5 Comments
User's avatar
db's avatar

Norman Fucking Rockwell is like the most beautiful album I've ever heard. Guaranteed bitch-baby tears when that SOB comes out after a few. Can't lie. Can only own it.

Expand full comment
Prairie Librarian's avatar

Thank you, Karen Geier, for giving voice to my exhausted, inarticulate, cuss-laden sentiments about our home and native (LOLsob) land. Where I live, we had an offshoot of the big convoy rolling around on Saturday in protest of carbon taxes, horns a-blaring, unignorable. I am so profoundly tired of being surrounded by neoliberals and racists and oil-idolaters, tired of them electing their ilk in landslides, tired of seeing their shitty anti-vaxx/racist/both signs on streets and farmland and inside hospitals and clinics, tired of their bloviating self-aggrandizing proudly-ignorant unmasked verbiage in the news and in waiting rooms and in line for a coffee when I risk venturing inside a cafe in between covid waves. Most of the time I try to keep my head down and focus on helping my community as much as I can. But I can't ignore it indefinitely -- the bastards won't LET me ignore them -- and essays like yours give me strength for when I have to endure them, or, uuuugh, interact with them, or cast my vote for the lesser of several evils and still know I'm pretty much throwing it away amidst a sea of votes for whatever right-wing/neolib has achieved ascendency in my riding.

Is it just too predictably Canadian that I feel I must apologize for my rant? Sorry. I'm just so tired. Thank you Karen, and thank you Luke for this newsletter, as always.

Expand full comment
HW Edwards's avatar

i don't have many regrets, but "got caught selling $10 bottles of popov to rich kids at my boarding school for $100 and missed going to prom with lizzie grant" is pretty high up there.

Expand full comment
Luke O'Neil's avatar

Lol what? Say more

Expand full comment
HW Edwards's avatar

buy a bottle or 3 of popov for a cool $9.99, split each bottle into 5 poland spring bottles that would sell for $20, and suddenly the blue-collar hockey scholarship kid at the prestigious kent school is very popular, with a lot of disposable income that could be used to procure more expensive narcotics, and thus hanging out with the cool kids, including one lizzy grant, who i drunkenly asked to prom with the killer line "hey, if you don't have a date for prom, i'd love to go with you" -- and then got kicked out the week before prom

Expand full comment