I can’t let go of the idea that I should have a “what I’m reading list.” It doesn’t matter that I’m not reading anything except George Carlin’s list of things you can’t say on TV (who knew?), I should have one anywway. I’d fake it, but what if I get caught out? I’d put things there like the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Insufficient Reasons, Anna Karrawhatshername and Dante’s Big Fucking Blaze and before you know it some fucking peedant would be onto me. Maybe I should have a “what I’m staring blankly at when I should be asleep” list. It would go like this: War Photographer. Joel-Peter Witkin’s snaps of oddly rearranged corpses to make me feel better about Natchwey’s starving Africans. A bit of Diane Arbus to keep me awake. William Eggleston to put me to sleep again.

I was supposed to go to a talk about bio-fuels today. Sounded exciting: 3 Mexican agro-economists telling 14 Canadians with beards and mountain bikes what they already know and nobody else gives a shit about (starvation, riots etc etc). I said “fine, I’ll come down and take a few shots of the cops.” Hmmm. Blank look. Seems the cops don’t bother to show up for these things like they do in other countries. So I went for ten minutes and then went next to over to the hospital next door to shoot pictures of the crematorium in the sunset.

Fatherhood: there are few other states in which a heterosexual male will boast about getting urinated on by another male. An underage male at that. And in the bathtub. With his wife watching. No photos, tant pis (pronounce as you will).

Summer has sprung and the lawnmowers are emerging from the snow. Or so I imagine. We don’t have crack addicts or derelicts in our neighborhood so it is up to our supple imaginations to manufacture their lives and what they are like. I’m pretty sure that they don’t bother to keep their lawnmowers inside, however. Nor do they follow behind their dogs with little plastic bags over their hands, waiting to scoop up the piles of steaming shit from the sidewalk. That’s why life in the slums isn’t so very nice. I guess. Not being a dog owner, I don’t really care about this issue, but if I were, I would be phoning the local heeler to get more garbage cans installed. Or maybe it’s a mark of virtue to stroll into Bridgehead, Dachshund under your arm, the smell of his feces wafting up from the bag in your pocket. I don’t know.

Nothing much changes when you have a baby; sure there’s an absolute imperative that drives your entire life, keeps you up all night, necessitates driving around town at 3 am in search of a packet of this or a bottle of that, but this isn’t unfamiliar territory. At least not to anybody who’s been a junkie of whatever sort.

If I had a one of them “what I’m reading lists” Boogie Nights would be on it (check out the lighting on Burt), Burt Glinn would be on it, and so would the Department of Transportation’s Motorcycle Driver’s Handbook. Gotta memorize this handy little guide in order to acquire my License to Kill (Myself) from the Canadian Government.

Meanwhile I’m still intrigued by the sullen sense of space enjoyed by Canadians. It’s odd. It envelopes them like a space suit or one of those groovy Boy in the Bubble outfits that were popular in the 70s (where have all those bubble kids and flipper kids and so on gone?) or maybe like an aquarium—one that has a sign on it that reads “please don’t knock on the glass.” This interest is piqued by the motorcycle handbook. “Experienced drivers” (we are told) don’t weave in and out of traffic, nor do they “lane-split.” “Experienced drivers” follow the rules and above all “maintain a safe distance from other vehicles.” The idea seems to be, generally, that if you follow the rules and maintain a safe distance from your fellow citizens, that you’re going to be ok.

Experienced Canadian politicians, meanwhile, line the pockets of their pimp suits with millions of dollars of public funds. Far be it from me to suggest that there is any connection between a government that teaches its citizens that blind obedience to the rules is the only way to stay safe and a culture of impunity for those who make the rules, but one does sometimes scratch one’s bean and wonder. Were there a point to this, it would warrant cross reference to a libelous and defamatory Encyclopedia Canadiana entry on Adolphus Egerton Ryerson. But there isn’t so it doesn’t and now I’m going to change a diaper

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.

So it turns out babies like light. But they don’t like bright lights. This is not so convenient.

The average Canadian child has $15,000 spent on it in the first year of its life (begs the question of whether the stupid ones get more or less). But what the fuck? 15k on… diapers? Frankincense? Myrrh? The child could go to school for less. Stick ten grand in the bank, and the kid’s education’s paid for. And your bar tab’s covered till the end of next month.

This town has not become less uncharming with the passing of winter. Great heaps of snow remain. Like glaciers, they’re protected from the sun by a nasty crust of ice and garbage; fast food wrappers, lost children’s toys and roadkill tossed aside by the plow. Our neighbor’s 9-year old went looking for a Barbie who went out in a blizzard and never came back and instead came across Fluffy, the overfed tabby her Dad told her had gone to live with their Florida cousins. Tragic really. Frozen into the retreating remnants of Ice Field 13. Looks like she was headed for Camp 2 but took a wrong turn at Dogwood Col and got lost.

I wish Steve McCurry would stop taking headshots of children in the Third World, don’t you? Seriously. Steve. It’s getting creepy. Just because they’re still selling doesn’t mean you can’t move on. Meanwhile, Nation of Pearls is back at it with more racist, defamatory silliness. Somebody must have finished some work and be drinking again.

I made that stuff up about the cat, by the by.

Yep, you know what that means. All baby, all of the time from here on in. For things that sleep so much, they certainly take up a lot of time. Imagine spending 12 hours a day on your cat. Or imagine lavishing all the attention that a generation ago was spread across a brood of twelve on a single baby. Such is modern, high-protein parenting—this is reproduction on the Atkins model: all meat, no bun. We’ve got the heir, so fuck the spare. Evolution without the safety net.

Life has become a revolving door of more or less stout women who teach us the things that our mothers should have, or maybe Aunt Agnes, or someone from down the street. The midwife, the doula, the lactation consultant for goodness sakes. And this is the low tech route. Most people have OBs, nurses, spinal taps, IVs, monitors and I don’t what the fuck shoved up their butts just to pop out a kid, and this inability to reproduce without the assistance of multiple professionals, hundreds of thousands of dollars of capital equipment and the support of the entire pharmaceutical industry is somehow seen as natural, ironic no? In our neighorhood the only things that outnumber university degrees are the squirrels, who homebirth to the last individual (or so I’m told), with children coming a distant fourth after Saabs and only marginally ahead of leafblowers. Point no point, really, though these empty quiet streets still unnerve me after the swarming alleyways of Cairo.

Fitna’s finally out. Major studio release on Youtube. I would be more interested if there were the slightest possibility of a sequel dealing with the Southern Baptists and the Old Testament (or even the Jews and the New York Times for that matter) and any translation of the Quran that refers to crispy fried turkey is going to make me wonder, but more than anything else it reminds me of a sequence from Bum Fights—you know, that series where they go out and get drunk mentally deficient guys on the street to fight for a bottle of cheap booze or a couple of bucks? I guess stupid people flailing about and calling each other bad names always has market value—squint at a picture of Wilders and you’ll see Archie Bunker (seriously, try it). Once this kid business has settled down I’m going to get something going here with inter-racial dwarf tossing. I hear there’s a franchise you can buy from somewhere out in Alberta.

As ancient man watched the seasons change, urban man watches for the recycling guy. Ours is a grumpy bastard, liable to leave your paper on the curb because it’s supposed to be in the blue box not the black one or spill your cans and bottles across the sidewalk because you have have violated some obscure blue-glass with red label bylaw. The cycles of nature, be they ever capricious. Things have improved since we started following Next Door Neil, who teaches anthropology at the local college. Neil, perhaps unsurprisingly, has an unparalleled grasp of the rituals of urban disposal—the color codes, the containers and the timing. Neil’s garbage always goes out on the right day, no matter what recent public holidays have skewed the collection day or time, and his recycling is always properly sorted and correctly laid out so that the grumpy recycling guy never has any reason to leave paper or spill cans or otherwise stain the street frontage with the signs of divine unpleasure. So instead of trying to figure it out ourselves, we follow Neil’s lead with blind uncomprehending obedience. When Neil puts anything out on the curb we wait until he’s gone, and then we run out and study it: bag or box? Tied? Covered? What’s in it, how far is it from the curb? Then we run inside and try to construct something that mimics it as closely as possible which we set out just so on the curb in an attempt to entice the gods to take it away and make space for more.

Hey! Happy Easter. Christ died for your sins. I was reminded of that by the butcher—the one that looks like Ronnie van Zant. Not that he said so in as many words, but I could feel it in his eyes as he handed over the brown paper package of Italian sausages. He was on the phone to his mom, always seems to be on the phone to his mom when he’s working, mobile phone jammed between a cheek like blanched ham and his shoulder, and he wished me a happy easter with a squinty, insinuating little look that said as much. And I thought to myself (a figure of speech meaning I didn’t have the balls to say this to a 300 pound zebella baida gorilla with a meat cleaver in its paw), thought “How do you think that makes the Jews feel?”

I thought Jesus died as part of some internal bickering about whether to allow a currency exchange office on Temple Mount—or the “Haram al Qudsi al Sherif” as they say in the old country—so I looked it up when I got home. Turns out Easter isn’t even mentioned in the bible. What a fucking fraud! All those easter egg hunts, all those cute baby bunnies and dyed chicks slowing expiring between the sticky fingers of gleeful little children exercising their protean parenting skills on disposable lifeforms. All as dust cast in our eyes by Madison Avenue. Makes me feel all queasy in the stomach region, unsure of what to do next. Like George Bush at an Iraqi birth control clinic.

Sorry. Giddy today.

So. Is it possible that someone was taking the piss down at the Weekly back in 2005, or was the governor of Sohag really named Beltagui? I mean, it would certainly explain a lot if the place was being run by Beltagui and his security chief Goha (seriously, read the piece, halfway down the page), but can it really be so?

If I was a journalist, and there are mornings when I wake up and I look at the ceiling and I curse my Lord God that I am not (not many mornings, Paul, but they do happen… usually when something big is blowing up somewhere and you guys get to put on little GI Jim hats and go out with notepads stuck in those pockets on the thighs of your pants where there’s supposed to be ammo) but if I were, a journalist, I would write stories like this: White guy watches Arabs shop at Walmart in Dearborn and it would certainly have lines like “As he [the manager] recalled their effort [took them two weeks of looking at food down at the wholesaler to figure of what the Mohamedeen would buy], a few women in hijabs — traditional Muslim head scarves — inspected produce. One spoke in Arabic to Mohamad Atwi, the developmental store manager.”

Meanwhile, down at Canadian Tire, it’s all very pale. Hockey jackets and those little pudgy white children who come in from the suburbs to vandalize the bubble gum machine by the door while Mom flirts her way through Aisle 9 in search of the Wii accessories. The rickety ones with the Hapsburg jaw from chewing their poptarts half cooked and the great bulgy troglodyte eyes from the rec room hours in front of the TV. Reflexes of a praying mantis from all that Wii, though.

It’s thawing and the snow drifts are getting to be middle aged: all saggy, with the bits that were perky subsiding into bits that were curved but are now only rounded. There is something to be made of this, the coming of spring and new life and so on, but I really can’t be fucked.

This photo is dedicated to Eliot Spitzer, star of the new NYP series Mr. Clean keeps it polished, in which we find out that Client #9 sometimes asked his lady friends “to do things that, like, you might not think were safe.” Keep the press free and yellow!

It’s not dedicated to Geneive Abdo though (yeah, I’ve finally gotten around to chewing through No God But You Know Who), who claims that Muslims are nice people and that good girls like to put on veils because it gives them a sense of identity. My favorite line so far? “He had always resisted the forces of the state, first as a drug dealer and then as a street preacher.” Leaving aside the obviously unforgivable peddling of noxious substances on street corners and considering for a moment his earlier career as a purveyor of exotic herbs: to whit, selling hash in Imbaba. A useful service? Certainly. Profitable? Possibly. But “resisting the forces of the state”? Earth to Space Station Conceptual Over-reach, Earth to Space Station Conceptual Over-reach, your pretension inhibitor is malfunctioning…

Meanwhile, the Egypt State Information Service declares that in “modern times, the world has derived from Egypt the institutions and modern administrative systems as well as the formulas of constitution, parliament, responsible government and judicial authority…” Apparently the internal combustion engine and heavier than air flight were also developed in a workshop in Shobra and Pharoanic scientists based in Thebes invented kidneys, the process of inhalation and gravity. What a load of crap. Some USAID hack got a nice wad of USDs in their back pocket from a project to “increase transparency in democratic practice and good governance” for writing that bullshit, so what the hell. Who am I to stab a fellow pro in the pay packet?