Saturday Morning Journal

Rain on the roof of the RV all night.  Gilbert let me sleep in till 10 am then lay on my chest as his way of telling me he wanted to go out to pee.  I dressed dog walking fashion. It’s a style that’s in with dog owners but for some unknown reason never shows on the Milan Cat walks.  Flipflops, sweats, t shirt, overcoat , half asleep face, dog pulling on leash, watering trees. Gilbert dumped half his body weight almost immediately.  I had doggie bags but should have brought large green garbage bags.  It was a momentous occasion.  They relieved of onerous weight he danced about sniffing nature with alacrity.  I followed. I’d long since let him on the leash in defiance of the leash law watching for strangers so I could leash him up again.  No one came. We walked a long ways and circled back.
Morning coffee. I ground the beans.  The noise was loud.  I’m rested. The month long flu which went and came and went is clearing with rest.  My ear ache and cough have all but gone this morning. The lethargy remains. I’m uninspired. I go through the day doing rituals but the brain isn’t sparking.  I am on automatic pilot.  I sometimes see myself saying and doing the right thing and am amazed. I think of government jobs and union jobs and sick leave and remember that every winter as long as I can remember I get the west coast sinus infection with or without the flu shot. I think the flu shot helps.  It’s a placebo thing in my mind.  I think I was sicker before I got it. I took a week or two off work a few years back but now I only lose a day or two.  But every weekend and evening I’m ‘recuperating’ . There are no holidays, just work and recovery, over and over again for weeks. And I try to maintain the schedule and meet the commitments and half to pay the rent and overhead and fear homelessness.  We’re all only months away from it except those in the elite with the security once promised but now no longer.
I could be depressed.  All day long people are angry with me because I’ve no magic wand.  More and more they want me to help them get money from some agency that withholds and like a circus masters makes the once great free beasts of the forest jump through beaurocratic hoops and take the whips.  I learned to jump years ago.  I’m an indoor nigger.  I try to help people stop running into glass walls, show them doors, encourage them to stop howling at the moon, save your breath.
Mostly I’ve been told there is no life after medicine.  16 years we must hold our files and wait daily for someone to complain and a lawyer to get rich when we’re demented and can’t remember what the cultural mores were of the day.  Over the years I’ve said whatever needed to be said to stop people from suiciding and know that now suicide is no longer a ‘bad” thing but the “in thing’ so for sure somebody is going to complain I convinced them to live another day. All those folk I convinced to not smoke marijuana are going to be forever angry now that smoking marijuana is all the rage.  I’m a very bad man and hated and despised for thinking ‘morbidity and mortality’ were what I was supposed to addressing rather than political correctness. The doublespeak of 1984 is commonspeak today. I’m a dinosaur and dying breed.  I hoped for some place I could go to lick my wounds and die quietly but know they always want to put people like me in carts and drag us through the streets of the New Rome.  I had thought 10 years I could wait for peace but if I retired at 65 and now it’s 16 years it’s not going to be till I’m 81 that I can be free of medicine.  I can’t recommend anyone be a doctor anymore and wish I’d never gone into this field where today we’re being told that killing people is the goal.  I took the hippocratic oath, do no harm and understood why that was the ideal but that was then and now ‘cure’ isn’t in the ‘lexicon’ of ‘health care spending’. Only the rich can afford old age and I made the mistake of focussing on keeping people alive and measured health as function and worked with the most angry and sick and defeated and psychotic who no one wanted to work with. I gave up the lucrative cushy jobs to work with the dangerous and insane and the addicts and try to help them to be free but now I’m told I’m wrong. Even calling a patient is wrong ‘nomenclature’.  They’re ‘customers’ .
Yet if the climataloogist fear mongers are right we’re be dead next week or the week after. They say we’re going to be extinct.  And the Rich want us to kill ourselves off so the rich can inherit the earth.  But I’m not rich and I’m just sick and tired at the end of the week. By friday I’ve run out of steam. I used to be able to work in the evening. I did university courses and studied till midnight but now I’m feeling age or fatalism and I’m exhausted by 6 pm and my brain seems not to work on friday.  Saturday like today I’m just trying to rest, walk the dog, do anything but think.  I can vomit my brain but I can’t analyze or understand. I feel like my poor head injured patients. There’s just been such a bombarding of desperation on one side and then insensitivity and uncaring on the other side. I’m in this middle place and feel like a soldier on a battlefield with his position over run and the administration saying we have to sign and counter sign for bullets and really we shouldn’t need bullets but should commune with them and besides they’re no longer the enemy.  People are trying to get HIV to ‘show solidarity”.  I’m told drug addiction isn’t a ‘disease’ but a ‘culture’.

(The Cognitive Behavioural Distortions of the above thinking include - Emotional Reasoning - based on my feeling physically sick and run down, i.e. depressed, I project that depressed thinking on the future and Selective Reasoning - chose to Awfulize and Catastrophise - a particular loop then occurs in my thinking to 'confirm' the obvious irrational thinking.  Any number of possibilities can occur tomorrow or the future - projections (especially all those 'media accounts' are notoriously erroneous.  Politically who would have 'guessed' ISIS.  Syria was never 'predicted'.  The climatologists can't even get the weather right weeks ahead and generally speaking the FUTURE IS BRIGHT but the fact is WERE ALL GOING TO DIE so it's right to be concerned if you are in DENIAL about DEATH.  So I don't know the future.  I'm just tired and exhausted.  It's always been a tough time of the year. End of winter, Spring slowly coming along, work overwhelming because life is even more difficult for those with less of anything. )


Sometime today my head will clear. I can only hope.  A nap. Distraction and then I’ll be in the hot seat again with no hope of reprieve.  Even if I left today I’d face being called to accountability for ancient history in a rapidly changing world. I’m in a society of historians ignoring the reality of the present and playing mind games with their selective versions of history for personal profit.  It’s group insanity.  The world is bizarre.  Meritocracy has died in Canada and it’s just who you know. I’m called a hater because I don’t agree with public corruption and waste of resources. I don’t like money for the poor spent on limousines.  It’s all name calling now and logic doesn’t count because the main stream is ‘ends against the middle reasoning’ and obfuscation.  Bullying is everywhere in suits and pseudo kindness.  I’m killing you for your sake.  You’re right to want to die. Let me help you. And can i have your organs too.  No of course I won’t give you anything that would make life more palatable.  I’ll just take the money to write a report.  We’re all paid to record and no one anymore is paid to sit and hold the hand of a person alone.  But this is just the negativity of tiredness and silliness. I must rally. I’ve only hours and a day at most before I must drag myself back to work thankful the coughing has stopped and the pain in ear and throat is less. But the weakness and tiredness how much longer. At least I can sleep now. My nose isn’t stopping me from breathing.
But thank you lord for the sleep I had last night. Thank you for the restfulness. The companionship of my friend and dog. Thank you for the work since lots of it isn’t as I colour it. Lots of what I do makes some sense. I’m pleased to see the smiles return to the faces and the light return to eyes. I’m thankful to be there. I’m glad to have an answer. I ‘m glad for the science I know. I’m thankful for the opportunity to reduce some suffering. I’m too sensitive. My heart is too wounded but please Lord don’t let me ever be closed hearted or hard. Thank you for empathy. Thank you for the colours. Thank you for the scent. Thank you for the wonderful times I had with friends this week. Thank you for the incredible joy I had watching Gilbert and Matty his little girl dog friend down the office. Thank you for the god children and the delight I see in their wonder at life. Thank you for the good parents I know who care so much for their children and are raising them to know science and music and to be good and kind and moral. Thank you for all those who are walking towards the light. Thank you for the politicians and beaurocratts and courts and judges and the police and military and the space cadets and space station. Thank you Lord for hospitals and nurses and doctors and technicians and all those incredible breakthroughs in medications and solutions and genius. Thank you for the wonder. Thank you for the stories. Thank you for the books and entertainment, the music and movies and tv. Thank you for bed. I love my bed and my couch and the comfort my back feels in lying. I love the showers and the heat and the walking. Thank you for mobility and feet and knees and the ability to use my hands . Thank you for my health  Lord. Thank you for my eyes and clothing and indoor plumbing. Thank you for refrigeration and the space heater. Thank you for taps and pressure and running water and reservoirs. Thank you for home delivery Canadian Meat Lover Pizza and internet and telephones and communication. Thank you for skin. Thank you for guitars and song. Thank you for breath. Thank you for the galaxy Thank you for all human endeavour. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you for the sunshine we’ve had and that will return and remind me always that blue moods are so much just a product of the rain and that I simply like the sunshine and dry and every day we’re getting closer to more and more and more of that.  The last weeks were glorious so I could drive with the hood down. Thank you for convertibles.  Soon I’ll be sailing and the boat will be out and the motorcycling will begin but thank you for the day and the knowledge that I have to live in the present to truly be with god.  Help me more and more be thankful for everything now and to have less regret and less worry but focus always on what I have right now. Thank you for this computer, these fingers, the friends and all the blessings and those I see and don’t see. Thank you God. Thank you Jesus.