Product of a family vacation in Montana,

No matter how you decide to run your newly liberated country, someone will end up calling you a tyrant. Or worse, a hypocrite.

Stalin was fond of saying that you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelette. But only the most brazen (and bone-headed) tyrant would explicitly speak of spilt blood instead of euphemistic egg-yolk.

Researchers at the University of Leicester recently examined the stated values of the world’s 38 current dictators (see planetrulers.com). The more dim-witted despots explicitly stated their divine right to rule (although few matched the poetic flair of Idi Amin’s self-proclaimed title of: “His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.“) On the other hand, the more educated respondents described themselves as just and popular even though their unflinching use of state violence and disregard for human rights have firmly placed them in the tyrant weight division.

Conclusion: The more brains you have, the less likely you are to admit to being a despot while privately availing yourself of your divine right to rule.

It’s not going to get the rapid international press off your case, but it does mean that you can spend relief money on your wife’s New York shopping sprees, scapegoat the West for systemically exploiting your people and not feel like a total jerk for burying your political opponents and their tribal relations in an unused mine shaft. For some, that’s a huge relief.

Sure, the idealistic freedom-fighter, still sporting his dusty combat fatigues, may wag his finger at you and call you corrupt. The words of C.S. Lewis might set the upstart straight: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. Those who torment the people for their own good torment without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” As flavors of tyranny go, simple greed is often more palatable for the common man.

That’s the trouble with dictatorships: running a country is much more complicated than moralists would have us believe. Military coups would be much more enjoyable if they were like fairy tales. The brave prince rescues his voluptuous homeland from the exploitative clutches of colonialist rule, is betrothed to her for life, and the rest is as simple as “Happily ever after.” By comparison, dictating in the real world is difficult. Make changes too slow, and your hungry militia will turn against you. Make them too efficiently and a pedantic human rights activist will berate you for crimes against humanity. If you don’t nationalize farms for your lieutenants (who unfortunately have little interest in agricultural pursuits), they will question your loyalty. If you cut a few corners and break a few limbs in order to speed up an election (that you are going to win anyways, so why go about all the fuss?), a stern UN election monitor is there to give you a slap on the wrist and vituperate about you in the world press.

So what’s a reasonable, educated, conflict-adverse leader to do? The way to approach dictating is to take a stand you believe in and stick to it, whether it makes you popular or not. If you are smart, you will read all sorts of books and magazines and newspapers and blogs that reinforce your particular point of view so that, if anyone disagrees with it, you can shoot them down (if you don’t decide to just shoot them) with pre-prepared diatribes on why, say, naked women cause earthquakes or how AIDs is a Western conspiracy to decrease reproduction in your country.

But let’s face it; most western politicians never bothered to try and understand you. They haven’t read the Koran or the Communist Manifesto. They blame you for all the repercussions of colonialism. Not to mention that they’re no fun! Who wants to listen to Hilary Clinton rant about the rights of women when you go to the Opera with Kim-Jong Il or play a round of golf with al-Gadaffi?

So here’s what many tyrants do: they subconsciously gravitate toward other dictators who happen to rail against the same Western powers that we do. This is convenient on all sorts of levels. For one thing, it makes dinner party conversations much more pleasant. For another, it means you and your friends can be hypocritical together without it being pointed out or, better yet, even noticed. For example, you can promote Coca-farming and all your friends will say “How cultural!” instead of implicating you in the War on Drugs. Or you can spend international aid on constructing an indoor waterslide in your palace on the grounds that everyone else you know does it too. Or you sit around smoking cigars sent to you by Fidel and warmly agree that your people follow you in their own interest, because human nature demands and, indeed, cannot live without leadership.

More than anything, though, having like-minded friends means that you can sit in your fortified palace wearing a panoply of medals and watch Friends with your retinue of terrified young jezebels and know there is someone out there who approves of you. Someone else who doesn’t question the mysterious forces of fate that have crowned you king. So kindly show Hans Blix to the door, delete all those unread human rights watch emails, and call up Bob Mugabe to see if he wants to play Farmville.

There are better reasons not to visit...

From: http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2010/07/14/con-oilsand-tourism.html

I have no doubt that the tar sands are an environmental disaster. The sickly rainbow of an oil-slick in a Walmart parking lot puddle is enough to gross me out. So it doesn’t take much to convince me that a 50sq mile waste-water pond isn’t this summer’s vacation hotspot. Don’t waste your time convincing me that the tar sands are an ‘evil’ expression of corporate greed and political negligence. I have to coexist with smelly, myopic homo sapiens every day. I am already drowning in the viscous, quotidian evidence of man’s brutishness.

Not to say that I find sanctuary in ‘realism.’  Realistically, if man wasn’t mindlessly chasing money and sucking every last drop of resource out of the ground and greedily selling it to other grotesquely overweight men that live in cities so grossly underplanned that they need a car to get to the nearest McDonalds so they consume themselves to death while idling in the parking lot, he would probably be at war. Realism is not a comforting proposition.

Yes. The tar sands are a reality.  Just think of the ineluctable moustache of Daniel Day Lewis. There may not be blood these days, but There will be Oil. There will be irreversible damage to Northern Alberta (although to be honest it’s hardly a place where life or human activity of any sort can be said to ‘thrive’). Economic growth will continue unfettered. Man will continue to extract, purify, package, transport, brand, and distribute oil with remarkable efficacy. And he will continue to shirk dish duty after he feasts.

Yet, without accepting the banality of evil or the complacency of realism, I feel an enormous reservoir of untapped scorn for the latest environmental campaign against the tar sands. Take a look at www.rethinkAlberta.com. Admittedly, the images of drowning ducks in the last throes of oleaginous life and razed landscapes are cheerless. But media like this only muddies the issues and pollutes our chances of changing our stubborn reality.

Take this geographical idiocy from their survey as an example: Which country is proposing an extensive network of Tar Sands pipelines and refineries that will keep the U.S. committed to dirty oil for at least another 30 years, while putting the areas around it (i.e. The Great Lakes) at risk of contamination?

Hm. Is it Venezuela? South Africa? I really don’t know…Not exactly flattering to the intelligence. And last time I checked, the great lakes are a long way from Fort MacMurray. (click here for a pipeline map, if you’re into pipelines…)

What would the Thoreau say today if he was forced to suffer through the condescending stupidity of the rethinkAlberta.com survey and website? Rather than love, or money, or fresh air, or healthy beautiful baby ducklings or oil revenues or the heads of the heads of our energy companies on a stake, give me some god-damn facts. Or, heaven forbid, the roughest sketch of a solution.

I don’t know why the bêtises of protestors rankle more than the endless stupidities of the corporate hegemony. It’s unfair. In fact, the former tends to be far more harmless. But there is something so distasteful about the hypocritical mudraking and hateful hysteria of the left.  It seems more about anger than hard work, empathy or creative solutions for the sad world we are trapped in. That’s it really. The hatred. rethinkAlberta.com is condemnatory and hateful to a whole population. To my (I am loathe to admit it) population. Its hatred that makes me think of Hanna Arendt and Adolf Eichmann.

“Just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations — as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world — we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”

I was hoping to fill this piece with light-hearted satire. Instead I find myself alluding to the Holocaust. I blame the lugubriosity of Monday mornings.   And the fact that another internet prospector stole my idea for this post: rethinkrethinkAlberta.com.

In conclusion, come visit. Alberta is super sweet. We’ve got dinosaur bones.

“I enjoyed your blog! The Obiter will be looking out for you.”

This from the Dean of Osgood University.

The Obiter is a law school newspaper at Osgoode. An obiter dictum is a remark or observation made by a judge that is included in the body of the court’s opinion but does not form a necessary part of the court’s decision. In more common parlance, it refers to an ‘incidental remark or observartion.’

Say, for example, a brief personal note on the bottom of an official acceptance letter.

Rugby Blood Capsule Scandal

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1213972/Bloodgate-rugby-scandal-doctor-suspended-GMC.html

These say that any publicity is good publicity. But I am still trying to sort out my feelings towards a recent condemnation of my sports writing for McGill rugby. I merely want to be recognized for wit and maybe a little bit of cheek. Recently I have been reviled as “a disgrace to McGill University, the QSSF and the sport of rugby in Canada…classless, disrespectful and ignorant,” in quite a public manner.

In retrospect, I suppose some of my phrasing was slightly (to use an apt, sport’s related expression) offside. My reference to the Ottawa club as “an unimpressive bunch of hydrocephalic thugs” was, I suppose, aimlessly venomous. And describing the “puppy dog tears leaking through the eye patch of a dejected” Concordia player might come across a little bit raw, seeing as the guy might be seriously hurt.

I am just a little bit ticked off about the strong use of language in the critique of my work. Sure, criticize it for being disrespectful. But realize that in the world of satire, lines can sometimes be crossed unknowingly. It is ironic to be called ignorant by an individual who can’t tell the difference between a tone that is more self-deprecating than outwardly offensive, more playful than abusive. That he wants to suffocate creativity just because I implied a few people were born with a skull swishing with cerebrospinal fluid and no grey matter seems a little extreme to me.

I was inducted into the tradition of McGill game write-ups long ago and I distinctly remember the instance of the word ‘troglodyte’ (brutish cave dweller) that inspired me to apply my literary panache in this forum. It’s sad to feel the yolk of bureaucratic PR fall once again upon my shoulders.

Here are the original versions for your non-McGill affiliated reading pleasure:

McGill V Bishops Preview:

What do you do when life gives you alligators? You make purses. The McGill Rugby Redmen hope to improve on a 48-0 drubbing and skinning of the Bishop’s Gators the marked the beginning of the 2008 season. Many of the McGill players who starred in last year’s contest are back this year and looking to further humiliate a team that chooses to wear purple. Josh Reznick, awarded Man of the Match last year for his penetrating runs, will be starring at scrumhalf. Last year’s MVP Mike Davis – a velociraptic winger emerged from the primordial muck of Missisauga, ON – will look to extend a try-scoring run that, as far as the author knows, may have started against Bishop’s on Sept. 5th 2008. The return of rugby sensation Alistair Crow at 15 – along with the indefatigable propping of James ‘the legend’ Stellick and Dave ‘creepy history teacher or sexy lifeguard – you decide’ Tontini – complete the veritable Germanic war-machine that is the 2009 Varsity McGill Rugby Redmen. Need an image of the carnage to come? Think back to when Happy Gilmour savaged that alligator that ate his coach’s hand.

Half a decade ago, Bishop’s had the audacity to paint the McGill rugby posts purple the night before the finals, bus in 400 heckling, classless fans, and steal away a QSSF final victory. That memory has buried beneath wheelbarrowfuls of McGill scoring since, but the swampy stench lingers on.

The match will take place in Lennoxville, at Bishop’s University, this Friday, September 18, 2009. Kickoff is at 6pm. McGill 2nds kick off at 8:00, hoping to improve on a 46-17 win on their season opener last year. Let the interment continue.

McGILL A 57 @ BISHOPS 5

Cold and darkness set on Lennoxville Quebec. The McGill Redmen take the Bishop’s field beneath Friday night lights. Hands rub together with murderous intent.

First half: the Gators manage to frustrate a disjointed McGill side. The backline glimmers with greatness but passes are lost in translation. Winger Mike Davis grows agitated waiting for an opportunity to break. He fondles his yellow LiveStrong bracelet on the wing like a religulous NFL player. He breaks and draws a penalty. Fullback Alistair Crow takes his first attempt at goal.

He stares up at the posts from 30 yards out. A belligerent heckle questioning his sexual orientation and mother’s fidelity swells up from the crowd. Perhaps he is rattled by some germ of truth in the imprecations: he shanks his first kick wide.

The Gators are putting together a string of respectable phases to push the Redmen deep into their end when rookie Mike Maloon, complete with aerodynamic Maori haircut, picks off a pass. Quebec may have its new intercept specialist. 60 yards later, with touching rookie humility, he dishes off to an equine Mike Davis who gallops in for McGill’s first score. Crow makes good on the conversion.

The inexorable McGill momentum starts to take hold. Prop James Stellick starts hitting rucks like a human bowling ball. One kid is thrown back 10 yards and actually loses his shoe. Flanker Jon Lee poaches so much ball, the WWF is notified. Second row “Dennis” Roderick is mathematically disruptive in the line-outs. Flyhalf Matt Sidoti breaks and dishes to Crow who glides in for the try with the intimate velocity of a fighter jet. He tallies two more points on the convert.

Bishops earns a try early in the second half with the trusted but uncreative battering ram maneuver: 14-5. But before Bishops has a chance to feel hopeful, the ball floats into the hands of inside center Sam Skulsky. His first touch of the game has the air of a preordained event. With calculated violence, he absolutely ruins the man across from him. Before he is brought to ground, he floats a parabolic pass to Alistair crow for try time. Alistair gets the 7-10 split on the conversion, bouncing the ball off both posts and in.

Then it’s Crow again. A human samurai blade, he slices through the line. It’s one goose step after another to the try line. He is the consummate Arian. A genocide of broken ankles lies in his wake.

The vast disparity in talent starts to crystallize in the score line. 8-man Anton Nestle scores in the corner. Skulsky’s continues rhinoceric charges through gaps in the centers. Oxpeckers start to circle above his head. Evan Strait shows no disappointment for being displaced to the wing: he hurdles a tackle and two Bishop’s tacklers collide cartoonishly beneath him. He wins the footrace to the corner for another score.  Josh Balloch, subbed in at flyhalf, breaks and dishes. Davis gets another score in the corner.

Skulsky rumbles on to score another monstertruck try between the posts. Not finished even in the dying moments, Skulsky gets the ball again and plays a sympathetic grubber into the hands of Mike Davis for the final try. Forget Rosh Hashana. This try-scoring affair is a out-an-out  Bar Mitzvah.

Final Score: McGill 57, Bishops 5; This Saturday, McGill plays Bishops again in Molson Stadium. Buenos dias Gators, bienvenido al fábrica de carteras…

McGILL 69 – BISHOPS 0

There are events in the course of human history whose immensity no scintillating outpour of prose can fully capture. Take Redmen v.s. Bishops 2009 part deux, for example. This match was a bitter 69-0 lambasting that will linger on many a Gator’s tongue well into the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend. I will spare you the exact, rapacious details.

To add further perspective to the win, it was rumored that the McGill side actively stemmed their own scoring after 11 tries. According to McGill winger Mike Davis, “[we] just want to preserve the scoreline’s aesthetic.”

McGILL A 57 vs CONCORDIA 10

This is the way a Stinger defends,
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The first McGill – Concordia collision of the year is a highly anticipated affair. Following rumors of Concordia’s recruitment of nationally capped forward Dave Biddle, many predict a close margin. But there is a faint hint of ozone in the air as the satellitic opening drop kick launches from the deft boot of Fullback Alastair Crow. One can sense any remaining flicker of Stinger hope start to fizzle.

A salvo of pummeling penetrations from flanker Cayse Reuter and high-octane loops from winger Kyle Buckley pepper the opening minutes like buckshot. Flyhalf Matthieu Sidoti floats a graceful chip into the corner that is almost swallowed up by Buckley’s hungry, hypertrophic arms. Rookie hooker Keelan Chapman, freshly rescued by from a Beijing opium den, repeatedly Bangarangs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhAI0-CbstI) into scurvied Concordia forwards.

After a rare 1st half penalty by McGill, Concordia gets a look at goal. Their fullback, a French import with quite probably the worst mustache of all time, makes good and gives the Stingers an unlikely 3-0 lead. Alastair Crow goes down with an unfortunate ankle injury during his first African-American penetration of the Concordia back line. Centre Sam Skulsky, showing no apparent weakening without his Victoria, BC symbiote Alastair on the field, pinballs through in the centers. His secret? A grotesque turf wound on his Peroneus whose miasmatic stench sends defenders reeling. Call it separation by suppuration. Meanwhile, Mike Davis is starting to find gaps in the Concordia defense. Unfortunately his mind is awash with rugbydump.com highlights and he wastes his breaks with ineffectual centering kicks.

Resistance is futile against the higher lifeforms that form the McGill backline. Flyhalf Matthieu Sidoti threads a penalty kick between the posts. The counterattack grows sharp under the generalship of replacement fullback Evan Strait. Kyle Buckley roars through on a set play to run a sprinting clinic in the Concordia backfield. He jinks the fullback before floating a gift-wrapped pass out to his better half Mike Davis. Try-time corner. Sidoti converts.

Flanker Cayse Reuter gets the glory after a technically flawless forward maul. Despite a great game and a string of highlight reel tackles, he still feels the need to threaten the writing staff with violence to assure publication of his try in the prestigious annals of McGill game write-ups.

The Stingers push deep into the McGill end but their threat to score is stymied by a huge defensive scrum, no doubt inspired by the uncompromising tenacity of Captain James Tiberius Stellick.

The second half starts up with Prop Dave Tontini isolated on a pick and go. He fends off tackle after tackle with the intensity of a cornered mammoth before accelerating into open space with cartoon elegance. There is no better way to describe his run than a 35 yabadabadoo to the try line. It’s an epic front row score. Gideon Balloch converts.

Then comes one of the prettiest McGill tries of the year. Gideon Balloch weaves though the backline wide right. He pops to Evan Strait in support. Lightning quick transfer through the silken Geisha hands of Keelan Chapman switches the point of attack to the far left side. Kyle Buckley makes another impressive finish.

Keelan Chapman earns his first try for McGill after several phases of respectable forward play. Then Concordia drives to the McGill goal line and receives a stale Food Bank handout penalty try from the referee. Cayse Reuter takes it right back at them. He burrows through, carrying five defenders on his back with his Atlas-like shoulders. Good hands from the backs get the ball once again out to Kyle Buckley who surges through the Bounty Soft ™ Concordia defense. Gideon converts.

8-man Anton Nestle and wily scrumhalf Josh Reznick crash blindside like Rocky and Bullwinkle. In one particular break, Anton lays a devastating stiff arm on Canada World Cup player and Concordia ringer Dave Biddle that provokes a rumble of sideline commentary including: “Now I know why Canada did so poorly in the last World Cup.”

Rugby pundit, credit card holder, and seconds fullback Roy Voigt gives the Concordia flyhalf some constructive criticism after a series of poor kicks, “Change out of those silly yellow boots!” Someone on the sideline remarks that they are the same color as his teeth. The Concordia defense continues to implode. Buckley mixes up goose steps with dangerous grubbers through the line. Arachniod second row Roderick McKenzie scores on an 8-man pick that inspires great jealousy in a sidelined Anton Nestle.

Mike Davis snaps up a cheeky intercept and takes off. After forty yards he finds himself face to face with James “the best winger in Quebec” Acker. But just when Davis looks gassed, he manages to somehow choke slam the approaching Acker and then float a long pass over to gentle giant Graeme Kempthorne for a much deserved try between the posts. Unruffleable, Gideon Balloch slots yet another convert.

The game ends with one last break from Kyle Buckley. But his tongue-wagging, epileptic head fakes are not enough to evade the Lilliputian second string Concordia scrumhalf who somehow manages to wrestle Kyle out of bounds.

The post-game imagery is splashy and gay. Dave Tontini devours a well-deserved box of Timbits. Jon Lee celebrates in the stands with the Korean Student Society. Puppy dog tears seep from the eye patch of an injured and dejected Dave Biddle. And the scoreboard glows with unbiased honesty across the dispersing crowd on Percival’s field: 57-10.

Next game: McGill @ Concordia; Sunday Oct. 18th.

McGILL B 0 vs OTTAWA 15

The McGill club team fell to an unimpressive band of hydrocephalic thugs from the University of Ottawa this past Sunday, Oct 4th.

Where the McGill side made a big 1st half impression was goal line offense. In the first half, Ottawa pushed over the goal line three times but only amounted 5 points for their efforts. One would-be try was held up by a flocculating mass of Red defenders. Big hits from forwards Devon “Red 2.0” Howard and Mike Meehan kept McGill in the game. Later on, a rotund Ottawa winger with surprisingly good speed and surprisingly abysmal hands was forced to knock it on just moments before he could do what fat men do best and fall over in the endzone.

Eventually Roy Voigt was forced to kill a ball close to his own goal line to halt a breakaway series of Ottawa grubbers. Chris Pam, pedant referee extraordinaire, decide to call it a penalty try. A conversion and a penalty kick before half put Ottawa up 10-0.

A few snapshots of the sidelines: Varsity players loiter on the sidelines and prepare for their match against Concordia. Rookie center Mike Maloon ruminates [fig/lit] over a Nutrigrain pastry bar. Alastair Crow gets tantric with his Styrofoam stretch noodle. Mike Davis starts the electricity flowing amongst his teammates with his homoerotic hellos. Anton Nestle looks out on the field with iPod earpods dangling messily around his ears, a blank stare that many a college floozy has mistaken for emotional and intellectual depth…

The second half showed a bit more McGill vivacity. Second half sub, Ed “L.B.” Cottingham aka Leg-Breaker aka The Real Slim Shady, added his gangster panache in the centers. Fullback Roy Voigt (infamous for his habit of interrupting practice to kick drop goals from impossible angles, bowing to marginally impressed club players, and declaring “that gentlemen, is why I play rugby.”) blotted out the sun with an impressive series of up-and-unders. Hassan Akbar attacked the line with the screeching bloodlust of a Persian spider monkey. Added to his efforts were good penetrations by Tim Ruban and leggy wing JM Lacourciere.

McGill conceded a late try to lose 15-0. Expect a better show from a disappointed but determined club side gets their rematch October 18th.

McGILL C 25 @ DAWSON 0

When a swarm of red tracksuits climbed out of a rumbling blue van in Verdun, many thought they were witnessing a remake of the A-Team: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SukN96byd3w). Instead, it was the McGill Club B-team taking to the trenches against Dawson College, in Verdun, Montreal.

Hooker Nitai Ben Schach, a recent graduate of the inner-city CEGEP, was adamant to make an impression on his former team-mates. Under the phosphorous lights of Crawford Park, the McGill Players rallied around Nitai’s Pétainian pregame speech: “Courage! On les aura!”

The Dawson side was ill-disciplined but not without ferocity. McGill had to work for hard yards, but managed some impressively consistent phase play. Dawson struggled to relieve the pressure as McGill’s little-fullback-that-could Ryan McDowell proved impervious to pressuring kicks and shifty on the counterattack.

Nitai, Jon Minz, Alex Vujicic, and Kevin ‘Sherpa’ Thiruchelvam earned hard forward yards off the breakdown to allow indefatigable flyhalf Trevor Clarke and serpentine center Clement Bisserbe to score first half tries.
The Dawson loosehead, a veritable Butterbean, laid the pain on Tim Ruban early in the half. But Prop Allan Leary delivered a Herculean dump tackle on the adipose prop as payback later on.

Tim Ruban, indistinguishable from alumni Matt Ruban in the 13 jersey, had a blinder. He passed up an overlap and burned in for the 3rd try of the contest. Not to be outdone, Clement Bisserbe made a stellar effort to block a kick and chase down the bouncing oval, scoring in the corner.

Lawrence de Pilato, out of the pleather jacket and into his Samurai jersey, continued to establish himself as a dynamic, soft-handed forward. He was instrumental in the attacking phase play that allowed scrumhalf Dan “Bright-Eyes” Levine to scramble in for the final score of the game.

In the last ten minutes, the colossal Jon Minz was moved to open side wing. Jon Minz – the Jewish man’s Jonah Lomu. But an unfortunate knock-on ended his career on the wing as quickly as it had begun.

Trevor Clarke went 0 for 5 on the conversions. Poor guy didn’t have a tee. So McGill ends up with 25 points and five hard fought tries to win over the Dawson Blues.

Parking lot dance party

Treeplanting reduces the human experience into tiny, manageable physiological moments. The world is bordered by aching bone and muscle. Little extend past the horizon of hunger. So my paralysis was completely understandable: I had been yanked out of the mire of a moment and cast by a tornado of socio-cultural meaning. A semiotic tidal wave of death, celebrity, music and dance crashed over the soiled furrows of my brow.

Let me hear you say.

Sometimes it’s hard to rank the importance of your friends in a meaningful order. Likewise, in the suburban, I had no sense that this was the most important celebrity death of my generation. Multiply this by the disconnect of bush work – any news is big news to a tent-dweller with a bug mask and a full beard.

Whiter than Michael.

It wasn’t until I was entrapped in the wild gyrations of an afternoon dance party that I intimated the wondrous importance of Michael. That dance can be an answer to so much. To the weighty convolutions of human meaning. To the vertiginous implications of death. To our collective failure to treat a troubled man compassionately during his life. Dance was our answer. Our apology. Our absolution.

Dance party essential: a toothbrush.

The King of Pop

Is dead

Long live the Sing.

Bush people

Gather around

This antiquated audiotape

Of thrift store providence:

This is Thriller.

Rhythm is our obelisk

And Liz knows all the moves.

Her face contorts,

Her feet footloose.

Billy Hackett

Is not my lover.

But he walks the moon

Like no other.

Wood chips, gravel

Scuff spinning toes.

Clasp your crotch,

Fling your feet

To reckless angles.

Stretch your falsetto

To octaves of joy.

And don’t stop

Til’ you get it on.

A-HOO-hoo.

Sexy raised to the 6th power

But eventually the crystalline sparkle of autumn on the Plains of Abraham came into view. The tidal rush of rugby roared across them. I scrambled into cleets and took the field.

We lost. The anxiety and mental exhaustion of the day had taken its toll on me and I made quite a few mental mistakes. My passion was slightly hobbled by a sinus infection and LSAT fatigue. But I played quite heroically at times, and stole a ball to win an 80 yard footrace to the try zone. There was one guy who was going to angle me out of bounds or tackle me but I was NOT going to run 80 meters at full tilt with a bad ankle just to get tackled within an eyelash of the white chalk by this little French squit who, unfortunately, had looped around at just the perfect angle to bump me out of bounds. But then this kind of metaphysical refusal to be robbed of this one small drop of victory in the f—ing ocean of strife that composes my life sort of unhinged something inside me. Some primal moral construct became dislodged – blame it on the LSAT, or the frustrating game, or the anxious car drive, or the anxiety emergent from reality’s constant hampering of our attempts to impress our volition upon it. I didn’t even hesitate to think. I just swung. It was a little vicious, not to mention totally illegal rugby-wise. I caught him with the soft underbelly of my fist, right in the jowl. I didn’t slow down to watch as he careened past me, his legs giving out like a boxer in the final round. I just tumbled in to claim my five glorious points.

The pudgy, post-ambulatory linesman was still around the half way line. He had already given me a penalty for fisticuffs early in the match, but he was far too far away and too myopic to be able to distinguish an innocent arm bar from a malicious blow. A towering opposing 8-man came up to me in offended disbelief. He had chased me like a hunting dog does a bunny all the way from the other hemisphere of our little rugby microcosm. He was the primary audience for my transgression and he was shocked. I rubbed it in his face a little. When we lost the game I had to shake hands with him a little sheepishly. He was pretty magnanimous about it.

Its comes with a strange, neandertholic pride, playing a bit of dirty rugby. I feel a little bad, from a kind of Kantian, categorical imperative, standpoint. I feel guilty thinking that I have perhaps somehow tarnished the game, discredited the sport by encouraging its barbarism. But there is a ‘this-is-war’ poignancy to it that cannot be denied, not to mention a kind of internal, karmic justice. Violent play is often answered with curt vigilantism. Fortunately karma is a long-run phenomenon, so I might just get away with it this season…

7:30 an electronic cacophony of cellphone alarms fishes me from sleep. I wake suddenly to find myself lost in that very suddenness. Given my habitual addiction to 4 minute snooze alarms, the urgency characterizing my resurrection hints to me that something was special about this morning. I don’t know quite what it is, so I suffocate the alarm and consider further sleep: I have had a few confusing mornings recently, probably due to stress. I even went to sleep once on wednesday in my room-mate’s bed (secretly- he is out of town on business) and woke up in mine. Disorientating. Perhaps not quite categorizable as sleep walking, but close.

Then four letters of grand purpose came to me, before I nod off into the late morning. LSAT. Law School Administration Test. Yippie-Kai-Yay. At least I am up in time, at least in a way it is close to being over.

Heavy caffienation, and bagelation ensue and I am soon winding through a crisp fall morning in Montreal, au velo. I bike through a wash of abandoned sunshine. The cold is sharp, a reminder that I’m alive. But it’s warm enough for me to be happy about that fact. I power up a hill past a lanky skateboarder. It surprises me, makes me feel a little self-conscious and lush, to see a skid like him up on the early hours of a Saturday. Where is he going, this lone four-wheeled ranger? I usually feel proud when I get up early, especially on a weekend. But this guy kind of disinfects it.

The LSAT is so much better but somehow worse than its medical counterpart. It’s not as debasing. It doesn’t try and break you with the weight of four oversized textbooks and an approachable-but-impossible-to-attain state of perfect preparation. It does come with its share of intangible stress. You invest hours. The test approaches. You reach a critical point where you have become helpless to really influence your preparedness further. You are left to wonder if you have done enough. Will you be good enough? Will it be a series of worst case scenarios? Will you be confounded by the subjectivity of Arguments? Paralyzed by the smallest stumble in the logic games section? Drown in an oceanic Reading Comprehension passage? Or will you experience just another mundane averaging of your effort? Will anomalous good and bad moments cancel eachother out, returning you to the barren, sternal bosom of the median?

What is perhaps worse about it is the ineluctability of your score. There is no ‘i could have studied harder’, or ‘memorized more’ type of post-test palliation. You are a number. It’s not all that matters, but in this particular, and at least minimally comprehensive forum of life, you equate to a number. No amount of protestation will change it. It is as real at the serial number tattooed on a prisoner’s arm and it also imprisons you in an evaluative cage of sorts. You grow aware that you have been gifted with language and logic abilities that place you above a crowd of people interested in exhibiting their language and logic abilities. But you are also now aware that there are others who will, in most likely scenarios, continue to be your facultative superiors. This is healthy to an extent, this standardized testing business. It is a salve to the hubris of nurturing parents’ caresses that have left you scarred with a close-to-inviolable sense of superiority and entitlement. A sense that you just might be smarter than everyone else in the world, that only effort separates you from genius.

The test is a breathless, totalitarian affair. I didn’t realize it would be so rushed. Everyone shows up with a 3.78 litre ziplock bag full of LSAT accoutrements: old-school pencils, analog watch, eraser, sharpener, protein bar, water, kleenex. The essentials, according to some sub-committee somewhere who determines these things.

The girls, there are a few cute ones who are wearing too-tight tights for bottoms and baggy McGill sweaters for tops. Some chauvinistic voice within me, perhaps reinforced by the near-ubiquitous coquettishness of women in western society, mutters critically that today is no different than yesterday and they could have at least done their hair up without threatening their test score. Shallow, cynical, I know. But perhaps there is a buried frequency in it. Perhaps it’s a cry to all of humanity to stop giving up the few prideful routines that give life its color under the oppressive heel of necessary-for-success events that demand our full attention.

Nevertheless, formalities and circle-bubbling commence. I battle both clock and bladder. I am in here. Out there are the real questions, all the intriguing complexities of human life. If only I could shed the light of this effort and logical rigor on the darker recesses of the human heart.

If the LSAT was a bit more human, perhaps it would look like this: a David Foster Wallace Pop Quiz courtesy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and phrased in LSAT vernacular:

Two men, X and Y, are close friends, but then Y does something to hurt, alienate, and/or infuriate X. They had been very close. In fact X’s family had almost sort of adopted Y when Y arrived in town alone and had no family or friends yet and got a position in the same department of the same firm X worked for, and X and Y work side by side and become close compadres, and before long Y is usually over at X’s house hanging out with the X family just about every night after work, and this goes on for quite some time. But then Y does X some kind of injury, like maybe writing an accurate but negative Peer Evaluation of X at their firm, or refusing to cover for X when X makes a serious error in judgment and gets himself in trouble and needs Y to lie to cover for him somehow. The point is that Y’s done some honorable/upright thing that X sees as a disloyal and/or hurtful thing, and X is now totally furious at Y, and now when Y comes over to X’s family’s house every night to hang out as usual X is extremely frosty to him, or witheringly snide, or sometimes even yells at Y in front of the X family’s wife and kids. In response to all which, however, Y simply continues to come over to X’s family’s house and to hang around and take all the abuse X dishes out, nodding sort of studiously in response but not saying anything or in any other way responding to X’s hostility. On one particular occasion X actually screams at Y to ‘get the hell out of his family’s house and kind of half-hits-half-slaps Y right in front of one of the family’s kids hard enough to make Y’s glasses fall off, and all Y does by way of response is hold his cheek and nod sort of studiously at the floor while he picks up and repairs a bent arm-hinge as best he can by hand, and even after this he still continues to come around and hang out at X’s house like an adopted member of the family, and to just stand there and take whatever X dishes out in retaliations for whatever it is Y apparently did to him. Just why Y does this (i.e. continues to come around and to hang out at the Xes’) is unclear. Maybe Y is basically spineless and pathetic and has no place else to go and nobody else to hang out with. Or maybe Y’s one of those quietly iron-spined people who are internally strong enough not to let any kind of abuse or humiliation get to them, and can see (Y can) through X’s present pique to the generous and trusted friend he’d always been to Y before, and has decided (Y has, maybe) that he’s just going to hang in there and stick it out and keep coming around and stoically allow X to vent whatever spleen he needs to vent, and that eventually X will probably get over being pissed off so long as Y doesn’t respond or retaliate or do anything to aggravate the situation further. In other words, it’s not clear whether Y is apathetic and spineless or incredibly strong and compassionate and wise. On only one specific further occasion, when X actually jumps up on an end table in front of the whole X family and screams at Y to ‘take his ass and hat and get the fuck out of my family’s house and stay out,’ does Y actually leave because of anything X says, but even after this further episode Y’s still right back over there hanging out at the Xes’ the very next night after work. Maybe Y is somehow both pathetic and strong…though it’s hard to reconcile Y’s being pathetic or weak with the obvious backbone it must have required to write a negatively truthful Peer Evaluation or to refuse to lie or whatever it was that X hasn’t forgiven him for doing. Plus it’s unclear how the whole thing plays out – i.e., whether Y’s passive persistence pays off in the form of X finally getting over being furious and forgiving Y and being his compadre again, or whether Y finally can’t take the hostility anymore and eventually stops hanging around X’s house…or whether the whole incredibly tense and unclear situation simply continues indefinitely. There’s also the factor of how X’s overt unfriendliness to Y and Y’s passive reaction to it affect certain intramural dynamics within the X family, like whether X’s wife and kids are horrified by X’s treatment of Y or whether they agree with X that Y dicked him over somehow and so are basically sympathetic to X. This would affect how they feel about Y continuing to come around and hang out at their house every night, like whether they admire Y’s stoic fortitude of find it creepy and apathetic and wish he’d finally just get the message and quit acting like he’s still an honorary part of the family, or what.

In fact, the whole mise-en-scene here seems too shot through with ambiguity to make a very good Pop Quiz, it turns out…