My phone is so parochial that it refers to Montréal as “Montreal City.” Well, at least it’s not “Montreal, D.F.”

I’m very happy about Trump’s statements on the Crimea. Now I will finally see fewer starry-eyed Ukrainians babble how Trump will be a great help to Ukraine against Russia. I hope he keeps talking. 

Something was making me queasy as I walked past the newsstand, and I had to go back to find out what it was. This is what my lateral vision had caught:

I think it’s a really shitty way to sell magazines. 

When I came to Montréal 18 years ago, everybody seemed extraordinarily, even obsequiously polite compared to people back in Ukraine. And now that I come to Montréal from the American Midwest, everybody seems rude and grumpy.

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In Montréal, everybody is dressed a lot nicer and people are a lot less happy to see babies. But everybody is very understanding towards people with accents because there isn’t anybody without an accent. 

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What everybody calls “intolerable heat” here in Montréal is a cool breeze back in St Louis. 

Some genius at La Guardia covered every surface with flashing screens. They stand between people at restaurants, bars and rest stops, making conversation impossible. You can’t kill the blasted things because the power button is disabled. 

There are screens even in the bathroom, informing people of how long until the next cleaning. All of this money wasted on useless technology, and there isn’t even a diaper-changing station in the men’s room. Somebody should inform the airport management of the shocking news that men have children, too. In fact, exactly as many men have children as women do. Freaky! 

I’m getting such screen fatigue that I’m about to start smashing these flashing, blinking devourers of human interactions. 

Why do I even live in the Midwest? The moment we arrived in New York, I met a group of great Spanish-speaking women and a restaurant that serves all kinds of wurst.

Republican ads in Missouri often sound like smear ads. At least, to me. 

“Catherine Hanaway fought to defend Planned Parenthood! And to remove limitations on conceal carry! And to kill a bus load of orphans and indigent retirees to save money on welfare!”

And then it turns out that this isn’t a smear campaign but a candidate proudly announcing her achievements. 

Melania Trump’s college degree turned out to be as fake as her husband’s “university.”

Trump loves screwing the “poorly educated” in every sense of the word. 

So I got a blog roll, right? It’s an app that brings together the recent articles from all websites I’m interested in. For a reason I will never find out, the app decided to deliver one of the blogs I read in an unusual format. The app would take the first couple of sentences or the title and subtitle of an article and arrange them to look like a little poem. It would look something like this:

On the last day

of the Democratic convention

Clinton will deliver

a long-awaited speech.

For years, I’d read this and think, “Wow, this guy is a really shitty poet. Why does nobody tell him to quit?” 

Finally today I could take it no longer. I went to the blog to tell the author to stop writing bad poetry. 

And that’s when I discovered that the fellow wasn’t writing poetry. The app was simply making it look like that. 

I’m now wondering if it’s just me who’s having this problem with the fellow’s blog. What if there are many people out there who curse him for bad poetry he doesn’t write?