She acts just like a nurse
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She acts just like a nurse
This newsletter will be short because my only COVID symptoms appear to be a thickness of thought, and I’m really sweaty, and I’ve mysteriously gained a bunch of weight. Also any inadequacies as a lover are totally COVID. Laziness? COVID. All of my flaws are COVID, I promise.
This will be a short newsletter today. The whole house has COVID! The walls and ducts and transoms and topiary and whatever else is in here has a thin film of the Rona. The eldest child hit cherries on a rapid test, normally a machine I would believe as far as the toddler herself as she speaks of tiny people living in her ear, but the fever and sickness in her and her mother don’t lie. It’s jarring to actually have The Thing, and even more jarring to read UCP guidance on how to deal with The Thing and actually need it. You open the approved tome, hands trembling, and flip through it’s impressive mass to read…nothing. Blank pages. Stay home, don’t call us. Someone else is to blame. If you’re essential to the GDP you’ll get a talking to from your boss.
Talking and dreading is one thing but you never quite anticipate your three year-old apologizing for being sick as she isolates in the master bedroom because she doesn’t want to get the baby and the obese, asthmatic, whiny-when-ill daddy sick. I think people talk about these small heartbreaks among themselves, like a mother of a new infant being unable to hold their baby for fear of infecting them and in so doing setting an early record for their separation since conception. I think these stories percolate as much as the larger heartbreaks we hear about more often, like being unable to visit a dying parent as they’re ventilated and belly-flipped, only a rushed phone call from a nurse on the edge to even let you know they died alone. You could spend a week trawling for these stories and never eat your fill.
Doesn’t matter though. Mental health is this close to becoming a conservative dogwhistle for “get out there and risk your life, champ, blow off some steam and get back work”. Every provincial government has thrown their hands up, probably a combination of being overmatched, under-resourced, and physically besieged when they try to put a lid on things. Fuck em’ if they can’t take a jab. Let them work til’ they drop. I tried. A portion of the civil service must slap papers off their desk every week thinking along those lines, those that aren’t just cavalry for capital.
I keep imagining myself wandering up to an emergency room, another toothpick packed ass-to-elbow with all the other citizens looking to tap a service we probably assumed was permanent as mountains. I’ll sit in the plastic chair at triage, choke out a few words at the person on the other side. Will they have dark circles and bags under their eyes? I’ll slap my health care card against the window when my asthmatic lungs sputter like a dying Pinto. I imagine the bracelet printer is out of tape by now and they just mark my hand with a C (for Clinton, and COVID, and collapse) as they send me…where? Is there a tent ward in the parking lot? Do these professionals in their gallows coping nickname rows of field ICU beds? Fucked, Double Fucked, Don’t Bother, VIP, To Morgue. Oh well. The government says this is a mild strain, right? I’m a dad, I know a thing or two about mids and, brother, I think everything is going to be just fine.
🔫This is a personal vendetta but the guy who gutted the Marquee Room and the Uptown Theatre in downtown Calgary, and has left it fallow for the better part of two decades, was charged with domestic assault and I just hope his wife takes every penny he’s ever earned from him in a divorce.
📡Seems like the Cargill plant took all those demands and suggestions to improve COVID safety for workers to heart.
🧲UCP government says, again, fuck them kids.
🛡A juror who cried at an inopportune moment might vacate the conviction of some guys who stalked a lady using Calgary Police Service resources, saying the tears were “indicative of something”. You can’t make this shit up.
🪒Going after the booze works every time. Booze tax on the South? Jefferson becomes president. Prohibition? Massive wealth transfers through bootlegging. Cut grog rations? Ship mutinies. High age of majority for booze purchasing? Society that equates teen booze acquisition with virility and coolness. Can’t get booze or weed without a vaccination? Vaccinations get booked.
🧸Fake horrible CEO congratulates real horrible CEO on becoming CEO.
🗑Local queen will spend final days on Earth abandoning her son. Sounds like Dragonlance or something but it’s real!
📍Nobody in the federal government does fucking anything ever.
🍥Who knew doing nothing could have such results!
🍌I can’t wait for the Quebec health tax on fat people like me.
🌭Everyone knows Canadians make too much money.
📉Alberta Advantage took a look at a great faculty strike going on at Concordia Edmonton and the half-measures bullshit of Roy Romanow!
🎧New Harbinger Media podcast! Debrief!
🔇New Harbinger Media podcast! Pullback!
🎚️New Harbinger Media podcast! North Untapped!
☢️You’ll see this a few days out but the Forest Lawn Youth Centre in Calgary probably still needs support after a burst pipe in the building.
🦀Congrats to everyone who stopped the evictions at CRAB Park.
A Quick Note: if you want us to include an article, petition, link to an event, or just want to drop us a quick line, reply to this newsletter or reach us at albertaadvantagenewsletter [at] gmail [dot] com. We’d love to hear from you! If you want to send some old timey mail, grab those stamps and send tributes/cake/not anthrax to Alberta Advantage Podcast, PO Box 52167 Edmonton Trail, Calgary, AB, T2E 8K9.
Our editor is Clinton Hallahan. Newsletter subject lines are stolen from these songs.
