Oh, Canada. Oh, Crap.
Euthanasia laws, a government that targets normal people’s bank accounts and gives medals to Nazis, have turned our neighbor to the north into a threat to free people everywhere.
Justin Trudeau’s father was a cuckold.
Neil Young, go home!
When I think of Canada, I think of snow, maple syrup, “O Canada,” and ice skating (specifically that of Elvis Stojko). I think of Wayne Gretzky. I think of my parents’ love of Vancouver as “the most beautiful city in the world,” of the supposedly global metropolis that is Toronto, the culinary delights of Montreal, of the vast emptiness of its northern reaches, and sure, of its sort of goofy little brother status vis-à-vis my home nation, the United States of America. And, from that point of view, that of the superior, alpha citizenry, something else I think about, and that really bugs me, is how Canada could have produced three of the greatest musical geniuses and poets in the history of mankind: Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young. They all ended up down here, they don’t live in the Great White North anymore, do they? So, why do I have to acknowledge that it made them?
Blasphemous as it …
My Willie Nelson Christmas
How the gravel-voiced country outlaw became my Santa Claus
The story of a discount CD that keeps on giving
The Easter Bunny is bogus, by the way
I didn’t grow up in the country, but my family liked to pretend as much around Christmas. We'd build a fire together, drink eggnog together, and decorate our tree together — just the four of us, my parents, my brother, and I. From our home’s vantage in south Los Angeles, upon a hillside once known for grazing and specialty row crops, our living room overlooked an endless basin of suburban pavement and twinkling city lights. Our tree always went in this awkward catty-corner beside the living room windows — where it'd be secured into its stand and given a perimeter skirt of linen snow — and the singular soundtrack to our adorning of its limbs was Christmas with Willie Nelson.
It was a pleasant scene, too pleasant for my liking. I envied my father’s childhood in the outskirts of Milwaukee, where it actually snowed. He found my longing for extreme weather ridiculous. So to deter me, he told stories …
Shoveling Water
Fleeing the faculty room to guide fly-fishing in Montana
Howling wolves, disemboweled sheep
’How could anyone actually live here?’
It is a new day and I’m in the truck headed north. A dusting of snow reveals a fresh pair of moose tracks — a cow and her calf — dotted across the highway’s centerline, disappearing into the borrow pit’s tangle of willows. A roadkill coyote stretches her frozen paws to the sky. My thermos is full of coffee, the heater is cranked, and my shoulders are stiff after the previous day spent rowing, or “shoveling water,” as some colleagues call it — my hands on the oars, pulling them in a constant, rhythmic stroke against the current while the boat drifts its way down the shining conveyor belt of the Missouri River, where I make my living as a full-time fly-fishing guide.
Out my left window, the Rocky Mountain Front rises from the plains into a skyline of jagged sawtooth peaks. I’ll be up there in October, after the fishing season ends, leading clients on horseback hunts in the high country, where the wind gusts …
