a grand experiment

so I’m gonna free form a little here

get my flow on as ’twere

And talk about the maelstrom of observation and wishing hard which made me pick Vancouver as the place to pin the starting point of a ‘forced green conversion’ on a major city. Cause that’s what ends up happening if you stop putting legal barriers in the place of people greening THEIR OWN SURROUNDINGS at the same time as the food supply tanks (the number of people living here tanks as well.) Can you imagine what public parks would look like if more of the trees and shrubs in them had to support people and wildlife with fruits and nuts?

I think if what I’m contemplating in my novel truly happened more than a million people would leave. It’s 2.5 million, give or take, so just under half. A disproportionate number would be under 15 – people would want their kids out of the city. WHICH MEANS that instantly every school district in every Canadian city over 100000 people would be jammed to the rafters with new kids. Vancouver’s troubles would explode out in all directions – back to China, where many would flee (leaving some behind to protect investments and businesses).

In the middle of the troubles, Amir the Syrian sez, “I don’t know why they complain about the things they do. There’s enough food, the buses mostly work and nobody’s bombing us.”

But people would leave. Western Washington would get about (rolls dice) holy shit 40000 people, mostly people with family ties but some IT professionals.

The Liberal MPs all skip town. The NDP MP’s all stay here, mostly to remind the Canadian government not to get all chummy with American plans to bomb the city ‘if necessary’. Since the POTUS decided to tweet about a hunnert times that this was definitely an option if American interests were not 100 percent protected. Yeah, go ahead and bomb those American interests, until something else distracts you, you gibbering remnant of a vile personality.

Canada would instantly have one of the world’s worst internal migrant issues. There literally would not be an available hotel room anywhere in Canada and this would have the dubious ability to simultaneously crash the tourist business while not generating much income from ancillary tourist spending, although I imagine drinking would skyrocket as well.

I knew that something so bizarre as what I wanted to have happen couldn’t happen without a miracle or money or aliens for chrissakes so I decided to make it all three but really what it’s about is me, all me, and my white guilt.

Recognizing this over the last couple of weeks has slowed my thought processes to a crawl. After the initial desire to fire up a butane torch and just immolate the entire oeuvre, which like suicide is an urge one needs to control as being animalistic in its immediacy, intensity and complete lack of reference to reason, or just fucking asinine since I’ve given a large chunk of my life to this and although I shouldn’t care under an egoistic and libertarian worldview of artistic production, there are at least a half a dozen other people in the world with skin in this too, and they’d be fuckin’ pissed at me for being dramatic.

I have three main choices as to what to do about it;

edit severely to try to minimize the damage, after paying some long-suffering Indigenous woman something resembling a decent wage to do a sensitivity read and please note as an aside that I’m cheesed I can find no one to help me, but *entirely unsurprised* because fuck it, it won’t be nearly as much fun to read as an Indigenous woman for pay as it was to write for free;

try to end run all that boring sensitivity read stuff, and I’m just having a panic attack thinking what a fucking Lena Dunham move that would be, like a pre apology apology? barf barf gag

Or I start my preface to Honey on the Moon with unflinching support of the return of Indigenous lands, and saying that foolish and trope-y and ignorant as my shit is, that is all the point that I’m trying to make with it. That I will undergo corrections and deletions as requested by whoever can make a good argument for them. That it’s an open universe to Black and Indigenous writers, and that canon isn’t even fixed IN UNIVERSE so I don’t see why I should be pissy about other people’s execution provided they go to the trouble of getting it edited.