Gratitude derailed

Thank you for the light in the morning when I walk the dog. This morning the sky was blue and the crocuses have returned. I’ve seen daffodils and now the neighbours tulip stalks are up.  I’m so looking forward to the tulip days to come.  It’s like somehow this year I lost faith in the fall and winter coming to an end.  My brother’s diagnosis has brought me face to face with aging.  I’m seeing illness all about me in a way that I’ve not for so many years.  There’s always been the itching sensations after treating the scabies patients.  The germophobias that assail me somedays.  I know that I can’t go out from fear now some weekends.  The attacks come back. There’s this lack of faith that I’ve had.
My decision to stop marijuana smoking as occasional as it was still remains an issue too because even though I drank and that was little compared to the mainstream today I felt I was wrong to be ‘breaking the law’ by smoking marijuana. As a professional it didn’t matter that I did this on holidays or weekends. It didn’t matter that I bought my marijuana from doctors or that I smoked marijuana with doctors , psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses and lawyers. It didn’t even matter that I had seen a psychiatrist who recommended that I smoke marijuana given my wife’s illness.  All that didn’t sit well with me.  Spiritually I’d felt that I wasn’t right. I’d made a promise to God to change my life. And I felt that smoking marijuana was breaking the law and I didn’t consciously break the law.
I was and am and always was a law abiding citizen for the most part even though in Canada today the legal system and bureaucrats and parliamentarians think people who are law abiding so called good citizens are fools, that’s what I was.  I’d speed in my car occasionally but these were lapses of judgement.  The marijauana smoking was conscious. I truly believed that the State was wrong, not just in it’s views of individual behaviour with respect to drugs but with its views towards sex and a variety of ’social laws’.   As I got older I saw that Canada wasn’t a ‘free society’ in a lot of ways and when I smoked marijuana I was ‘rebelling’.
Yet here I was riding on roads made by the collective.  I was enjoying the clean water and food that came from the collective.  I was thankful for the courts and parliament for the jails and laws that fought murderers and thieves  I enjoyed so much of what our ancestors had given us in our buildings schools and churches.  I was being paid as a physician through the organization of health care. I was taught as a physician.  These were all ‘lawful’.  So what was I do ‘breaking the law’.  Why was I smoking dope.  I drank wine and that wasn’t an issue.  I was a wine connoisseur. Yet when I drank wine I smoked cigarettes and marijuana. I’d concluded as a physician that smoking cigarettes was stupid, evil, extraordinarily unhealthy and that the tobacco boards were organized crime. I further thought that our government was corrupt to arrest marijuana smokers but allow tobacco producers to be rich and major influences on the supreme court and parliament.
When I drank legal alcohol I’d smoke again though I’d quit and when I was smoking cigarettes I’d prefer a joint so I’d break the law and get some marijuana as well. I’d even tried cocaine but was glad it didn’t agree with me.  My pleasure seemed to be red wine and smoking a mix of low strength marijuana and tobaco.  I thought I was ‘cool’ when I was a little buzzed.  Like I was James Bond and Sherlock Holmes and that I could write and play guitar better. I was wrong . I also thought I was a better lover. I was slower but I don’t think I was a better lover. I know too I didn’t think about work and I didn’t worry and I was just happy to sit and let the world go round and round as compared to my normal state where I’m trying to help and work and concerned about what I could do next.  I certainly never worried I wasn’t fulfilling my destiny or doing all I could be or achieving my potential or what others thought when I smoked a joint. I was utterly narcissistic and definitely purely pleasure oriented. A hedonist. Canada is a country of hedonism today or some might call it "shedonism'.
But I was breaking the law.
So when I stopped I sought help from the Physician Assistance program.  I couldn't get my wife to address her illness so I felt the best way was for me to admit my problem, and that this would lead to her getting help.  I was a politically outspoken person who had represented a lot of cases against the totalitarian corrupt authorities.  I’d been an outspoken critic against communists and fascists and Canada breeds both in abundance in high places.  I had integrity and told the truth and defended patients from abuses from above as much as I fought the diseases which plagued them from within.  It made me a lot of enemies.  Reporting a pedophie means that he’s caught but the ring survives.  Reporting a doctor doing unauthorized experiments on patients for profits catching him but not the nest. Always the very authorities whose job it was to protect patients were collecting their pay and not doing their job.  I was a vigilante good samaritan, doing the right thing.  But of course, when the criminal was caught, it was naturally asked why the beurocrats who are paid millions to protect patients didn't get these 'big fish'.  They naturally looked bad and they hated people like me.  I think too that they're there to 'protect' those 'special  doctors who aren't like the rest.
I had to do it .  It was a thing I had with this ingrained integrity and ethics and morality that said that doctors shouldn't be killing and that eurocrats shouldnt be colluding.  Of course everyone wondered who was getting kickbacks.  Why  were these doctors getting away with murder.  The elite protects its own.  It’s disgusting but true.  To get ahead they have to have protection within the courts and high places and especially within the bureaucracy. I exposed this.  If you do good in Canada you will be burnt. I was a whistleblower and whistleblowers are all collectively condemned in Canada.  The State thrives on 'informants' and encourages 'confidential informants' and administrators carry little black books like all good communists do but 'whistleblowers' are another thing.  They disrupt the common business of corruption and undermine the whole 'institution baksheesh' industry.  The Reformer is the enemy of anyone who benefits from the status quo.  The whole job of the elite, the bureaucracy and the courts is to resist change.  Change  threatens  the powerful.   The lie is they are always 'promoting change' deceitfully.  Lie, lie, lie!  Deny. Deny Deny!  It's the halcyon cry of the courts and bureaucracy.  Fuddle Duck!!!
I cause change.  My generation was a ‘change catalyst.’
My question at the time is what do I do with my drug addicted wife and how can we get help with our marriage.  I’d been divorced and concluded that I  was facing another divorce and the common ingredient in my divorces was that my wives and I drank and smoked marijuana.  Of course given feminism in it’s day and the radical feminists in beaurocracy they had long concluded that all divorce was the cause of men, another common ingredient in marriage,  so drugs were irrelevant.  This was before lesbian marriage with its similar rate of divorce so the idea that men were the cause of divorce went out the window but too late for my marriage.  I divorced.  I was punished as men are in divorce .  It's a sexist society, i.e. men are sexist.  I was also punished as marijuana smokers were in the day.  Marijuana smoking wasn't actually punished but rather being truthful about marijuana smoking.  The same as homosexuality. For the longest time homosexuality wasn't punished as long as you were not truthful about it.  Society is that kind of lie.  I was punished because while the bureaucracy paid lip service to the idea of ‘disease’ the individuals involved in the programs were holier than thou and claimed that they were the guardians of the public good.
Yet they didn’t care that the prime minister was smoking dope as a teacher and that the prime minister was smoking dope as an MP.  They didn't about the irreparable damage he did as a teacher and the irreparable damage his example has had on children.  Baseball players and hockey players are condemned for smoking marijuana because they are an 'example' to children but Justin Trudeau was smoking marijuana when he was an Member of Parliament so what kind of example does that set for children.
They justified all that they did to me and others by the idea that we were a threat to society. I was never a threat to society and never made a bad decision. I loved the movie with Denzil Washington as the pilot because that’s what I saw in my case and for those around me.  This horrible ‘war on drugs’ world was coupled with beaurocratic pomposity and deceit.
So my marriage ended.
The friends of the men whose friends I’d caught stealing, killing and raping, suddenly gloatingly became my superiors holding my freedom in their hands.  I was terrorized by a little hitler and his little eva brawn.  And today I’m afraid of drugs because I believe seriously that too many people in Canada are on drugs and that the only way we have been able to get another lying Trudeau in leadership is because Canada is a nation of stoned drunks.  I would have voted Trudeau when I was smoking dope.
So I’ve not handled the election well. I’ve not handled watching 18 billion candian dollars go to the PARTY.  I’ve not handled the lies well and the idea that others don’t ‘get’ it.  I’ve also wanted desperately to smoke dope again so I can join the stupidity and not be aware of what’s happening.  I’d like to smoke dope and believe that there isn’t illness and everything is an illusion and that if I just have my dope mind I’ll get by.  When I smoked dope it was like I was one of the batteries in the  movie Matrix. I thought the Matrix was the best movies about the drugged and the awake.
I’m awake today.It's hard to be awake.  I think of the millions who were not caught up in the Hitlermania of their day or the Lenninmania of their day.  There's this 'mania', an orgy that I could get myself caught up in when I was smoking dope and drinking. I liked the group grope and hedonistic throb of the club scene when I was a little high and in denial of reality.  I loved the escape to adolescence, the disregard and animal like awareness that drugs brought.  I smoked a joint and drank some wine and I was blatto.  My IQ dropped and I had trouble following conversations or walking to the bathroom. I was demented.  Usually I was actually more aware than the thousand or so others in the club since I was only a light user in public and at home I used to just go to bed early.  I was a happy drunk, if drunk is the right word.  Rarely was I angry but like all couples drinking we had our shouting matches.  She was always a public ranter screaming at me when I wanted to get her home public scenes worked well for women.  I remember trying to get drunk women into taxis to get them home with even drunker men trying to keep them at parties and me caught between these two drunken nightmares.  Sometimes I went home alone and worried all night if she'd get home somehow.  When I went to Al Anon I was the 'wife' and my stories were the norm for that group. I fit right in.  They'd all been their with their drunks and addicts.  And yes, some of them had joined in but the fact was we'd always been the 'adults'.  We'd been the ones who had to 'get the other home' or take care of the 'adult' business the next day. I was always 'papa'.  I am seriously tired of being the 'man' .  I always knew I could take care of myself and I could take care of others but that if there was trouble I really couldn't rely on the wife to take care of me. She was hardly able to take care of herself.  It wasn't just out in the wilderness but in the city. I've watched the new rage of girls in high heels beating up guys in tv movies and it's more of the lie.  I've known too many situations where there's three or four men and I'm defending myself and a woman and the woman is usually drunk and stoned and often caused this scenario but probably won't remember what happened the next day.  Or she'll rewrite the script to be something like a Supergirl scenario and ultimately she'd find a way to blame me for her drunkeness or being stoned legless.
I’m thankful fortmy sobriety. I’m thankful I’m not stoned. I’m grateful for the relationship i have with family and true friends and the journey I’ve been on if only because it helps me related to the horrendous abuse that so many Canadians have had who when they smoked dope at their jobs were subjected to forced treatment for the benefit of society. I am thankful that Justin Trudeau driving his car stoned didn’t kill anyone and I didn’t kill anyone even though I now know that people who smoke dope are ‘impaired’ for 36 hours though they feel the effects of marijuana for only a few of those hours. I’m thankful I didn’t hurt anyone except my beautiful ex wife with my unkind words because her drug addiction was so much worse than anything I experienced and I never was understanding of her it mpairment because I was totally caught up in the narcissism that drugs does to self and relationships.  I know today that relationships are the first thing harmed by drugs and that we can’t really know each other when we’re in a parallel play only because our only intimacy is with the ‘drug’.
I suspect there’s a ‘dose ‘ factor. I think there’s a ‘steady state’.  Certainly pharmaceutical medications don’t ‘impair’ like ‘self administered pleasure’ drugs. I don’t suspect there is a ‘low dose’ that can be helpful but that this isn’t like the aspirin where we know the dosage by years of study.  With marijuana it was always ‘good’ weed’ , bad’ weed’ and effects over time. I truly don’t think ‘maui wow’ was ever strong enough to do more than what a beer did but BC Bud is “killer weed’ far more potent than possibly cocaine or tequila.  A regular hallucinogen.  I hope one day that agents like SATIVEX will make dope safe.
But I’m struggling with this right now.  When I hear Truedau speak I could swear he’s had a joint especially when he smirks to himself.
I loath that the Trudeau household was a Maggie filled dope house of second hand smoke when my friends were being put in jail for one joint. I hate the double standard and I’m really struggling with getting old and thinking I may be dependent on institutions like my parents were and have to trust again. Because I stopped trusting 17 years ago when I divorced and I witnessed the worst medical care I’d ever believed possible and saw first hand abuses of power that I never in my life would have thought could occur in Canada and yet were done to me.  I’m lucky to be alive.  God had other plans. I put my living down to the intervention of an unknown female Irish psychiatrist and some Christian doctors who believed in truth and love more than profit and power.
But I’m struggling. A whole PTSD time coming back to me and questions between me and God about prayer and faith and gratitude.  And rumours of war and end days and Freud saying ‘maybe the paranoids are right’ and me thinking really ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’.  And everyone seeming to be smiling their joint like smiles, while  I’m standing on the street during “Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ scene.  The smell of marijuana reeks. I can’t get away from it in Vancouver.  It’s worse than the smell of second hand smoke or stale beer.
I'm hoping for tulips and that this too will pass. I'm hoping that with spring I'll snap out of this and find gratitude. I know I'm needing to deal with resentments and fears and that I have to get my head into the same room as my head. I've got to be thankful. I've got to find a way of seeing this present situation in a way that spiritually makes me a better person. I always remember Dr. Ney, the great anti abortion physician saying, the world is full of bitter people. You have choice.  He'd cry when he heard of more babies being killed.  I see the light going out in the eyes of people when they're on drugs and alcohol. He saw the light going out in the world when a baby was killed because there was no hope and no one cared for life.  Death stalks the earth.  But there is gratitude.  And with an attitude of gratitude there is no room for the darkness, fear and resentment.  That's what Hal Morley told me and Hal was a light in the darkness.
So again I must find gratitude.  Thank you God that I'm alive. The daffodils are out.  Soon the tulips will return.