FOOD IN TRANSIT
by Alex McIntosh

Plastic Pies

The lack of garbage cans in the cities of Japan is likely linked to the fact that no one eats on the street. Frowned upon, say the guidebooks. Food is consumed sur place even if it means hurriedly swallowing a proffered sample at a food hall, or chugging a drink by the vending machine. There is no roaming about with coffee cup in hand. Tourists thus find themselves carrying small accumulations of refuse in search of an appropriate receptacle, and think twice about the barbaric act of eating a clementine in a public park.

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Recently back from the future, Alex McIntosh considers the lobster delectable.

DISPATCHES FROM THE OTHER SIDE
by Aaron Kreuter

Editors’ Note:
Local hikers found the following typewritten pages in an enormous crater next to what appears to be an ostrich cemetery. We have never heard of the author, nor do any of the events he refers to correlate to reality. Nonetheless, we have put together three excerpts from the vast amount of text extant, to showcase the workings of what must have been a very unique mind.

-eds, North American Anthropology Quarterly

strange times

September 2nd, 2008

Fellow Americans,

The news out of Washington this week is bleak. I just got off the phone with my good friend Bill Hackensack who has been working thirty-six hours straight, balls to nuts, trying to get to the bottom of this vice-presidential shitbomb. Bill says he has a credible source in Flatback, Montana who has old B grade porno featuring the Alaskan governor herself. According to Hackensack it was an all out fuckfest complete with eighties soundtrack – the governess and four, five men, poolside, stilettos and (this will at least keep her evangelical friends happy) no contraceptives.

I knew from the moment she was brought onstage something was amiss. The tight teacher bun, the glasses, the pouty lips. It all makes sense now. And McCain weasel smiling away, bloated from the condensed fat of young school children.

In saner times this would spell the end for the Republican push for the white house, and the framed picture of Obama I keep on my mantelpiece next to my hunting rifles would have paid off, but the country appears to be one gas pump away from a pure clusterfuck, these apes in suits itching to send us back into the early mediaeval period, where any sign of straying from the status quo was met with a terminal visit to the rack and insubordination was treated with boiling oil.

I am ready to flee at any moment. I have a suitcase packed with passport, pistol, and my bust of Richard Nixon by the door. I put a down payment on forty acres of tundra a hundred miles north of Yellowknife. And if I don’t get out in time, when the militia come knocking at the door me and Jack Nicholson have enough dynamite to blow those bible-fuckers back to Jupiter.

We won’t know how serious the situation is until November, which leaves us at least two months of the NFL, though with Favre playing for the Jets and the Gillette stadium buried under a mile-high mountain of ice, it is strange times indeed to be a betting man.

AK

dispatch from four thousand feet

September 25th, 2008

Fellow Americans,

I am writing this from a small wooden shelter high atop the Canadian Rockies. On clear mornings the smoke from America’s eastern seaboard is as visible as grey weasely laughter. Me and my new neighbour Calvin spent all weekend installing triple-fortified barbed wire around my compound with air-raid sirens every five feet. If anyone comes for me they’ll have thirteen feet of 300 watt fury to get through.

Not even the most apocalyptic fundamentalist nut-jar could have foretold that the downfall of the American empire would come so swiftly, so severely, so historically beautifully. But if we’ve learned anything in this epoch of fear and ignorance and animal stupidity it is that history is one toothy-grinned motherfucker. And now while the world picks apart the corpse of a three-hundred year experiment that somewhere back during the early eighteen-hundreds veered off course and never had the balls to do anything about it I eat roasted venison for every meal, play a hick version of checkers Calvin has taught me, go on long walks with my pitbull Bernanke, and experiment with the local flora.

Is it too soon to elegize? America, you fucker, you really had us going. Oh well. So it goes. Besides, nothing will really change: whomever rises to global dominance now, whether China or Russia or Europe, the inherent production of goods and spending of capital will still reign supreme. The unprecedented clustershitfuck that is high capitalism won’t be happy until human kind is dead and bloody in the bathtub, covered in the piss of fanatics and the reeking shit of powermongering strongmen.

Canada probably won’t be safe for long. Who in their right mind would leave such a wide land of trees and snow and mushrooms to fend for itself? But I can see the mountain road that would take me deep into the arctic and I know a thing or two about survival. One thing’s for sure – Calvin, Bernanke and I will persevere.

Saying Goodnight To The American Dream That Turned Into A Nightmare And Bit Our Collective Cock Off While Giving Us A Blow Job,

AK

dispatch from the other side

November 5th, 2008

Fellow Americans,

Since the polls on the west coast closed last night I have been busy. I powered down the electric fence, uncoiled the barbed wire, took down the buckets of boiling cooking oil that were prepped to fall on intruders with a tug of any number of ropes. The remote-detonated mines I will leave, for now: I’ve heard rumour that there’s bands of disenfranchised voters roaming the mountains looking for revenge. Like the jazz great Bloody Wallace used to say, the best way to stop a lynching is dynamite.

But those are exceptions of the time, fringes of the zeitgeist. Most of America will fall into line – it’s what they do, at least until the fang-toothed monarchists are able to regroup, be seen together in daylight once more. Being a humanist I can’t help feeling sorry for them: they were so close to reinstating the feudal system in the new world, they were four to eight years away from complete and utter dominance, and now, in one sweeping day, they’ve been shown for what they are: power drunk mutants with too many hands on the steering wheel. A few still remain unscathed, clinging to their positions, waiting for the return of their lost wet dream.

Sadly (on that note), even a half-drunk student of history knows that the good times rarely last. And because of that I’ve got a lot to do. For starters, the largest organism in the world is apparently a miles-long fungus growing under Montana, and I am, lest we forget, a doctor. Ah, the hallucinogenic thrill of the open road. I’ll miss this place though. Tonight with the help of my cyclopsed neighbour Calvin we’re going to dig an enormous pit in my backyard, have a bonfire of all my correspondence, clothing, books and various drug-related paraphernalia. To my editors, please take this as my formal resignation from my weekly column. To all the gun store owners of this great nation, don’t be surprised to see me in the near future, a crazed look in my eyes and self-defence my only concern.

Enjoying The Good Times Because There’s Much More Shit Than Candy And The Kids Keep Getting Fatter,

AK

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One of the headlining authors of Hot Dog, the recently kibbutzed Aaron Kreuter has settled into grad studies at U Vic and is writing poems not necessarily about animals that are finding their way around the quarterlies. "What's up? Just started my second semester at U Vic. Putting together a poetry manuscript. Nothing much else."

See. That's what I just said.

THE RODEO
by Jessica Howarth

I decide that we will break up at The Rodeo—it’s a western-themed restaurant on Shop Street. The specials board outside is advertising Cajun burgers and chips for 4.50.

He sits across from me, staring at his food. There is a giant painting of John Wayne on the wall behind our table and his gun is pointed right at our heads. I look up at John Wayne and tell him that I cringe when he touches me. I say, I’m sorry, it’s all my fault. I eat and speak at the same time, dipping my fries into a dish of mayonnaise.

We barely spoke in the two days between Dublin and Galway. He thinks that I’m angry about what happened at the party—he got drunk and embarrassed me in front of my friends, then made me sleep downstairs on the couch. And I am angry, not entirely about that. Just most of the time. On the late-night bus ride to Galway I could not abide the sensation of his shoulder against mine. I moved to a seat across the aisle, and we travelled through the pitch-black Irish midlands in that silence.

Let’s go for dinner, I said today. We barely have any money left. OK, he said. There is a restaurant back home in Montreal where we used to go to communicate bad news. We have broken up twice before; I find that it’s best to do this kind of thing in a public place. We would go to this restaurant—the one back home—and sit in a booth by the window that overlooks the parking lot, and order fried chicken. I would tell him that I was going away somewhere, that I didn’t love him as much as he loved me. He would never really understand, would never finish his food. I’d have to remind him to eat, tell him that the food wouldn’t taste as good later if he brought it home in a doggy bag. I hear myself telling him this now, or telling John Wayne at least. I cannot tolerate wasted food or emotional states that deny the appetite.

I say, I should never have asked you to come to Ireland, and then I reach over to take a sip of his Coke.

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Jessica Howarth is gainfully employed at McGill Queen's University Press and recently edited Commotions: New Writing from the Oscar Wilde Centre. She is brave—she skis down hills, scrapes out mold from the fridge and turns her heels on the bony exoskeletons of centipedes while others squeal mold! and centipedes!

NEVSKY PROSPEKT
by Melissa Bull

A suited-up drunk careened off his steed, shouting at the sparsely moving traffic on the street. A young woman led the horse by its bridle in high-hipped jeans, sneakers and blond hair to her ass. Stray bitches lurched from fleets of street-cleaning Humvees, their half-dozen tits as rubbery as baby bottle areolae. I walked past the McDonald’s, past the Coca-Cola sign, past the restaurant with the black guy decked out like a pirate all hours of the day. I didn’t know my address, but I recognized my place by the green Lada stranded in front of the building where in the courtyard, litters of kittens glommed on to garbage containers, mewing and flicking their tails in the dusty beams of dawn’s mid-morning light. I unlocked the twelve bolts on my door, showered under a dribble of rusty-urine-stinking water in a fuchsia showerstall with a radio option and lay down between sheets printed with astrological signs on a plush pull-out sofa. A dream-catcher hung from the ceiling fixture. When I took off my glasses it fuzzed out of focus and its plastic beads swung shapelessly in the breeze of the open window.




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Bull works in Montreal as a writer, editor and translator. "Nevsky Prospekt" was first published in the Université de Montréal's Festival du homard: A fresh catch of Montréal writing (2009).

STANDING IN FRONT
OF KAZAN CATHEDRAL '05
by John Goldbach

Tears began to form in his eyes while, thinking of his mother and brothers and father and sisters and friends and girlfriend, as he stood in front of the Kazan Cathedral, staring at its gold cross penetrating the blue sky, an artificial looking sky, like a Technicolour movie sky, and the gold twinkling in the omnipresent sun, he dreamed of a video camera recording him, men in masks and a knife to his throat, all of these things he thought of while tears formed and he thought about what he’d say, what he’d do, in the last few minutes before these men, these men he had little to nothing to do with, decided to chop off his head, like they’d done to others, while staring at the spire shining in the bright sun and tears were growing larger and starting to leak out of the corners of his eyes, but he’d be brave, he decided, not begging but smiling, smiling into the camera, and he’d say that he loved his mother and his brothers and his father and his sisters and his friends and girlfriend very much, especially his girlfriend, who was his favourite person that he’d ever met while living, and that he was grateful to her, perhaps, but that would sound lame so maybe he’d just tell everyone that he loved them all, keep it simple, not waste words, and be brave right before the men with the black balaclavas cut off his head and it fell to the dusty ground of some cave, though maybe he’d say something about his captors, too, like they were just fools so the world should forgive them, something Christlike and understanding, something full of infinite love, since he wouldn’t have to make good on that love but rather he’d just die and be done with it so he could afford to say something special and sweet for the world to remember his boundless benevolence by and he hoped that people would miss him, miss him so much, and he thought about Tom Sawyer and going to one’s own funeral and he wondered what people would say, if they’d express anger over his terrorist kidnappers or if they’d talk about what could’ve been, the potential he wouldn’t have to make good on but would nevertheless be remembered for because he’d had his head chopped off by terrorists in some remote locale, as a result of some conflict he had little to nothing to do with, and the clouds moved fast past the Kazan Cathedral in the big blue northern sky, and he started to cry a little more as he pictured his brothers hugging his mother, his girlfriend sedated with pills, everyone dressed in black, and his father silent as stone as his friends smoked cigarettes, not knowing what to say to one another, simply shaking their heads in disbelief, and he started shaking, thinking of all the people he loved mourning him and missing him and they wouldn’t be able to forget about him because he was killed by terrorists so he’d have scholarships named after him and maybe a day named after him, too, or a street or something, or a statue like Field Marshall Kutuzov, in his hometown and then he said: —This is ridiculous and narcissistic, and his thoughts started to calm down.

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John Goldbach is the author of Selected Blackouts, a collection of short fiction published by Insomniac Press in 2009. He lives in Montreal, where he works the nightshift at the UN or NASA or something.