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Own a Piece of Alberta for Your New Out-of-Province Doctor's Office!

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Sick of getting yelled at on your driveway? Sick of unsolicited phone calls to your private number? Sick of going in to kiss your child goodnight only to find out it was Tyler Shandro all along, wearing their skin like a pasty wetsuit? Looking for some swag to enliven your new out of province doctor’s office?

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Honour your roots by displaying this nostalgic rust hued paean to the single minded petrophilia that has set up shop in Alberta’s psychosexual imagination. One so boner popping we’ve picked a fight with doctors during a pandemic just to scrape together a few extra bucks to subsidize the oil industry’s own flight from this inbred backwater that can’t even build a pipeline without draconian state legislated assaults on liberty and free speech.

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But let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. You made that mistake once during your residency, and never again. Alberta may fucking hate doctors, but it is still the land of limitless opportunity: The angsty mountains in their craggy indominable youth. The pimpled foothills destined to be popped and strip-mined for coal. The pube-raising azure skies scratched by office towers omnipresent and vacant like the idle gaze of a UCP backbencher. The eastern slant heralding Canada’s unremarkable prairie gooch. A fertile land where you too can be the highest paid MLA in the country despite record drops in GDP and historic public sector layoffs.

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If being a gummy bastard with all the blank stare but none of the virtuosity of Deliverance Banjo Kid is not your bag, there’s other options. You can make almost $200 000/yr getting into petty arguments on twitter, or $250 000/yr to sit in an office in with nothing but your theology degree and gentle directions to grovel at the grand buffet of international commerce for table scraps. All it takes is a little elbow grease! Which is what Kenney uses to snake a plastic straw up through your colon and suck the marrow from your spine.

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When all else fails, you can move to Edmonton, a provincial capital with a truly exceptional 15.7% unemployment rate and serve overcooked prime rib to toothless millionaire athletes until you too get Covid-19 and are turned into a human sandbag to plug the leaking roof of Roger’s Place.

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Buy this painting and in two months, you’ll be giving a patient a simple procedure that takes five minutes costs the province $50, but costs $300 and several hours in ‘berta. The stench of perhaps a moldering pica dead in the air intake will remind you of the incompetence, entitlement, and tailings-soaked duck tartar that howls along the QE2 like a wind tunnel.  Your patient will ask why you’re chuckling softly to yourself (or, if you’ve moved to Quebec, pourquoi tu est rire-ing a ton self) you can simply gesture at this painting. To which they will respond “oh, ew!”.

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3ftx3ft, acrylic on canvas. This work is the first in a series, and if the current state of affairs is any indication, they’ll be sellin’ like fuckin’ hot cakes.  

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July 20, 2020