I remember first feeling an outsider when we moved from Toronto to Winnipeg. The kids in the neighbourhood had a pecking order and they bullied me. I was the ‘different’ kid. I was made fun of. I was cheated. My father was away working. My mother was depressed and lonely separated from her family and her church. My brother was my rock but he too was facing his wars. He had a thicker skin. I’d learn later he was just better at hiding the pain. We were outsiders.
I’ve spoken to the children of soldiers, corporate leaders, and diplomats. We all share the experience of ‘stranger in a strange land’. Position authority is the power one gets from remaining. These are the big fish in a small pond.
I have always Allied with the ‘underdog’, the ‘outsider’, the ‘outcast’. When I look back on what the differences were that we were mocked and bullied, the first that comes to mind is being Christian. The secular kids were comfortable with the dog eat dog, social Darwinism, struggle of the jungle. They didn’t have a creed that said ‘love the other’. They didn’t hold their punches. They didn’t need to tell the truth. They associated with others who revelled in glory, greed and violence.
I began fighting physically at five. I don’t remember fights in Toronto. My grandmother and grandfather, aunts and uncles, mom and dad and brother and all my neighbourhood friends were there. It was a safe place of play. In Winnipeg a kid punched me. I punched back. His older brother and his friends came next. I punched more. I was hurt by the mob. I’d made some friends but they were geeks and outsiders like me. Dad bought us boxing gloves and set up a ring in the basement. He taught us boxing. He taught my friends Garth and Kirk and I had to protect ourselves. Dad was Air Force.
The bullies parents were businessmen and lawyers. When they came back we fought back better. They were the secular kids. They were the aetheists. They weren’t the Catholics. Some might have been the Anglicans. We were Baptists and we kind of aligned with the United Church kids. Mom was staunchly baptist. There was one Jewish kid and one black kid. They’d be my friends. Like the geniuses. They’d be my friends too.
I was forever seeing some bully going after some little guy and I’d wade in and come to their defence. I was often fighting guys who picked on girls. I fought the kid who was giving wedgies to the girls and ripped their panties off. Looking back he was a bit twisted and ended up in the principals office. Likely today he’s on a sex offender list.
The bully I fought as a teenager, him and his two friends, later went to jail. He was the son of a rich lawyer businessman and became a serial rapist. His accountant friend and he got a stash of the date rape drug and used it all through their college years till they were caught in their 30’s with a trail of victims in the hundreds. The family money hushed up the story.
Years later when a local judge got caught for pedophilia it was in the news only a day. The story of the priest was in the news all year.
My friend and I were the first ones in high school to challenge conventionality. We stopped shaving and had beards. Principal Zotolov called us into the Principal’s office. Kirk and I were told to shave. We didn’t. I’d already defended the girls wearing pants bringing in the motion for women to be allowed to wear slacks and fighting it through the student council , bringing it to the principal and school board. A long lesson in the powers of conventionality. The reformer is the enemy of anyone who benefits from the status quo.
The Vice President gathered all the girls together along with the Principal arguing against my motion and demanding that the girls vote to wear skirts in 40 below weather. The teacher’s pet gave a speech and she called me homosexual for wanting women to wear slacks. I don’t even know if I knew what that was. I’d be called faggot and a lot of other names for being ‘different’.
I was a tall kid. I’ve been told I was good looking. I dated cheer leaders and models and later married the most beautiful and brightest of women. I never felt okay.
The principal had a beard growing contest and it became apparent that there was a lot testosterone in the guys in the older classes. Cavemen sorts. Football players who were beard farmers in weeks. Kirk and I had poor crops by comparison. He was hairier by far but the principal won that round. I fought back with wearing suits and ties. Ultra conventionality. Steal a little and they put you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king. We outdressed the staff. I fell in love with sports jackets and nifty ties, especially those wool woven one.
Any time I did something different I was mocked and treated with disdain, shamed by others. I was physically strong and athletic. Grandad was a rancher. Dad hunted and fished. We did a lot of physical labour. Roofing construction , growing up. Mom encouraged us to read. I loved to read. I loved to ride my bicycle and explore.
Dad liked country music. My brother liked Elvis. Mom liked Gospel. I liked the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel.
Kirk and I were the kids who moved through many groups. We were both jocks, provincial champion athletes. We’d been to the YMCA together and excelled in gymnastics, swimming and volleyball. It wasn’t the football team or the basketball team but I’d played hockey till high school. The guys accepted us. Until the boozers and rock and roll music. The Rolling Stones crowd and getting drunk and getting drivers licenses. We got girlfriends instead and were more intellectual. I joined the theatre club and the Manitoba Theatre School and wrote poetry. More mockery.
There were these ‘greasers’ back then and they did poor in school and got into drugs and liked to ‘rumble’. I stopped enjoying fighting when I was knifed and had to conceal the wounds from my mom. .Kirk and I learned Jujitsu. I would be surrounded by a gang of guys with motorcycles and bicycles. I’d block dozens of knife stabs but one got through. I have the scar today.
Shame. I’d have liked to have fought back, not just been defensive but my friend had done that weeks before and he’d been swarmed. He spent weeks in hospital. A serious head injury. He’d later be in jail for small time crimes and I’d be his psychiatrist years later my heart torn out for my friend and me thinking it could have been me. I listened to him tell me how he woke up stupid and how difficult those next years were. He’d been one of the brightest guys I knew
The school didn’t protect us from bullies. The police didn’t protect us from bullies. One of the worst bullies was the son of the judge. The police chief’s daughter was the worst.
Hierarchies go back generations. When I was in England I saw that some cliques lasted hundreds of years.
By the time I was expelled from high school I’d been stabbed for being a geek. I was different. If you excell the conventional guys are jealous. When we won a game we couldn’t leave the locker room till the police arrived because the other team had knives and brass knuckles and were screaming “you fucking won the game but now we’ll show you who wins when we play our game’.
One kid had failed high school a half dozen times. He told me once years later, “ In high school I was somebody. I could beat up any of you kids. I always had some younger girl to fuck. I was somebody. When I left high school I was just the stupid loser”.
I was going to church and studying the bible and president of the amalgamated baptist youth groups. “I don’t want to talk about god and all that shit, I’m just interested in booze and pussy, you fucking freak,”.
I fit in in the theatre. We were a group of outsiders. I was adept at dancing. The gymnastics and athletics and martial arts prepared me for the early work as a stunt man and later as a dancer.
I felt like I belonged on our school volleyball teams. I made a few good friends in student government. My friend Kirk and I moved apart a bit when Garth died, when I left gymnastics and the leaders club and focused on poetry, music, and coffeehouses. Our school friend Danny stayed in music. I helped organize a dozen or more coffee houses around the city and was co manager of Wise Eye for two or three years. The Winnipeg Folk Festival arose out of the coffeehouse scene. Jim Donahue brought Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen’s music to Winnipeg. My friend Jon Cowtan introduced jazz guitar and music was the thing then. I was writing poetry with Karen Asselstine, the extraordinarily talented daughter of a psychiatrist, all round creative artist who’d go on to have her own fashion chains out of Toronto at one time designing clothes for celebrities wanting eco friendly wear way ahead of the times. Heady days.
Having got drunk I’d avoided alcohol but was happy enough when someone would pass a joint around or offer me a hit of acid. I was a roadie for a bit. I was raped and betrayed that summer. I went hungry but was only days homeless. My brother and mother met with me and Dad brought me home , the prodigal son.
I ‘d felt apart of in theatre and in poetry. I was called an intellectual. I was told I was smart by people who used that word as an insult. I read a lot. In dance the other dancers only really magazines while I read books, classics, science, philosophy literature.
I met Baiba. She was a dancer and her family were immigrants. I learned old world values. I learned anti communism. I met White Russians and people who’d lived under Marxist dictatatorships and had seen so many of their friends die. The Jewish kids were into Marx and Utopianism. Jews like Jews. Part of their love of Marx and Freud and even Einstein was they were Jewish. I loved the love of community among my Jewish friends.
Baiba and her family were involved in the cultural affairs as Latvians. Theirs was a community. I loved their song fests and dinners. Years later I’d participate in the Scottish Irish rites but while Mom celebrated her Irish background Dad didn’t connect with his Scottish roots. He’d had a falling out with his very old scot father when he’d left the ranch and gone Industrial era becoming mechanic, millwright and engineer loving machines more than horses. Grandad liked ranching and logging. I had an uncle who was a true cowboy all his life, lived in the saddle. Dad rode well. I rode with him and his friends and they rode horses like I rode bicycles but Dad loved his trucks and cars. He was a spitfire mechanic in the Air Force and a Bomber before he went on to get his Engineering diploma. He was in charge of hundred a fifty men on big conveyor belt projects for airports and post office and grocery stores. With the agreement of the Canadian government he met Castro and help get the Cuban conveyors working again.
My brother was angry that he didn’t wear suits. He only wore suits to please mom. At church and at the political events Mom was involved in. She’d become a journalist involved in community and church and big with the local city politics. I never knew my parents in so many ways. I was so self absorbed so long. I liked to be left alone. I was a high achieving brooding kid. I was struggling with philosophivial and theological question and reading the great poets and wanting to be the renaissance man, doing all those things an actor does, learning lines, fencing, dancing, doing voice training. All round development but struggling competitively with choreography , shows, television appearances.
I was in love with Baiba. I felt at home with Ken Mathew’s Dance School. My room mate Fern was a great guy . The girls were extraordinary, stunningly beautiful, accomplished, show dancers. Baiba was brilliant reading books like me. They were exotic creatures and we were all ‘going to make it, to be stars’. Antonio was going to be a businessman . Clarkey could have been. Her partner had been in the ice follies and talked of glory days on his second bottle of vodka. We were a family of sorts. Halcyon days.
I felt very much a part of the group. I had my family. I had my family at the Y. I had my family in Volleyball. I had my family in the Manitoba Theatre School. I had a girlfriend Nina who had friends and we were acting and were into art and the occult. Mysticism. A friend in the Rosicrucian’s. Friends heading off to missionaries in Africa.
Then I was in the music poetry scene but there wasn’t a family there.
In dance there was a family. I had friends and then Nancy and then Baiba and a whole world of feeling inside. Even in the Latvian cultural world. But I was an outsider. Actors were different as artists. The world was lawyers, administrators, beurocrats, accountants. I was a dancer and I’d be called a faggot. I was an artist and the ‘conventional’ kids in uniforms and safe in mob numbers would mock us. I had long hair. I’d be shot at. Bullets whizzing by my head. “You fucking long haired hippy. Look like a girl.”
I’d be chased through the woods after being picked up hitchhiking by four ‘red neck jocks’. “Let’s kill us a fucking hippie’. I ran fast and long when I jumped from that moving car and looked over my shoulder at these guys with baseball bats and tire irons.
I was wearing a skirt and high heels on Davie street when some Surrey Brown guys cruised by and nearly stopped. I felt totally vulnerable in sling backs. These South Asian gang guys were cruising and beating up transvestites. The police caught them later. I thought of my friend with a brain injury. My patient today has a claw hand. Homeless people, drug addicts with a pit bull did’t have the pit bull chained when she walked by down town. The pit bull grabbed her hand and crushed it. She’s old like me and can’t use her hand any more. It’s constant pain. They killed the dog. The dog wasn’t the one that needed punishment There was no compensation. The new world order has lots of people doing damage on the streets, criminals acting for the government , scaring us all, marauding through the city, pillaging, stealing and mobbing just like the Nazis before Hitler finally won. They call themselves ‘antifida’ today. Claim to be anti Nazis. More nazi than Nazis. Lenin spawn. I see the evil in government and recognised the totalitarianism of Trudeau and today’s liberals and federal NDP. I’ve read history. I E read books. It puts me at extreme variance from the magazine readers. I’m mobbed when I write anything ‘unconventional’. I’m threatened when I still speak of Jesus. Love. Secularism is the cammoflage for aetheist communism. I’m not anything but a Christian who says Jesus said Love God and Love your neighbour as yourself. I struggle with morals and ethics and took an oath a couple of times to do no harm. I don’t fit. I feel like the only vegetarian in a tribe of cannibals. I live in fear of when they’ll turn on me again.
I’d prayed to be conventional. I was in the middle and feeling good in the group in medical school. I liked psychiatry till the professor fucked me and it was not what I wanted . I was struggling with marriage and drunken in laws and a depressed wife and no sex and her saying ‘women don’t like oral sex’ while that’s all she liked and she grew so strange and pretentious and I was in the insaniety of struggling with all that came with country and northern practice and then psychiatry. So much time with outsiders. She was so conventional and so wanted to be conventional and money was so important and social status was so important. I was an outsider.
My friendswere rock and rollers then and motorcyclists and musicians and they smoked dope. My friends were artists and they were outsiders.
I remember the day my senior administrate doctor upon graduation took me aside and told me that I was a doctor now and that doctors only associated with other professionals like lawyers , accountants and other doctors, that I’d have to avoid other people. He said we were ‘officers’ now and couldn’t mix with the ‘others’.
You’re a white man, you shouldn’t be helping the Indians.”
You shouldn’t hang with the Jews. They’re not your kind.
You re not Irish. You’re Protestant. Irish doctors are catholic, he said.
I still cry.
I’m so alone.
In AA I felt a sense of family. IDAA was and still is the best of family. I still worry people will laugh at me. To be the best I’ve always had to start the worst over and over agin. I envy the one trick pony.
I ‘ve made such good friends and then they began to die. So many have died these last few years.
I’m so alone.
I did yoga when it was ‘weird’. I did Tai Chi when it’s was ‘weird’. I was vegetarian when it was ‘weird’. Then I hunted when it was weird,
I don’t know if I’m just more sensitive to the abuse, I suspect my mind plays back being shot at for having long hair, being told by wife that your friends aren’t the ‘right type of people’. I joke and say ‘alcoholic alzheimer’s’ is where you forget everything but the ‘resentments’.
But I know my enemy is the one who teaches me my weakness I know i project my inner unresolved conflicts. I envy the Liberals around Trudeau and his coven. He’s like the high school ‘in crowd’ who surrounded this kid who became a serial rapist. No one talks about it. But they must have felt really close and family till some ‘bitch’ broke up their fuck fest.
I’ve stopped so much corruption and crime in my time. I ‘ve had a half dozen pedophiles or more arrested. I’ve been glad to stop serial rapeists and even murderers. I don’t have a protective group. The government here protected the psychopaths in their group.
I won. The corrupt thieving hospital administrator was removed. The lying drunk head of Psychiatry was removed. I was called a ‘non team player’, a ‘trouble maker’, a ‘Jew lover’, an ‘Indian lover’. I was un -Canadian for my friendship with immigrants. I was a loser.
Now I feel alone, The slurs and bullying come back and I see the thugs all over again. They feel cozy like Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Motlotov must have felt. They had their tribe.
Now I get laughed at for wearing a dress. I was laughed at for wearing a beard.
I was laughed at for wearing a suit and tie. I was laughed at when I got beat up but then went off and trained in martial arts and came back and 6 months later when the gang mob me again I kicked two in the head and broke the nose of another leaving three guy bleeding in the snow and the rest running. I did’t feel good. I felt ‘even’. I felt I’d done the right thing and stopped these shits. I’ve stopped a dozen rapes in progress and stepped into so many fights to break it up. My therapist said he thought I liked to fight and was scanning for scenarios where I could be the good guy in a fight. At the time I thought I was a pacifist.
Now I’m old and these fights wake me from sleep, nightmares and this feeling of how unprotected I’ve been, how I’ve paid millions to government and the police and authorities have been a kleptocracy.”
I’m so disillusioned feeling unsafe in old age. My back has hurt for over a year and I don’t feel I can fight off attackers. I don’t feel I can physically defend myself and I see the gangs roaming the streets and the government saying we can’t defend ourselves. Every day I hear of another older person in Vancouver beat up. Everyday I hear of patients afraid to go outside. Covid was bad but agoraphobia is safe and smart in a dangerous city of terrible violence and criminality that’s covered up. The governments are so corrupt,
I’m afraid
I’m different . I want to hide in conventionality. But i struggle to be authentic. I can’t conceal being old.
I don’t know what it is.
I wish I’d focussed on money instead of learning and science and art and healing and I could have 7 body guards and armed people surrounding me. I wish I could sue people for defamation I wish I could have laws against Christophobia like the Homophobia, Judeaophobia, Islamophobia groups. I wish the new immigrants didn’t go in gangs I wish they didn’t mug me and punch me and scare me to the core. I wish I wasn’t such a coward. I have faced gangs and protected a child being berated by a bunch of drunks and I’ve fought them back ….I’ve got some scars I got in self defence…..but now I’m just paranoid. And afraid.
I was so sorry to see my friend sick and alone and not having the ability to get up and get food. I was so thankful she had friends to bring her groceries. I don’t have children and protected my mom and dad in their old age. My brother protected them too.
I don’t feel I have protection,
It’s always the poor me too, the sucking on the tit of despair,
Everyday I fight with the gratitude I’m thankful to be a live. I’ve this great little dog buddy. I have a roof over my head, indoor plumbing, a freezer, I even had the air conditioning fixed yesterday. I have phone service, I have internet.
God has been with me all the time. I’m alive I’ve survived. I’m blessed. I’m outside but I have friends. The Governemtn hates doctors today and have stolen all their money. All my career I’ve worked without the resources and personnel I was promised and watched as the courts and government offices became fat. No it’s contractors . All the time there’s the criminals too. The 80 billions dollar weeks black market industry and all these mafia sorts ‘good old boys’ , like the Kennedy booze runners ahead and clever and their kids in the best schools. Now it’s the fentanyl dealers in league with the Communist China Military and the money launderers in casinos and real estate.
I’m thankful for the sun.
I m late for work. Altruism calls. Everyday another person tells me how much more difficult it is for them. I feel I have so little left after the government took everything. I have so little I can do to help. Local government does it’s best but Trudeau took the money for doctors and nurses and medical care and gave it to his pet projects where he could get votes, to corrupt and stupid people.
I’m trying to talk to God to be above this to just think with love that Trudeau is sick not bad, that it’s the media, it’s perception. It’s all God and I’m struggling to see it as Jesus would. I’ve not been very good at this. I have to squeeze the pus out of my brain and try over and over again every day to give my head a shake and focus on the positive.
I’m so grateful for the sun and clean air and I’m alive.
Thank you Jesus.
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