“WILDFIRE SMOKE ADVISORY ISSUED FOR
KAMLOOPS & SURROUNDING AREAS
Aug 19, 2010 – Kamloops. The Ministry of Environment has issued a Smoke Advisory for Kamloops and surrounding areas because of forest fire smoke that is affecting the area. Smoke concentrations will vary widely as winds, fire behaviour and temperatures change. This situation is expected to persist for at least the next 24 hours.
Between 8:00 and 9:00am this morning smoke levels rose rapidly in Kamloops. The Ministry of Forest is not aware of any new fires close to Kamloops: the smoke now in the Kamloops area is probably from fires burning in the Cariboo.
Avoid outdoor activities.
Fire activity is on-going, creating the potential for smoky conditions. Forecast is for a change of weather on Thursday which may improve air quality.”

Breathing is optional.

This is our day……… businesses are closing all over the place and the few mask donning pedestrians that are about make it appear like either Has Mat or Michael Jackson fans have invaded the downtown core. Visibility is at about a block right now and we all reek of that sour burnt wood smell.

Fuck.

I know we’ve been here before, but never in my recollection has the smoke been this bad. You shouldn’t be able to actually chew the air, should you? Not much to do but sit back and watch BC burn….

There’s that saying “It’s all smoke and mirrors.” I just didn’t realize they meant in my fucking living room. It’s center of the sun hot here right now but I can’t remember when I last saw blue sky.

This picture isn’t really all that impressive unless you know that there is actually a mountain back there. Several in fact, and not all that far away. It’s as though I suddenly live in the prairies without having any memory of packing and moving and leaving the mountains behind. It’s kinda like my glasses are dirty but no amount of cleaning removes the film that I am looking through.

This shot- also not particularly impressive- shows a blurry hill. On a normal day you can pick out individual trees. You can see the trail of dust left behind an ATV as it roars upward. Not so much these days. The interior is a shroud of smoke and the constant buzz of water bombers. 2 firefighters just died the other day when their bomber crashed and then the wreckage started yet another fire. I’ve lost track of how many are burning in my beloved BC interior. It reminds me of those uber foggy mornings in Vancouver where everything just disappears into the mist. Instead of that wonderfully sharp and briny sea smell, my house is a campfire, only missing the whole Kumbaya and marshmallow roasting part of it.

Fuck. I’d kill for a bit of wind right now.

I just finished eating a salad for second breakfast that was so fucking boring it should have killed itself. Or been a guest on The View.

I am about to start this stupid “cleanse” which essentially means a liquid diet. Given how much I LOVE food, would marry food, would have a skanky one night stand with food, this might be difficult. However, beer and wine are liquids and I have always had difficulty following a recipe, or rules for that matter, so we’ll see.

Steve- we’re walking to Dairy Queen for dinner and I’m having a double fucking flamethrower. And fries.

It all starts with the innocent statement

“Unidentified white powder.”

Suddenly, the calm quiet school that you run is roped off with yellow tape and there are 2 police cars, a fire truck and the Haz Mat truck and full trailer outside. Needless to say, interest was piqued by the passerby’s. By the end of the day I swear to dog that if I would have heard “What’s going on?” one more fucking time I would have stabbed someone in the eye with a pair of dull scissors.

So, when all was said and done, the “unidentified white powder” turned out to be plant fertilizer, but not before we caused quite a stir in my little desert town.

From one of my students came “Someone dumped laundry soap all over the inside of my car”

“Does your car smell like laundry soap?”

“Hmm. No. It doesn’t. But the whole inside is covered in blue & white powder”

This turned into a phone call from one of my instructors to the police. “What should we do? We’re not sure what it is.”

Enter Haz Mat and all other accompanying vehicles. Fuck.

I spent the day rounding up students for police interviews which entailed “If this is a joke gone bad, tell me now because if I find out that it’s laundry soap done as a stupid prank I’ll be back and I’ll grill you and I’ll polygraph you all.”

No one put up their hand.

By 2 pm they had the car sealed up with crime tape after Haz Mat determined that they’re not going in until testing is done, and they haul it to the environment Canada yard.

Again, turned out to be random act of vandalism with plant fertilizer, but holy shit did it fuck over my day. I would seriously like to kick the shit out of the asshole that’s walking around with a fucking bucket full of miracle grow.

Apparently this is how you cause a stir.

So I was scanning the paper this morning and stumbled upon this little gem…..

“Britain sets limit of 225 nuclear warheads”

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but couldn’t you nuke the ENTIRE FUCKING PLANET with about half a dozen? Of course if that number seems ludicrous, let’s just remember that the US has something like 5000 of the suckers.

No……. I wouldn’t call that overkill at all.

In other news, the very next page and therefore almost as important, is a substantially longer story detailing the new music label that Ellen Degeneres is starting.

Some days I genuinely feel like I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole.

Great rivers of oil are gushing into the water at an astonishing rate and BP still can’t stop the flow. They have fucked up royally and we all know it. They know we know it. They hold press conference after press conference about their greatest new idea to save the day and the tone isn’t one of shame or horror, it’s more like “Rally the troops! Let’s figure it out gang!” It’s almost as though he hopes to have us all get behind their valiant effort while attempting to administer a verbal lobotomy on us with his soothing “There’s no I in team, folks!” bullshit.

What I find interesting about this whole shit show is how people are reacting to it. Yes, everyone cried foul after Exxon when down and emptied it’s belly in the water, but then it was over and the clean up began and it slowly drifted off of the front page. Eventually people forgot. Ok, maybe not David Suzuki, but it did lose it’s shock & horror value once we stopped seeing the dead oil covered animals on the news every night. Let’s face it people, we forget. Not everyone obviously, but “Middle America” has a history of forgetting rather quickly. (I do mean us Canadians as well but “Middle Canada”  doesn’t have the same ring- makes us sound like a weird tribe of hobbits from a Tolkien novel- and we all know that can’t be true since hobbits don’t live in igloos.)

So- yes, we forget. However…. I think this one might be different. As the BP spill is lacking the normal “Spill, cry, clean up, and move on” formula, we stand far less of a chance of forgetting. It’s still fucking gushing and growing and killing and destroying.

And it might take months to stop it.

We’ll be watching this for months- watching the oil take over the water- and watching BP try to blame others even though something as stupid as a $500,000.00 acoustic switch which they said was “too expensive” to install could have prevented this, and even though just last year BP lobbied hard against tighter safety regulations for the industry. (Roy has an excellent post over at Matt’s all about this greed fuckery)

Will a man made disaster of this magnitude be enough to force politicians out of bed with the oil the companies and make it easier for them to side with the environment rather than the stack of dollar bills? As we watch oil pour into the sea month after month while BP fumbles around, will it enrage us enough to really give a shit and demand change? And I mean demand it until it happens, not just demand it until it’s time to go pick the kids up from school or time to go back to work and “here- can you hold this rally sign for me, I gotta drive to starbucks for a latte.” Because make no mistake kiddies- politicians loooove waiting us out because we stamp and scream and holler until it’s time to go on that golf trip or weekend drive up to the wine country. “I know there’s a boycott, but this shit was already planned!”

We always cave and they know it.

Maybe BP fucked up so big and so bad that we won’t cave this time. Maybe we’ll just keep stamping and screaming and hollering until they cave.

So I swing by London Drugs this morning and as I’m standing in line with my holy shit I can’t wait to eat you Hardbite Himalayan salt chips, I can’t help but notice the guy at the checkout ahead of me. It wasn’t the flashy black suit jacket paired with the faded black jeans or the shiny black loafers made out of buttery soft looking leather. No, it was none of those things. It was the $487.00 worth of Claritin that he was buying. A stack of little blue boxes piled up so high that oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling, least we all fall ill with altitude sickness.

He wasn’t standing there twitching or picking at gaping sores on his face or the imaginary bugs crawling up his arms, but he may as well have been. His unassuming well dressed self was still betrayed by the giant fucking wall of Claritin boxes between him and the checkout lady, so really, even having METH LABS INC. tattooed across his forehead couldn’t have made it any more obvious than it already was.

My deadpan “Real bad allergies, huh?” was followed by him staring at me like you would a basket of kittens. I mean, if the kittens had been put through a sausage grinder then fried up on a George Foreman grill and served with a little lye sauce for dipping.

I guess it’s not totally surprising that no one else seemed to notice or care being that we were in London Drugs at 9:45am therefore me & Mr. McMeth were probably the only ones in the store that didn’t watch the moon landing live on the telly box. I’m sure that more than one of those motorized scooter driving, polyester slack wearing centurions were thinking;

“Oh dear, look at that poor boy.  Sure is a sickly little fellow.”

I’d even bet that a few of them are at home right now wishing they knew where he lived so they could bring him over a nice bowl of borscht. How the fuck he’d eat it in a full face mask though I have no idea.

I normally only see my doctor  once a year when he has a bunch of lubed up fingers jammed inside me but after a brief visit this morning due to the KNIFESTABBINGHOLYFUCKKILLME pain, I apparently have sacrumilliosis or illadus or chittychiitybangbang, whatever the hell he said. This essentially means that my right side sacrum & ilium are having a giant fucking pissing match. That normally sexy spot where the dimples sit right above your ass…. yeah, right there. Oh, and because that isn’t nearly exciting enough, let’s throw in 2 inflamed disks. Why not? Canes are a fucking fashion statement, right? RIGHT!!??

It’s not like we were covered in grape jelly and playing giddy up in a fucking sex swing yesterday. I don’t even like grape jelly.

So I’m sitting at home buzzing on T3’s and drinking wine. Did I mention that it’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon and that I’m sitting at home buzzing on T3’s and drinking wine?

Because apparently I stepped on an ant or karmicly fucked someone over in another life, I now have a weird stiff limp, a cane, and a permanent wince on my face. Yeah, I’m pretty hot right now. Throw in a little drool and I’m a fucking super model.Try to stop licking your screen ok? It’s super creepy.