Why isn’t dog shit fluorescent orange? I thought dogs and humans were supposed to have evolved to live together in harmony over the millennia. If this were true, would dogs not have evolved shit that is not camouflaged against the lawn, such that first thing in the morning when you’re all bleary eyed and stumble with a coffee in one hand and a poo-bag in the other you could find it easily?

Or maybe dogs evolved lawn-coloured shit precisely to please our ancestors. Which leads me to wonder whether maybe our ancestors did not in fact prefer to ignore their problems, and didn’t mind getting sticky stinky feet once in a while.

Which leads to me to contemplate another of life’s little mysteries. The dog is supposed to be man’s best friend – these days I suppose “person’s best friend” or something like that. But what kind of friend wakes you up early on a Sunday morning and makes you watch them shit all over your lawn?

Some German once said that when you stare into the engine bay, the bay stares back into you. How insightful those Germans! And here it is, a topography of vacuum lines and air hoses and pipes and wires run in endlessly elaborated parallels and perpendiculars. Like a nest built by a family of particularly OCD rats. First thing you see, taking the air cleaner off, is the mechanical fuel injection system, atop which sits the fuel distributor, a chunk of machined aluminum with a bunch of lines coming off it. Eight go to the injectors, one is the input from the high pressure pump, and there’s a return line to the tank. The return line, though, doesn’t go directly to the tank. Like some kind of arterial malformation, it goes instead to a fitting on another high-pressure line. This line is connected to AC compressor. I stared into the engine bay for a good ten minutes pondering this one. I chewed a nail. Drank some coffee. And the bay stared back into me until I figured it out. It’s a heat exchanger. The fuel is cooled on its way back to the tank by the air compressor. How clever those Germans!

Working on a big Mercedes engine, you can get the feeling that there is such a thing as too much development. Too many engineers, too much money and too much coffee. The engine mounts are – and I shit you not – little shock absorbers. Like at the wheels, only smaller: little oil filled pistons. And there’s no computers. A fact which I – fool – thought made things simpler. In fact it makes for the most ungodly complexity of interconnected vacuum switches, analogue sensors, relays, connecting rods and levers and little control units scattered about the car. Anyway. It has leather and polished wood end to end, at least three ashtrays and it goes like hell. And it guzzles the gas, which is the one thing that makes me feel good about life these days. I mean, the poor Saudies, right? Everybody hates them and now they are broke. But at least they had the foresight to sock it away into a sovereign wealth fund while prices were high. Or wait, was that the Norwegians?

Dear Leader won his referendum while we were in exile. Touring Ireland with a turd the size of a potato taped to the camera sensor, two kids and a craving for nicotine that threatened to consume what little was left of my mind. No. Not true: we were in Geneva when he won, and had fled thence to the Isle of Guinness after seeing Calvin’s chair, which they have parked in a corner of a cathedral the size of a church. A mean little chair with a sharp edged triangular back and a well-worn footrest. Calvin had short legs.

Hockey cards are here. The town is in a ferment. Hockey cards. Long lineups jam MacDonalds’ all over town.

Last week the weather turned ugly: shock and awe weather. Freezing rain and blinding whiteouts. Cars and garbage cans, signs, power poles, mailboxes and stray pets were encased and frozen. Then covered up in feet of thick, crusty snow. Clinging to the vestiges of sanity, I took to tearing out walls. Plaster dust built up like the snowdrifts that had us besieged, and the basement began to look like Port au Prince. The good news came late. The ice has killed the bird flu, according to the Department of Plague. The virus nests, weighed down by icicles like so many toxic chandeliers, collapsed, crashing from under the eves of barns and bus stations, shattering like glass and exposing their nested young to the frigid air. Cleanup crews toured the city to general delight, sweeping up the broken remains and carting them off to the incinerators at the edge of town. The signal fires were lit one last time, and the smell of their smoke mingled with the pungent smell of burning viral husks. Our leaders now appear in public with their faces exposed. The gas masks that they have been wearing since fall tucked into briefcases held in the background by their aides.

The crows come behind the west wind that sweeps in gray and chill an hour after the sun goes down. Black clouds of them, hundreds, silhouetted against the crepuscule. Rising out of the rookery behind the mall on the other side of the river and rustling low on their way north, toward empty Parliament.

On the Corner John’s Gollum has disappeared. Last seen climbing over Barhaven’s back fence around midnight last Thursday in pursuit of a lost garbage can lid, which it had been using as a Frisbee. Spinning it through the air at night, trying to dislodge sleeping raccoons from the trees maybe. Nobody’s saying anything, but it was the prime suspect in the disappearance of Barbie’s cat a couple of weeks back and nobody would be sorry to see the last of it.

Dear Leader has dismissed this pesky parliament; perogied it away with a wave of hand, gone in a puff of greasy smoke, leaving the spiky cathedral of our little democracy echoing empty and dark through these winter evenings. The whiff of bacon hanging on the chill air in the empty corridors the only reminder that it ever was. Holed up two blocks west in his well-fortified HQ the loyal leader of the opposition has taken to scrawling his edicts in Russian on the back of peeled-off beer bottle labels and throwing them out into the street between the iron bars that cover his window. His inner circle are to wear suits with matching ties. MPs shouldn’t talk about weed anymore. The crows are to be fed cranberries to maintain their loyalty.

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?

The Plague has descended on this par-frozen city like a fisher’s net upon a school of blind mullet. Every morning we feel it threads biting a little closer about our necks. Every evening we thank the St. Peter that we at least are still breathing water.

On the Corner John has built a gollum of organic compost and mud scraped from the inside of his wormery’s lid. He supposes that it will protect him somehow, and it roams the neighborhood by night, snuffling at the garbage cans and uprooting bulbs planted during the warm days of the early autumn, when we had faith that we would live to see them flower.

From another time or another place we could have decamped, I suppose, to the countryside. Holed up in some picturesque spot and abandoned ourselves to the pleasures of good food and storytelling. But the countryside here is infested with Catholics who huddle in their rags amongst the corn stubble, the blood of infidel babies smudged about their mouths. Mumbling imprecations against the heathen city dwellers, Porkers, Pork-eaters, Swine lovers, who brought down the virus wrath of their angry, airy God. So we stay put, protected only by confiscatory public-transit rates against an invasion of these corn children, but sitting prey for the Plague.

“Zionism has won!” declares “dovish” former education minister in Israel (Ok, he said “Zionism has already won”). Niiiice. He was commenting on the removal of the word “naqba” from a third-grade history text for Arabs in the Israeli school system.

No word in the piece on what it might be replaced with, but sources who have no idea what went on are suggesting that “arrival of civilization from the west” is the leading contender at this point. They add that “final solution” didn’t even make the short list.

A week of contemplating the rain soaked scenery of one of Canada’s several Occupied Territories has left me refreshed but a little addled. All that home made booze seems to have scrambled something upstairs, if you know what I mean. Referring of course to the Gulf Islands, home to a small indigenous hippy population. Watched over by a small contingent of Canada’s finest (hey, you need to complete high school to get into the RCMP!), these quaint folk spend their days in various traditional pursuits. We were proud to be invited to a nit-combing bee while we were there. We turned down the pot circle, though, as well as the grievance rehearsal. We did catch the first day of a dream catcher conference, however.

Today, back home, I cleaned a tennis ball that T picked up in the park. Watchful dad that I am, I didn’t think he needed to ingest any more dog spitaki than he already has.

It’s raining again. Pouring down in thick, unwavering perpendiculars and collecting in tepid puddles that shimmer dully in the late afternoon. Nothing exciting about this rain. No thunder and wind. Nothing to suggest ferment in the heavens. A very Canadian rain, I guess.

I made a wormery in the backyard by filling an old laundry sink with topsoil and adding in half a pound of vicious worms specially bred on a farm on the outskirts of town for their nasty appetites. They squirm and thrash hungrily when you toss food into them. It’s like having a shark tank back there. I put a lid on the sink so that it wouldn’t fill with rainwater and drown them, and I think the constant dull drumming of it coming down is driving them mad.

Happy Canada Day eh? Downtown crammed with potbellied whities in red t-shirts pushing strollers toward the Hill for their free hotdogs, or returning, ketchup-smeared spawn snoozing quietly with little flags clutched in their fists. The greater part of the Canadian Air Force, half a dozen or so antique trainers, wandered listlessly back and forth overhead, circling the faux-gothic towers of Parliament like a murder of wayward crows looking for their way home.

Nothing like a little nationalism manufactured by some Reform-crony owned PR firm.

Sources report that Dear Leader spent much of the day in the clock tower with an old Winchester 30-06 clutched to his chest, scanning the crowd below and muttering that “the old goat’s gonna get it today.” Despite rumors that he might put in an appearance, however, Preston was not spotted amongst the silver-haired crowds who flocked to tour the seat of Canadian federalism on this auspicious day.