As a Canadian, coming to New York in the winter is like walking into someone else’s hell, only to find out that it’s just like home. Like if Mohamed, in casting off the mortal coil, found himself somehow transposed into an Italian hell—you know, the Dante place: the nasty hot weather, the boiling oil, and the rampant buggery. “Hell? Shit, this ain’t so bad.” Hitches up his jallebeya and scratches at himself. “What’s Whitey bitching about?”

We rolled into town swathed to the eyebrows in cheap but effective winter gear. We looked like Walmart Eskimos. The White Trash from the End of the World. I imagined the New Yorkers sneering behind our backs. Them in their stylin’ double breasted wool overcoats with the big lapels and funky little hats, their ears white with cold, shivering, their hands stuffed into their nethers to ward off frost bite. Maybe they stared enviously. I don’t know.

New York gave me some very strange dreams. One night I dreamed I was playing golf in Bhutan with Charles Levinson. We were plotting to murder someone but I can’t remember who, but I think we were going to do it with a nine iron. I think it was because the place where we were staying—we were house-sitting for Mike and Kelly, friends who have two small children—was full of toys that talked. Great piles of plastic cars and model space ships and guns, keyboards, toy drills and so on and on. The alphabetic fridge magnets sounded out their sounds (“I am an A, and I sound like this…. Aaaaaaaa”), the race track in the bedroom said “Give me speed! Speeeeeeed!” and the spaceships made little laser “tew tew” noises and barked commands at one another “Break right!” and so on. It was all very animist and disturbing. The worst was the Storm Trooper helmet that looked like a severed head. I was helping Mike unload the car after they came back. It was piled high with more toys that talked. It was the middle of the night and the snow was swirling around us and we were both freezing (me because I left my coat inside, Mike because he lives in New York now and if he wasn’t freezing he wouldn’t fit in). Mike pulled the head out of the trunk and stuck it under his arm and started to trudge back up the street. It eyed me for a moment then yelled “I’ve got you covered!”

New York: My watch is running slow. It only fits 50 minutes into any given hour. The effect is enervating. I don’t have what it takes to deal with this city. Sitting here in Queens I feel like a battery hen squatting on an empty uterus.

We helter-skeltered out of our northern refuge almost a week ago. Tumbling southwards like a breeze-blown frost bunny, like a family of snowballs headed south for the winter. Shedding icy flakes and getting nervous. Watches slowing.

We over-nighted in Clark Summit, just outside of Scranton. I should have known better. One look at Biden’s hairplugs should have told me everything I needed to know about Scranton and its immediate kith. An hour at the Gourmet Family Restaurant, however, filled in the rest.

The Gourmet, just off the side of Great Army of the Republic Highway, has a certain charm. The booths still sport little personal jukeboxes, the ones with the bakelite buttons—a dime for the latest George Jones or Dolly Parton—and there are six American flags in a row in the parking lot. There’s a counter where folk too old to lever themselves down into the booths sit with their canes lined up between them like, well, like canes lined up between old peoples’ knees I guess. I dunno. Come up with your own damn metaphor.

It’s a place straight out of What [middle class] White Folk [like me] Like. It has all the class-transvestism that we like. That frisson of the cultural dumpster dive. But the food’s crap—canned gravy over canned meat. Canned veggies on the side. And the air smells of Glade and the kind of furniture polish that White Folk put on plastic wood. The garrulous old fuck at the counter, when he’s finished gumming down a piece of pie with canned filling, hauls his rickety self out to a thirty-thousand dollar Cherokee parked in a row with everyone else’s thirty-thousand dollar Cherokees and fires it up beneath that row of a half-dozen fluttering Old Glories.

It’s a place looking for a punchline but with only 50 minutes to work with this hour, I don’t have time to figure out what it is.

Christmas: it’s finally over and we go back to not giving a shit about family. Man, I hate those once-a-year phone calls to Aunty Whatshername.

I spent as much time as possible playing Call of Duty 4, which brought back fond memories of Iraq. Not the bullets zipping overhead and the shooting dogs part, but the night where I sat bleary eyed in the MWR watching half a dozen teenaged platoon mates zipped up on Rip It and Poptarts playing the multi player version.

These kids were barely out of basic training, let alone grade 8, barely out of Elbow Fuck, PA but that they were mainlined into Butt Fuck Mesopotamia on a C-130. Dropped into a grey world of gravel and c-wire, T-wall, shit stew portapotties, burning tires and towel head wackos looping out through the c-wire. Where they get to spend their off time working through … more of the same.

It made going out on patrol kind of eerie though. Like we’d all stepped out the gate, and straight into the head of the pimpled little teenaged Californian who earned a new Porsche and Spanish revival bungalow by channeling these post-modern Magyar nightmares of Saracen pillage into a little white box.

Highly instructive, though, those hours of hiding in my “office” shooting brown people with a bottle of Jack Daniels by my elbow.

Lesson #1 learned: if you’re in trouble, hang back and wait till you get an opportunity to shoot one of your buddies. Shoot him in the leg and let someone else finish it off. You’ve got nothing to lose by doing this, and his corpse is a good place to scavenge for stuff you need.

Lesson #2: Shooting those fuckers yelling “khawaga” at you as you try to do something is just about as fun as you thought it would be.

Lesson #3: No matter how drunk you get, no matter how sucked into that weird racist world of bloody meltdowns where the only goal is to mow down The Other as quickly as possible, listening to Roxette while you do it is inexcusable. It’s over the line.

Winter has this sad northern city firmly in her grip now, her frozen vaporous breath has sunk into its marrow even as Dear Leader bends over the cooling corpse, his freakishly blue eyes glittering at the thought of what he might find as he begins to rifle through its pockets. With democracy suspended by order of a Queen we thought had died, or buggered off somewhere warmer, and martial law set to descend as soon as St. Nick lifts his cheery protection come Boxing Day, about all we can do is huddle by our woodstoves and leaf teary-eyed through our old copies of Crime and Punishment and whatever it was that Alice Munroe wrote (you know, the one about the winter and the dead calf) to see what it is that the future holds.

Manley – why the hell can’t he be PM again? He was the last guy with a degree in anything other than law or hockey stats that we had running things. The last guy who didn’t act like a real estate agent from Oshawa. Manley has announced that Dion should do the decent thing and shoot himself before Christmas, and be dragged into the ground by Herb Grey’s ghost (to be fair, I’m not sure he said the last part), and that someone, anyone—which means in effect a washed up lefty who used to be premier of Ontario or that ex-pat columnist for the Washington Post with a penchant for sticking his size 9 into his gob—should spit on his grave and attempt to fix the unholy fuck up that the stumbling moron from Montreal has visited on our little republic-to-be. Would that it be so.

For the first time I see the sense in the Egyptian system. Not the part where some grifting Goha from the delta gets to sit on the throne and keep his thumb stuck up the American president’s ass while his sons suck half the GDP into Swiss bank accounts. No, the other part—the part where a truckload of fuckwit fundies Kalishnakovs the reviewing stands and leaves the lot of them twitching in a pool of hot blood. At least it would melt the ice.

High time, what with the snow tumbling from the sky, the icy winds of winter wending their brittle little fingers around the eves, the local urchins trudging by in the morning, skates dangling and clattering from laces clutched in little chilblained hands, to think warm thoughts. Warm cozy hot chocolate thoughts.

Yes. Now that the leaves have fallen dead from the trees to lie buried like so many discarded chocolate bar wrappers until spring, when they’ll be all black and rotten anyway, it’s time to turn over a new one. Time to think “lessons learned.”

So here’s a couple of things I’ve learned recently.

From my 8-month old son I’ve learned that gravity is a capricious bitch. She lies in wait and when you’re least expecting it she’ll grab you and slap you upside the head with a chair, or the floor. A real cunt that one.

From Newton I’ve learned not to lift that little lever that lets you adjust how far your car seat slides back when you’re braking heavily for a red light. Or at least put down the fucking coffee first.

From my 5D I’ve learnt that you can never be too fast. Seriously. Hit the button, get it done. If you can do it 800 times in a day, of course that’s a plus as well.

What I haven’t learned recently: not drinking and blogging would probably be the big one.

Dear Diary

This week I joined Facebook. Congratulations to me. Facebook is blogging stripped of any pretense of literacy. Or, more positively, Facebook is the toilet wall of the 21st century – the 21st century toilet being understood in a purely conceptual but highly personal sense. Imagine an invisible outhouse set down in a digital cabbage patch. Ok. Fine. How about this then: Facebook is where you go when email gets too personal for you, when your nerve endings are so sensitized to human contact that the thought of using a phone makes you scream, or at least grunt in that unpleasant way that some people I know grunt when they really really really don’t want to do something.

Ummm. Glad I got that off my chest. What else? I got better at Quake this week. That’s right. Quake. The shoot ‘em up game for the Middle Ages, and the Middle Aged. Jureal can kiss my nightmare level ass. Well, on a good day anyway. If you know what I mean, you’re lame.

Meanwhile the simian howls from our duly elected representatives are reaching painful levels as a French guy with a speech impediment (no, not the old one, a new one! These guys have to stop marrying their cousins) who lost the last election is attempting to to take over the government from a pasty faced crypto-Christian fundy from halfway up Elbowfuck Nowhere (see Dear Leader) who also lost the last election. How does this happen?

And, of course, it’s colder than hell outside.

One of the newly discovered joys of parenthood is that other middle-aged people with children think that you are now to be trusted with their own sticky-fingered, over-valued little brood.

So at about the time that angry little brown men with big guns were kicking down the doors of civilization (to whit, throwing the breakfast china on the floor at the Bombay Oberoi) and big angry white folk were kicking in the doors of Walmart and stomping one of the greeters, I wasn’t only snowbound and drunk on the northern periphery of the known world, but in charge of two small children, a pair of cats (one of which is completely deaf) and a half-grown boxer with bad breath and an obsessive compulsive desire to lick human mouths.

It wasn’t that bad.

The booze had been discreetly tucked away before I arrived, but I found the liquor cabinet and managed to pry it open. Then I ate my weight in snacks. I guess the kiddies are going to have to go to school next week without their wagon wheels or their Nature Valley nut bars (which taste pretty good if you soak them in red wine). I rifled through a comic book collection I fear belongs to the kids’ father, and spent an hour reading a coffee table book about beauty pageants (did you know that the Miss Universe Pageant was originally known as the Miss United Nations Pageant? Indeed it was, but it went massively over budget after the judges demanded air conditioned Land Rovers, bi-weekly business-class travel to Geneva and beach front Malibu villas for the year leading up to the event). I dribbled chocolate sauce across Miss Israel 1958 (no comment) and passed out on the couch in front of Shrek 2.

So the snows have come, and gone, and come again. The first lot melted a few hours after drifting down out of the sky as fluffy and as cute as a sky full of drifting down poodles. The second lot came to stay and is now mounded up along the sidewalk in ugly heaps. The grader came and did that—mounded the snow up into heaps along the sidewalk. Then the little tiny sidewalk snowplow came along and cleared the sidewalk, pushing up onto the mounds and making them bigger and more irritating. It also crushed one of our recycling boxes (we have two – one black, one blue. They are for different things but I can’t remember which is what) and carried off the lid of the garbage can. That was four days ago. We just found it three houses down in the direction of the video store.

The Canadian Supreme Court has ruled that if you’re fat, an airline has to give you a second seat for free when you fly, which is annoying. I think that they should rule that the owner of a garbage can lid that gets stuck under a small articulated snow plow and dragged up the street has a right to Kalishnakov the shit out of the operator of said snowplow. Unlikely to happen soon, but if I get put in charge of implementing the decision (say, for having been an early and enthusiastic supporter of the regime) I would arrange for it to happen down at the rink (which is an easy walk from our door—this is a good neighborhood by Canadian standards: we have a video rental place and a hockey rink!).

The New Yorker has a video of a man trapped in a New York elevator for 41 hours. Whipped up from the CCTV footage inside the elevator and set to music, it’s a beautiful thing, but having just read Deer Hunting with Jesus, I get uncomfortable squirmy feeling in my tummy that indeed we are living in the End Days. That the cracker hordes really are going to rise up and disembowel the degenerate elites with their faggy preoccupations.

The first night in Baghdad lying awake on a cot at Stryker: Waiting. Rigidly sober but fucked up on jetlag. Nothing to do but listen to the helos bang overhead, pounding circles around BIAP, twenty minutes up the road. Wondering what time is up, and which left is down. The AC is cranked to meat-locker, its maw like a window open to the north pole, and the inside the tent is freezing. We are literally on ice in these sealed up canvas bags of soldier. Outside, the sun cooks the narrow concrete canyons between the 20-foot blast walls and saturates the air with the sweet smell of the honey pit latrines across the way. But inside we’re a thousand miles to the north. There’s frost on the steel bedposts and my fingers go numb when I reach out to pull up zip up the arctic-grade sleeping bag I bummed off a friend in Cairo.

Came in on a C-130 from Kuwait, dropping out of the sky like a steel leaf in the darkness, twisting and winding back and forth. Lights out and the helmeted crew glued to portholes like frightened goldfish watching for the cat—frightened goldfish wearing great googly eye-extenders that glow green in the dark. These boys must dream screaming nightmare missiles that rise up from the depths of this glowing nucleus amygdalæ spread out below us, of towelheads hyped on Rip-Its armed with super RPGs and hyper AKs, or sly-eyed I-ranians shouldering smart Yanky-homing shaped charge monsters that reach up into the sky to tear them down and smash them.

It was too much fun to even think about puking and by the time we landed I knew that I was ruined for civil aviation forever. This is the only way to arrived.

Back in Kuwait I couldn’t stop staring at the soldiers. They are huge, and massively healthy. Their cheeks glow with good behavior. Weedy journos and spotty faced contractors weeve in and out as these outlandish, monstrously clean cut animals that lumber to and fro around the base. Each one carries 300 kilos of guns and beddings, helmet, armor, knives, plumbing equipment and spare humvees slung in sacks across their backs, tucked into webbing and in the hundreds of pockets of their cargo pants.

At roll call for the flight they all sound-off loud and confident. Clear of eye and purpose. Bellowing “Ho!” Except for one. A little guy with a Mohawk tuft of black hair and narrowed dark eyes who yelled “Kill!” Ho ho indeed, I thought and squeaked “present” when I heard my name.

Aaaah, sweet sweet Jane.

Apparently in Ghana you can get fried bat on a stick. Children sell them standing on the street corner, popping up out of the gutter to wave them in your face when you stop at the lights.

I don’t know. Do people stop for lights in Ghana?

The American public, meanwhile, is throwing quite a party. Imagine the most hideous possible case of post-coital tristesse. Imagine waking up next to a George W Bush, with him wearing the ranch-hand smirk of one who has but recently disgorged the curdled contents of his rich-boy gonads into some unsealed hole in your skin.

Then thank God you’re not American. Poor fuckers.

But its more than just being wracked with a hideous (albeit unconscious—these are Americans we’re dealing with) sense of having gone home with the wrong guy not once, but twice in a single evening. These people are suffering through some kind of Oedipal Daddy thing. Witness Ward Cleaver shoved aside by Homer Simpson. Witness JFK done in by Don Draper—as tawdry and nihilistic an ad man as any mother could fear sandbagging her politician son. Witness Californication, wherein David Duchovny plays out every white middle aged dad’s fantasy of familial abandon: drunk writer with European convertible and a 12 inch cock does babes like PeeWee Herman did popcorn (that would be warm and wet handfuls). And none of it’s his fault.

Ah, sweet Jane. Standing on the corner, friedbat in my hand…

Point? Point, as usual, no point. Except maybe this: a geriatric burn victim who can’t type and Eskimo Barbie running for Mr. and Mrs. President seems so odd, but really they’re the American family for the 21st century. The post-politics, post Oedipal family. It’s surreal because this Oprah generation has no use for the real. Surreal is the new real.

Makes me want to gouge out an eye and go live somewhere you can get bat delivered to your car.