Swimming in Dystopia Pt.2

Nov 17th, 2021

“Just grab the one you want off the shelf. No problem.”

The manager at PetSmart is a slim, friendly Asian man. This is my second trip in two weeks. I’ve become familiar with the staff here through a series of online order mistakes. The place smells like cat food and I’m eager to leave. I snatch my missing fish tank accessory from the shelf and turn back to the manager.

“You’re ok if I just take it?” I ask.

“Yup. I’ll take care of it” he replies with what I presume is a smile. I can’t really tell with the PetSmart branded mask covering half his face.

We’re in the process of buying my daughter a pet fish for Christmas. We successfully talked her down from a puppy.

My car glides out of the parking lot and sunlight fills the interior. This is the first glimpse of direct sun we’ve had in weeks. In the days prior a record amount of rain showered down over the lower half of our province. BC’s Fraser Valley has flooded and we are now cut off from the rest of the world. Highways are blocked in every direction, farms are underwater; our rural communities have been decimated.

A snug, unsettling blanket of isolation.

I pull into the parking lot at Burger King. Whopper Wednesday: the only time I allow myself to eat fast food with a clear conscience.

The front counter is surrounded by construction workers and students. Everybody’s here to fill their bellies with “flame broiled” hamburgers. Burger King’s signature flavor is a specific mixture of low quality beef and chemicals that tell your brain these burgers were cooked over an open fire. We know they aren’t, but the sentiment is nice.

I approach the flustered cashier and place my order. Whopper with cheese. Large coke. Poutine instead of fries.

Yes, this is Canada and Burger King serves poutine here. But instead of delicious beef gravy poured over melted cheese and crispy french fries, Burger King gives us soggy fries topped with dry cheese curds and drenched in a strange tasting diarrhea brown water.

High grade garbage.

Ding!

A new message in my Facebook Messenger  app. The older I get, the more disdain I have for these digital alarms that sound off in my pocket at random times. Constant communication, advertisers, distractions; filthy pigs jumping over each other to grab your attention.

Low grade garbage.

I unlock my phone and see it’s a response from my sister in law. I sent a message earlier to check on them. They’re renting a farm that’s located at the edge of the flood.

My youngest half brother is a rock star- literally. His wife is an actor; a very familiar face from a very beloved TV series. I wouldn’t know how famous either of them are. I’m too old and cynical to follow pop culture.

They’re ok. The basement is flooded, but everything is fine otherwise. Rock star privilege. She sends a few pictures of the mayhem. Light jokes back and forth. We’ll have dinner soon. Let’s do my place. Less water. More strained laughter.

I sit at a dirty table and unwrap my whopper. The first bite always takes me back to my teenage years as an aspiring graffiti artist living on junior whoppers and poutine; scribbling my name on walls, dodging police, breath smelling like flame broiled chemical goodness; vague memories of freedom.

John Horgan holds a press conference on the flat screen TV overhead. He’s British Columbia’s premier- Canada’s version of a governor. His eyes are heavy and his face is covered in a scraggly, thin gray beard. He’s been dragged away from cancer treatment to address the public. The province is submerged and our leader is dying.

When it was announced that Premier Horgan had cancer, the news was met with thunderous silence. Nobody wished the social democrat any ill will, but nobody wished him well either. After eighteen months of authoritarian measures put forth under the guise of “flattening the curve”, British Columbians were tired of his lefty bullshit. They had introduced a vaccine passport that most of our province were vehemently against. We were divided on the subject of the Covid-19 vaccines, but we knew what a passport symbolized. We knew it would only get worse from here.

No bad words, no vocalized sympathy. Crickets. It’s the metropolitan Canadian way. Conflicted liberals, reluctant compliance, passive aggressive cowardice.

I voted for the man- twice. Even as I aged and became more conservative, I still believed that our socialist party, the NDP, were the right group of weasels to hold power over the other rodents in our legislative assembly. BC is a unique place; where billions of foreign Chinese dollars are laundered through our housing market and casinos on a yearly basis. It wouldn’t hurt to grab some of that cash and distribute it to the people.

Horgan now finds himself in a bit of a pickle- one outside of the cancer cells destroying his body. To the west he has a coastline littered with freighters unable to dock at the Port of Vancouver. Each freighter is packed with containers carrying valuable electronics, food and consumer goods. The official government line is that there are so many consumer goods shipping to Canada they can’t unload them all in a timely fashion; an abundance of cheap Chinese products clogging up the arteries of the Pacific Coast; massive whoppers bringing the country to cardiac arrest. The unofficial story whispered amongst blue collar workers is one we’ve all come to know quite well: the supply chain has broken down due to a shortage of workers brought on by the vaccine mandates. There aren’t enough people to work the docks, unload the boats and drive the trucks. The expendables have proven to be not so expendable after all.

You can almost hear the collective outrage of housewives who’ve spent over three months waiting for a dishwasher that’s currently anchored on the open ocean.

To the east entire towns and farms are buried underwater. The highways are now canals and trucks can’t get through. Grocery store shelves are quickly emptying and the farmers who supply our province with food are stowed away in flooded barns watching their livestock slowly drown or starve to death. To make matters worse, the NDP shut down plans for a number of pipelines and a refinery that would’ve vastly increased an oil supply which never seems to meet the demand. Canada is the fourth largest oil producing country on the planet, but our self-flagellating federal government is determined to kill our most profitable industry and force us into a new carbon-free world without any plan as to how that’s supposed to work. Turn off the taps, hope for the best. Pretend nothing happened. None of this makes any logical sense, and now the few pipelines we have between fuel starved BC and oil rich Alberta have been closed due to the flooding, so we’re suffering from a gasoline shortage. Horgan is restricting non-emergency vehicles to just thirty liters of gas per fill up- that’s seven gallons if you speak American.

Leftist utopianism meets reality. The political chickens have come home to roost.

I dump my tray in the trash and look back to the screen at the fading leader; stumbling over words, lost in a cancerous ideological haze. It’s hard to feel anything for a man that oversaw the dismissal of thousands of doctors, nurses and first responders- all a reaction to their expressing concern for a controversial and potentially dangerous gene therapy they were mandated to take. Perhaps it was a federal directive handed down from Justin Trudeau with orders to toe an authoritarian line, but goddammit, have a fucking backbone. Stand up for your people.

My brain swells with endorphins, telling me I made another great decision on this Whopper Wednesday. My stomach grumbles in disagreement. The longer I stare at the screen, the more anger rises inside of me. The whopper induced molecules quickly spring into action and suppress my malcontent.

The glossy eyes of a dying man staring out at a tragic world. Collective apathy staring back at him.

Good luck, John.