Wednesday, September 30, 2020

Gilbert died yesterday

I’m better today. Lonely. Lost. Empty. But better. It was such an overwhelming shock to find Gilbert dead.  He died in the morning. When I woke he didn’t join me as he usually did, leading the way from the bedroom down the stairs to the living room. He was lying stretched out in office on the floor. He sometimes liked that. The office was the garage and it’s cooler there. I wasn’t sure if he was a live when I looked at him.  I thought he was breathing. I regret now that I didn’t touch him.  I sat and meditated for a while.  Then I returned and stroked him. He was warm. But stiffening.  I couldn’t feel a pulse. 
He’d been sick. He had heart disease. A murmur from when he was a puppy. A valve disorder that got worse this last year. Dr. Biernacki the vet was treating him with medications, heart and diuretics. He’d had trouble breathing in the altitude when we were up at hundred mile house this spring. We’d come back to lower altitude and his breathing improved.  Some days he wasn’t up to walking very far. The day before he died he’d enjoyed the long walk out to the generator. I’d seen the Kingfisher and taken a photograph. It was auspicious.  When I walked Gilbert on the trail by the river 2 or 3 times a day I’d take my camera in hope of catching a picture of the Kingfisher. It’s such an elusive bird and returns each year.
So it was very spiritual and synchronicity.  He shared my barbecued pork chops.  He preferred steaks but I’d cubed the chops and we had our meal together. Then he brought me his ball and I threw it by his feet. He loved ball but blind he still played it only he took longer finding it.  It was a fairly typical night.  Him sleeping and visiting. Me rubbing his head. Petting him.  Watching tv.  Going to bed.  He slept under the overhang of the mattress. It’s a king and it made an overhang so he had a little cave.  
Now I’m alone.
I was shocked at how hard it hit.  I cried all morning, most of the day, and then again today.  Seeing his picture does it. He has this great little smile. He barked so happily.  He always wanted to play. He was so thusiastic even after he hurt his back, lost his eyes to glaucoma, and then was slowed right down by congestive heart disease.
After I took him to the vet for cremation it was all I could do to pick him up from the floor, put him on the couch, wait some more and eventually get him into the car.  I’d traded the Miata sports car we’d loved for the Mini Cooper because after he hurt his back and was blind I wanted him to be able to stretch out in the back seat. Laura sat up front and he lay in the back. We drove down to the Oregon beaches and he ran and ran. I thought the memory would free him. After losing his second eye and becoming totally blind he’d been quite terrified and really depressed. That’s when I sold the car I loved and planned the trip. It all took only a month or two.  It was worth it to see him happy again running on the beach. 
He’d sailed with me on the SVGiri, my 40 foot ship, I’d sailed solo to Hawaii with through winter storms. Stuart, my Scotty and Angel, the cat had been on that trip. Stuart died overseas.  Angel would be Gilbert’s second mommy. Laura was his first. When I brought Gilbert back from Washington as a little handful of puppy, we’d stayed the first weeks at Laura’s apartment with him.  He graduated to living on the boat and later became a sailor dog, sailing all over the islands of the strait of Georgia. That’s where he learned the fun of beaches, going a shore in dinghies.  Later he’d be a biker dog, riding on my Harley, long trips to the interior, a favourite weekend in a pup tent at Merrit to hear Burton’s Cummings.
He’d fly in the plane with me on all my trips to Ottawa and Hay Bay. He met my dad and my brother and was great friends with them. A true inspiration. He made Dad laugh so hard with his squirming and licking. Dad called him ‘monkey dog’ and was always interested in his adventures. He sure had those,  He loved being with my brother and his cousins, the cockapoo girls, Eva and Pepper. They were such a crew running about the house at Hay Bay.
He hunted with me. I wanted him to find my partridge that I shot and he did. Wounded the birds sometimes hide and he would always find them .He even fetched them back to me, learning this on his own. He was such a great companion hunting. Riding along in the trucks, going for long walks, sitting quietly in ambush.  So alert. So involved. Such a happy hunting buddy.  
I loved his jumping up on the couch and cuddling when I was watching t.v. Partly that was an excuse to look for crumbs. He loved the stick after we’d eaten the ice cream bar.
There were so many things he liked. He invented his little games and rituals too. He’d bring me the ball to throw when he was blind and that was a cue so he could eat his little Caesar.  He’d take a bone outside and bring another back in. He couldn’t go out at night to pee without that bone.  
I’m crying to think of him gone.
I felt his presence,
I walked the trail we walked and I felt him telling me my body was my first dog and that it was his friend and he’d walked it and now I must walk and exercise it. That was his lesson, he said He thanked me for walking and looking at his favourite places. He said he could see now and he could run full out without pain or fatigue. He was with my dad and they were having fun.  Dad would be throwing sticks and giving him treats.  But he wanted to thank me for looking at the places where he’d liked the smells and stopped to pee. He said he could see through my eyes and was thankful.  I know he’s better now and in a better place but I’m lonely and sad, and quite bereft.
So much of my life decisions revolved around having a dog. I walked him twice a day. We made trips to dog parks. I fed him twice a day and got treats to bring home. He loved to look in all the shopping bags. Where I live was always with consideration of him and his enjoyment. I travelled with him.
When I didn’t travel with him I could only leave him with perfect people. There was always Laura , his mommy, Joanne and Hannah, then Belinda. I just couldn’t go away without knowing he was safe. I knew how much I admired someone by the way I’d trust them with Gilbert. I didn’t like anyone who didn’t like Gilbert or who Gilbert didn’t like. I trusted his opinion more than my own at times. He was such a sensible easy going big hearted little guy but he had his limits.  
I’d liked that my former dog Shinto, a cross Irish setter springer spaniel was such a tough country dog. I loved that he beat up a collie that tried to attack us.  Gilbert was a lover and I protected him.  I never expected him to protect me. I devoted myself to protecting him. He was first a therapy dog, then a companion, then a hunting dog, a sailing dog, a biker and a little special meaning. 
When Covid struck he kept me going. When I felt life wasn’t worth living I knew I had to live to care for Gilbert. I couldn’t give up or suicide because I needed to get his food. I needed to work to give him a place to stay.  I loved him more than myself at times.  I loved him more than people.  I’d prefer his company to most peoples. I’ve gotten old with him. It’s been 10 years. That’s as long as my two marriages lasted and he was never mean or deceitful or wanting to hurt me.  Sure he’d want to go one way on the leash and I’d want to go the other way and I had the leash and we’d go where I wanted to go.  I expect that summed up the problems in my marriages pretty well but he never held resentments. He forgave me.  He didn’t ever give up.  He died. I didn’t want him to die. 
Now I’m even more alone in Covid.  
I don’t feel I can get close to people. I have a special friend.  I love her as much as I can love. I believe my divorces, the loss of family and all the death and disease and betrayal I’ve known has hardened my heart so I can’t trust people or myself. I trusted Gilbert. He softened my heart. My heart just burst sometimes to see him and be with him. I laughed so hard at his antics. 
When he first saw a cow as a puppy, he was so afraid barking furiously.  The cow ignored him, turned, lifted her tail and began to emit a steady stream of poop.   Gilbert caught the sweet fragrance, ran directly into the rapidly growing cow paddy pond, and began showering with glee under the cows ass revelling in poop. I was terrified the cow would step back on the little guy so ran after him to catch the wet stinky squirmy guy as the cow moved off.  
Another  joyful moment came when he found a dead fish on the way to the Miata, Monday morning, and began rolling in dead fish. He was in such ecstasy I had to grab him by the collar and pull him away from the rankest smelling refuse I’d ever known. He was experience beautification and ccouldn’t understand my interrupting his communion with God. With the sports car top down in winter I drove him to a dog groomer and physically left him running as she screamed at me holding fingers to her nose that she couldn’t possibly take him.  He was wholly nonplussed.  Couldn’t understand human drama. 
Now I miss him.  It’s getting better. I am able to work. I’m thankful that. I lost all capacity to compartmentalizations my feelings yesterday. Now it’s a dull ache and this empty space in my present and future. Already I allowed work to make me miss our walk.  I’d make the time with him and now my remember what he told me and make the time for my body, his friend, what I have left today.  He was my personal trainer along with all the other titles he held.
Laura is missing him too. We both are grieving. He was so much apart of our relationship. All I had to do was hug or cuddle with her and he’d be instantly on the bed scrambling to be apart of the group love. If we wanted privacy we had to tell him to leave.  Cuddles and kisses he was apart of and with him squirming and laughing our hugs were sublime. When i think of him I think of laughter.  Stoicism too. He’d be so serious on the hunt and at sea but when it came to fun and glee he was all for it. 













Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Gilbert

Gilbert died this morning. He hadn’t bounded up to greet me.  He was yong still in the office.I thought he was breathing.  I waited.  I touched him later. I thought he was just tired.  He was stiff. He wasn’t breathing. Rigor Mortis was setting in. He was still warm. I petted him.  He was present. Now I don’t know. I’ve wrapped him in the Scottish towel. I held him on my lap. I’ve cried. I keep crying. I know it’s for me. I keep thinking he’ll bounce up and cuddle.He liked to lick my neck. I loved his cold wet nose.
We walked last night. In the forest, on the river trail.  The long walk to the green generator.  He sniffed a lot.  I saw the Kingfisher.  I finally got a picture. That was special.  We walked home.  He was happy. He always was a happy dog. 
He had lost his eyes to glaucoma a few years back.  First one then the other 6 months later.  He was lost and devastated till I took him to the beaches of Oregon and he ran. I loved when he ran.
We hunted together when he had his sight. He found the grouse I shot. He raised them too. I loved when he brought back a
The downed grouse, helping me. I’d not taught him to retrieve. He just did it on his own.  Then I shot a deer. He ran so hard chasing the falling deer. He jumped right on the antlered head trying to rise. The weight of my little cockapoo was too much. His head fell back and he died.Twice, Gilbert helped me kill a deer. He once even followed a blood trail. Always he kept me company in the woods and elsewhere. 
He sailed with me. He and Angel, the cat, in the SV Giri.
Mostly he liked to ride in his carrier box on the back of my Harley.Gilbert, the biker dog.  He came  to work with me every day.  He’d greet patients.  
Laura was his mother.
When I brought him home as a mere handful from the States, we kept him in her apartment house training him together the first weeks.  I’d carry him in an over the shoulder baby pouch to work on the motorcycle. He had a helmet and goggles at one time but didn’t like them.  He rode in the side car when I had the Russian motorcycle. In the woods he rode of the back of the quad, or in the side by side Pioneer. He preferred the Ford truck though. He liked his comforts.
He sailed.  Running up and down the deck. Sleeping at the head of my berth in the cabin.  Cuddling beside me on the couch.
He’d ride in the truck in the front seat standing with his head out the window or in the back seat lying on the luggage.
He liked to sleep with his legs stretched out behind him.He was so cute.
He always liked to fetch ball. He loved to play with other dogs too. Never aggressive but he’d stand his ground to defend.
He liked the beef little cesars.  He like little stick chews. He loved the mini milk bone treats and the Princeton Liver Jerky treats and little Edam cheese.  I’d share my barbecued steak with him.
When Angel, the cat, was alive they were best of friends. We all share barbecued Safeway chickens on special nights. Angel thought of herself as his mommy too.When George, the cat, was alive,  he and Gilbert became best of buddies. George was a rescue cat, traumatized, a scaredy cat. Gilbert got him out of himself. Gilbert brought George who was hiding under the couch a ball until one day George joined Gilbert and played with the ball together. Later, They shared the chicken ritual together.  George didn’t sing like Angel did when I played guitar. Gilbert liked my singing and guitar. He liked when I read poetry and prose to him as well. He was really sad when Angel died, then Dad, and the George and George and my brother. Now he’s dead. He died in his sleep. 
“Gilbert’s a good dog!”  I said that over and over again. He is such a good dog.
Now he’s at Rainbow Bridge.
My father loved him and called him “monkey dog’.  Gilbert loved to jump up on Dad’s lap and squirm about licking Dad’s face and ears. The two of them would laugh and play. I know they’re reunited in heaven . My brother loved him too an they’re together.  Gilbert’s  cousins are the two cockapoo girls, Eva and Pepper, with my nephews. They loved to play with Gilbert when he visitted Hay Bay.
I know Gilbert’s  waiting for me at Rainbow Bridge.
I’m so lost, alone and bereft. I don’t know how I’m going to carry on. There’s been so much death and loss in this life.  Yet it’s been a good life.  I don’t know what I’ll do. My life revolved around Gilbert as his revolved around me. He helped me be a better person.  He took me for walks. He reminded me to eat. He reminded me to sleep. We loved the outdoors together.  We loved other people who loved dogs. He was such a good judge of character.  
The Bishop blessed him.
He flew with me in planes. He sat in church with me. He worked with me as my therapy dog in my offices and clinics. He kept my spirits up. I really believe his back injury, blindness and finally his heart disease, the valvular fault and expanding heart and congestive heart failure were all the hits he took for me. Spiritually he was my guardian. Just as in life he was my protector, protecting us from wild animals when we stayed in tents, alerting me to all manner of things, in the wilderness or  when we were in the city in our home.  He was always another set of ears and a presence to contend with. 
 He could be ferocious. He was always so courageous. Mostly, he was just so loving, kind and good hearted. He was such a happy little, good spirited dog.
My cousin Wayne had a cockapoo that sat in the truck with him. I met Wayne’s cockapoo and listened to Wayne sing his dog’s praises. Now that’s what I’m doing. Singing Gilbert’s praises .  Dog of Dogs. A real prince. Gilbert Hay. I named him after Sir Gilbert Hay of the Hay Clan and the Poet, Gilbert Hay.
I don’t know how I’m going to go on without you.Gilbert was ‘such a good boy!’






















Saturday, September 26, 2020

Venables

I just walked down Commercial buying an Rembrandt pattern umbrella for myself and a cow handled umbrella for Laura.  In the Britannia square a mother from the forensic youth service was with her daughter selling masks. I confess, I bought several as gifts.  I loved the fabric designs, sci fi, animals, fish.  They were selling them for $10 or 3 for $25. I’d almost bought one in a store but balked when she told me the price was $17.  This exchange was all very community market and more fun.
I’m still waiting for my Vespa and annoyed at Covid. I have twice walked down Commercial past the excellent tattoo parlours and been unable to book a ‘walk in’.  By appointment only.  Half the sailors would never have had tattoos if they had time to sober up. I’ve been wanting a simple little navigator compass for over a year.  My Chamorrhan navigator tattoo took me a couple of years to get from the time I was encouraged too. 
When my ‘trick ankle’ wouldn’t seem to heal after the awkward motorcycle stop I had the barbed wire tattoo superstitiously warding off evil spirits. Anything to stop the recurrent twisting collapse.  It worked, personal placebo therapy at it’s finest.  The only trouble is Dr. Graeme Cunningham, seeing me at a conference, asked if I’d taken up pole dancing as a side gig. He’s a great wit. I didn’t tell him I’d turned down a pole dancing gig at a gay club in London in the early 70’s.  I just worried I might need to escape and there I’d be running naked through a foreign city.  Today I worry enough about getting a deer I shoot out of the woods without having to consider how my back would handle a pole.  I tried the Pussy doll work out and was humbled to find my ‘booty” doesn’t shake.  I can’t hoopla hoop either.  For a former champion athlete and dancer I am acutely aware of aging but thankful for all the capacity that remains. 
Walking today Clarke to Commercial and now back is a real treat. I love walking.  The real joy of travelling has been walking about cities. I loved doing this with Laura in Dublin, New York and Rome. I so enjoy seeing my friend Barb’s pictures of her walking tours of foreign cities. With Covid I’m thankful to enjoy Vancouver. Commercial Drive’s “Little Italy” is as close as I can get now. When Covid is over and the world is no longer at war I long to return to Italy, Ireland and Scotland. The beautiful and brilliant, Brazilian and Chilean women I know have so often waxed poetic about their homeland I long to travel there too. This is especially after Don posted his pictures of his travels in South America last year. Right now he’s in Lake Louise living the life with her RV and Harley. 
It was great seeing Jackie on Commercial. I forget that I’ve lived in Vancouver so long and been involved in the community that there is this added pleasure of the city, the people. In foreign cities there’s little likelihood of meeting people you’ve known for decades.  I’m blessed to know a whole range of folk with the best and sometimes the naughtiest of humor.
I reflect on spirituality a lot. My God has a great sense of humor. Thanks to Carolyn I’m reading the Ethical Slut, a therapists take on polyamory and a libertarian approach to sexuality. Anthropologists describe North America as serial monogamy. I just read a book on culture and DNA with the lessons of ancient history. The ideal of the original Asian and African cultures was the Big Chief and the Harem. That changed of course over the centuries but it was noted that ‘monogamy’ originated in the ‘indo european’ Caucasian cultures in the area of present day Persia.  Without consideration of what’s better or worse, the variety of sexual arrangements of humans has been as great as that of birds who learned their proclivities from the dinosaurs.  
Children love stability and the monogamy of the Bible was the family that proved such a threat to the STate and was the backbone of modern civilizations.  The whole issue of jealousy and envy and the legal industry of divorce and hate is a whole separate issue.  Divorce is thousands of years old but the children have not been subjected as they are today to the vagaries of a self serving patriarchal legalistic entity fundamentally abusive of family. Marx and Engles hated the family and rather liked the female unit as an available sex objcct. In the Marxist LBGT community the term ‘breeder’ is used rather nastily in reference to the ‘mother’ which remains most celebrated in Christianity.
I like the ‘ethics’ in this book.  If you succeeded in having family and monogamy, what I believe is an ideal then I truly believe we should reward and celebrate those people. However I’m single and childless and there’s many like me so what are the options. The Ethical Slut certainly discusses them all.  Having been punished despicably for marriage, my friends who refused to involve the ‘state’ in their affairs, men and women, by contrast rewarded, I don’t see marriage as a likely future.  I can’t say. It’s a possibility but singly I’ve seen marriage as an institution for ‘children’ and ‘family’.  When I was in a childless marriage I observed that our life was closer to that of gay couples than it was to that of families.  Today I live with a dog and have a very special friend.  More and more I see older people having similiar relationships that are reminiscent of the adolescence.
Given viagra and cialis sales and the fortunes made in skin products there’s a sense that some of increasingly ‘beating a dead’ horse. I’m feeling like the others of my age surprisingly young and alive and unencumbered by a need to define or think in terms of lifetimes. I’m happy to wake each day alive and then set out to have as good a life as I can serving God, my fellows, and myself.  
Now I’m going to walk back to Vespametro and hope my darling little ride is ready for new adventures.  




Starbucks on Hastings

I stopped at Ralf’s Radio on Venables. They’ve moved. I had to replace the charger for my Iridium Extreme Satellite phone.  Amazing device. When my mast broke midway in the Pacific I was able to use it to get advice on a jury rig.  The coverage is much more extensive now than when I first got the phone a decade back.  I just needed some more minutes for BC. I’d not even used my last package a few years back but always felt better having it out hunting with me.  Now I’ve a satellite phone and a ham radio 2 meter.  We’ve got a week’s vacation and I’ll be up in the mountains alone. I never thought it at all when I was hunting alone in my 30’s, 40’s and 50’s but now I’m a whimp.  I don’t want to be lying in the woods waiting days to be found should something bad happen. I don’t think it will which is why I have insurance policies. I think of insurance as the means to avoid negatives. 

It’s a bit twisted, but I really believe if I didn’t have insurance, bad things would happen. I was indoctrinated in cub scouts and Boy Scouts,  “Be prepared.’  So sailing alone at sea I had a life raft and emergency survival container to grab but never needed them. Thank God. 

Ralf’s has done my car and truck stereos over the decades. Great company. Great people. Lee must be getting near as old as I am.  This young Julius Roye was incredibly helpful. Turns out the reason my charger was hooped was because of the abuse I gave the connection.  There’s a simple solution and hopefully I can avoid having to buy another one any time soon. Despite the overcast which used to ruin iridium reception completely in the past, Jules was able to call Ralf’s on my phone. I now have to charge it fully and enter new phone contacts. A couple of my emergency contacts have died so they really need to be replaced. 

At Vespa, they’re short a technician again.  Same happened last time but with Covid, even a minor cold means workers stay home.  Be Safe. I’m still waiting but at least I could leave the bread I’d bought in my Vespa boot.  

That’s how I’m here at Starbucks.  Trying to avoid washrooms by drinking a double espresso this time rather than an Americano.  Washrooms are the greatest risk for covid so I’m sure to wear a mask in them and wash my hands with soap and use my elbows to open door. If I do touch anything I clean my hands with the little hand sanitizer I carry in my bag.  

Laura is with Gilbert. I sent her a copy of the video I got when her motion triggered security.  It shows the little guy jumping up and down running in circles because she’s arrived. I’m superfluous when she’s around.  I enjoy watching her mothering in action. Mother and Grandmother and dog mom, she actually pays attention to all his little games and activities. I figure he’s blind so I keep reading or doing whatever I’m doing while throwing him his ball or giving him partial attention. She gives him her undivided attention.  

A friend told me her breasts cost $7500.  Amazing.  I told her that they’ve probably doubled in value since she got them 10 years ago. Indeed I thought there might well be a possible resale in silicone inserts.  Given the amount of money the old clothes of Elvis and Elton John sold for, the possibilities for women in old age wanting to pay for nursing homes expenses is a consideration. I’d be impressed with a girl who said “these used to be Marilyn’s  or “Rita Hayworth’s. In a sci fi future every body part will be replaceable. Already Xi Jinping is harvesting the body parts from the millions in his gulags today.  Macabre times.  I read heroin addicts in Africa sell one kidney for drugs.  Thankfully with stem cell advances we already can grow skin and organs.  I’m ready for so new parts, my lower back could be replaced for one. My ears aren’t what they used to be which is made more obvious by all the Covid masks.  

If our government wouldn’t waste so much money on frivolous low brow Trudeau shit then we’d have more scientific advances appropriate for the 21st century. It’s the 21st century.  We don’t need more abortion clinics. Killing babies has been something we’ve done as a species for hundreds of thousands of years.  Today we have the capacity to put people on Mars and the Moons of Jupiter. But instead we have a Luddite Pretty Boy playing silly hoax games and criticizing the Columbus’ for saying there’s a new land  just waiting out there. Buckminster Fuller showed that the sea habitat would be a marvellous place for condos and that there was infinite energy and solutions if you could think beyond your pelvis.  He spends money like there’s no tomorrow but won’t support the energy sector where genius really does reside.  

I actually liked waiting for the Vespa as it got me walking on Commercial, having brunch at Havana and getting my phone fixed at Ralf’s. Now I’m wanting be home. I’d go back but there’s no place to sit there. Here I fill guilty now having overstayed the unspoken ‘time’ one gets with a coffee.  There are only a few seats available. So far no one has been mulling about but I’m feeling a need to pee. Covid concerns.  Time to move along.  



Havana on Commercial

I dropped my Vespa 300 Touring at Vespa Metro Service to fix the tail light I’d banged against the Osprey Lake picnic table. It was spitting on my ride into town and still threatens to rain. I walked up Hastings to Commercial enjoying the exercise.
Yolks and Red Wagon, popular Vancouver breakfast spots already had line ups. I was thankful to get a veranda seat at Havanna’s.  It’s one of the great Vancouver restaurants. I’ve definitely enjoyed brunch here often over the years, people watching on the Drive, meeting with friends.  When I was younger and actually dined out a lot this was one of my favourite places for food and ambience.  It’s very uptown downtown Commercial
My Chorizo Hash has arrived and it looks delicious, smells delicious and I’m sure will taste delicious. 

That was perfect.  Hot but not too hoot. The waitress, Brittney, was terrific too. Never once asked me, any question, when my mouth was full.  Offered more coffee.  Wearing a mask in Covid but speaking up for my old ears.  Background music, just the right volume and not offensive. Not Handel or Bach.  More disco but still brunch appropriate. I actually didn’t notice it till I finished my Chorizo with poached eggs.  I was simply relishing the delicious meal. Not my own cooking. Such a change with Covid having closed the restaurants.  Going out to eat now, with less crowding and the lingering novelty is such a delight.

Havana is again the best. What a great culinary experience!  What wonderful service and marvellous ambience.  Enjoyed the other diner’s too. The ever special Commercial Drive experience.









Havana on Commercial

I dropped my Vespa 300 Touring at Vespa Metro Service to fix the tail light I’d banged against the Osprey Lake picnic table. It was spitting on my ride into town and still threatens to rain. I walked up Hastings to Commercial enjoying the exercise.
Yolks and Red Wagon, popular Vancouver breakfast spots already had line ups. I was thankful to get a veranda seat at Havanna’s.  It’s one of the great Vancouver restaurants. I’ve definitely enjoyed brunch here often over the years, people watching on the Drive, meeting with friends.  When I was younger and actually dined out a lot this was one of my favourite places for food and ambience.  It’s very uptown downtown Commercial
My Chorizo Hash has arrived and it looks delicious, smells delicious and I’m sure will taste delicious. 

That was perfect.  Hot but not too hoot. The waitress, Brittney, was terrific too. Never once asked me, any question, when my mouth was full.  Offered more coffee.  Wearing a mask in Covid but speaking up for my old ears.  Background music, just the right volume and not offensive. Not Handel or Bach.  More disco but still brunch appropriate. I actually didn’t notice it till I finished my Chorizo with poached eggs.  I was simply relishing the delicious meal. Not my own cooking. Such a change with Covid having closed the restaurants.  Going out to eat now, with less crowding and the lingering novelty is such a delight.

Havana is again the best. What a great culinary experience!  What wonderful service and marvellous ambience.  Enjoyed the other diner’s too. The ever special Commercial Drive experience.






Thursday, September 24, 2020

Thursday, Covid times, Communist China deploys destroyers

I just walked Gilbert in the rain for his morning constitutional. Two mornings in a row now he‘s turned around in the trail and headed back unwilling to do his business in the hard pouring rain. Yesterday when the rain stopped in the evening he agreed to face the outdoors. It‘s that bad.  Really heavy rain. Good for trees. Good for firefighters.
I am working from home. Video and cell phone connections.  9 to 5 or 6 and I‘m exhausted.  I talk to others working from home and it‘s definitely tiring in a different way that working from the office.  There‘s a loneliness in the day.  I miss people but don‘t miss the commutes and feel safe and secure in doors.
A little more than a month to the world election. Trump versus Xi Jinping.  America versus the Sharia Communism of the China Islam UN blocks.  Europe has fallen hostage to the oil of the east and the markets.  Trudeau sold Canada cheap to China and now the news from the Communist Broadcasting Corporation is constant propaganda.  I tried listening to the radio on the weekend but couldn‘t stomach that wretched I‘m superior and I‘m informing you what to think of the CBC radio persona‘s working their ‚perception management ‚ scams.
I had a really good time off schedule at Osprey Lake.  Laura and I are planning a fall vacation with Gilbert in the Princeton region. Finding a RV park open with running water electricity and wifi wasn‘t easy. So many close Oct. 1.  I explored the area near wear we‘d be. Decade, I guess, I was up there with Luke, Tom and Sonny.  I hope the weather is still warm enough I can use the Vespa. I expect I‘ll be getting about in the truck though
I read that China has made aggressive fly overs of Taiwan. They‘ve deployed new destroyers in the China Seas.  They‘ve invaded Hong Kong arresting leading citizens. They‘ve still not withdrawn from India which they invaded months back.

Proverbs 27. Faithful are the wounds of a friend but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful. 

I am a spiritual being living in a material world. I am the bubble make me the sea.  In the beginning was the Word.

‚But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus.  Philippians 4:19

I have an abundant life but I have a fearful mind.  I am thankful that CBT, cognitive behavioural therapy, taught me that I tend to catastrophize.  I repeat the prayer , „all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well , whenever I catch myself having negative thoughts.  I am thankful for Brother Lawrence teaching the practice of the presence of God, Baba Ram Dass‘s ‚be here now‘ and Ekart Tolle‘s Power of Now.  I liked it being simplified for me by a young army sgt in Chilliwack. ‚Get your head in the same room as your ass is.

I will do my best today to be of service to my fellow man and to God of my understanding

I am thankful for all the blessings I know. Thank you Jesus.  













Wednesday, September 23, 2020

Rainy Morning

Rain on the roof was kind of scarey. Harbinger of the fall wet season with flu and Covid.  Thankful that dog is sleeping in.  I will have to walk him eventually but hopping rain will let up. Yes, all you virtue signalling, God made me sheriff, I’m offended today, people, I thought about the trees. I am thankful for the forests getting rain. I love the green but the forest fires are poor forest management because of Greed Climate Change policy and leftist arsons.  
I’m irritable this morning. I am planning another coffee. That’s all it takes to move my mood into the positive. I’m thankful that I’m older and wiser. When I was younger I needed coffee and cigarettes and a hot shower but then I was on call for years and lived with shifts and nights and decades of disrupted sleep. I life to play the tough biker guy especially around the criminals but my own bad binges were at most a few years out of 50 of hard work and service. I took a year off and was on a crazy sailing sebbatical with a drug addicte woman who was always lying and trying to kill me.  I have nightmares of going off the bow wave of an oil tanker or the night she drunk insisted on driving and drove my side of the car into a wall full speed.  I wouldn’t have minded but I was always to blame. Chivalry took a long time to die allowing the communist feminists to take advantage of existing systems and ideas established for mothers not woman hating girls who wanted to rule men. 
I am alive today.  I’m clean and sober. I pray all day. In the background of my mind when it says all’s lost or catastrophises I remember being alone in the eye of a hurricane knowing I’d come through this far and had to come out the other side. The other side was easier.  I’ve done the uphill and I’m on the downhill. I’m thankful.  I shiver with rain. I’ve spent too long in arctic weather. I long for tropical beaches but really enjoy Canada except maybe two months less winter.  I dream of having the ‘Priviledge’ of Quebec where the snowbirds winter in Florida because the mafia has arrangements between the two governments.  
I am thankful.  With an attitude of gratitude there is no room for fear or resentment.  I’m thankful that my dog is alive today. He was so quiet this morning I thought he was dead. He’s old and sick but happy. I was thankful for yesterday because I felt I helped some. I was thankful that on the weekend it did’t rain and I was able to hunt in the mountains on my Vespa with blue skies and sunshine.  I’m thankful today that I work from home. I’m thankful that there’s no new calamity of 2020 today.  China did release videos of exercises attacking US bases but their naval ‘exercise’ ‘invasion of Taiwan has ended. They’ve still got 20,000 troops in India but after killing 20 Indian soldiers haven’t advanced further.  
The world election is closer.  America or China. Trump or Xi Jinping.  Dictator communism , sharia socialism or more of the same capitalism and freedom and human rights. Canada’s been infiltrated at all levels of media, government and education by Communist Chinese Military operatives.  Free land is an operative of George Soros. Trudeau like his father has sworn allegiance to Communist China but as well on his own has sworn allegiance to Islam.  It’s odd being in Canada as all that was ‘Canadian’ is destroyed.
Here though I have dry, heat, running water, electricity, light, and the rain has lightened up. A shower and a quick constitutional walk for Gilbert and I’ll be ready for another day of work.  There’s so much pressure, so much despair, so much anger and fear.  I’m thankful I’ve been able to comfort and ease the pain and reassure.  The lies of media and Ottawa are frightening.  This too will pass. All will be revealed.  
I’m interested that I don’t take much comfort in myself being relatively okay while others are suffering so much more.  The ‘prisoner’s dilemna’ comes to mind. I like it when I’m a head but I don’t like it when I see others falling behind. I want us all to win though in my heart of hearts I want to win a little more but not so another loses greatly. I remember the developmental stage when that changed. It was adolescence. I saw that I didn’t like others suffering. It’s not surprising I became a healer.  It’s so much more challenging to save rather than destroy. I’d be good as a killer and I’d do well as a winner in those games people play but I like to struggle with God and fate and save a life that was meant for death.  
Now it’s the overdose deaths in the fentanyl crisis.  All these kids doing skydiving for the poor and the harm reduction folk trying to fashion parachutes.  Meanwhile a whole other group is saying take up water skiing.  
I’m just in the middle. Stuck in the middle with you. Thank you Jesus. 



Monday, September 21, 2020

Horse Lake, Tuesday

Yesterday was a cool overcast day with showers. Today there’s blue sky and white fluffy clouds. It’s already warm.  I’ve just returned from a long walk with Gilbert. He was so excited this morning when I lifted him up on the bed to be with Laura. He’s had his medications wrapped in bits of roast beef. 
I have nothing to say but will speak anyway. Everyday is a relationship with God. I’m talking with God, listening for God, watching synchronicities.  In my dreams I was with lovers, long conversations, like we had as adolescents. Now we are careful as adults. Offence is easy. The world is in rage.  As youth we sought commonality. Now they look for differences to pounce upon. 
I saw a deer crossing the road this morning and a lone mallard drake in the playing field. Fishermen were heading out in their boats. I was thinking of coffee. No real plans in my heavily unscheduled day.  Fishing I believe. Target practice perhaps. Drinking coffee and reading for sure.  This vacation is rapidly returning me to those idyllic days on the boat in the Sea of Cortez. Nothing happening. Or the times on the homestead when feeding the chickens was so grounding and uplifting.  I was so fortunate to know pet geese as guard geese. 
When I was young I wore names like champion, genius, intellectual, husband, professor. Today I look around the park at all the old guys and know they’ve had their collection of names. Mostly they tell me their favourite is father or grandfather. Yesterday was Father’s Day.  BLM didn’t even acknowledge it. All the fatherless son’s afraid of their mothers. 
I miss my Dad. We’d be out fishing by now. He was a pragmatist. A William James of the 20th Century.  Wisdom came with doing. As kids we followed behind him climbing hills, trekking through forests. I never cease to wonder at the foods he’d give us to eat as we struggled to keep up. ‘Rosehips,’ he said and we dutifully chewed on them as we walked.
My favourite time was catching pickerel in Northern Saskatchewan. After we’d caught our limit,  he beached  the aluminum boat wit the 5 hp Johnson outboard on the sand, cleaned the fish, filleted them and in the pan he always seemed to have fried them up in butter. They tasted so good that to this day some 60 years later my mouth waters with the memory.  Sunny days sitting in boats or on the sides of a lake with my Dad.  Endless blue skies.
When we drove long distances, he’d sing the one song he seemed to know,  “Home, home on the Range, where the deer and the antelope roam, where seldom is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day.”  Mom would always be laughing.
The coffee tastes especially good this morning. I’ve switched from a machine espresso to a stove top espresso maker. There’s an art in grinding the Ethiopian coffee beans just right.
My mind is like a ping pong game sometimes.  This morning coffee was playing against fishing and coffee won. Sometimes it’s a pin ball machine with a pinball of thought bouncing off all the barriers.  Each day I’m here the cacophony of the city’s anthill of intruding thought stills. I’m so conscious of the pressure of congregated sentience in the city and how in the country self is freer.  I feel the expansion and safety in looseness. I remembered that feeling living on the acreage.  Now it’s returning.  I love that feeling. Expanding and contracting consciousness.  I love flying dreams as well.  I love the freedom of movement in dreams and imagine those in wheel chairs and confined to bed love to dream if their conscience is clear.  My grandmother loved to sleep in  her final years in our home. She loved the warmth of the sunshine. Little things.  Learning to pay attention to detail and appreciate the nuances.  I loved the subtleties. When life moves from the solid colours to the pastels. I remember that day I felt the pastels return after the months of reds and blacks. I am so thankful to friends and family.  
Across the way a young mother is playing with some kids, aged three to 6 by appearances. She is blowing bubbles and the kids are chasing them trying to break them.  They are as precious as the god kids or my nephews when they were small.  I knew my nephews as rug rats and now they are amazing men and one has a child with the loveliest lass alive.  When I was young I was so keen to climb mountains, see distant lands, sail across oceans, build igloos, spear fish beneath the sea. It was different then. Not better or worse just so different. The stages of life. I love watching the young today.  My brother coached his kids in soccer and loved watching them grow from stumbling to gangly then to the adult men today whose limbs work like professionals even if they wind much sooner.   Out walking the dog I passed a stooped older guy and enjoyed our few words. . His young  dog was a little boston bull dog that jumped straight up and down on stiff legs when he met Gilbert.  
I once lived in libraries, spent hours exploring old book stores, then the churches and religious art.  The sacred spaces in the city that felt proximate to the  serenity among trees or watching northern lights on the Tundra.
God is all. I am living in the mind stuff and star stuff of collective thought and the programs of God who wrote the language. “In the beginning was the Word.” I so loved John so many years.  The mystical resonated. Like love making without the sweat and grunts.  Moments of distraction and being.  The ‘aha’ times. The days she gave herself to me. Opening like a blossom.  The unequivocal invitations. 

Today’s reading, so applicable,  1 Corinthians 14:33 KJV “For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints”




 

















 

Yolks and Metrovespa

I’m delighted to be alive. I’m sitting outside at Yolks on E.Hastings. I’ve ordered an eggs benny with maple smoked Ham.  I had difficulty hearing the waitress through her mask.  I’ve experienced a decline in my hearing.  I say that it was caused by  ‘guns, rock and roll and ex-wives’.  My taste has improved. Like all elderly , those 10 years or more older than me, I’ve found increasing appreciation of meals. I’m not hungry like I was as an adolescent.  I was athletic then and food was energy I could hardly get enough of with all the dancing, cycling and loving I was doing.   Then there were the ‘yuppie years’ when I really enjoyed food as a side dish to the wine. I was a connosieur then and so enjoyed a  fine Cabernet.  I simply enjoyed them too much over time. 

I’ve just finished the eggs benny which was truly delicious.  Before Covid there would be line ups around the block for Yolks.  I’m trying to look for the positive aspects personally for Covid and getting a seat at Yolks without waiting in line is certainly one..

I just drove into town on my Vespa wearing a jean skirt and sandals.  I’ve left the darling little machine with the delightful folk at Vespametro service. I have perfectly good ‘street’ tires but in a couple of weeks will be in the woods bow hunting so wanted the more gnarly all season tires that are also better in the city in the winter rain.. I love that the Vespa stops the wind when I ride. I don’t have to gear up in armour, jeans and boots. Perhaps it would be safer but I simply have always ridden scooters in street wear, same as I bicycle. I grew up in the era when we didn’t even wear helmets bicycling.  Mostly I’ve ridden scooters in summer with flip flops and tshirts and shorts so I think I’m doing well, wearing a helmet, short leather biker gloves and closed toe sandals. I actually added a jean jacket to that but given the heat forecast for the day I left the jacket with the helmet and gloves in the Vespa luggage box.

Now I’m so enjoying the city.  I had only anticipated a couple of hours but service said it’s likely to be more like four hours because one of their mechanics is off sick.  Suddenly I’m like a ‘free man in vancouver’ to quote Joni Mitchell and change the location from Paris to here. So next stop Commerial with more walking and shopping to do. I left Gilbert at home after taking him for a walk and constitutional.  Given his heart disease it’s good for him to have some down time sleeping. When I’m around he gets up every time I move.  I’m able to watch him with the security camera. When I’m not there he lies in the Masters space on the couch.  

The line up has formed around Yolks. I ordered another capucinno but wouldn’t have if I’d looked up and seen the people waiting but it’s moving right along. They have staggered booths because of Covid.  I’ll have to pee before I leave. Public washrooms are frightening places considering viruses.  At least I have a mask and can wash my hands. It’s just that really, with the closed moist space and metal fixtures, they’re a risky place.  What was I thinking ordering  another cappuccino? But it was so good.




Breasts

My long time fantasy is to have breast implants. Cross dressing is fun in a dress up kind of way. A mundane repetitive activity is improved on by wearing a skirt.  I am aware of my entertainment value. The old guy in a dress. A bit of a Monty Python, Benny Hill meets Eddie Izzard.  A lazy cross dresser. A kind of quiet radical.  I rarely am stared at and frankly find it rude. 
I love children’s stares by contrast. 
“Daddy, that man is dressed like a lady!” A little girl, three or four, pointed me out.
‘Yes, dear,” the father answered smiling
I felt much as I did when I tried nipple piercings for a while and had children at the beach, shouting, “Mommy, the man has rings in his chest.”
“Yes, dear,” the mother had said smiling.
Occasionally an oriental frowns, staring hard at me and appearing to talk to the Lord about the abomination I am. I’m okay with Jesus.  I know that God has bigger matters on his mind than whether I wear a panties and bra and a skirt. I don’t even think God cares what old people do sexually.  Most of us do nothing and our collected self centered ness and personal hedonisms is probably more offensive than the odd ball that gets out and about. 
I fantasized that I’d retire one day and give up the masculine role.  I saw myself flying to Thailand where there’s a very good clinic and having breast implants. I’d not recommend SRS to an older person as risks increase with age. Frankly these matters can be taken in stages. There’s never a rush.  If there’s a rush there’s other matters pushing it. I might die any day and come back reincarnated as the female self I’d be today.  
I argue biblical scholarship and science with friends.  300 ad at the Nicea, Constantinople, outlawed the idea of reincarnation.  We die and are in heaven on clouds playing harps for eternity.  Mark Twain’s, Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven is more my idea of heaven. It’s like C.S. Lewis’ musings and T.S. Elliots play about the afterlife.  I like the mystery that the Catholics espouse.  When I find the spiritual arguing I remember the debates from history of the Churchmen disagreeing on how many angels can fit on the tip of a needle.  
I imagine today that I’d go to Thailand and have breast implants and get a face lift. I’ve had the idea for enough years that the latter has been added in recent years.  It’s an adventure, this adoption of another gender. I feel politically castrated as a man and see no future for myself here.  I was once the wild man that Robert Bly so elegantly described in Ironjohn. I stole the locket of the lady’s hair and listened for decades to the silence of mothers as the daughters condemned all things masculine while themselves imitating all things males.  It was just a change of heads for tails. All the promises of a better world, the rewards of transparency and letting one’s defences down.  Silly for a man to do that. Everything he says in secret shows up in divorce courts and other public forums.
I feel sensual and relaxed in nylons.  Jeans and jackets are for work and war.  Silk is the fabric of relaxation.  I love my Scottish kilts but they are heavy and a bit martial.  The cotton skirts are lighter and more relaxing. I’m just as comfortable in sarongs and shorts. I don’t go to work in the conventional sense, dressing in uniform.  Now I’m happy to dress as a woman would for the office.  Women’s clothings shouts freedom.  Men’s clothing for me has always spoken of work and duty.
I admire mothers.  I don’t feel they’re collectively able to get over their inherent competition on behalf of their own sons.  I miss the Pieta.  So much abortion.  I feel the constant screams in the ether of children turned back by knives and pills.
I don’t believe a man can be a woman simply because the possibility of becoming pregnant, giving birth or having an abortion is never there.  DNA is binary with exceptions. Mutations that are positive are rare.  I’m interested in the Other.  I’m the Twin Spirited one of my native brethren.  We were healers in the ancient tribes.  Our lot are noted for neurosis and high intelligence. I’m the Celtic Druid, poet.  This Celtic class was like the Brahmins of India. I feel stuff. Being empathic is overrated.  Peoples emotions are always shouting at me like a cacophony of sounds. The duplicity is voluminous.  
I’m waiting now at the gateway to passing over. I’ve done my four score and seven and then some.  I contributed. I worked in the areas of greatest need.  I tried my best to be conventional, to have a family, to fit in.  I did my duty ,and then some. I’ve fulfilled my promises only to see the authorities break all theirs.  
The communists kill the men and rape the women.  The old are left to die in poverty.  They are offered MAid or nursing homes with bed bugs and covid, bedsores and  overworked staff. We are already seeing the redistribution of wealth. The workers of this era are punished as their pensions and savings are taken to be given to the politics of the fringe, those who have already given their freedom for a free meal.
The old man, a sniper and survivalist, would have to campaign and fight his final years in protests and rallies, shouting against the rank dismissal and abuse of the loyal elderly whereas as a woman I can take delight in little things.  Like King Lear I can sit with girls and chat about court things. I love to write poetry, compose songs, cook. I’d like to exercise more and get rid of this office chair waist. I can sit in offices doing the work I do in silks and satins. I don’t need to wear cammo.  I like the idea of serving and helping but I’d also like to play more and take things less seriously. I don’t want the worries of mothers, grandmothers, fathers and grandfathers, watching their childern’s futures being taken by the minute and hours and days and years. I am single and alienated and alone.  I would rather be with the girls and be gay.  


 

Childless

“Everything is a blessing and curse.” The mother said. “It’s what you make of it.”
I had told her of my marriage and desire for children and now old I felt empty and betrayed.
“Feeling empty is a normal part of aging. We give our all till we areall used up. Feeling betrayed is altogether different,” she said.

He remembered her singing the song ‘she’s a young girl and she’ll never leave her mother.”  His name was Billy and the girls had teased him when young.  “I don’t want a child,” she said, after the marriage, “It would hurt my figure.”  She was vain but it really was an excuse.  She was a physical coward and caring of others but totally terrified at the prospect of her own illness and mortality.  He felt betrayed. He’d married for children. Marriage was an institution for family. He’d worked three jobs and supported her as a princess.  

“You know who has power because they are the one’s you cannot criticize’, his older European friend liked to say.
“You can’t criticize girls, women without children, but you can criticize mothers. God knows, to my shame,I criticized my own.”

“Or blacks today,” she added.  “Or Jews, or aboriginals. Or Gays.  Muslims for sure. Or poor people.  “Anyone with a ‘card’, the ‘get out of jail free’  card. Or ‘it’s not my fault. It’s somebody else’s fault. And you’re a hater, if you blame me. “ She laughed as she mimicked the whine of the unaccountable.  “They are special and I don’t, mean wear a helmet special, but special in society.  The courts and real power back them, not you.”

“Single women, childless women,” they have that card.” I said.

“Yes, but only when they’re young.”  She added. “Older they are pitied.  Older the mothers who have had a good life, chosen good men and raised their children well, with respect and values. They are successful and know the happiness within that good works bring. They know they could have remained single, refused to have children, blamed men for everything, remained little girl children and refused to grow up. But they’ve made the sacrifices.  They’ve done the hard work.  They don’t envy the false bravado and loneliness of their sisters.  There’s nothing like being a good mother and they know it.”

“I believe the fathers do too.  The grandfather’s are especially happy as great Cheshire cats who know the sacrifices they made and older,  reap the reward.”he laughed .

It was evening and the light was falling.  Outside men were starting fires in fire pits. There was a loon on the lack .  It could have as easily been an outdoor cafe by a busy city street. Their conversations occurred everywhere.  Men and women, older, reflecting.

“No praise, no blame, no regrets.” I said. “It was the motto of the eastern philosopher.  I lived by it when I was younger but I was blamed. I received no praise for my decades of service. I kept these women in wealth.  Other’s envied me because they worked but I worked two to three times as hard bringing  home two thirds of the money and doing most of the work of building and maintenance.  I was husband and wife. She chatted with her mother and talked with her girlfriends and watched tv.  She looked pretty. She did her job. No different from me but she got all the praise at work whereas I didn’t. We had to be so much better to be acknowledged whereas she was pretty and bright.   At first she certainly engaged in sex before the marriage. After was a different story.  You know what they say about wedding cake.” I said. 

“Yes, the greatest sexual turn off to a woman. “ she said. “Not traditional women. Marriage was when the party began.  Traditional women loved sex and loved children and loved marriage. Not these boy girls today.  They hate mothers.  They imitate men..” She looked away musing for a moment.
“ You were a catch.  Good looking. Hard working. Masculine. Successful. Good family.  Hot. The women competed for you.  Getting you they won. They were the party girls. Consumers. They put you in the box beside the doll house and proceeded to get the other parts, the right house, the new car, the nice vacation and cool friends.  Barbie dolls.  You were Ken.  Barbie had a cool job but Ken did all the real work.  It was even better if he had a trust fund and Daddy had done the work.  Barbie never had children. Not when I was young. Just lots of stuff.  The ultimate consumer girl.” She laughed. With one hand she pushed back her hair.  She was beautiful as an older woman but younger she would have been stunning. He loved her as a friend. Her honesty and frankness.

“The sex stopped.’ I said. “Not quite stopped but scarcity set in.  A month or more would pass. The more I gave her, the less we had.  Houses, cars, status, parties.   It had been fun.  All the  romantic loving, sentimental sex, the crazy dress up, role playing sex, every possible combination and perturbation that two people could do. We did them all. Every night at first. Then with marriage it stopped.  Missionary position and more and more rejection.  She rolled over.  She said she was tired.  She turned her back to me and I assure you that wasn’t an invitation with her.   We weren’t into others. But then we were married and she’d roll over or not really think of it.  I did everything to ensure she had orgasms.  I’m more a lesbian for the service I gave but no returns.  She just found the less she did, the more I did and the years went by with her taking. There was no reciprocity. And one day. I gave up.” I choked at my own failure. 
“  I was ashamed to talk about it. I saw a psychiatrist. I was the envy of all. But at home I lived with the shrew.  She was only interested in her mother  and I was cuckolded. I was faithful till nearly the end but she’d not been. She gave her time and interest to other men.  She flirted with the husbands of her friends.  I flirted drunk but she just flirted specifically.  It was embarrassing. Staying with my friends and her making out with the man.  The woman looking at me and always there was this unspoken expectation I should, as the man ‘do something about my wife.’

She laughed, “Isn’t that the truth.  We’re supposed to do something about our children and our spouses but lawyers and social workers live in every house and lie under the beds listening ready to take sides. Then it’s the human rights brigades and judges, all taking the place of the much judged minister and church lady of yore. Same nightmare with no space for love or privacy, just new names. “ she laughed.

“I thought how fortunate a community was to have an honor killing once a year.  It was like the public hanging of the thief.  A deterrent. Now there is none. It’’s civilized but I’d get these looks and wonder’ what am I supposed to do’.  She hit me, you know.  She’d also say “touch me and I’ll bang my head against the wall and say you did it. You touch me and I’ll make so many bruises they will put you away for life. I’ll cut myself up if you ever question what I do again. “  She was evil then. I saw the rage.  She did’t want to sleep with the single men but she wanted to sleep with the married men, the husbands of our friends.  “ I said, sadly, remembering. All I’d done is ask her not to with my boss and his wife there. She went into one 
her slam the doors rages. Otherwise she did the cold chill. More like the Arctic.’

“I had a sperm test.” I said on a change of note. “ Most humiliating thing in my life. Masturbating alone with a magazine and jar the girl at the clinic had given me.  You’d think that would be a guy job. But no, a peppy young girl. It was  a rainy night. I cried  She’d refused to go to the clinic herself or with me. I went alone. Curious.  The report card came back and the boys had passed but it, didn’t matter.  I couldn’t blame her if she was infertile.  But was she.  She had had the abortion and I suspect that was it. I blamed her for marrying under false pretences. I blamed her for saying she wanted children but not having sex and making it about me . I blamed her for blaming me.  Ultimately I blamed her mother. “ 

“As you said, “the mother could be blamed’. But not if you were Latin, The Catholics got that right,” she laughed.  

“I gave up you know” I said,wading past her laughter, reallly on a role. . “When the court believed that ugly lying psychopath and I had to pay a million because she ‘claimed’ I’d said I wanted sex with her. She was such a disgusting fat and stinky thing but the judge, smiled at her and made me pay.  She claimed she was hurt by words I never said and wouldn’t in a life time. I was vindicated later but two years of time and money, living in fear, losing all respect for the courts and government. It came out at the appeal, she did this sort of thing. Falsely accusing men, extorting, lying. I was the only one who’d gone on to the appeal. Turned the whole thing over but no consequence for her.”

“It’s an industry now “ my friend said“The courts only make money if they can move it from one to another. The lawyers take a third on either side and create disputes. These false allegations are the norm in this country. It’s why they have perjury laws elsewhere in France the the most famous book ‘j’accuse’ . It’s what this was all about this. Freedom. Truth.But here they want lies and informers.adon’t care if they lie, it’s about everyone as informer. You are an unimpeachable good man. You’ve given a life time of service. She’s a skank.” I loved how she spit out the word then continued.
“The court wants everyone guilty. Even though they say ‘innocent until proven guilty’ the court actually works on the basis of ‘guilty until proven innocent”. That’s where your million went. To pay your lawyer and the court. The  courts threw her a thousand to pay for her performance. I loved Davidson writing about these girls considering testimony their fine art projects and expecting rewards for their works of fiction. The latest book says that ‘50% are false allegations’. It might be more. Remember when the courts  believed men with 8 inch penises were raping infant girls and there was no damage. They didn’t listen to the doctors. That scam still goes on. The courts are only interested in maintaining the status quot.  They took your money and your time because they could. “. She was laughing.  “It’s really great being a girl. I’ve loved it but I’m not a skank.“.  She was smug. ‘I was a good wife.’   ‘What did your psychiatrist say?”

“He said I could be a ‘bitter old man’.  “Bitter old men and bitter old women are a dime a dozen,” I answered.

“Carpe diem.  Elkhart Toole wrote ‘the power of the now.”  Brother Lawrence , called it, “practicing the presence of God’. She said. 

“So let go of the past.  Forgive. “ I said, questioning.

“You could still have children.”  

‘I thought of it. My friend tried to set me up with a young Asian girl. I was just afraid as a man to have a child in this country. I see the women and the courts using them always to extort more money from the guys.  I once dreamed of our children and our family but watching this government and the trend I don’t care to pay for a child that the state will create a monster from. Parents have no more rights and their children aren’t their own. There are no freedoms.  I see men being blamed and families divided, women rewarded for giving the state evidence against the men,whether it is false or true

“Old white men are the target today.” She said.

“ I actually think of having a sex change. I’ve cross dressed since acting days..  I’ve had sex with men and it wasn’t the horror women make it out to be. I’ve no desire to be a knight.  I did my time as Galahad and I don’t want to be a celibate monk.  The society’s a matriarchy.  If I was a woman I’d have children but I can’t have children. I’m not so much waiting for the messiah to come as wondering what to do in death’s vestibule. I’m not ready for board games and frankly I’ve cared for thousands of other’s children and served more women than I can remember. I like to hunt and fish and travel and write and read. I’m waiting to die.  I’ve been raped, rejected, underpaid, stolen from, castrated. To quote the Travelling Wilbury’s, “I”ve been beat up.”

“Self pity doesn’t become you.  Take up sky diving.  Or come with me. I’m off to buy some new shoes. We can make a date for getting our nails done. If you shoot a deer I expect you to invite me for dinner. “  she laughed. I liked her laughter. 













Hunt

I woke at 4 am. Gilbert, with his congestive heart failure has been coughing in the night. He’s pleased that I’m awake. After petting his squirmy little body I attended to the toilet and also shaved.  Then I dressed in leotards and cammo leggings. I remembered dressing for hockey like this.  Long socks. Preparing for the cold. I’m going to ride the Vespa in the backwoods and sit at dawn waiting for deer to walk by.  I’ll take my Ruger 30:06 for big game and the Chiappa 22/20guage for grouse and rabbits. I packed my cammo pack sack last night.
With a flannel shirt and flannel vest and hide slippers I was ready to take Gilbert outside.  I put the flashing light on his harness and took a flash light.  I sat at the picnic table and looked up at the canopy of stars. He’s blind and old. He sniffed a circle of the campground peeing and finally pooping.I meditated.  Praising God, talking to Jesus. It’s incomparable beauty. I remember my father and brother and I lying on our backs on the lawn learning constellations. Now my nephew is an astronomer.  I’m resisting thinking of the the bitterness of life, the old wars, the wounds, then too all the good people I’ve know. A whole cast of characters.  
I worry about him getting too far away, a quick snatch coyote. I picked him up and brought him into the cabin.
Now I’m waiting for the coffee.  It’s time to move along.  




















Friday, September 18, 2020

Excitement

How exciting to watch the sun come up. That great orb of brilliant yellow and orange rising in the eastern sky. Being here to see the never ending miracle of light returning. I think of how for 80,000 years we all used to do this, before Edison.  
You are more beautiful each day.  Your hair dishevelled by sleep.  Your face relaxed and all those lines of worry from work and pressure gone in the morning as you rise to greet the new day.  A stoic. A warrior. A woman of faith and confident. Resilient with humor and grace. I love how the light bathes your sensual skin.  I am blessed to be with you.

“Is there life after death,” she asked, looking across at him over the rim of her first morning coffee.
‘We slept last night and we’re awake today.  What more do you need?”  He said, buttering the croissants for them, before sitting beside the rickety bamboo table they kept on the east facing veranda for just these mornings.
“But I’ve seen dead people. I’ve been to funerals. You know what I mean.” Her eyes twinkled as she peered at him . A late cock crowed as if the sun had surprised him.
“I am not them. I don’t know what they are experiencing. There’s an infinity of possibilities. I feel sorry for those who can’t imagine so reduce everything to their own perspective. I simply choose to believe.”  The old dog smelling food had moved from lying by the door to sitting down beside them at the table, lest they forget he liked croissant too.He put his paw on his masters knee.  The man knew he was there, of course. It was a game they played. He waited. They both waited. When the time was right, he’d respond.
“I do too.  Life’s an adventure and a journey.  I feel people who don’t see that think of it as a prison and death as an escape.  It’s sad really. “ The sun was now above the mountain where the pine and spruce were opening their stomachs to the radiance and food of light.  One bird song was definitely a robin.  The other was a chickadee. A crow was squawking too.  Morning news and comments. The cock crowed again preening itself and unapologetic for sleeping in.  
There was a special elegance to the way she lifted the porcelain cup of honey flavoured Ethiopian coffee flavoured to her full red lips.  He thought how little time there was to relish her.  To see the surface reflection of her infinite depth in the tiny movements she made.  Like now,as she put the cup carefully back on the flowered blue and yellow saucer and reached for the still warm croissant.
“I like to think of life as a gift and something to be thankful for. “ he continued. “Like a toy a child receives without instructions but meant to be played with and enjoyed.  The wisdom texts are the messages down through the ages of others who have found satisfaction in the game and shared their insights into the meaning and joy of this mysterious thing.” 
Now he broke off a piece of croissant with his fingers, passing it under the table to the waiting dog.  The dog carefully accepted it before quickly swallowing it, taking his paw from his master’s knee but waiting still for more.  Insatiable.   The dog loved being included.  Sharing the food at the table was as sacred to the pooch as sacrament at church. It meant inclusion in community, shared pleasure in sustenance for the body, heart and soul.  The dogs’ tail wagged. The master smiled.  Sympatico.
She finished her croissant taking a last sip of coffee before rising naked to walk lithely to the beach.  A pelican flew awkwardly overhead as her body transformed into a sleek dolphin  slipping under the soft lapping waves.  He joined her moments later waiting only to watch her fin cut through the souther tropical  sea that engaged the northern land.
  He became a walrus as he moved from the soil to the sand, bouncing awkwardly and manly after her. Looking back she stood high on her fin  laughing at him before twisting and falling into the wonder of water.  Seeing her grace and beauty he galumphed more hurriedly after her into the sea.  The dog barking happily, swam beside the master for a awhile. Then the dolphin and walrus swam together further from the shore into the reap. He turned and paddled back to the cabin to wait their return, curled up on the veranda beneath the bamboo, guarding the croissant crumbs he knew remained on the plate.

In the ocean deep, the walrus and dolphin cavorted.





 

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Men’s Meeting

I’ve not been in a group of people in nearly 9 months.  I dash in and out of the clinic and stores. I’m always there to do what needs to be done and I’m gone.  Tonight was different. I made it back to my men’s meeting. I’ve tried to go many times over the last couple of months but the thought of people close and the time sitting just left me cold. I haven’t been to church even. They are meeting outside and I’ve wanted to go but I was afraid.  Spiritual places. Spiritual people and me with faith but I can help others not myself. If I am sick I get really sick. I thought I was going to die when I couldn’t breathe early spring. It was like the underwater crisis when I ran out of air scuba diving. 
Air.
Oxygen.
Breathing.
I meditate on breath.
I now am afraid to breathe around others. Especially with these fires caused by more government mismanagement and pseudoscience, lies and arsonists. It was good to be with men I knew and admired. We’ve met for years and shared our experience, strength and hope. It wasn’t them I was afraid of .It was the stranger. The person who wants to get close. That man who tapped me on the shoulder early covid and got in my face wanting me to listen to him. I was afraid I’d punch him.
I like being alone.  I was out with a couple of girls who called themselves my ‘older sisters’.  I laughed to be ‘socializing’ ,missed the repartee around dinner parties and the conviviality but then I’d stopped going out to be among even friends because they’re all so easily offended.  Everyone knee jerk emotions and judgement and the world self appointed sheriff’s.  I just found it all so hard work with everyone so emotionally loud after my days of work with dangerous people.  I felt safe alone, with my dog, or my friend. 
Now here I was welcomed back by a group of men who I like and they seem to like me. We have a low bar in this group.  It’s comforting.  
I listened mostly though shared when asked, briefly.  I always worry I speak too long or say to much or go to deep.  The demand for perfection in my field has become overwhelming now that the police bureaurocrats have been sainted and awarded medals of supreme sensitivity and whatever they say is gospel, they say. 
I sometimes cry.  Tears well in my eyes.  I am ending my run. A long time doing the best I can.  Sacrifice and duty. Old words of disgusting relevance compared to the shiny words like ‘priviledge’ and ‘oppress’.  I can’t listen to the media. So much error lies and propaganda.
Not here tonight. Just truth, the old kind. The kind that keeps a guy a live.  Honest sharing. A man talks about his difficulties talking with his wife. Another man talks about his failings.  There’s no bragging.  I am just happy to be there. A way out. A reminder it was worse and worse was a long time ago. This too will pass.
I’m glad I joined the fellowship in reality.  Living in a virtual reality, zoom and such isn’t quite the same.  This was real. Thank you Higher PoWer



Psalm 23

The Lord in my shepherd
I shall not be in want
He maketh me lie down in green pastures
He leads me beside still waters
He restores my soul
He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I will fear no evil, for you are with me
Your rod and your staff, they comfort me
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies
You anoint my head with oil
My cup overflows
Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. 

This is one of my favourite biblical passages and I have over the years memorized it but seem often to only remember the ‘yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil’.....I love that image of the world.  ‘Valley of the shadow of death’.  I loved Ernst Becker’s book, Denial of Death.  Death and Life are intertwined like lovers held in the mystery and mystical God.



Monday, September 14, 2020

Smoke in the Air

There’s serious smoke in the air. The New Westminister pier was on fire last night. We have fire smoke from Oregon. BLM and Antifida have been causing chaos funded by George Soros, the ex Nazi anti Semitic Jew, whose Open Societies have influence Trudeau. The socialism/communism/Bolshevism totalitarianism is alive and well with Open Societies, the euphemism for dictatorship of the people.  Yesterday was a Freedom march.  In Hong Kong the Freedom movement is feeling the boot heels of the Communist Chinese Party.  The Communist Chinese Military and the WHO lied about the virus.  I don’t trust them anymore. It was like the Red Cross during the ‘tainted blood scandals’ of the HIV/Aids epidemic.
Covid 19, the Chimera SARS Virus released from the Wuhan lab form to function studies in search of a vaccine for profit continues to move steadily around the world. Dr. Tam the Canadian embarrassment of a public health minister is now encouraging masks. She called us ‘racists’ for criticizing the international airport accepting Wuhan flights later than anyone in the west. Taiwan and Singapore closed the border to China months before Canada. Now Tam is saying wear masks even during sex. A bright student, isn’t that like handing out condoms at the baby shower. Of course, it is.
Now everywhere Arsonists are being arrested.  The ‘protestoers’ who blocked the highways and trains and tried to derail the trains for their personal agenda have had little consequences.  Criminal behaviour is applauded by the Liberal government. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.  The PM ignoring repeated ethical violations and Liberal MP”S falling like bowling pins with charges of fraud and graft.  
Now we have the New Westminster pier on fire, a favourite place and Antifida and BLM have been destroying public property with little consequence all the while that law abiding citizens like me are taxed and harassed and threatened.
The air is so bad it’s reminiscent of New Delhi.  I don’t feel safe going outside and ordered and air filter for inside. Gilbert because of his heart disease and congestive heart failure is having more difficulty breathing, coughing and wheezing. Here it’s Covid and I’m worried my lungs full of dirt are more at risk for this virus, I probably have had and am immune to but have become decidedly neurotic about. I think the TB and HIV and Meningitis and yearly influenza and seeing all those old men die of pneumonia, old’s man’s friend, has me spooked.  I’m afraid of the coming wet and cold season but positively thinking of deer hunting this week if only for the pleasure of hunting grouse and eating tasting wild chicken morsels.  
I pray. I meditate. I swam yesterday. I’ve cleaned out my locker and just get the keys to someone who will salvage and trash the mix of gold and manure that remains. I’m through with that movement and am glad to be back to one storage locker. I like not having guns and valuables in my home.  I’m thinking of storing the Harley early too since the Vespa is giving me joy in the city doing everything I need.  Twice weekly Post Office and grocery runs.  
Laura was over again on the weekend and we had a lovely time. Spa day. Pedicure, manicure and hair colouring. True pampering and decadence.  Hot tub and swim.  She walked Gilbert several times and we watched some movies and at White Spot take out Fish and Chips.  Life is good. God is good. God is good all of the time. Thank you Jesus. 







Sunday, September 13, 2020

Gender Fluid

I just read that a recent poll showed 22 % evangelicals  did not accept the Biblical Old Testament Binary, Male and Female.  I’ve always recommended people read the letter on the internet “Why I can’t own a Canadian?”to appreciate the concept of ‘cherry picking’ the Bible.  It’s no longer kosher. Jesus said all of the scriptures could be summed up as ‘Love God and Love your neighbour as yourself. ‘That’s the key to understanding all the Scriptures,till Jesus, who was said to have brought a new ‘accord’.  He didn’t speak about sex.  Christians and humans in general are obsessed with sex as much as Chimpanzees.  I’m writing about it now.
Sex is male or female and is intrinsic to the genetic make up of the individual, XY or XX.  There are exceptions like XXY.  “Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex’ by Drager is the classic text on sex and gender. French Philoospher, Ivan Illich’s book “Gender” is a deep read about the ‘gender role’ in society and how they were considered ‘equal’ . 
This was before the reductionism of Marx followed by the errors of the Frankfurt School. These patriarchal philosophers argued ‘men oppress women’.  Marxism basically said the ‘rich oppress the poor’ and then the Frankfurt school continued the binary insanity with ‘any ‘x’ can be chosen to argue ‘x’ oppresses’y’”.  
Illich showed this was historical revisionism.  Women and Men were complementary.  
The role of the mother in society, had until the devolution of Marxism and mass abortion, been highly valued.  Children were ‘tools” until recently when they became ‘luxury pets’. Children were necessary for the farm and the military, the greater the family, the greater the wealth and the greater the ability of the group to defend against invaders. They were the old age pensions.
When the Industrial Age began the ‘individual unit’ and the ‘State as God’ competed with the idea of the family relationships and relationships of family to the world and to God.  The image of the industrial age ‘clock’ was one of ‘connected ‘parts but each part as separate.
Men and women who did not have children were no longer necessarily part of a family. Marx and Engles set out to destroy the family in their socialistic and communistic utopian fantasies.
Gender became ‘fluid’.  The first to show this were women with Chanel in the 30’s challenging convention by introducing formal ‘pants’ for women, this trend culminating in Hillary Clinton’s ‘pant suit’ woman.  Men to today in America, in the greatest empire of the time, must still formally wear the equivalence of he British empire military jacket and trousers. Very functionary. Men are still ‘tools’.  Women have by contrast the freedom to be the ‘peacock’ and the ‘luxury pet’.  Lingerie and negligees and all the ‘fashion’ of the ‘feminist’ woman is ironically oriented to the age of chivalry, sex slavery, concubines and the  role of seduction and leisure. 
The Chinese Emperor took pleasure in having the longest finger nails as evidence that he did not need to work. The term ‘idle rich’ was not a British or American concept but came from the inherited wealth of a leisure class of elite common in the Middle East and Asia.  African, European and North American leaders were first warriors and later considered themselves such, associating ‘leisure’ with the feminine.  Hugh Heffner’s Playboy motif was a challenge in America to the Stoicism and Pragmatism of American philosopher Emerson.
In all other cultures there were less extreme divisions between male and female role with men have sarongs, kilts, robes. 

When I was in theatre I liked playing different roles. I liked costumes. I liked dress up. I liked cross dressing. I liked dancing and the dance and theatre world because it was ‘relaxed’. It was gender fluid. The gay and lesbian people were accepted and people were judged on their performance.  There was a lot of sexuality and even  sexually inappropriate behaviour. I didn’t like that I saw people get positions simply because of the ‘casting couch’.  There was a lot of favouritism but in the end talent counted , a lot.  
I once wrote an article in an international scientific journal speaking to the division of society into principally male and female realms.  This followed Ivan Illich.  Education and health care and the church were principally female domains with the military, law and business as masculine domains. Of course these were broad generalizations with exceptions and different cultural considerations.  Dr. Carl Jung described the Anima, or female self and the Animus or masculine self in terms of the individual.  He also described the Self and the Shadow, the individual being made of different parts or modes. In theatre, according to the Stanislav technique, we’d find the character within and build on these aspects of self. The distinction between the actor and the multiple personality disorder was that one changed roles and characters voluntarily.  

I liked fabrics too., I early had girlfriends who were models and clothing designers so became aware of the different textures and appreciated the vast variety of ‘feels’ that clothing had.  Women were permitted and encouraged to be sensual.  By contrast I remember a rugby player saying that if your rugby clothes didn’t stand alone unwashed because of sweat, or you washed your uniform during the season ,you were  gay.

I didn’t have any issues with doing conventional female activities if the price was right. In England I spent a year as a secretary in London because I was adept with typing and early computers.  By contrast my friend went to work on the oil rigs and made the same as I did but had to live and work in the harsh high risk North Sea environment only getting back to London for plays and the city life every month. I was mocked and called gay and made fun of by the ‘boys’ in the firms though the male and female  leaders accepted me quickly because of my work performance. Some of the women ‘stenos’ were threatened because I was rapidly elevated to the executive assistant of the CEO and heads of companies because I was a better typist than most, comfortable with learning the proto computer,but mostly because I was conscientious and reliable.  


I was often called ‘gay’ told ‘why don’t you wear a skirt’ and made fun of by men and women in the working class. I was happy to have the high pay.  I was at the time married to the sexiest most beautiful woman in the world and had no questions about my sexuality though I”d had homosexual experiences but simply thought myself purely heterosexual. I was always ‘different’.  “You are too smart for your own good’, was the way my mother put it.  I was exceptional in most that I did, academically achieving, athletically accomplished, always with the brightest and most beautiful women ,with a network of highly accomplished friends across a broad spectrum. I was in early years an ‘intellectual’ and very interested in spiritual pursuits though raised in traditional congregational Christianity.

I liked dressing up as a girl for Halloween and later for Rocky Horror picture, in lingerie.  I smoked marijuana on vacation and enjoyed the ‘subordinate roll’ associated with that. With a second marriage gone and a whole lot of bizarre psychological behaviour in my wife’s alcoholic family and her insistence that her viewpoint was the ‘norm’ for the world I felt trapped in weird secular suburban, the ‘life of quiet desperation.’

I enjoyed in psychiatry, having left more conventional surgery and general medicine, the broad and deep approach to human experience. I loved studying anthropology, psychoanalysis, the great thinkers and makers and shakers of the western world. I consumed knowledge and experience and came home to ‘my way or the high way’. I remember most being told that ‘all women don’t like oral sex’ at the height of ‘deep throat’ and thinking how terrible my future would be listening to this ‘my mother says’ world I was suddenly trapped in. Naturally my own family was even more ‘prosaic’ but it was a wholly different group of colleagues and experiences I encountered in my residency. Ultimately the drugs and sex went sideways and I left my marriage and my university.  I was chasing after the monk who sold his Ferrari and loved Karma Bums and Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas.

I met a fellow doctor with the same Avante garde interest in drugs and alcohol and sex and life continued on. I’d cross dress and role play and enjoy regular exotic sex for years but  eventually sailing we’d smoke dope and ultimately more problems arose with her and her cocaine addiction and indiscretions.  I sought help. We separated .I returned to the ‘straight and narrow’ and ‘clean and sober’ dated and lived the life of the successful sought after heterosexual man. 

All the while society was constantly denigrating men and women were lying, betraying and aborted my child. The song”I’d rather be a hammer than a nail’ kept recurring.  I grew weary of the constant relentless attack on men by Marxist feminists and the tokenism that saw the most incompetent and meanest evil women elevated to high position beyond their intllegience or competence. Rather than a ‘changing of the guard’ making things better, they just got worse and worse.  Heads were changed to tails but my work increased and increasingly I was confronted by lying female psychopaths with the backing of the corrupt fascist state. I was doing my job. I was doing my job well but constantly under attack over and over again by these deeply evil people and the forces around them.

I can’t say I felt I was ‘born into the wrong body’ as a child. I seemed to be ‘ambidextrous ‘ as a child. I learned about the studies of gender and sex which showed a range. Dr. Dorothea Bea out of Berkeley wrote a paper, Fluffy women and Macho men.  At the ends of the spectrum were 10% who literally would rather die than do or be perceived to do anything that was of the opposite gender. In the middle were those, like myself, which would do whatever so long as it profited them. My macho man friend worked on the oil rigs and I worked in the high rise banking office. 

I hunted. I fought. I played hockey. I did all those masculine things, a real cowboy, riding horses and later motorcycles. But I danced and I wrote poetry and I was interested in emotions and the unconscious and spirituality and prayer.  I came up on the tests as a rare extrovert and introvert. I was always in the middle. 
This meant politically I was attacked by the extremes and had scars all over. A military friend laughed and said that he’d always known me to charge first into battle whereas he as he’d got older had learned to stay back with his back to the wall.  I don’t know why. I attribute some of this to my Christian spirituality and relationship with Jesus Christ. I wasn’t fearless. I was constantly terrified but I truly believed in doing the right thing.

I found dressing in what were considered ‘female clothing’ comfortable. I was sexually abused by a superior who liked me wearing his wive’s black negligees.  Eventually anal arousal became parts of masturbation and sex.  I imagined myself becoming a lesbian. 

I had therapy and exorcism and met with the leaders in the field, gay , straight, psychiatrists and psychologists, ministers, male and female.  I would collect women’s clothes and on vacations wear them, mostly nightgowns and later I’d cross dress and go on outings at night. I’d cross dressed in the acceptable theatre world and it didn’t have a sexual component.  Later it would take the trials of a quarter century of marriage with years of abuse ....men are not allowed to talk about how difficult living with modern feminists is, their promiscuity, lying,  violence, mood swings, their paranoia, and their insane families, with psychotic mothers and dangerous brothers, and drug addicted criminals friends....I confess I’ve really enjoyed being single. Obviously the best times, usually the first five to seven years, were great with the year or two before the divorce being hell on earth followed by society blaming the man and treating the woman as a victim.

I was working with men and women though out decades seeing the individual cases, men abused, women abused and the legal and political and media making profits off it all. So I saw things individually but wearied of the constant attacks on men.  Meanwhile the male predators and narcissists were chameleon and lied and had the full support of their women cohorts who themselves would be lying. I knew there were good men and good women but the ‘system’ was seriously flawed. When Lenin said ‘women are the niggers of the world’ in the 60’s that might have been true but when Justin Trudeau said “I am a feminist’ women were in charge and frankly as abusive as men had been. We are today living in a twisted matriarchy in Canada.

About 20 years ago I approached an organization about a sex change. I met with psychiatrists and transsexuals and at the time was helping dozens of transsexuals.  I found that my desires ebbed and flowed. I joined a transgender support group. I was more likely to want to cross dress when there was a full moon. Really, lunacy.  I would gather clothing for months then ‘purge’ but never for more than a year or two. Then I’d ‘relapse’ and start a new wardrobe. I’d stop masturbating, all masturbating, all fantasizing for years at a time. I wasn’t drinking or doing drugs for 20 years and yet during that time of abstinence’s and meditation and prayer and spiritual pursuit I’d return to contemplation of a sex change.

After years of abuse for being male by a depraved bureaucracy supporting female psychopaths I increasingly didn’t want to be male.  

So here were the considerations I made and addressed.
1. Cross dressing was for me a ‘Klinger’ like reaction to the madness of the society. I learned about the Historical Mad Mollies who dressed up as women and at night attacked the landowners who were killing them with starvation in Ireland.  I identified at times with Joan of Arc and enjoyed wearing a kilt and Scottish regalia with a ski n do and dirk. But in Canada Scottish men were arrested and fined for wearing kilts and ski n dos and dirks. All the while Siks were allowed to go armed as were aboriginals.  The war on men by the Liberal government had followed the attack on white people with impoverishment of women and celebration of abortion.  Immigrants had large families and were highly supported, came from patriarchal countries and persisted in raping female girls, honour killing and major sexual abuse along with constant sexual harassment, hate words against whites and men, in their language, (I got translations) and this perpetuation of a double standard. Canadian liberalism was all about mass chaos with the elite benefitting.
2. ‘Identification with the aggressor’. I’d been raped by a superior who culturally and financially and by being part of the Liberal elite suffered no consequence. Just as the abuse of aboriginals was by the Judges, Principals,bureaucrats and Politicians but only the Church and the Teachers were condemned. Satanic. The whole ‘reconciliation process’ protected the lawyers and judges who went on to make millions. More satanic aetheism. Natives would get a million but the lawyers and judges would get hundreds of millions.  I never got anything. I felt badly. I did the ‘right thing’. I ‘reported’ the breach of trust and the broken rules and the abuse and instantly was further abused.  I have never been forgiven for reporting the abuse of power and abuse of trust.  The whole industry of ‘false chivalry’, ‘protect the little women’ by the courts and the ‘big men’ in the courts making a killing off the attack on the rest of the men and disruption of society doesn’t apply to regular men and women”. 
My ‘cherry’ was broken and I was seen by these men, the judges, bureaurocrats and lawyers as being a ‘pussy’.  It was all further abuse and girls collectively like each group have been ‘out for themselves’. Our mothers and girlfriends and sometimes our wives have been understanding and sensitive but for me the abuse just continued.
A colleague, known for his sleeping with a lot of women outside his marriage. A ‘real man’, much admired by feminists, a regular Bill Clinton character told me ‘since rape is inevitable you might as well lie back and enjoy it.’
3. Humiliation and sensuality. There was something in the subjugation, humiliation and sensual appeal.  It’s tied to the idea of a ‘sissy’ and an odd twisted Sadism and Masochism quality.
4.  Reproductive sex or biblical sex followed ‘fun sex’.  Chimpanzees our nearest primate love sex.  Tribal folk didn’t necessarily know that sex begat children until they moved from hunters and gatherers to shepherding and ranching. Animal husbandry and breeding became central from 80,000 years and reproduction and ‘marriage’ was about the responsibility and ‘ownership’ of the children.  There was no ‘rape’ in marriage because both man and women wanted sex. Women wanted children. 12 children increased the life expectancy and health of women. The greater the number of children the higher the status of the woman and the more success of the man. For 80,000 years until a couple of hundred years ago men and women had sex at least daily except during the woman’s menstrual cycle. The ‘more the merrier’.  Caucasians or aryans - Indo - Persian- Irish - introduced the monogamous arrangement.  Having more than one wife was the purvey of the negroid and mongoloid. The big man had the most wives. Ghenghis Kahn and his brothers had Khan gene that is so prevalent in Central Asia that it has been extrapolated that together the men had sex and children with a million or more women.  Rape was an act of war. The Moghul modis operandi was to kill all men of fighting age, impregnate the women and then take the children into their army.
5. There was nothing I could do to stop her having an abortion. I paid the rich and powerful women who I married , I paid everyone and then some,feminists who claimed in court to be ‘little girls’ and I was the ‘bad man’.  I feel I’ve had a life of castration. Women have cuckolded me.  We know that the children of divorce, 40% are not their fathers.  I have however been held to a standard of perfection and had women cut the tips off condoms. Meanwhile they can take the birth control pill, can use condoms yet if they get pregnant the man is accountable. I ‘ve had many women patients being supported with hundreds of thousands of dollars by men. One fellow paid $250000 fo see his daughter. State sanctioned extortion. The courts so often saw the children as the possession of women and supported their use of children for profit and extortion. Meanwhile feminists would not allow women to use their wombs for artificial insemination.  It’s the most bizarre world , the family and female courts system with systemic abuse of families and children and equal abuse of fathers and mothers. I worked in it and saw countless tragedies and corruptions and diabolical abuse.  I was punished for marriage. Men who don’t marry are safe in Canada. Father’s are grossly abused in Canada. I don’t know whose more abused by the government today, men or women, but the feminists would say they have a’monopoly on suffering’ and literally don’t care about men
6. Boys are sexually abused and have very little support.  Pedophiles when caught commonly have 250 to 500 victims , male or female. The question arises is this sexual addiction and indeed is the whole transvestism, transsexualism matter, sexual addiction. 90% of cross dressers are heterosexual and 100% of women cross dressers do not see their cross dressing as sexual. God is all so there’s nothing outside of god. The choice is God or not God, love or fear, with hell, the absence of God. Addiction is the false God. Clearly sensuality, hedonism and Epicureanism are counter to the stoicism OS some Calvinist or puritanical aspects of God. These sects are big on gluttony and make Money their God. The joke then is to avoiding judging others for sins you don’t enjoy while staying blind to your own evil preference. In the Catholic Church the men drank and the women ate. Fat women and skinny men. Then there was Veblen Conspicuous consumption. Now that gays are no longer the sexual scapegoat the transgender can be attacked by straights and gays. Ridiculous.
7.  So there I was ambivalent.  I had a girlfriend and I’d had marriages and lots of girlfriends and a few experiences with men. I’d been cross dressing off and on and increasingly didn’t like being male. It’s difficult because I didn’t like being a lot of things. I didn’t like being Canadian when the liberals were in charge. I didn’t like being a professional because the big bad boys look for scapegoats. I didn’t like being a lot of things. I’d stopped playing hockey and stopped getting married. I even gave up on having children. I ultimately gave up buying houses because at the end of the day I had no rights and the government laws meant I merely leased the property. EVeryone else was making a fortune for little work and I was working 7 days a week 12 hour days and watching accountants, lawyers and government politicians and bureaucrats steal from me with one lying scheme after another. I seemed always to be among parasites and all my working helping others was undermined by the forces of evil.  There’s simply more money in killing than in saving lives. The abortions I did paid more than the babies I delivered. The government I was working for was little better than a gang. Steal a little and they put you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.  Montreal and Toronto were disgusting treating western Canada like a colony. I focused on my work but because I gave it my full attention I depended on others to protect me and they didn’t. 
8. I had erectile failure. One day my cock gave up. It no longer would be dependable. It once lead. Now intermittently it would say no. Maybe the abortion or all the demands. I spent hours between the legs of complaining women never satisfied wanting bigger houses, more cars and competing with sisters and girlfriends. I felt good camping, sailing, fishing and hunting. I began to envy women. Viagra and coal is worked but mostly I’d be fine and then it wouldn’t work, unpredictable, and it wasn’t the girl. I just saw it as a performance thing. I and my cock were just really tied of ‘working on Maggie’s farm’
9 Scab labor.  I had heard how tough it was to be a woman all my life but whenever I took on women’s roles it was a lot easier than what I faced as a man.  Where this stopped was child bearing and mothering. I definitely saw those as tough jobs like being a father. But when I compared single women and single males especially professionals the men were shafted and the expectations on them were massive. Cocksucking wasn’t even a big deal. I tried it and it wasn’t any better or worse than all the cunniligus I did. Yet there was a time when this was compared to the ultimate sacrifice and ultimate gift. All marketing.  I grew really tired of the constant complaining. I did appreciate the mothers. I realized that Feminism was about girls and feminism was ‘imitation as the sincerest form of flattery, ‘ since all feminists want was to do male things or appear to do make things’ get the benefits without the risk or cost. So we had women in the military getting all the ‘cudos’ but not many on the front lines. 
10. All the women who were my ‘equal’ and were’ competent’ and the ‘mothers’ and the female surgeons and the combat women and the engineers all got along with me and me with them. We mutually supported each other and admired each other.  This shrieking of the feminists demanding equal pay and lying constantly and not doing equal work or risk was just painful. So I worked with two types of doctors, women better than me and this group of women who were lazy and token doctors and did everything to get credit and cudos but avoided the work. There were men like that to. Often they gravitated to administration.
11. I just didn’t want to chase women anymore or initiate sex or get on top and my back hurt. I was happy to lick and suck and happy to lie on my front or back in my fantasy but by my 50’s and 60’s I was worn out. I was tired of fixing vehicles for women to ride in, fixing machines, always covered in grease with scrapes and bruises.. I cared for dogs and delivered babies and had helped children and single mothers and mothers but then the feminists called all men pedophiles and rapists and I just didn’t want to be around the aggressive sociopaths. I was tired. I have a lifetime of being falsely accused and having to deal with bullies and gangs.
12. I’d travelled for a week dressed as a woman. No expectation. I wrote. Took pictures. Wearing pants and jacket I’m targeted by men and women who are looking to score. I’m Billy the Kid. There are all these losers who want to compete because they are insecure. Wankers and losers. Sick.  All my life I’ve felt prey or on guard. I’ve been shot at , stabbed, mugged and robbed.  As a transexual woman who clearly didn’t pass I was a source of entertainment at best but invisible as well.  I personally was withdrawn.
13 When I’m dressed as a woman I don’t feel I have to ‘provide and protect’.  It’s being on holiday. Normally I have to leave Canad to feel safe. You just never know when someone will be offended or threaten you or worse threaten you and your dog. Everyone can hit me but I can’t defend myself because I’m a law abiding white old guy and we are the number one enemy. I’ve saved dozens of women in the community from rape and attack and fought gangs of men to protect women. That’s been outside of my job which has been serving women and children and men.  I’ve given two thirds of my income to rich women and lawyers and had no children and the women have with the courts castrated me treating me as some sort of beugoisie and as well  the poor women who was a dangerous drug addict has been supported by the courts. Years of my time and life and sanity has been stolen by these evil demonic sociopaths.
14. I’ve wanted to die. I’ve been suicidal. I don’t know if I want to be a woman but being a man has sucked immensely. I’ve made the best of it. I’ve survived barely.
15. My fantasy for years has been to change gender. To be a woman. To travel as a woman.  I would have liked to have had children and grandchildren but I married women who wanted to be the child and the princess and themselves didn’t want children.  Ultimately my child was aborted and since I was forty sex with women over forty hasn’t been about children but about sex and ultimately sex for men is serving women and meeting their needs and fantasies whereas I’ve just lost interest in the ritual. All men I know have faced years of rejection. In studies men have been rejected sexually hundreds of times where as women in the studies were at most a tenth or a hundredth of the times.
16. People lie. They lie on the studies.  Women lie better than men about sex. In a classic study a ‘social acceptability’ scale was introduced to women’s responses and they answered what was ‘socially acceptable ‘ and they later believed they’d answered true when their answers changed. It was the same with the ‘water fountain’ studies regarding sexual harrassment and women.  Women are only sexually harassed by the poor, the ugly or those they believe they can take advantage of.  Indeed the book. Who stole feminism, how women betray women’ showed that for women as for men, selfishness is central and each will use whatever to ‘win’.  The saddest problem is in ‘prisoner’s dilemna’ the ‘we win’ solution never wins because people collectively prefer ‘I win, you lose’. Gladwell’s book on women and a third of college girls not knowing what constitutes consent. 40% of sexual abuse claims are now false. The opportunists are legion but it wasn’t always so. As Davidson says it’s all about appreciating the creative fiction. There is no truth in a post modern society. Cat eat cat. Churchill bear Hitler but Eva Brawn bear Mrs. Hitler.
17. I admire grandfathers the most. I love grand mother’s too.  I rarely have sex.  When I was young all I did was have sex but older it’s just not high on the priority list. When Covid hit and I was able to work from home I was happy to drop pants from my wardrope. As a sailor for a year in the tropics I’d lived in a sarong or faded canvas shorts. I love wearing kilts in winter. I just had a day at the spa getting red pedicure nails and French manicure.  I like the colour. I liked having my hair coloured. I’ve gone months at a time even years when I coloured my hair and then I have gone months and years happy with the grey.  If I lived in Texas I believe I’d like being a man. I wouldn’t have Justin Trudeau with his Nazi body guards with guns surrounding him and his constant attack on hunters like me owning guns while all the rich and powerful I know regardless of the laws have owned arsenals.  Bernie and Obama and Hillary are armed to the teeth. I am frightened of these people and the mismanagement of the economy makes me think that my skill collecting game hunting will soon be needed to feed myself. I come from people who the government starved. Communists have killed half the countries they’ve taken over, hundreds of millions and the ones they target are the intelligent. I’ve never been accused of having a low IQ, stupid yes, but Low IQ know. I’m afraid and I turn to Jesus and ask for faith and strength and don’t think he cares whether I’m male or female or something else. I’m ‘other’.  I did my best to be a father and paid massive dues without reward and now I just want to take it easy. I don’t think men can take it easy in Canada. Leonard Cohen wrote the great song ‘There is a war’ and I love the Travelling Wilbury’s.
18. My transexual psychiatrist friend and the transexual patients I know are ‘outside’ of the ‘stereotypes’ and the harsh demands. I have liked adventures and there’s no fame or glory for men climbing Everest or going to the moon. All the glory goes to the woman who does what the men did decades ago.  Now one has to be a disabled black aboriginal drawf to be celebrated.  So much for fame and fortune.  The Beatles introduced long hair back when the play Hair hit Broadway demanding ‘are you a boy or are you a girl, with your hair like that you look like a girl’.  I was shot at hitchhiking several times when I was a long haired hippie.  Four yahoos with baseball bats chased me through cornfields screaming they were going to kill a ‘long haired hippy’.
I’ve done my duty. I’ve served my society. I’m going to die soon. My brother said ‘he couldn’t live through another liberal government’ and promptly died. My father and mother both had no respect for Pierre Trudeau. I left the liberal party after 20 years because of the corruption and terrible evil.  Now I’d rather wear pretty clothes and work and play and let someone else take up the fight. I’ve got all the scars I need to get into heaven and sometimes thinks the MAID future is just the Liberal Solyent Green. 
19 . Beam me up Scotty , there’s no intelligent life here.
20. The real question is do i want to be an old lady or an old man or other.