Explosions

Ottawa book launch announcement -- this Tuesday night!

I feel like I’m about to explode.

And maybe it’s because of non-stop stories of pockets exploding or kitchen counters, grocery checkouts, children who reached for the pager not knowing it was a bomb. Who was the man who pressed the button? What did he hope would happen when he detonated thousands of bombs across Lebanon?

My explosion will be triggered by a hundred wo/men making a thousand terrible decisions that lead us all down the path of destruction. A slow, Western destruction that we don’t really notice until we show up in an ER parking lot having a heart attack, only to find out that it’s closed. The nurses can’t help because they say they’ll be fired if they do. The python of the state coiling slowly around our necks, squeezing out our right to free speech and free expression, while way too many mainstream journalists tell us that pythons aren’t lethal (they won’t bite).

The idiocy. The foolishness. The hubris. The act of holding a gun to the head of something we’re all bound to defend and protect while acting out the part of some kind of progressive saviour. The hypocrisy. Sparks licking a luckily stuborn fuse.

But the fuse can only take so much before it ignites. To feel the reach that Zionism has in Canadian instutions of all kind and to know that that feeling of being iced out, from everywhere, all goes back to that foolish thirst for justice that we discover too many people act out rather than feel.

One of the ways I deal with all of this is that I write. But I’ve had no time! None! I’m too busy cleaning to be able to write. Cleaning and massaging and fixing and talking (so much talking). No wonder I feel like this.

It’s in the background though where the spark is perhaps the strongest. When I think of the fact that my fourth book has been out for five weeks and I have done no mainstream media interviews for it, I feel like something inside me is dying. None. Despite the topic being the biggest issue facing Canada right now, no one has agreed to write about my book or talk to me about it. No one. I’ve never been this shut out before. Iced out. Concrete wall.

Edit: I can’t even get listed in a list of 54 nonfiction books out for the Fall from CBC books! You’d think I murdered or adultered or punched someone.

Luckily, we are building alternatives and those alternatives will soon be all we have. I had a great chat with Jeremy Appel about The Social Safety Net which you can listen to here:

The Rise and Fall of Canada's Social Safety Net

Thanks to Jeremy for giving me the time. I appreciate it but I especially appreciate it given everything.

And, if you’re in Ottawa this Tuesday, come out to the Haven café where I will talk about this book in public! I promise, I won’t be a downer. You’ll have a good time and who knows, maybe meet the love of your life. These things still happen.

Information for the event can be found here: https://octopusbooks.ca/events/42298