if i'm going to a show, i'm going to a show. where the show is doesn't matter - i'm going to the show.

but, if i'm going for drinks, i want to avoid spaces where....what i'm concerned about is being mistaken for cis.

it depends, really. i feel safer in a mixed setting, usually, and i'm not too keen about getting hit on by gay guys, either. so, if i'm going to go dancing, i'd rather go dancing in a place that is mostly straight, so long as it isn't oppressively so - i'd rather be the weirdo, sort of thing. unfortunately, the bars on the strip in windsor are horrible places that are going to exert exaggerated concepts of hetero-normativity, and that i'm not going to want to go into, for that reason. i've never been into most of these places, but i've walked by there frequently, and it's enough to scare me off. i know i'm going to get stuck with some straight guy all over me when all i actually want to do is dance...

so, i'd feel safer in a queer bar.

but, there doesn't appear to actually be the option. it's a show at phog, or bust.

i did a quick google search and it doesn't appear that there are any gay bars in windsor, although a few have recently closed. and, i found some articles documenting something similar happening in hamilton.

i'm not going to research this, so this is a deduction and, like all deductions, should be contradicted via evidence, should any arise.

but, it's easy enough to figure this out: gay men, especially, are largely looking for sex, and they're going to get what they're looking for quicker and faster in an online personal site than in a bar. so, you'd expect a decline in explicitly queer hangout spaces to follow as a corollary to the rise of internet personals, given that everybody knows that the actual purpose of them was always explicitly sexual.

i can always check out phog mid-week.

but, the cursive show is looking more likely.

and, i don't even know where the gay bars even are in windsor.

the early forecast is that it's going to be beautiful next week, but with the uncertainty of the track...

...and there's nothing happening, as far as i can see.

i'm not just going to go out for beers, if there's no bands. that's boring. so, this whole exercise might collapse in on itself, in the end.

i haven't really started on the legal stuff, yet. i've been sleepy. that's ok, i have time.

it's looking to me like the storm is going to track about 100 km north of here, but, as it's been all year, it's almost impossible to be certain about it.

i'm itchy. i want to get out of here tonight if i can. so, i'm going to get ready for it, and if i have to reverse that choice around 18:00 or so, so be it..

trump wasn't exactly an anti-war candidate.

but, if obama was the alter-war candidate, and clinton was the ultra-war candidate, trump was the less-war candidate.

i know that certain media outlets wanted to push a narrative of trump being unhinged, and even being in cahoots with russia. this was all very silly, and is all very easily deconstructed, but the concern was always that he'd kind of lose interest in foreign policy and let the party take control. that's how bolton got there in the first place.

what trump actually ran on, what was a central part of his populist rhetoric, was an invocation of the "glorious isolation" pushed by conservatives in the early part of the last century.

i think there's a role to play for international institutions; i'm not opposed to global governance. but, i'll take isolationism over the perverted trostkyism of the neo-conservative clique, which is just a demented front for the war lobby.

john bolton was probably the single most dangerous person in washington. i'm not naive enough to expect his removal to be enough to spin trump back towards his campaign promises on a quasi-isolationist foreign policy, but it's just about the most positive thing you could possibly hope for from this administration. this is good news.

the press is predictably lionizing bolton for preventing trump from making "mistakes" in north korea, syria and iran....

i've been clear on this point: i think he had an electoral mandate to withdraw, and he's broken it. bolton has essentially operated as a representative for the deep state, trying to keep the president in line. while it's not clear that his replacement will be better, i can't imagine it being much worse.

john bolton is not an american hero, and doesn't deserve your respect or admiration. john bolton is a war criminal, and he deserves to spend the rest of his life in a jail cell.

who's next, though?

koo koo ka fucking chew.

and, good riddance.

he was never as openly irreligious as my mother often was.

but, neither of them had any meaningful beliefs, and neither of them made any attempt to steer me towards anything, either way. they were hands off, in that respect.

in fact, for the last years of his life, about 2007-2011, not including his battle with cancer, my father spent sunday mornings with me on a breakfast date. i would often end up cancelling due to hangovers, or something else. but, the general ritual was that he'd pick me up at 9:00 or 10:00, and we'd go get eggs at one of a handful of diners up on wellington. and, we'd catch up on what happened that week...

it was quite important to him.

what i didn't realize until a while into it was that he dropped my stepmother off at church on the way to picking me up, and picked her up on the way home. so, it was partly a "get out of church" card.

as always, they asked bernie a lot of stupid questions, and he just had to spend the time doing damage control.

he was fully bilingual, but he didn't read much, in either language.

even late into life, this was probably his favourite piece of literature:

in fact, the effects of maurice richard on quebecois identity are quite substantial.

he was a quasi-religious figure that was seen by many as a messiah that would save them from anglo hegemony.

much has been written on this topic.

so, that wasn't merely a glib comment; there was some truth to the idea that the rocket was bigger than jesus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Riot

i did not participate in the seconds or third sacraments at my catholic elementary school.

and, again: my mother's parents were anglican, but she never went to church out of her own will. she may have identified vaguely as a deist, but i would actually categorize her as more of a laveyan satanist.

my father appears to have had a complex ethnic background that included jewish, italian, french canadian, native american and potentially african-american ancestry, but he was baptized as an infant and raised a roman catholic. his father looked pretty jewish, but had a pure laine quebecois mother, and identified as a francophone roman catholic, as well. i never saw him go to church of his own free will, either; he was vaguely deist, but i think the truth is that he just didn't think about it much. what did religion have to do with the habs winning the cup, anyways? he believed more in maurice richard than he did in jesus; his real religion was hockey.

i was not baptized as an infant. i actually remember my baptism, at the age of four. at the time, the public school system started at grade one, and the catholic school system had two years of kindergarten. so, i was baptized into the catholic church by my satanist mother as a cynical ploy to get me to go to school. and, don't be too kind about her motives: she was a brutal alcoholic and was trying to find something to do with me.

by the time i was about nine or ten, i'd decided that religion was ridiculous, and i never wavered on the point.

so, i'm not religiously or culturally jewish - my dad would have identified as italian or french. and, i'm not roman catholic in any meaningful sense, either.

send the right-libertarians and anarcho-capitalists back to the nihilist right; i won't organize with them.

a holistic, coherent, environmentalist politics needs to understand the dangers posed by second-hand smoke exposure, and stand up for the people trying to minimize their exposure to it, by fighting for bans on residential smoking.

stop.

you stand with the natives when they fight for clean water, but you won't stand with your own people when they fight for smoke-free housing?

you're a hypocrite.