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?

Amr! My little friend. There was a rumor going around that you had blown off your fingers with one of those little devices you build. I had a vision of you stump-fingered and frustrated.

I’m glad you’re back though. When you first dropped by, I was hoping for regular guest appearances. An angry, crazy muppet popping up from the floorboards periodically to spit and squeal in half-English and make the audience snicker.

No coincidence I suppose that I was reading Thompson at the very moment you stopped by. Perhaps indeed this was the phrase that conjured you up:

“What do you say” the Good Doctor was asking, “about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison … ?” And being the irascible old burnout that he was by then, he immediately answered: “…if a cool spring rain on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison scum in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation.”

He was talking about the generation – mine I suppose – that grew up in the 1980s.

Are you a child of the 80s Amr? I imagine so. Sad that, because in Egypt you didn’t even have TV worth watching. I guess it’s a good thing you still have your fingers.

But thinking more broadly of Egypt and things blowing up, it looks like a couple more kids from Boulak or Sharabeya or some other cinderblock shithole have jumped the tracks and done to some French school kids what the security services have been doing to them all these years.

What do you say about a generation that never knew the crystal blue lake at all, only the black poison scum that comes up out of the gutter every time it rains? Forced to learn mindless nationalistic nothings by rote in schoolrooms without windows while the crooked sons of sycophantic regime-trusties go to school in Europe. Working mindless jobs for bus fare and an ever-shrinking loaf of tasteless bread. And fucked with broomsticks by thugs in dirty uniforms when they protest.

There is not much left to a generation to whom even relentless masturbation is denied (notwithstanding the odd bit of pocket-pool action on the Metro when a foreign girl gets into the wrong car) by sheer population density and the highlight of the television season is a dreary Ramadan special that would put Jerry Lewis to sleep. One can only imagine how attractive the mantra of “two parts ammonium nitrate, one part hydrazine” must be to a priapic seventeen-year old contemplating another night huddled with seven siblings and the neighbors to watch Adel Imam worry about the embassy next door or the car thief down the street.

NB: if you’re nuts, and you submit a comment, I’ll edit it before I approve it. But I guess you already knew that, didn’t you cheesehead?

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.

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.

So, freak day down at the mall today. It’s some kind of holiday, and that always brings them out. You know what I mean. It’s like full-moon city for the circus crowd. The hairy backed lesbians and buck-toothed dwarfs. Contortionist trans-sexual Mexicans and Serbo-croats who can swallow baseball bats without tearing-up.

“…he cut off a piece of his body and ate it,” said a blind guy with hair like a rooster comb as I walked in. He was sitting at one of those little Second Cup tables that the teenagers who work the till don’t really police too hard. You can probably sit there all day on a small latte.

“Jesus, no shit?” The fat chick with a mustache who was squished into the little plastic bucket chair across from him rubbed her face with her hand, smooshing it up and around like it was play dough. “Like, which part?”

Thirty percent of all the bats in this city have rabies, which is fine. Their business really. But apparently these mice of the air drool as they fly and the flecks of saliva thus dispersed carry this pesky virus in sufficient quantities to bring you down to the state of Old Yeller. Nice. The municipality offers this advice to those who find themselves locked in spontaneous nocturnal combat with one of these nasty little things: “If possible, contain the bat in a closed room…”

The mind boggles at the thought that there are bats out there, even if only in the minds of municipal workers, that are so enormous, and so bad tempered, that a couple of mature humans would find themselves insufficient when it came to preventing its escape from a room.

Meanwhile, as if viral bombardment with virally-loaded spit weren’t enough, turns out that the city’s water pipes are made of lead. Explains a lot about the city, in a way. There is a certain dull-eyed stare that marks a native of this city that most times gets put down to the high percentage of government workers pumping their genes into the pool here. Turns out there may be compounding factors.

This year’s municipal mascot is an autistic child with rabies. He slobbers, he bites, and he hangs around in the mall.

Time has come to bid farewell to New York and head back north to cooler, less intense climes. But not before tacking up a couple of notes on art stuff. This is a subject that I am singularly unqualified to comment on, which makes it that much easier to say what I think.

Jackson Pollock: somewhere in that dizzying tangle of glue and latex, string, tequila bubble gum and manic depressive paint is the intersection of Art for Art’s Sake and Art for the Sake of 140 million clams. Or dollars. I want to stand on that corner with a paper cup in my hand and a sign hanging around my neck that reads “Will splatter for food.” Or maybe “Will splatter for fud.” Seems more artistic that way don’t it?

MOMA has a room of this stuff and you emerge feeling gut wrenched, excited or just pissed off that some bald philandering finger-painter who got drunk one afternoon and wrapped his Oldsmobile, and his girlfriend, around a tree (all too the ultimate benefit of the wife) gets that much attention. All depends on your disposition, or maybe whether you got a drink at lunch or instead had to attack the afternoon from a platform of splintered sobriety.

Can’t remember much else from MOMA except the Bell H-13 helicopter they have parked high above the lobby. Sitting under it, if you look straight up and quietly hum the theme to MASH, you can almost smell Alan Alda’s aftershave. An experience of limited appeal, I’ll grant you.

Then there’s the Met, where they have an entire Egyptian temple for God’s sake, not to mention some French guy’s living room from 1920 (rather dark and over-wrought, who saw that coming?) and half an Andalusian villa (lovely marble balustrades). God bless America. All that money. My favorite thing in the Met has to be the little collection of Brassai’s black and white photos of French hookers from the 1930s. Who doesn’t have a soft spot for that stuff? It’s like paintings of Elvis, or little brass cowboys being bucked off little brass horses. Classic.

The ICP has photographs by a drowning Japanese man—I mean, they really make you wonder how they recovered the film. Go to the website. You’ll see what I mean. Some photos of exploding limestone, a class picture in which every student is the same model and a very peculiar video that involves elephants, elephant shit and ventriloquism. After which you can presume yourself to be up to date on the state of Japanese art photography.

And finally the Guggenheim: that Frank Lloyd Wright thing that looks like the inside of a soft-serve ice cream cone. I think it’s more like climbing up the inside of a long coil of dog shit, but fine, if that’s your thing then that’s your thing, but it takes a little getting used to. There’s a fantastic room full of Kandisky there. You emerge shaking your head and wondering what those crazy Russians are going to think of next. The main attraction these days, however, is a an exhibition of the life’s work of Louise Bourgeois—yes she of the giant world spanning spiders. Nothing scarier than a crazy ninety-something year-old French lady who owns a herd of spiders each the size of a two-story bungalow. Well, maybe a balding finger-painter with too much red wine in him behind the wheel of a giant green convertible.

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.

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.

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.