Monday, Christmas Calendar

I woke an hour early with a recurrent nightmare. I was in a little closed room with an overbearing official browbeating me. He was threatening to tax and fine me to homelessness if I continued to speak. I was half heartedly threatening to fight him personally till my dying breath. Even as I was saying that I felt the fight slipping out of me. I  realized that I was willing to close my Facebook account, move to the country and live out my life with my dog. I had dreams of tropical beaches and old country churches and here was another bully telling me to shut up. Frankly I was ready to take a vow of silence. I welcomed death to any more conversation with the devil.  The banality of evil had got to me. I know some are sicker than others and I’d read Screwtape Letters. I woke up againrealizing all I had was time. I didn’t want to spend the little I had left in prison.  I felt powerless.  I prayed.  I asked God for the umpteenth time to be with me. I love St. Patrick’s Breastplate prayer.

I couldn’t fall back to sleep so went to play with the puppy. He had  woken with my movement. I wanted to be a uniform. I wanted to be the same. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to do whatever it took to be nobody.  I looked at my red nails. I tried thinking they were nothing. It was Christmas.  But I knew too well they were the latest in a long list of acts of civil disobedience.  Like the time as teens we wore ties to mock the authorities, dressing in suits to go to school.  Mirroring the authorities.  They actually liked it.  All about appearances. Political correctness, the shit in gourmet bun and the false belief it improves the taste of shit.  Give peace a chance.  I loved Klinger in MASH.

So many Christmas I’ve been moved to reflect on peace and sacrifice and God.  As a child I wrote poems about resurrection at this time of the year.  In the dead of winter in the early morning I sat in the sun room in Winnipeg learning to type by writing poems about the end of war and coming of peace, the wish for the new year. Noel.  I loved the story of Jesus.  I loved the Prodigal Son. I loved the psalms of David and the Beatitudes.  

I didn’t care for the Old Testament much till I was older.  I read John over and over again as a child and young man. The mystical meaning in the ‘in the beginning was the word’.  Later in physics and science I’d reflect on all of thermodynamics was just an ‘unpacking’ of that idea.

I struggled with the idea of transparency.  The head of the Supreme Court of Canada, McLaughlin recommended ‘transparency’ for the Canadian courts.  The courts rejected her idea.  Parliament this year has redacted all that has been requested. I once requested files and saw that they’d all be redacted too.  In war, ‘lose lips sink ships’ but I’d been a hacker and found that all the government files were wide open in the early years of computers.  I accessed all manner of information that was assumed by the common man to be protected.  It wasn’t.  Just like my campaign to ensure privacy was respected with regard to hospital files when patients personal psychiatric records were totally unprotected.  Now the Communist Chinese have hacked all of Canadian security files several times. The solution has been to lock up Julian Lasange who only told the truth about the arrogance of leadership and the disregard of the common man. Hillary and Obama having a private server that was not encrypted and lead to the death of several intelligence agents.  Who cares.  The OJ trial mostly showed that the police had no idea what DNA was and treated samples like fingerprint.  I loved my patient who hacked into the most secure anti hacker ‘authority’ and left happy faces through his computer systems. Hubris.  Now the Communist Chinese claim to have a functioning quantum computer so the change will be how to avoid industrial espionage against an aetheist aggressor who believes in theft and murder. It was the sole reason the Bolsheviks with Lenin succeeded against the moderate Mensheviks.  Stalin’s and Lenin, Molotov and Trotsky believe in murder as justified means. 

Christians are taught to turn the check 70 x 70.  We’re increasingly looking like Carrie in the movie, our heads cycling.  Yet as a physician do I believe in assasination.  My opponent will cheat and murder and steal and I’m just not that desperate, motivated or disgusting.  I can’t ‘hide’ everything and I can if I put the time in access all the data on any enemy and like Lenin and communists resort to lies and assasination. I have the skills and means to kill but have chosen to use my talents for healing and not for war. I chose Love not War. Yet C.S. Lewis ‘s talks, summed up in the book, Mere Christianity were what the troops heard when they countered the Neo pagan Nazis.  Bonhoffer was one of my favourite reads. Like St. John’s Dark Night of the Soul.  I loved Thoreau’s treatise on Civl Disobedience almost as much as I loved Walden Pond. I read Brother’s Karamasov with fascination. 

Now all the books of my teens  and 20’s were become the living reality of my later life.  Truth and deception, camouflage and transparency.  The idea that the big brain of man was to accommodate deceit. The black man who said the social workers knew all about him because he was homeless but the rich hid behind closed doors and apparently some visitted Epstein’s islands and others persisted in cannibalism.  Show me, don’t tell me becomes a whole different matter in those instances. Yet peasants want to believe their king is guided by God which history too often disputes.  Which God too?  

Now I’m facing another day in the world of Covid, trying to train my puppy not to bite and hoping I won’t say anything that is too true or too censored . I don’t know what offends since even black judges in Canada are called racists and aboriginal female attorney generals are fired and comedians are fined.

Difficult times.  I think of becoming a hermit and taking a vow of silence. Then I forget and like the puppy believe it’s still Peace and we don’t have to take on war mode just yet.  

I pray for vaccines and symphony and theatre.  I long to fly to Scotland, Ireland and Italy. I am weary of the state of emergency and the unconventional war and the fog of war and war and rumours of war.  

Christmas.  I am longing for the break.  Now to walk Madigan with Laura.  It’s comforting to be with them.