theme "striving" title "our home and native land" in misc. flash fiction

Utica is America’s Canada, which should be the world’s most obvious statement, considering the Labatt’s billboards every mile or so headed west into Utica. This is despite the fact Utica has two local brews of its own, first-off there’s Utica Club which is iron filings mixed with diluted horse urine and second-off Saranac, a line of actually pretty decent beers. Even with one good beer and another terrible cheap beer for hipsters to pretend is good ironically, it’s still Labatt’s Blue Light all the way to Rome. Utica is America’s Canada.

Utica is Canada without socialized medicine, the southernmost suburb of Toronto striving to work its way back up from the rust-belt and if you don’t get what I’m saying, consider that it’s the only city in the United States that gives a damn about having a minor-league hockey team. The Comets set the record for the most sell-outs in a row in the AHL, a league with American cities magnitudes larger, cities with major league teams in baseball and basketball, Milwaukee, San Diego, Cleveland, and yet here’s tiny Utica consistently selling out home ice, what’s more True North Strong and Free than that?

American cities have local celebrities that are football stars, television actresses, pop singers or basketball gods. The most famous person in the Utica, who is in a commercial for a local bank chain every thirty seconds on the local NBC, is Erin Hamlin who won a bronze in the Winter Olympics in a sport so obscure I can’t name it without the using of the Google. I think there’s a sled involved? Skeleton? Skeletor? Freestyle Poutine Toquing? Not to take anything away from her, I haven’t the physical endurance to watch the Winter Olympics, let alone place third, still only in Canada could that make you the big local celebrity.

Utica is Canada South because it has an actual curling club. Anywhere else in America, when the Olympics briefly remind the Land of The Free that curling exists, every late-night hack-job has a joke about it being iced-shuffleboard or the Quidditch broom race for frozen drunks but in Utica, they can look up from their Secretariat-piss beers on Varick Street and explain the rules for you.

Utica would be better served by a Canadian web-presence anyway, if you think about it, U-T-I dot C-A. If only it were actually in Canada and if only that site wasn’t probably already claimed by the Urinary Tract Infection Foundation of Canada, which may or may not exist but again I’m not going to Google that, either. If I wanted to slave over notations, I would be in grad school.

Utica is America’s Canada to such an extent they even spell the town’s name Canadian. I mean, for God’s sake, it even ends with “eh?” U-T-I-C-eh? U-T-I-C-eh? And that’s not a bad thing, I consider it a real honour. That’s honour with a “u”, no matter what my poor American Microsoft spellcheck has to say about it. A true honour.