This is Edmonton. Edmonton, Alberta. As such, the city we consider home is subject to randomized turns in weather that few other places in the world would consider sane. Speaking to that, the average Edmontonian has to ride the waves as they come, trading shovel for shorts and back again in the space of a week. That’s the lifestyle you sign up for each time you open the front door here. But the outdoors in Alberta offer such beautiful opportunities to see, experience and explore. To pursue the outdoors in Canada’s Western prairies is to embrace this region’s inherent chaos by necessity. Discovery isn’t just about the place but the way you-
YYYEEEAAAAAGHHHH!! Fuck, this body’s tight. You call those muscles, mortal?? Eat a damned sandwich. And what tripe is this? “…trading shovel for shorts and back again…” Did that actually sound clever in your head before you typed it? You must be shimmying through the most weed infested corner of the land of imagination. The one full of rejection letters and Orson Welles’ cigar butts. Your creative license must be an illegal forgery.
And rambling about the Great Outdoors again? You haven’t even had an outing in the actual outdoors for weeks – I checked. Your porous little memory may be unreliable as shit but your mind still carries the stink of slowly growing desperation. Ahh, that at least is an ambrosia I know how to massage. I’ve brought much more capable people to their trembling knees than you with a few pulls of the right levers. You’re lucky your only vices are camping, coffee, video games, and …oh dear, really? Haha! Well let’s just keep those particular memories to ourselves then for the sake of pretending I chose someone even slightly respectable.
But where was I? Oh yes, I’d like to utilize this foray into the corporeal world before my host either snaps out of his caffeinated reverie or goes to sleep, both equally likely for some reason. Salutations world, internet, esteemed nobodies. And congratulations – some realities one just couldn’t write better oneself! It seems that all you need is a dash of temporary anguish and a scapegoat for everything to go to hell. Mm-mm, some things never change!
I’d like to point out that in a universe so rich in boundless causal possibilities, every road in this particular Earth apparently leads to blame. Life is, for most, an orgy of choice. From the tiniest protozoa to – well, you wouldn’t believe what lives in some galaxies – every successful life form adapts its way around trouble. Yet here you don’t really adapt, you just let minor inconveniences flourish, harden and swell into painful sensitive sores like an abscess that fills with rotting gruel until it tears itself open and spreads infection everywhere. Endure the momentary sting of flushing a small wound with cleansing self-examination? Not for any price; that requires a moment of time and a sliver of strength! Much more comfortable to encyst a hurt feeling within the nurturing scab of externalized resentment. Now you don’t have to answer any hard questions because it’s someone else’s villainy. Have an old grudge? Project! Lose an argument? Gaslight! Trapped in a corner by the accumulated clutter of your own casual bigotry? Accuse everyone of stealing your rights! There is no barb too petty, no justification too lazy, no entitlement too monstrously obscene. You have truly perfected an art here: when all life adapts to better itself, you will disadvantage yourselves without hesitation to engineer someone else a moment of pain.
The beauty – the sweet, supple, infernal beauty – is that nothing you do ever needs outside help. A frustrated, swelling pustule of resentment will suppurate into an ever reddening hate independently! Closed off from air and light in the humid stagnation of its own echo, hate feeds on itself like a weeping micro biome of fungal rancidity. You’ll tell yourself it’s free thought, audacious and subversive, your own private revenge for all those pitiless abuses you’ve suffered. You’ll tell yourself you’ve broken away, that you’re at the forefront of a wild rebellion, that this is finally the moment to “take a stand” and not an empty excuse to be a prick at all. You’ll tell yourself that it’s OK to push farther and farther into radical words if someone else uses them too. This is fun, this delectable taste of catharsis is exhilarating. Now nothing can stop the delirious release – not details, not contradictions, not even facts. Nothing matters but sustaining the raw bitterness. Reason is too boring, drama too titillating and standing up to your demons far, far too hard. Oh but a straw enemy you’ll damn well stand up to! Such power!
To a world such as this one, money is arguably meaningless. Territory is secondary. Greed is yesterday’s sin. Nothing makes people crawl on hands and knees in aching desire like an obsessively constructed identity. That quivering need to feel cool, even if only for a second, is what holds meaning. The holiest relic is to wrap oneself in symbols and say ‘I’m in this prepackaged category, everyone see me!’ And the most valuable currency is the irresistible prestige of the gloat, which is why I’m here. You’ve developed all the way to having the internet so you can hear yourselves bray, thus I thought I’d slip in to say hello.
Keep up the good work, I like what you’re doing with the place. Now I must grease my way out of this namby pamby so-called writer and channel into someone with a little more style. I call it Channel Surfing, haha.
Remember, the demons are too hard!
Too-da-loo!
You might discover an ancient geological formation that you didn’t even imagine Alberta had, or you might discover the greatest calzone you’ve ever tasted along the way. Every discovery is in the cards somewhere. The point of discovering these things is the choice you made at the front door to say ‘Fuck what the weather does’ and go there.
I’m, uh…
How the hell is it nighttime?
There's No Going Back 