Anchor Struck

With profuse Canadian (and they’re the best) apologies, I return to the digital world after a six month, event-filled absence. Not that it hasn’t been tumultuous for all of us. The Ukraine war rages on, as do U.S. school shootings. Political ads in America are surpassing record hype and hysteria. Gas in British Columbia is $2 per litre (@$8 per gallon). And climate change didn’t even register a mention as a concern in a recent poll south of the 49th.

The political climate in the U.S. is so toxic right now that I asked Jude if we could switch the news over to a Smooth 70’s music channel. Right now Pink Floyd is telling me not to bother them about that goody good bullshit because they think they need a Lear jet. They might have been speaking sarcastically. It was always hard to tell with those guys.

Point being, money talks. The nonpartisan research company Ad Impact estimates nearly $10 Billion will be spent on the mid-term elections. Mercy, mercy me, Marvin Gaye is now lamenting, as he hands the mike to Carly Simon to remind us that’s the way she’s always heard it should be.

Must it, Carly? The Repubs are hammering the Dems on law enforcement, glossing over the supreme irony that they’re anti-crime yet somehow anti-gun control. The conventional wisdom is that the GOP will win back the House and maybe the Senate. If so, expect a slew of petty investigations in Congress. Trumpism will get a reset even if Trump isn’t central to it. I believe at least one of his legal entanglements will doom him, most likely the Mar-a-Lago miasma, but I have consistently underestimated him.

This summer Jude and I drove to northern California to visit her son and meet our three-year-old granddaughter. On our way we spent a night in Washington to see old friends. The small town on the coast we stopped at was holding a bikers’ convention of sorts. There were more hogs and tattoos there except for the Sturges rally. And ample Trump flags.

Plus, the small town near her son’s home where we stayed had more churches than I’ve seen in 17 years in Canada. One of them, in a strip mall we passed every day, had a big sign in Rubenesque rainbow letters that said “Joyful Healing”, with “the church of” in much smaller black letters at the top. It took me several days to realize that it wasn’t a massage parlor.

On the way home, we managed to catch the rush hours in Portland and Seattle, so it took me weeks to unknot from all that after we rolled into home. I garnered two memorable insights from the trip: that I am much more rural than urban, and that I am much more Canadian than American.

The first was no surprise. Buying a farm sorta made me suspicious. The second did surprise me. I still have deep roots in the U.S. All our family and old friends are still there. But to immerse ourselves in U.S. culture, even on the Left Coast, for ten days was a bit of a shocker. Granted, Jude and I live in a progressive bubble on Quadra, but just about everyone we meet up here is friendly. And we have two fundamentalist churches on island.

It’s great to get back in touch. Let me close with some classic Canadian advice: If you ever get annoyed, look at me I’m self-employed. I love to work at nothing all day.