Dope City Prison

When you live in Canada, the unlikeliest of states, few experience more than a small percentage of our overproof land. Many, perhaps a majority, of the rain soaked people of Dope City never make it past the town of Dope two hours of tame driving to the east. Many more are afraid to cross the rusting overcrowded bridges which lead into Sliverville where fear, pit bulls, distrustfulness and smuggled hand guns are a man's best friends.

Past Sliverville and the crooked steeples and shit heaps of homeless of my town and those that surround it lie Canada; untamed as an Hezbollah rocket; unpredictable as a wind swept forest fire; as empty and full of stories as a pile of empty boxes of beer early on a Sunday morning. It is a sad thing for people to live all their lives enveloped by Dope City's polluted, narcotic steaminess. It is evil to live imprisoned like that in one of the world's many great cities. But it is evil as a Sunday morning dirty sleeping bag beer fart to live unexposed to the outside world in an overgrown Moose Jaw of a town like Dope City.

I find it hard to imagine a life lived without listening to the calls of a kingfisher from across a lake, blue as a kingfisher's feathers, covered with the perfect circular wakes of leaping fish silver as new dimes.

How can one say one has lived in Canada without having experienced an osprey pausing in flight, diving with grabby talons for an insect fattened dinner as free of filthy chemicals as any food on the planet?

How can a Dope City sophisticate or unsophisticate deny their pet pooch the sight and scent of a black bear? Or the sound of one crashing through the woods like a speed fueled logger after having a shotgun slug whistle overhead?

You motherfuckers have got to get out of Dope City. Get the fuck out. Now, before hockey gets going again.