People ask me why I write bizarre stories populated by a whacky assortment of characters.
My answer? I’m Canadian. As a people, we’re allowed and perhaps even encouraged to be different.
Heck, a former Prime Minister [and the dad of our current PM] Pierre Elliott Trudeau became a role model for a generation in the 1960s to push the envelope. He drove sports cars, wore a red rose on his lapel, and swash-buckled in public wearing a cape. As a bachelor, he dated famous women including singer Barbra Streisand, movie star Margot Kidder, and classical guitarist Liona Boyd.
P.E.T., as he was tagged in headlines, caused a stir in 1977 after he and other G7 leaders met with Queen Elizabeth. A photographer captured him doing a pirouette behind the back of Her Royal Highness. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/11/12/trudeau-to-meet-queen-elizabeth-38-years-after-sensational-pierre-pirouette.html
Canada is a country that in relative terms is safe, caring, and provides citizens the freedom to be themselves. When you’re not worried about health care or getting shot, you have the luxury to work your crazy.
Canadians don’t bear the weight of the world. We don’t carry Kipling’s “white man’s burden” originally plopped on the shoulders of Britain and now on the U.S.A.
We don’t have to jealously guard our ethnicity because, frankly, we don’t have one but many.
We can invite millions of people of colour to Toronto for Caribana without fear of anything other than overpriced hotel rooms. http://www.caribanatoronto.com/masbandscostumes
We are unafraid to go where no one has gone before. Canadians first conquered space [at least on the small screen] with the likes of Captain Kirk [Canadian William Shatner] of #Star_Trek fame and his trusty Engineer Scotty [Canuck James Doohan], the original Battlestar Galactica’s Commander Adama [Canadian Lorne Greene], and more recently Canadian Nathan Filion as Firefly’s irreverent Captain Mal Reynolds. I won’t mention Spaceballs with its largely Canadian crew of SCTV grads.
When it comes to real space travellers, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield took a ride on the wild side with a cover of David Bowie’s Space Oddity live from the International Space Station. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrHHsP8BACg
Canadians can even poke fun at our the national anthem as long as it’s the unstoppable William Shatner doing the poking. https://www.nfb.ca/film/william_shatner_sings_o_canada/
In a nutshell, I write weird stuff because I’m Canadian.