Journal Jan. 31, 2016 Sunday

I’m not doing anything. Well, I’m breathing. My maintenance physiology is running in the background. My heart is beating. I’m thankful for all this.  I’m looking at this Apple computer screen and moving my fingers on the key board. Yet I don’t feel like I’m doing anything.
This sense of ennui that comes over me is associated with some idealized activity.  I’m in the now.  This is a good place. I’ve just walked Gilbert the dog in the woods and enjoyed watching the river. When I woke this morning late I sat and meditated.  I rue the busy structured week because my mornings are a hustle with dog walk, hygiene, dressing and commuting.  This morning I didn’t make it to church.  I didn’t want to drive into the DTES.  I miss church when I don’t go.  I notice the absence of church in my life in the week after I miss a service. It’s the fellowship. It’s the shared worship. It’s that feeling of doing something good.
I haven’t swum. I meant to swim today. I thought too to clean up my garage. It’s a horrible mess. I’ve never got my summer clothes from last year or the autumn clothes to the storage locker. I’ve got to prune my wardrobe too. Just last week I was telling someone how I could easily get rid of jeans, not just the two size smaller jeans but the one’s made without the expandable stretchable material.  I envy women their tights. For comfort I’d be a nudist. Part of my not going out when I’m at home is the unwillingness to put on pants.
When I was on the sailboat I spent days like this but I’d first drive the boat to some anchorage and feel like I accomplished something. Today I’m reading. I’ve been reading Fields of Blood which I erroneously called Rivers of Blood as if geographical constructions are interchangeable when it comes to blood.  I am enjoying Karen Armstrong.  I’m also reading Duncestan or Dunscefield, the WWI English colonels dispatches and journal from his time commanding a unit in the middle east.  It’s been months now, actually since being in Istanbul or Moscow before that, in which I’ve been trying to educate myself regarding that whole area I thoughts was vaguely Eastern Europe then India and China.  I really didn’t know much about Afghanistan, Iran, Bagdad, Iraq, Kurdistan, Armenia, or any of the newer stan’s and couldn’t pass a geography test on the seas. I’ve read the news and repeatedly looked at the google map to see what people are talking about but it’s not been very well established in my mind. I am like the american who asked me where I was from and when I answered Canada, said ’that’s to the north, mexico is to the south’.  Part of it too is my visual memory. I seem to have lost the capacity to remember and see things easily in 3 D.  Throughout medicine and surgery I had an uncanny mind for that sort of thing but now I’m more prosaic though do see relationships and understand things in a peculiar way that seems easy to grasp to me but to others seems befuddling. I miss the 3 d memory. I used to love seeing chemical molecules with all their bits floating in the air.  It’s probably a muscle. If I would work it more it would come back. I’m fat in my gut for lack of sit ups and other parts of me including my mind are sedentary.
I need a road trip. It’s too early to get the bike out of Trev Deeley.  I had this weekend and could have gone snowshoeing or skiing or fishing. I see these days off as precious and then so much recently all I find myself doing is laying about .  I shopped for essentials at Walmart yesterday, got myself a couple of new shirts and a pair of rubber shoes. I really should cull the old stuff.  I threw some underwear out because there was a hole in the side.  I think a moth got at one of my sweaters. I’ve had to put my kilt away since last week. It’s all hanging in the garage but I’ve just not put it in its bag.  I keep waiting for my Mother to return.  I want to hire another cleaning lady but I don’t like having people in my place. I like my privacy and go years between times when I’ll actually trust someone in my home. I think if the wives had lived elsewhere we would have lasted longer. Gilbert is the best of company. He’s a dog.
Right now he’s curled up on the comforter I got cleaned with the view to changing the one on the bed, for no reason other than it seemed timely.  In the meantime I’d moved the comforter to beside the bed and Gilbert has made it his bed. I don’t think the original plan is going to fly.
There’s just a whole bunch of ‘should’s’.  Like shaking out the rugs.  I did clean the stove and microwave this weekend.  But I’m mostly psyching myself up for another week of work. It’s a lot like war.  Frontlines.  I cringe at the yellers and the threats.  I worry I’ll lose it when I’m talking to the happy happy government people.  I have to get over my self pit and martyrdom.  It’s really a pretty good place I’m at. I’m really thankful for all that is happening in my life. I guess I have a bit of that waiting for the shoe to drop. There’s always these lulls and then the storm but mostly it’s the weather. I felt worse in November.  It’s already February and the spring is spectacular. I always feel great when the light returns but the taxes and the deluge of license fees is just overwhelming now.  I find myself worrying about how I will ever take a break because everyone wants more and more money. All the ‘takers’ have increased their fees and my income just decreases like the canadian dollar. The government is the worst.
Boohoo.  Thank you God for my health. Thank you god for this safe cozy place with warmth and heat. Thank you God for Gilbert and his healing back.  Thank you for this computer. thanks you for an income. Thank you for this day. Thank you for friends and family. Thank you for the books I get to read.  Thank you for history and spirituality. Thank you for prayer and meditation. thank you for the refrigerator.
Really I probably am just needing another coffee.  I was morose there earlier and I just needed a sandwich. Then I napped.  I was a bit off and had a bowel movement. These are things I rarely notice in my work week. I’m lucky to get to sleep.  The weekend comes and I’m on the couch.  Gilbert is snoozing.  He’s has no guilt or shame about anything.
I do the dishes.  I swept the floor a month or so ago.  Gilbert’s toys are everything .I vacuumed centrally yesterday.  I have a new bathtub. Things are getting done. I have the most unrealistic expectations. If it’s not failure to be taken by the aliens I’m pissed because I didn’t make the cut for the rapture.  Even if I was taken to  a different galaxy I’d probably still have to clean my room.  l just don’t have room for the stuff.  I think of buying another house but remember the last one with the basement and the increasing hoarding of ‘stuff’.  Stuff expands to fill the space.  That’s what I liked about the boat. Everything was there. Right now I think of playing my guitar but it’s under the clothing in the garage.  I suspect I’m not wholly alone in this experience. On Facebook the other day some one asked about who made their beds and several of my friends took pride in their OCD. I throw the comforter over the bed solely because if I don’t Gilbert will jump up when he’s wet and muddy and lie on the sheets where I do.  If the comforter is there it’s less a tragedy to have his wet dirty little body on the bed. I like to get into relatively clean sheets.
I bought a couple of shelves yesterday to add to the collection of shelves I have for the express purpose of reducing the chaos. I have this one shelf that will take care of the books I have around with the express purpose of reading immediately. there’s about a dozen. They’re ‘urgent reading. They re on the floor beside the couch.  I’ve downloaded 5 science fiction kindle books about earth being attacked and the defenders fighting off the fleets of aliens.  I read these like candy several over the last couple of weeks.  Meanwhile the ‘real books’ the ones I have to read are cluttering the floor beside the couch. There’s an addiction textbook , four voluments at the office I had intended to read by Jan.  I’ve read  few chapters. How did I read all those textbooks on brain injury in the last couple of years and  all those theological textbooks. I’m just plodding my way through this Fields of Blood. It takes me an hour to read 10 pages and I keep cross referencing bits with the encyclopedia.
I’m a whiner.
 I hate that I’m a whiner.
 I want to sail across the atlantic but fantasize about barging down the nile with fans and people feeding me grapes. There’s two sides to me at war, one industrious and the other very very lazy.  It’s amazing I’ve got this far.  I could die soon too.  I’m of the age when people do that sort of thing.  I can see the advantageous. Right now death would solve the whole cleaning issue.  I stay around though for my dog.  I also have obligations and concerns about people. I figure to I must eventually do something with my life. Mostly though I feel I’m on the bench waiting to be called by God. A part of a back up plan.  I saved a life last week. The rest of the week ws coasting but there was one person who if they’d not seen me would have likely been toast. I’ve found it quite amazing that just having age and seeing tens of thousands of people I know things that others don’t. It was that sort of thing that others would have missed. I’d have missed it a decade ago. But I’ve seen it ow several times so recognized it before it caused death. Death is that close at times. So I was useful, not just the usual waste of flesh that I feel at these times.
There really should be a place on a mars shot for a fat old white guy. The world is tired of fat old white guys.  Everywhere I look I hear anger and abuse about what my great great great grandfathers and grand mothers did by climbing down from trees faster than the neighbour and developing a better club because they got up earlier in the morning.  I’m thankful that my ancestors were quicker on the draw but I’ve been relatively slow and today I’m just really tired of all the abuse.  This divide and conquer of course is what the 86 world leaders want. They want us scrapping about crumbs and fighting over who has freckles and who doesn’t so that they can keep more to themselves.  Maybe they’re managing things better though I don’t know. I, like all the other critics, can’t manage cleaning my room but I think I should be in charge of NASA if only I want to get off this planet before the grim reaper takes me.
Really I don’t.  I want to be in Thailand or Cambodia or Ethiopia. I want to be somewhere I’ve not been walking around learning.  I know too that when I’ve done that for a bit I want to be right back here where I am. Indeed this weekend I’m really enjoying being in this place I pay rent for but rarely use. I’m thankful that I can hang out with my dog.  That’s a real treat.  I am really very fortunate.  I’ve enjoyed the mush mind netflix run I’ve been on this weekend watching a half dozen shows of Jessica Jones and Occupied. In one a superstring woman with amazing sexual energy fights a mind controller while in the other Norway is occupied by Russia.
I was glad to talk to family. That’s enjoyable always.  Good to hear they’re okay.
God thank you for this down time.  I know it’s better in the boat where I’m bouncing up and down and doing the very same thing, reading, writing, watching tv but this is pretty good. I’m very thankful for my back yard. I like that I have a back yard. I liked the balcony on the apartments but this backyard is so much better. I am thankful I had chickens and geese. I ‘d like to have chickens again.  But I’d rather travel.  Travelling is something I want to do more of as part of the research I continue but there’s Gilbert and I have to consider where he would stay when I travelled. I like to visit churches and cafes.  They don’t particularly welcome dogs in churches and cafes. A road trip he can come on. Either on the motorcycle or in the car.
We may have to go to the US for a weekend. That’s always a great break. Overnighting a cross the border.  Bellingham Seattle. I worry about the peso like value of the dollar.  But then I could go to Bellingham rather than Seattle.  That would half the cost.  Yes that’s a possible plan. I have these vague ideas that get me week to week. Something in the future that seems interesting.  Anything to break up the routine.  I admire the god kids for their ‘outings’ to the woods and streams.  I could have gone looking at sea dos and wave riders.  Maybe a second hand one but where to store it.  But if I had one maybe I’d go up the river.  I’ve got my boat and could get out in the little boat and go up[ the river.
No i think I’ll have another nap.  

Psalm 70

Psalm 70
"Hasten, O God, to save me,
O Lord, come quickly to help me.
May those who seek my life
be put to shame and confusion
may all who desire my ruin
be turned back in disgrace.
May those who say to me, "Aha! Aha!
turn back because of their shame.
But may all who seek you
rejoice and be glad in you;
may those who love your salvation
always say
"Let God be exalted!"
Yet I am poor and needy;
Come quickly to me, O God.
You are my help and my deliverer;
O Lord, do not delay.

Well, that pretty well sums it up. What more need be said. The Psalmist captured my deepest feelings thousands of years ago.  His words are all that are needed this day in the 21st Century. The plight of this man remains the same.  I feel harried, threatened, anxious.  I am forever doing my best and yet feeling there are those with more time and more money and more means and that they will hurt me because they can.  I feel powerless.  I turn to the Lord begging constantly for help to over come the anxiety and fear I experience every day I go to work.
I know that technically this thing might be explained as some kind of post traumatic stress disorder. I might even be called depressed but I think it is more to do with the human condition.  There are forces beyond my control.
I am reading Karen Armstrong's timely text "Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Blood".  It is so far a masterful treatise.
She challenges immediately the simpleton's who ignorantly equate religion with violence.  Violence has always been with man. As a hunter gatherer violence was limited by the resources and the need for the tribes to focus on survival.  Only with the agrarian revolution was man able to develop armies. I love that she says the first real violence was within society.  The 'aristocracy',  meaning 'best' and their hangers on, bureaucrats, judges, advisors , developed armies to subjugate the masses so that some 2% of the society lorded over the rest who principally did the ugly work of raising food and building. Indeed this upper class shunned work. They were warriors but the idea of tilling or labouring or constructing was often beneath them. They preferred to 'administer'.  They also early found that 'organized theft' was the best means of expanding individual and collective wealth.  So lords proceeded from the earliest records of civilization to attack their neighbours and steal.
Theft is what war is all about and everyone is doing it.
I loved Dr. Samual Johnson's great words, paraphrased by Bob Dylan, "Steal a little and they put you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king".
That said, religion, to survive aligned it self with the warriors and rulers.  This goes for Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism and the greatest killer religion of all time, Atheism.
Now within the religions , starting with Zoroastrianism there was this 'guilt' about killing.  That's an interesting development.  This 'reaction' which appears to have resulted in interesting divisions in society and specializations so that the 'killing' could be done by this other group which was at once abhorred but obviously necessary. Because wealth stemmed from the army.  The army was divided later into external and internal army, or army and police because it also served to maintain control.
"The reformer is the enemy of any one who threatens the status quo".  So all of government and society is established to maintain the very forces that ensure the upper classes, that 1- 2% of administrative warriors retained their power.  All banking and all resources are managed to maintain supremacy of the 'ruling elite'.
For the silly and stupid, that means that Obama and Justin Trudeau and all the world leaders are there first and foremost to maintain those who are in power.  In the US these would be foremost Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.  Of course there are the Rothschilds and Rockerfellers but all billionaires have a major investment in maintaining this world as we know it.
Biblically Jesus called this world ruled by Satan.  Herod was the Jewish leader of the day who killed all the children fearing a prophecy saying that a baby would be born. Eventually this local billionaire leader would have John the Baptist beheaded because his girlfriend's daughter wanted this.  Pontus Pilate the Roman Empire leader would allow Jesus eventually be killed as a young man because the religious leaders of his day, who naturally were aligned with the ruling elite, felt he threatened the 'order' of society.  Hence the crucifixion.
Yet 300 years later Constantine, the Roman Emperor caught in an internal struggle noted that the Christians were the best fighters and that their communications. So Constantine had a quickie conversion, and won the battle of Milvian Bridge against Maxentius going on to make Christianity, the state religion. Thus began the Holy Roman Empire and Catholicism which would reign until Martin Luther with the backing of Nationalistic forces of the Protestant cause would begin to decentralize power.
Today, the atheists like to deny that their great atheist oracle Marx and his bench man Lenin created the greatest atheist empire the USSR which promptly killed 60 million and centralized war.
The Chinese atheists under Mao would kill 100 million.
I have never forgotten the great paranoia song of the group Buffalo Springfield with its incredibly brilliant refrain, "Something happening here, what it is aint exactly clear, man with a gun over there say, hey you got to beware, stop hey what's that sound, everybody look what's going down" and "people carrying signs mostly say hoorah for our side."
Now tribalism is the support of 'your group'. Sociopaths are those who will fight and defined their own group within any greater society.  Psychopaths by contrast lack any real empathy and aren't too good at groups. So it follows that for sub cultures the 'hero' is another man's 'terrorist'.
Personally, I like the Aryans. They were the Indo-Caucasian cowboys who moved across India and wrote the Vedas celebrating women, wine, war and cattle stealing. The Celts, the cowboys of Scotland and Ireland and Northern Europe did much the same,  Great warriors and cattle and women thieving.  Later the Indian society separated into the Administrative Brahma religion political class, the warrior class, merchant class, labouring class and slaves.  Prior to this 'warrior specialization' the leadership had focused on being the best killers. A little nation state in Africa has men who do just that even today, maintain their martial skills while the women do all the labour. That group hasn't become civilized to the specialization.
There has been no other successful civilization or empire.  The Khybers and all major political societies today have this history and intrinsic war motif.  The Communists have great armies and sell weapons. The NATO states are the greatest arms dealers and the leaders of the United Nations are all leaders who have been appointed by warrior countries.  Anyone who is not a great war monger is marginal and irrelevant to the powers of the day.  Even Iceland who kicked out it's bankers derived from the great 'organized thieves' of their day, the Vikings.
The Zulus were another group of cowboys.
Cowboys love their cattle.
Warriors are meat eaters. Meat has been rationed throughout history as the most powerful food source for action.  In Scotland the Lords, left overs of the great warrior castes of feudal Europe with its Kings and Queens, own all the fish and edible wildlife.  That's why in Canada today the State is trying to outlaw personal hunting and fishing and is licensing it and taxing it out of reach of the common man.  Indeed vegetarianism has always been encouraged as peasant food with the Irish potato farmers as the classic examples.  The world over, the chicken has been the meat of the people along with lesser fish.
"Guns Germs and Steel" by anthropologist Jared Diamond certainly supports this view of history.
Tribalism, partisanship and behind it all a desire to be home.  We are all walking each other home.  But the glory and the fight and the world of war is alike to sex and orgasm, hence 'all's fair in love and war'.  The two passions of all men.
And the denial. The people who say they don't like war.  They are commonly the 'effete' who detest the soldiers but love the power and wealth that they bring. They are the girls like Canada's protest singer who wrote "Universal Soldier' blaming the soldier. But she may as well have blamed Eva Brawn, Hitler's girlfriend because the girls are the ones who celebrate most the 'returning warrior'. Matriarchies have all been warrior societies and celebrated the wealth the warrior brings.
Krishna said to Arjuna, there will always be war and the war will always be between family members so the only real question is whether you will be in it or not.
So the poverty saints, like St. Francis and others have recognized that without war you can have poverty but with poverty you can still have God because God is truly universal where as Ferrari's unfortunately are not.  Neither is Chanel.
I fear even saying these truths because the evolutionary biologists have said that we have developed our human big brain for the purpose of 'deceit'.  Only by deception did little men kill saber toothed tigers.
I believe this is the truth and I believe the Psalmist called on God because he too was a truth teller.  And every one knows 'he is a fool who cannot conceal his wisdom'.  No religion is truly a 'religion of peace'.  So if you believe Islam is then I have some great swamp land to sell you.  The Klu Klux Klan by their few numbers are clearly less aligned with the major forces of war than Buddhists, Christians or Atheists.  Their 'meme' isn't nearly as duplicitous as that which all major religions can purport to provide.  Support for the warrior 'ruling elite' and 'solace for the losers'.  As Neitze said there are 'supermen' and 'slaves'.  A good religion is good for all but doesn't rock the boat.
But religion doesn't cause war.  Greed and power seeking and lust cause war.  It's a male and female thing. It's a very human thing.
So I'm still thinking that Peace is an elusive butterfly and Love conquers but not in some simple stupid way.  Faith surpasses fear but only with discipline and training. It is natural to be afraid if alone because only together has man and woman been able to face the foe.