopard?

Caves, at any rate, are holy places. Lot laid his daughters in a cave, Abraham threw about inordinate amounts of incomprehensible verbage about caves and burial, and I think there are still some caves in Jerusalem where Americans go to soak up the cool, wet atmosphere. I try not to think about Abraham when I’m down there doing the laundry (let alone Lot), but I do think about those Americans, and it’s tempting to think that if only they would do a little more of their own laundry, in their own homes, satisfying that urge to hang about in caves before heading out on vacation, the Palestinians might be a little better off.

Ottawa was built in what we Canadians call “cottage country”—swampy land with lots of black flies and good moose hunting. The kind of place that real men retreat to in the fall to drink and shoot. I guess in the 19th century, when the powdered wigs of Whitehall were scratching themselves and poking pins into maps of the North American wilds (”this delightful spot shall be known for my youngest niece” said Lord Thistletwat, using an ivory pointer to tap a particularly blank spot on a large empty map. “Come here, Winnipeg, you must push in the pin….”) this made it ideal. I don’t imagine that administrative positions in the new colonial administration of this alternatively freezing and sweltering end-of-earth hell were a great prize. In fact, it must have scored barely higher than a post to the Gold Coast, where at least it was warm year-round and plentifully supplied with fresh fish. “Think of it Marmeduke” (this is Lord Thistletwat again), “think of it: tramping in winter across the ice in the company of your Eskimo guides. And in summer! In summer you may hone your masculinity to a point pursuing the mighty Elk of the North. It will be capital Marmeduke, and an excellent place to hide while this whole gambling debt nonsense blows over.” Our latter day Marmedukes, of course, have more civil tendencies and tend to amuse themselves indoors, faking up expense receipts and fixing land deals where it’s air conditioned. But that’s beside the point. The point is that living in this fucking place is right now is like making your home in a bowl of half warm soup.

Holy Kurd! No new pictures for a while. My shoulder’s wrapped in tape and my arm’s hung in a sling. “Don’t lift anything heavier than a Dixie cup full of warm air” were Physioguy’s parting words. First thing when I got home I tried to lift a camera. Something crunched inside the joint like a mouse under a bike tire and I decided in to take his advice for a while. So recycled pictures of peculiar Kurds (that’s Betseh’s hand on the left btw) is what it is from here on in.

Life here in Suburbiana continues (which is about all life in Suburbia really does). I got a haircut yesterday. My hair looks like I got attacked by a drunk guy with a bowl and a pair of those kids’ scissors, the ones with the plastic blades they use for craft-day in kindergarten. The criminal is Around the Corner Mike, a squat balding guy (should we trust balding barbers?) who’s lair is around the corner (get it?) from us. Mike offers old fashioned value, by which I mean he’s cheap and he keeps the combs in a jar of green stuff that I think is probably Lysterine. There’s a spinning barber pole outside the door and just enough room inside for two ancient barber chairs—the humongously heavy kind with the wide red Naugahyde armrests and cast iron footrests. Mike wears glasses. He’s worked there for 48 years and he still has an Italian accent. I guess Mike’s name is probably Michelle.

Apart from value, Mike also offers old fashioned service. The sunshine comes Rockwell-style through the window as the afternoon wears on and when I pick up a pinch of half-gray clippings from the bib that he slung, perfectly clean, around my shoulders a moment before, he apologizes for not having cleaned it off after the last customer. I like Mike and wish I could go sit in his chair and chit chat, but somehow avoid the horrendous hair cut.

So the house insurance guy came around a couple of weeks back. A big pudgy guy with a puppydog face and clip board. Bill Something, something forgettable. A suit he got on sale at Moore’s and formal sneakers (I mean they were black with black laces: you wouldn’t notice they were sneakers unless you looked directly at them). We had a cup of coffee and then he toured the house to make sure that we have enough smoke detectors (we do: I went down to Canadian Tire that morning and bought three) and that the wiring was safe (it’s not) and then we headed back to the kitchen for more coffee. He kind of reminded me of hapless Mike Bentley, who used to let me cheat off him in Grade 12 physics. Mike worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken and was allergic to the batter and the skin on his forearms started to flake off in sheets. Didn’t bother me at the time—I didn’t eat at KFC—but in retrospect it seems a little nasty. Mike was a nice guy. Always ready to chat. And while we chatted I would copy out his homework. So we’re chatting in the kitchen there (me and Bill Something) and drinking more coffee, and I’m trying to distract him from the wiring, and he tells me that the only people who have a higher fatal accident rate than 16 year old males who have a newly-purchased motorbike? Males in their mid-30s who have just purchased a motorbike.

So whatever. So much for insurance and Bill and KFC and so on. The world’s a dangerous place to have a mid-life crisis, but we already knew that. Went off on a little roadtrip with my mountain bike a little while later and have been pretty much gimped-up since. I’m sure we all see the irony: the motorbike is still in the basement. The next morning I had no particular memory of the incident itself, but between the missing skin, the clunking noise coming out of my shoulder and the undeniable effluvia of bar on my breath, the narrative seemed clear enough. Pics in the camera suggest that I spent a good deal of time between bar and home taking pictures of orange and yellow light smears (cars maybe? a speeding convenience store? Looks to me like I was trying to shoot from my bike and didn’t have the sense to stop) and began to lay the foundation for a photo essay about bags of garbage. I imagine myself crawling across the lawn, drooling and mumbling to myself as I try to get the word “Life” on the side of the garbage bag in focus.

Point is that no, Suburban Life is not dead (but thank you for asking), it’s just been taking a little break while the bruises fade to a dull yellow and the roadrash scabs over.