MISSING TEXAS

O, Galveston.

After I moved to the socialist paradise that is Canada, I did as the Romans did. I joined the free healthcare club, drank Molson products, and bundled up in expensive North Face fare when Yukon decided we were too warm. But the longer I was up there, and even the more I enjoyed Alberta (“North Texas” my wife and I joked to our friends) there was more and more that I missed about Texas. As we move back we are becoming reacquainted with the things we love in no short supply. Calgary being the largest city in a thousand miles in four directions, we began to reminisce about the simple things you could not get and as we’re back I remember that regardless of being forced to leave my adopted land, I remind myself that my first thirty-four years in Texas went perfectly fine.  

There is no replacing Tex-Mex food. It is not Mexican food. It is not a taco truck. It is not meat and cheese thrown into a tortilla. It is a culinary art. Have you ever eaten in a Chinese restaurant and not seen people of Chinese descent running the place? Well, in Canada it’s much the same with “Mexican food.” I’m not just talking about that lime flavored goodness that is the steak fajitas at Lupe Tortillas, or even the small chain of Mamacitas that serve that ENORMOUS beef burrito that I had to stop ordering all those years ago for the sake of my stomach lining. I’m really talking about the Taquerias I would raid in college or in the middle of the night coming home from a bar. The “Tamale Man” who would park off FM 2351 and the Gulf Freeway. I’m talking about the small store fronts all across the city with signs that say “Dos Mas” and “El Gato Negro” that just PROMISE the experience of saying “holy shit, that was good. Get me another one!” The only thing I miss about teaching were those random times my students, the overwhelming majority of which were Latino, would come to my classroom with a brown bag full of whatever they helped their mother make the night before. Tamales. Enchiladas. Breakfast burritos. Empanadas. Sopapias. And I would graciously thank them while trying not to embarrass myself by scarfing it down in front of them. There is no hiding it. “Mexican food” in Canada sucks.

There were more Vietnamese in my high school than black kids, all of whom I knew personally. When you graduate in a class of 200 you pretty much know everyone. Trang. Jason. The Castillo Family. The Brown brothers. I come from a super white family but I went to a pretty diverse suburban high school and my college brought me into contact with Arabs, Jews, Brazilians, Caribs, and Africans of every stripe. Canada is becoming a pretty diverse place but its diversity is mainly South Asian and East African. The Chinese are already there. They’re not Chinese anymore. They’re Canadian. But Texas is filled with generations of ethnic groups that have been here more than long enough to say ‘ya’ll’, drink a Tecate, and bitch about the heat. Immigrants are everywhere, and trying to stim the tide is a joke, but I missed the color palate of my State, the hues of cool, the cultural experience of growing up together, going to school together, learning new shit together, because we were all Texans regardless of where our parents were from: South Vietnam or West Texas. There were more mosques in Calgary than Southern Baptist Churches, and that felt odd. Not because I have anything against Muslims, but because I grew up with a SHITLOAD of Southern Baptists.. and though I’m not a Christian… I did miss them.

Sometimes I would stand at the Target at Bay Area and just marvel at the rows and rows of shit. Neosporin. A-1 Steak Sauce. Forty types of Gatorade. Wolf Brand Chili (NO BEANS!). Canada has a content law for just about everything. It’s another way of tariff protection. The Canadian dollar keeps most people out anyway. Best Buy squeezed in by purchasing the Canadian knock-off Future Shop. But there were tons of things missing in Alberta. A lot of it was the population – there are more people in Texas than in all of Canada and more people in Houston than in all of Alberta. The demand just wasn’t there and trends likely took something off the shelves that you really liked. Living in a consumer country of 300 million ensures that no matter what I want, I can get it, and now, for just a price. I hated driving across town in the middle of the night looking for that one pharmacy that was 24 hours. How do pregnant women cope with no supermarkets open past nine PM? You’d be hard pressed to find a Walgreens here that’s not open to midnight and finding a 24 hour CVS is just not a problem. Even some Walmart’s ever close their doors. Service here is an opportunity. People are happy to work because they view it as something to take them somewhere. In Canada, it’s a fucking drag, and they don’t owe you anything for that fifteen percent tip. I once had to return a car multiple times for servicing the same problem. I didn’t have to pay. It was never about the money. And it wasn’t incompetence. It’s just that they didn’t care. Whereas in Texas, if it isn’t fixed the first time, the earth will be moved to satisfy the customer.  That kind of service, the service I give my clients and the service I expect, is just not present north of the border, and they’re fine with that.

A real beach. Movie tickets that are only seven bucks – four bucks on a matinee (which does not exist north of the 49th Parallel). Going down the river in the summer. State Universities. But above all else, my family. I really missed my family. Even those who don’t like me. 

MISSING ALBERTA

O Canada. My home and adoptive land…

I have been out of work for seven months. After two-hundred and fifty applications, I had five callbacks and three interviews. I nailed every interview, only to see the job slip through my fingers due to circumstances beyond my control. After two weeks of international effort, I found a job in Houston, my hometown. I landed the job over the phone, packed my bags, and started two weeks later. It’s a huge pay cut, but a bigger opportunity. I’m lucky I have the advantage to go across the border. Most Albertans don’t. There are lots of things I won’t miss about Alberta: the lack of U-Turns, or real Tex-Mex restaurants, having only one freeway and they country’s hostility over what it means to be an “Albertan.” But there are many things that I will miss, and I thought I would enumerate them here in no particular order.

There simply is no comparing where I was born to where I spent the past seven years. Some might not think so, but I think Alberta is the Garden of Eden in a country that far surpasses most of the world in terms or beauty. It is simply gorgeous all over – even on the windswept plains. The never-ending forests and of course the Rockies, the Rockies, the Rockies. On my back porch I can see for thirty miles – over the horizon – and I know I will miss it every day.

Any place can be beautiful but it won’t be much fun if the people suck, and Albertans are without a doubt, the best kind of people in Canada. I have traveled throughout the Great White North and I have a special affinity for Newfoundlanders, but I simply cannot describe the kindness I have received from Albertans. Once on my way to Banff my driveshaft fell out of the bottom of my RV and though he suffered an accident himself just a half hour before, an over the hill oil patch worker helped tow my five ton monstrosity off the road with his Ram. I’ve stopped to clear blown tires and stray ladders off the road, only to be beaten there by someone who had a smile and a wave. It took me a lifetime to gather friends in Texas, all of them through the trial by fire of high school and college. But in Alberta Friends are easy, and they mean it. Weekends are full of back porch barbeques, camping in the hills or forests, mountains or foothill ponds. When I witnessed a car plow through a crowd of people, I was surprised how many dozens of witnesses stopped their day to fill out an incident report. The dozens stacked up. After I received my summons to appear an officer called me to tell me that my 911 call… and the three others that night… forced the defendant to settle. Yes, they are Canadians, but they are Albertans. They are not flawless but there is a genuine togetherness, a sense of community that exists past Stampede, and while we’re at it, I’m going to miss that, too.

Stampede is actually amazingly small. The first time I went I was surprised at how miniature it was compared to the famed Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, which easily dwarfs it. The Saddledome, impressive from afar, shrinks when you think the entire stadium could fit on the field of the Astrodome. Calgary actually misses out on dozens of summer tours because no one want to play in a venue so small in which you cannot hang your stage lights from the ceiling. The rodeo is unbelievably expensive and is a pittance of the Houston competition in which seventy-thousand people in Houston regularly attend… and some for twenty dollars.

But Stampede is so ingrained into the culture of Calgary that it’s attendance rating is through the roof in terms of participation. The city practically shuts down from seven to ten every morning the week BEFORE Stampede as to feed everyone in the vicinity a free breakfast. At first, I attended only the company’s pancake breakfast that I worked for. Then, I hit my competitors who invited me to theirs. My wife’s company held one in the parking lot and invited the vast blocks of the residential neighborhood behind them to join. You could not travel anywhere across the city without seeing signs telling perfect strangers they were welcome to pull over and have a free breakfast. This past Stampede, that was mired in the horrible downward spiral of an economy in freefall, pulled out all the stops. For half the days of the Stampeded, the first five thousand ticket holders received a free pancake breakfast. The lines were long. The families full of children were grateful. It seems in Houston, perhaps ten or fifteen percent of the city participates in the Rodeo. There are almost six million people here, and we all can’t go. Some of us never go. Most of us only one day a week. But in Calgary, I’m willing to bet participation is almost 70%. During the floods of 2012, which endangered the very existence of Stampede, forty thousand volunteers all across the city descended onto the Stampede Grounds to shovel, sweep, and mop every inch to get it ready in time. The Saddledome had to be abandoned, the flooding was too much. But new dirt was trucked in, the stalls repainted, and every energy company that had a conscience let their employees go down with a company barbeque pit – a personal one if necessary – to make burgers for the helpers because there simply were no stores open to provide meals. My children will be bewildered when I take them to the Houston Rodeo, but they will never forget Stampede.

Calgary particularly has a kind heart for children. I was lucky mine were so young while we lived there. Skating lessons, fencing, hockey, soccer, just about any sport you could possibly imagine. This teamed with free Lego classes at our local community center, next to dance and drama where I took my children to Beaver Scouts, Cub Scouts, Girl Guides and Brownies. There we attended book clubs, took the kids to the playground and swam in the only open air community pool in the city. When the city declared they had to close the pool because to replace the aging wonder would be close to a million dollars, the entire neighborhood launched a bottle drive to save it. And save it they did. This mindset, coupled with the people’s desire to have parks, parks, and more parks, to take the LRT and decrease pollution, to smile and say thank you to everyone regardless of what they did for you or with you, of their race or religion…this is what makes Alberta special.

In minus thirty degrees Celsius, we can take our kids to indoor water parks that rival California. For a thousand dollars you can go to Toronto but for five hundred you can go to Hawaii. The border dashes we would make to Costco in Helena and Spokane before or after our camping trips or flights home for Christmas. To come home after a long day to see your neighbor had shoveled your walkway because they knew you would be home late. I was always home late. I was always at work. I was always missing my family. I never worried. I knew Alberta was taking care of them. 

YES, I’M STILL LISTENING TO GLASS HOUSES

Hot Funk, Cool Punk, even if it’s old junk, it’s still Rock and Roll to me.

It had always sat there on my brother’s shelf in between his Blues Brothers Soundtrack and Pat Benatar’s Ballerina LP. I listened to it then and wondered why my brother had also bought the singles. He had three: All for Leyna, You May Be Right, and Sometimes a Fantasy. I tell you, at the age of six or seven, I learned a lot from Billy Joel about masturbation.

My record player was a birthday present: a bright blue Disney suitcase that opened to Mickey in the hood with a huge smile on his face, his arm holding the stylus that you put onto the vinyl. It was built primarily for ‘45’s and story board singles that came along with a story. Star Wars, Raiders, and a dozen others that I listened to endlessly. But if I opened the case just a little wider I could fit a full 33 and a 1/3rd, and one of the first ones I spun was Billy Joel’s Glass Houses.

I knew nothing of the time of punk rock or raw rock or where the new wave was going. In fact I still hadn’t seen the image later emblazoned in my mind of two astronauts planting the MTV flag on the moon. But I knew good shit when I heard it, and Glass Houses was full of good shit.

There was, of course, the opener everyone became addicted to even if you didn’t like Billy Joel: You May Be Right. Unbelievably this opened the album but was not cut as the first single. It followed second in March of 1980, just in time for my birthday. It was a huge eye into the young New York life, a life that some may say was exaggerated, but I tell you, I had two brothers ten and twelve years older than me and it didn’t seem like that life was too exaggerated when I spent my summers with them. And as if to enunciate what the song and the album was all about… a good Catholic boy singing about love and sin… the first thing you hear before You May Be Right is the sound of glass shattering. Here we go, you could say, on a ride to take us on the borderline.

Elvis had only been dead three years, so imitating him was in some cases more dangerous than when he was alive. Joel’s voice mimicry far surpassed what every one before him tried to do: how do you sound like Elvis without it sounding like a joke? Elvis wasn’t a joke, and to a musician who toured most of the year away from friends and family, neither was masturbation. The second track, Sometimes a Fantasy, therefore was an odd mix between the traditional gospel vocal sound and the punk rock guitar-mixed-with-a-Moog that had such a huge impact in the late 1970’s. We can all point to the Sex Pistols because they are easy prey. They sold the most records but keep in mind they only made one – only one real record. Most punk bands of this time were like this. Flipper churned out just one. So did Death. Rare were those like Bad Brains or Black Flag who lasted more than three. But Joel isn’t out to imitate punk rock, only draw from it, and oddly this makes Sometimes a Fantasy, the last single released in the summer of 1980, one of two songs you did not expect to be the lasting legacy of this album.

The obvious legacy is You May Be Right and It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me, track four. And after two songs of overbearing machismo, Joel follows it up with Don’t Ask Me Why which isn’t Dylanesque, but has a very solid history going back to A Hard Day’s Night. This soft melodic tune following such hard hitting songs really shows Joel’s vocal range…but also his songwriting range as well. And when he follows this up with It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me you start to think he might be the American Paul McCartney. Ostensibly about acceptance, the heart of the song is about more than that. A theme that flows through the album, It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me is about conflict between what society wants us to be and what we want to do. Expectations are not set against reality but rather against inner-expectations. In the end it doesn’t matter to Joel what rock and roll is or is not, because he likes it all. He’s already proven that up to now.

But the show stopper was the first single off the album in January of 1980: All for Leyna. Unbelievably paced with rapid piano punches and a Moog instead of a lead guitar for the solo, the song issues metaphors before the bridge, and solid reality after it. The subject of the song, how one perfect night with the right person can just fuck up a person’s perspective on the world, is something the young can side with. You could very well replace Leyna’s name with your first heartbreak and it could be your song. But surprising to us is that this isn’t Joel’s deep machismo voice or his soft melodic ‘For the Longest Time’ barbershop quartet voice, but an angst-ridden midway that screams much like Jonny Rotten would. There are many times I just can’t believe the mike picked it all up flawlessly. There’s not a single hint of feedback or screech. So not only does Glass Houses have excellent song writing and musicianship, it has outstanding engineering and producing.

The machismo voice is juxtaposition against what could be the softer side of his songwriting: side two offers up I Don’t Want to Be Alone. About an established couple wondering whether to take the first step, the song sounds like the man is bringing a lot of baggage to the table: perhaps a Leyna or a Diane to be specific. So we have the young, the old is to come, but here on side two we have reached middle age.

And middle age is threatened when you find the right person but they don’t realize it yet or don’t want to take the risk, which is the topic for track seven: Sleeping with the Television On. The track even opens with the danger one faces when they hit forty: the sound of the National Anthem playing before the broadcast signal is cut off. This is Joel’s warning to anyone who lives in a Glass House. This could happen to you if you moralize too much, accuse too much, if you can’t leave that baggage at home.

Cetait Toi (You Were the One) follows in this very same theme only from the male side of the relationship. Having found your one-and-only, you have to recognize that comfort should be found from that person instead of seeking it from someone else. This would be a rejection of say Outside Woman Blues, which Cream most successfully reincarnated just twelve years before, and more than just in theme but in voice. Joel softens it all the way, even sings a whole verse in French, to get his endearing point across. The crass drunkard youth from You May Be Right seems a million miles away from this song. From a different album. From a different time. From a different person. This song slips us to the mature. So now that we’re mature, what do we do?

Effectively, you have two choices: track nine, Closer to the Borderline in which you put everything you have earned at risk. Or track ten, Through the Long Night, in which you settle down with that perfect somebody, all your baggage neatly packed away, and ready yourself for the rest of your life. This isn’t so crazy a choice. For a long time the nation was under the accepted impression that the divorce rate was about half. Some indications are this was inflated but no one seemed surprised. Where you go, Joel is telling you, is really based on whether or not you live in a Glass House… and if you throw any stones. His preference despite his four marriages is the last track on the album. Bless him for it. 

It’s a brilliant album concept. The theme relates to all of the tracks in different ways. Some complain about a being a shortage of music: the longest song is 4:15 for You May Be Right and All for Leyna. But ten tracks is compact and the album might have suffered with the inclusion of any tracks not deemed worthy to include. As it is, these ten tracks are all ten tracks that should have been hits, and Joel had five hits off a ten track album. Glass Houses was nominated for a Grammy but won the AMA. Then he was nominated for Male Artist for the AMA but won the Grammy. The charts read like something stupid. One in Canada and the US but Two in three other countries. It charted in fourteen countries. It didn’t just go platinum. In the US it went platinum SEVEN TIMES. Five times in Australia and Canada, platinum in New Zealand of all places, and gold in the UK and…Hong Kong.

This was a different age of music. Joel replaced Pink Floyd’s The Wall and was replaced by The Rolling Stones’ Emotional Rescue. I know that everyone grows up and listens to the ‘music’ of the time and thinks ‘this is shit.’ I find it fucking hysterical that people are looking back at Britney Spears’ first two albums and thinking that it’s some kind of fucking golden age. But looking at what is cranked out now, or what is autotoned now, it seems the argument of ‘the old’ not liking the ‘new’ is predicated on music getting worse. We all know art is in the eye of the beholder, but I’m not sure what is made these days is really art unless the artist is truly in charge. Oops…I Did It Again outsold Glass Houses in every market exactly two decades later. In the case of the US, it outsold it by three million albums. But that album has thirteen producers to Glass Houses’ one. It has twenty-one writers, including Spears herself who took one-third credit on only one song… versus Joel writing everything himself.

I remember watching a hysterical bit on Letterman a couple of decades ago when Barry Manilow released a record with a slip of paper that asked people to take ‘the Manilow Challenge. Play this record track for track against any record and see which one has better quality.” In the case of Glass Houses, we can confidently say not everyone at the time liked it. One reviewer said it’s tunes were “catchy,” but then so was the flu. But I have to give credit to Manilow, of whom I am not a fan. He would have lost every challenge had I put any album of his on one turn table with Glass Houses on the other. But then, most records would, regardless of the Beholder… regardless of their sales… regardless of their writers… regardless of their producers… because what Glass Houses has to say about Americans trying to find their way in 1980 is profound. And what Spears has to say… about anything… is not. The best song on her sophomore album is “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Writers: Jagger and Richards. Talk about needing an Emotional Rescue.

And you have to wonder… just a little bit… if Spears is aware of what Satisfaction is all about. Does she know it’s about a guy throttling his cock at the lingerie commercials on TV? And did she choose to cover that song because she is clearly, just by her writing credits, incapable of writing anything remotely close to anything in the same universe as Sometimes a Fantasy? I’d like to think that my fantasy today is a girl who has my heart talking dirty to me over the phone in an effort to get me off. But in reality, my fantasy is that some day, some pop artist will chart something that is remotely akin in quality to Glass Houses. 

FANTASYLAND

When you wish upon a star…

With all my air miles I cashed in plane tickets to Southern California. With relatives spread all over the Left Coast I never paid for a hotel. Kindness lent me personal cars. Love bought me meals most days. A rainy day account allowed me to take my kids to Disneyland, my son to tour the Warner Brothers lot, my daughter to the greatest zoo in the world in San Diego.  All my family, all my wife’s family, all our friends, all treated us like double platinum super stars, and we needed it. When we arrived back in Calgary the reality set in.

Unemployment in Alberta has doubled from 4% to 8%. Receiverships are at an all time high and credit extensions are maxed out. The CBC reports that Severance Packages are running out and with no one hiring, the Prime Minister has extended unemployment insurance for the Province. Local news is reporting that vacancy downtown is higher than 20%, crime is up, and for the first time in five decades, the Provincial population is declining. On top of this is Quebec saying they won’t let Alberta run a pipeline through to the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Americans won’t let another pipeline run through North Dakota, British Columbia won’t let a pipeline run through what is literally (not figuratively) the middle of no-where. Kijiji is packed with free furniture, air tools for under a hundred dollars, and tons of postings for jobs. There is so much for sale the price is now free. Transit tickets are underselling. More houses are foreclosed and the realty market is finally entering a fall…some fear a free fall…and no one knows where the bottom is.

Most people grabbed their campers and headed into the mountains for the summer. I was lucky enough to head to California where we smuggled lunches into theme parks and aboard aircraft carriers to avoid the expensive pre-cooked fare. My cousins and friends are doing well in California and I say good for them. I saw a Lamborghini drive downtown today near the Bow and while other are saying ‘fuck that guy’ I say ‘thank the cosmos it still creates guys like that…and the one thousand well paid blue collar workers in Italy that still have a job.’

Canada might be entering a depression but Alberta is approaching a state of fear. 10% inflation has not been seen in North America (outside of Mexico) since the 1970’s…but we are about to get there. Production and Pipeline companies are now so cheap that small chemical companies in the States are buying them out just to vertically integrate. Some families are illegally camping because they cannot afford rent. Defaults on loans are reaching an all time high, renovation companies have record low orders for the onset of winter…and no one seems to care. Not the Liberal government in Ottawa, not the NDP government in Alberta, certainly not anyone in the States and last on the list of who gives a shit is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In fact, the people who have the most amount of sympathy are the hard working blue and white collar people of Canada. The people you meet on the street every day, who sympathize, for real, who would gladly do anything for you if only you could swallow your pride enough to ask. O Canada! Your people are your greatest pride.

While the world capsizes all around us and I wonder if I’m going to make it another year, another month, another week, on whatever I have left, I have asked the world of my friends and families to save my children from the depression that is the summer of 2016. Take us, please, I said, and show them a good time. And they did. And it was good. And though Hollywood on its best day looks like the worst Canadian Ghetto on its worst day, we went, we saw, we amazed. We rode everything but Mr. Toad. I marveled at the teacups, Dumbo’s revolving circus, the simplicity and beauty of Peter Pan’s Adventure and simple marvelous stories of Pinocchio and Snow White. We shot forward on Space Mountain, traveled back in time on Pirates of the Caribbean, and looked across the Mark Twain to what used to be Tom Sawyer’s Island hoping one day we would return to see an Ewok village.

I am a huge fan of Tomorrowland as I am always interested in what is now the Woody vs. Buzz dialectic, but this trip I was enraptured by Fantasyland. I found myself in the shadow of the Matterhorn finding relief from the heat and on the horses-only carousel with my daughter wishing I was in not another place, but this place, with her, smiling forever. I’ve been here before, even with the kids before, but I’ve never experienced what Walt meant when he wanted to design a place to take away people’s fears and instill them with hope. He was a complicated guy, but Disneyland is a pretty simple place. For our budget, we did it on the cheap, and we will never regret it. Because for a few hours, we lived in Fantasyland. We wanted to get away, and we did. It’s the harsh reality to come back and face another year of unemployment. Another year of dead bottom expenses, another year of going without. I won’t be getting the kids new school clothes and new supplies this year. We simply can’t afford it. This at a time when the Saudis decide they can forfeit a hundred billion just to teach the Americans (and Canadians) a lesson: how dare you sell your own energy in your own market for just as much as us.  

I dream of returning to Fantasyland with my kids whenever I can. It’ll be the first thing I save up for when I am re-employed. I’ll always be thankful for what I know as Fantasyland – the Southern California filled with studios, theme parks, our cousins and friends -  and what they all did when we were so down, so scared, our future so uncertain.

LEAVE THAT SHIT IN THE STATES

“Karmic.”

So in case you haven’t read my last blog that touched on the radioactive topic of why people hate people who work in the oil patch, go ahead and read this asshole’s tweet, which he later deleted, and you’ll see why:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/tom-moffatt-karmic-tweet-fort-mcmurray-fire-suspension-1.3573156

“Karma” as defined by the Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy published in 1989 by Shambala has a lengthy description but can be nailed down to“1. A mental or physical action; 2. The consequence of a mental or physical action; 3. The sum of all consequences of the actions of an individual in this or some previous life; 4. The chain of cause and effect in the world of morality.”

I am sure that most of us are familiar with karma as a term or use it loosely to define as good and bad things that happen to you but like most things in religion or in this case a philosophy of religion there is a HUGE FUCKING ASTERISK on ‘Karma’ that you should all know….especially this jackass. Karma is not some magical bullshit that happens to you because you listened to a snappy John Lennon song. It’s not the accumulation of your deeds and actions so simplified, it is not a convenient way to cosmically get back at that bitch you fucked you over last Saturday night. Karma, as defined above is a created potential that INCLUDES THOUGHTS such as “I’m glad that he totaled his truck after he cut me off. That’s fucking Karma, asshole.”  This thought…even if your deeds are good, WEIGHS AGAINST YOU. This negative morality is just as bad as any physical decision you make such as cutting someone off on the freeway, kicking the dog in the ass or not asking your girlfriend for anal before attempting the Dolphin.

SO NOW WE MOVE ONTO THE ASTERISK, you wonderful people seeking knowledge as well as you assholes you think you can accomplish something by sneering when you see someone pass you on the street in a turban: Karma is also defined as your LIMITATIONS as in the collective physical and metaphysical decisions. Your thoughts outline what you can and cannot do because you formed these tendencies to behave or THINK a certain way. One might read the previous sentence and be confused “Limitations,” so an asshole can’t break out of the cycle of being an asshole? Great!” NO! NO! NO! NO! NO, you asshole! Karma does not let you off the hook by saying because you make negative potential you forever get to be negative. An asterisk to the asterisk is…wait for it…FREE WILL. You have the option of behaving and thinking like Jesus Christ or Charles Manson or to choose an unexciting middle-man, Donald Trump…or you CAN CHOOSE NOT TO.  As the Shambala gloriously explains:

“This freedom of will and possibility of free choice are a reflection in each person of the freedom of the atman, the consciousness within.”

This allows you to, for lack of a better explanation, replace your ‘bad’ karma with ‘good’ karma (though Hindus do not really define Karma in such ways) and in doing so you release the limitations of one for the freedom of the other. SO WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO DO THIS other than to say to yourself “I’m not going to be that asshole who beats his wife or neglects his kids or that whore across the street putting herself through college by stripping.” The Hindu here would huff and say “isn’t being a good person enough of a reward for working on your positive potential?” The Buddhist here would say the destruction of limitations is one of the ways in which you can reach enlightenment. Be a good person…and you can free yourself of karma…forever.

And now that you’ve got that rant from a philosophy major that studied under Dr. Ray Wright of the University of Houston – by far the wisest soul with the greatest potential of Christian Karma I have ever met – now you can see why I am over the board pissed off at a man who looks at 80,000 people fleeing a burning metropolis that was their home through a cauldron of hell around them and says to the world through the non-filter that is Twitter and says:

“THEY DESERVED IT.”

Tom Moffatt, a one time candidate for the New Democratic Party, the closest thing to a Communist Party in Canada other than, well, the Communist Party, lost an election in 2008, 2012 and then a nomination in 2015 in which the Communists, I mean, the NDP, nominated someone else. I can’t believe I’m saying this…but the NDP was right in that decision.

Tom Moffat is just a man. And he is a man with a megaphone that everybody has. This means nothing in the long run but like so many other assholes in this universe he is the only one that we see or hear. Assholes are like icebergs. When you see one, you know there’s more behind them. And behind Moffat is a legion of assholes that actually think that people who work in the oil patch are people who deserve to have their homes destroyed, their belongings burned to ashes and their lives in danger because they labor to create a product that 99.99999% of people on this planet need in order to survive.

When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, 700,000 people fled with whatever they could carry – namely their children – to Houston where they found insufficient shelter, insufficient funds and insufficient government structure to help them for years. I saw people suffering in numbers that would claim a town seven times the size of Fort MacMurray. Against this suffering was a pile of bullshit that included a number of Americans saying: “well, that’s what you get for living in a shithole like New Orleans.” People on TV, not just talking heads, but real people looked at their suffering citizens and said: “That’s what you get for voting Democrat.”  People who live in cities that have crime rates like Chicago and New York, people who live in States that have Earthquakes that leveled cities in recent memory looked at New Orleans and later, Houston during Rita and Ike, and shook their heads at the idiocy of it, proclaiming “well, that’s what you get living on the Gulf Coast.” I won’t go into the contradiction of everyone freaking out when a hurricane flies off and hits New Jersey or New York…let’s stay on topic. This attitude, this metaphysical moral thinking, is very American…and not very Canadian. As an American who lives in Canada, I can tell you that on this one thing I KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.

The very least this asshole should get is fired. He should, at the very least, lose one thing that 80,000 people in Fort Mac have lost: their jobs. Their way to earn a living. Their way to take care of their families. Their route to replacing everything that was destroyed. He sees ‘karma’ because of global warming? He, like many people, misunderstand karma. It is inherent. It is intrinsic. It is collective over lifetimes. To Tom Moffat’s logic, the happiest man in Fort Mac whom everyone in town would describe as a ‘good man’ or a ‘pious Christian’ or place your positive description here, deserves to have his life destroyed because he drives a truck full of clean sand back from restoration plant to the reclamation land to be sculpted over the stripped-mined face of the earth. This figurative man, who makes a living turning the earth back into a beautiful landscape that all Canadians desire and appreciate, is guilty as charged for committing global murder: the paramount crime of contributing to climate change.

I’m not going to go into the climate change argument. Instead, let’s look at Moffat’s Twitter feed. For a guy who wants so badly to be a Canadian public servant, he sure spends a lot of time pushing Bernie Sanders in a doomed bid for the Presidency. This is not about Sanders, but about Moffat. Where does he live? Whom does he serve? Canada? Alberta? Or the States? He should be more concerned with helping the people of Fort Mac in his albeit late position as a public servant than rooting for socialist in a foreign country who would, no doubt, agree that refugees from Fort Mac need our help and sympathy. Where did Moffat learn this detestable victim-blaming bullshit? There’s only one answer…and he should really leave that shit in the States.