No matter who wins the US Presidential Election, we aren't getting back to normal.

The sun at breakfast time- on the 21st of October was as warm as if it were August. It blazed through the front window of a car driving me to my town's train station. I was travelling to Toronto for a colonoscopy. It was requested by my oncological surgeon to determine if my rectal cancer had recurred at its surgical site. It would have had some cheek to return to the first place it was detected in 2020. I thought it would be a bit like an arsonist who returns to view the fire he set the day before. There would be a smug smile etched microscopically on its malignant cells.

The person driving me was a neighbour, who I asked to take me because I wasn't feeling well enough to walk the 45-minute journey or rich enough to afford the 18-dollar taxi ride.

The neighbour has fascist tendencies despite her veneration of Ernie Ford's song "16 Tons." So from the moment I got into the car until I left it- I regretted asking for the ride.

I don't think she would have offered had she known my left-wing politics. But nobody in my building knows or needs to know my politics because you can't change the ignorant from being ignorant, especially if they are elderly.

For some, it takes a lifetime to become so stupid, but in the case of my neighbour; she took to it like a fish to water from the day she was born. Sadly, she is not alone. Recently, I was in a brief online discussion with a well-paid, high-up Guardian journalist who believes some billionaires support democracy.

The trains I took to and from Toronto last Monday, were late in their departures and arrivals. They are never on time anymore, which is not unusual because inter-city commuter rail traffic is given short shrift in Canada.

It, like the USA and much of the West, is a nation of car drivers. We should be commuters but to do so would destroy neoliberalism and the wealth of the few. It's why, we are told saving the environment isn't as important as preserving the economy.

Despite the COVID pandemic still being prevalent, life-altering and deadly, there was no one in my carriage wearing an N95 mask except me.

In Toronto, it was the same on the subway- a crowd of unmasked people made their commute. They were a herd of slobbering and unshielded coughs and hacks.

When I returned to the surface of Toronto, it was almost lunchtime. There was chaos to Young Street as migrant gig workers in numbers that seemed as large as a school of fish delivered fast food on e-bikes. Long ago, North Vietnam mobilised their people and sent them to the front lines on bicycles to fight for their liberation from colonialism. Neoliberalism in the 21st century used the bike not for revolution but to mobilise the overworked, under-waged and easily exploitable migrant labourers to earn profits for the 1% and deliver convenience to those with more disposable income.

There were no surprises to my colonoscopy. Cancer was not detected in my bowels. I would have been surprised if there was because my cancer is more of the milkweed type that likes to float on the slipstream of my lymph nodes and goes wherever fancy takes it.

After the procedure, I was discharged, still so very high from the anaesthetic. I walked 15 kilometres around the city until I returned to an outdoor pub near the train station for a beer.

The street was shaded by the condos and office blocks that rose from the ground like a concrete Sequoia forest.

There was no sun, but the abnormal heat of the day persisted. Sometimes, the weather around my birthday finds itself warmer than normal.

The balmy temperatures of 2024 are different because they aren't a one-off. It's been a long streak of good weather that October in the northern hemisphere has no more right to it than a wealthy person has to avoid paying taxes.

When I finished my beer, I returned to Toronto Union Station and joined the queue for my train home. Hours later, I arrived at my hometown and walked the 45-minute trek to my apartment.

In the night time distance, I saw sombre silhouettes cast from the street lights. Shopping carts pushed by dispossessed into the park by the river. A perverse re-enactment of Grey’s elegy. "The ploughman homeward plods his weary way. And leaves the world to darkness and me."

From the environment to the rules-based systems that defined Western democracies since 1945, the natural order of things is breaking down with the speed of a murdered corpse decomposing in an acid bath. The US Presidential Election won't be a tipping point or a watershed, no matter who wins. We are well past crush depth- and we don't have any ballast left to discard and resurface in something akin to normal. Trump is a fascist and will do terrible things if he is elected President again. But you can't believe the Democrats can save you from fascism and political chaos when they are neck-deep in a genocide. They are doing terrible things now- just perhaps not to you.

Nothing works well anymore, and outside of filling it under an "ever thus" heading, pretending that things can right themselves or voting for neoliberal parties that are either fascistic or corporatist- few want to accept how profoundly fucked up we have become as a society.

There is no remedy left to us now outside of revolution. Yet, it is doubtful it will come.

Instead of insurrection, we will gladly take the hand of our executioners, the 1%, and thank them for dispatching us after we have been robbed of our material possessions and dignity by them.

It’s an SOS because I need 6 yearly subscribers to make Novembers rent and there are only 5 days left in October., Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, it’s a precarious daily battle. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co- morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these times, especially when you are in your sixties.

Your support in keeping my dad’s legacy going and me alive is greatly appreciated. I depend on your subscriptions to keep the lights on and me housed. So if you can please subscribe and if you can’t it is all good because we are fellow travellers in penury. But always remember to share these posts far and wide. So many of us lose so much time on the important work that must be done because of the mad scramble to pay the rent and feed oneself during an economic crisis not seen since the 1930.