Tase-O-Rama!

Now that it’s that time of season again, shouldn’t you be thinking of your family? Shouldn’t you be thinking of your family’s safety? What better way to protect them than the taser of your choice, now available at your local Taser City.

Sick of lineups at The Gap? Hasten things along with some harmless high voltage.

Kids acting up? Tase them! It’s not just for adults anymore. Everyone likes a jolt now and then to keep them on their toes, especially the prepubescent (unless they happen to be on cocaine, but how many kids aren’t strung out on blow these days? At least more than half of them).

Is there a visible minority or person of lower social class cramping your style with their close proximity? Tase that motherfo and be done with it. It’s not like you have to be a cop.

Boss giving you a hard time? The “taser in the parking lot” is still better than the “sawed-off shotgun rampage”, regardless of what HR might think. Always looking for fresh blood, that bunch.

And if all that doesn’t sound enticing then consider this: the true sadist, the hardcore misery inflicting fundamentalist set, they really go for a taser. Firearms have a way of being so final where a good taser is the gift that keeps on giving. You’re down! You’re up! You’re down! It’s a roller coaster ride.

And everybody knows that roller coasters are fun.

Much cleaner than pepper spray as well.

So just get in the spirit already and buy one. Incapacitate the first person you see, swipe their presents and run off, laughing all the way. But do it for your family.

Don’t do it for me.

I Sit In a Pod

I sit in a pod. This is my essential existence, which is to say that if one were to compile a catalogue of photographs taken on the hour, every hour, of me doing whatever it is I’m doing at that juncture (au natural – or as close as one can get to it these days) and proceeded to fashion a crude flip-book from the resulting images, the effect would be that of a stationary subject/object, seated, face illuminated by the other-worldly glow of a computer screen with the odd blurred figure rushing past in the background every ten photos or so to serve as a reminder of the highly managed climate-controlled pseudolife taking place on the perimeter.

Of course, I haven’t actually tried this. Nor have I asked anyone if they would consider taking it on as a sort of personal project, a document of: a) the times, b) my generation, or c) the ever-expanding employment segment foisted on people my age as the only sweat-free and thus, respectable, post-graduate commercial undertaking - one depending on and back-feeding the crippling depression and sloth which drains the ambition to actually do anything other than ponder the vast possibility of some alternative fantasy land: office “work”.

Neither of my grandfathers sat in a pod. They hauled pulp and gravel in trucks whose oil and grease worked its way into the folds of their skin, marking their flesh like arteries on a road map. They built sawmills, houses and communities with the same hands that furrowed the soil. Providing sustenance and guidance without ever once stooping to the so-called man. Rising early, going to bed the same. A life of labour understood beyond mere commodity; drinking clean water from their own wells, and sweating it out in rivulets from under rolled-up shirtsleeves, beading on their brows and the backs of their necks, moistening calloused hands.

Ambition was more than mere ideological rhetoric before the invention of convenience, when “factory farm” seemed a contradiction of terms – long before Ray Kroc got his greasy paws on a milkshake machine. Farmers were more than a cuddly novelty for rock-stars and politicians to rub elbows with when convenient, to remind their consumers and constituents of their marketable working-class roots. The “ambitious” Maritimers of my generation have forsaken the land of their forebears.

The land and those who worked it were the backbone of a rural population, a former majority that has since thinned away to nothing but a tree-laden suburbia, its exposed ribs barely weathering the flurry of our culture’s left-right combinations of greed and complacency. Bruised and bloodied against the ropes, eyes swollen purple-skinned and gaunt, locked in a purgatorial standing eight count.

Sweat is dirty, sweat is evil and we have myriad products designed to stamp it out or cover it up. No one can make a living wage through sweat-inducing jobs anymore since they’ve mostly been replaced by machines, with the notable exceptions being that of prostitute and professional athlete.

So I sit in a pod. And maybe I should suck it up.