I currently bank with RBC. I was recommended this bank because they had the shortest lines at their downtown branch in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, and Yellowknife at rush hour is a real doozy. Over the past few years I have read about the irresponsible investments that RBC has been a part of for hundreds of years and that they were a large part of Alberta’s glorious tar sands project. Since finding this out it has taken me nearly a year to get my ass in gear and finally change banks. This morning I went to a local credit union to open a new account. This evening I read this article. Super timing.

Side note: The world’s greatest newspaper, The Leader Post, said that nearly thirty percent of Saskatchewanites support tar sands development. Like dropping the Atomic Bomb once wasn’t enough to make you realize it was a bad idea. There is also a motion to change the name of Fort MacMurray to Hiroshima. Saskatchewan wants to tear apart its true north strong and free so that Brad Wall has a few extra billion dollars to spend on football stadiums that we don’t need. But there are twenty-five percent who oppose, and they are the ones with post-secondary educations. Thank god for them and their educations.

I still plan to leave RBC because big banks are about as trustworthy and transparent as a raging bout of chlamydia, and although they have slowed their investments in the tar sands they have probably found a new investment in the beheading of homosexuals in an nuclear weapons factory or skinning orphans to make wallets. Switching banks is like switching the brand of poison you want to gulp to end your life. There may be a few that kill you painlessly and leave you a dead beauty, while others may leave you dead and wrinkly. Either way you end up dead. I guess I will find out which is which.

I inquired into ‘ethical funds’ during my ‘investment portfolio’ ‘meeting’ with ‘Gerald’. He basically, indirectly explained to me that investing is never ethical and that ethical funds are for suckers who think they are changing the world but are actually still investing in oil and Wal-Mart. He essentially told me that there is no point in caring anymore. There goes my last hope.

Last week I was advised to watch a program titled ‘Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura‘. That would be Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura, former governor, wrestler, and Navy member. He reinforced ideas I had already heard or decided myself, such as global warming being fake, the fact that twelve rich men run the planet, and the knowledge that we are being tracked by governments and companies through our credit cards and online identities. These are things he highlighted that I already knew to be true. I believe mostly every conspiracy I hear, and I’ve woven a few of my own in my day mostly related to gingivitis, bottled water, and Wal-Mart. Through watching this show I even conspired that the show was produced by the government to scare viewers even more, even though the show was about how the government was doing things to try to scare the public. I have learned that more than half of the time the absolute worst situations that you could possibly think of are what are currently happening in the world. This makes my conspiracy spinning so much easier. It is never as it seems, it is always worse.

The first conspiracy theory I remember hearing was from a Simpsons episode or something, where flu shots were used to control the brain and send people into a frenzy of unnecessary shopping around Christmas. For some types of people, after hearing their first conspiracy theory it is hard to live a normal life again. I have reached a point where I accept all theories because there is likely more truth in them than in what is fed as reality. The days when conspiracy theories are truth and what they feed us as ‘truth’ was written by the same people that write General Hospital are dark days. These are dark days.

There is not much to remedy this situation of being a slave to these theories of defeatism, and I will likely never outgrow them, but I will learn to live with them, with a 2% interest rate on my ethical equity and a 5% return on my bullshit bonds. My meeting taught me further that banks, even local and responsible ones, are more than deserving of your assumptions of malpractice, and that even your slightest attempts at being a decent human being will be crushed by a divorced man named Gerald.

Not much you can do about anything, but angry music always helps.