Life As Performance Art 66

Get your kicks...on Route 66. Remember that lame pop song from the sixties? Or earlier? I don't either. What does Uncle Google have to say? Okay, it was a travelogue tune based on the travels of an American couple and written in 1946 on Route 66 that took them across the US heartland from Chicago to, I think, LA. Well, what has that got to do with us, Gentle Reader? Especially given that I have never been on Route 66, and likely never will. No one has mentioned, either, that it deals entirely with car culture, and we all know what cars do to the environment, especially when you think of how long it's going to be before everyone can afford an electric car (and folks are going to need something fast enough to get them away from all the floods and forest fires, I guess.) Heck, I'm not even American, neither do I intend to ever again find myself in that august country, not even while changing flights in one of their airports. This also brings to mind how inundated we in Canada have always been by American culture. In the sixties, when I was a child quickly growing up, it only occurred to me in the fifth grade that I actually lived in a distinct country, and this because the curriculum had changed to teaching children Canadian history, beginning with the early discoverers and explorers, such as Jacques Cartier and Radisson. This was back in 1966 and 1967, when I was a ripe ten and eleven years old. It was interesting, fascinating, engaging and gripping. Even our teacher liked the material, and she was having fun teaching it, the old battle-axe! (sorry, radical feminists, I know that you don't approve of hag-shaming. Silly me!) For the first time in my developing young life, it occurred to me that I was living in a different country. With a unique history, and with unique indigenous people. I knew that I lived, not in the United States of America, but in the Dominion of Canada (okay, we are independent from Great Britain, even if some of us still worship the Queen. My most humble and sincerest Canadian "Sorry!" to any anti-monarchist, probably white, Canadian nationalists I might have just offended.) Mind you, all this is changing yet more with mass global immigration, globalism, and with our aboriginal peoples finally finding and raising their voice. This is the sixty-sixth post on this particular blog series, Life As Performance Art. I don't think we're finished yet, Gentle Reader, this is going to be a hard theme to exhaust, a rich and vigorous cow that is not about to be milked dry (sorry, vegans! Actually, not sorry at all, you people are so annoying and self-righteous, you're worse than Christian fundamentalists and born-again Marxists! You're even more obnoxiously pure than I was when I was a teenage Jesus Freak, and that is pretty bad! especially since I am still pretty darn close to being a Jesus Freak, that's how bad I find a lot of you militant vegans) I like this series because I can still get snarky and bitchy as all get-out, but we also know that my tongue is always going to be planted firmly in my cheek, and that I simply refuse to take any of this too seriously. Well, I'm up from a three hour nap, following a short sleep night again, and raring to go. Happy Monday!