Showing posts with label Saipan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saipan. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Vespa 300 GTE Touring Motor Scooter

I am so pleased to be a Vespa owner.I woke up this morning and looked out to see the Vespa parked beside my Harley Electroglide and felt right with the world.  God is good all of the time.
The Harley Electriguide is the biggest Harley made. I rode it to Sturges South Dakota and back in 2013.  Nothing beats the Harley for highway driving.  However, it’s rather big for the city. And nothing beats the Vespa for the city. 
I know cyclists will tell you different. I bicycled across Europe with a gorgeous woman companion in my 20’s. I was young and athletic then. I’ve since had several bicycles and loved my latest, the Rad Electric Bicycle. But I’ve been a fan of scooters since I rented my first, in my 20’s riding about Hawaii and later in Cozumel, Mexico, having so much more fun. 
My first scooter was an Aprilia 50 cc which I bought when I lived in the Vancouver West end.  The Italians are famous for their scooters and motorcycles, world reknowned for their performance design and workmanship.   The next scooter I had was the amazing Honda Ruckus. The Japanese captured the American market with motorcycles in the 60‘s and 70‘s. My brother loved his Yamaha 125, back when the 100 to 150 cc machines were all the rage.  The big bikes, like the HD and Triumph 1200‘s used in WWII only became popular for cruising in later years. My HD Electriglide is 1600 cc and can carry myself, Laura and the kitchen sink at high speeds, all day without a care.
I passed my Honda 50 cc Ruckus onto Laura.  We both truly loved it as the ultimate inner city get about. It only weakness was the lack of power going  over Vancouver bridges. I‘d graduated to a Buell Blast 600 cc which had more than enough power to spare. I toured the whole of BC on that motorcycle.  
When I lived in Saipan, the jewel of the Northern Mariana Island I rented Vespas. Laura and I loved touring the island on a Vespa 250. It was grand riding through the jungles and coming out onto a stretch of endless white beaches with vast expanses of blue Pacific Ocean.   When we visitted Rome, not that long ago, I again rented a Vespa 250.  It was one of our favourite days travelling around  the ancient picturesque city, scootering from cathedral to cathedral to pray at the these famous sites of the most holy of relics.  It was a bit gruesome, finding the head of one saint at one magnificent cathedral and the feet at architectural.  The Vespa made it all so Italian. Really quite spiritual.  Cobblestone roads made by the Romans.  Places where St. Paul had walked.
Now I’m the owner of a Vespa 300 GTE Touring motorscooter and I’m thrilled.  
In Vancouver, it’s an unspoken rule that anyone on a motorcycle is fair game.   The trouble is female vegetarian yoga pant wearing liberal voters Huffington Post readers, with their unowned aggression in deep denial of their road rage loathing all things male, unfortunately, perceive motorcycles as masculine, It’s a life and death struggle with their constant negligence and insistence “I just didn’t see him, (before I smashed him like a bug with my Volvo SUV).”  By contrast scooters are treated like bicycles, somehow seen as not target worthy  metrosexual.  They are less triggering to the liberal arts college grads.  Riding a motorcycle in Vancouver is a serious matter. I’ve even a heard a Hell’s Angel say he wouldn’t ride his Harley downtown because of the poor drivers.  Vancouver drivers are definitely the worst in the world but they are equally passive aggressive.  However, they simply don’t target scooters.  Admittedly when I’m driving my Harley, Steppenwolf, ‘Born to be Wild’ plays in my head while  on the Vespa I’m hear opera arias or in the summer sun,  the Beach Boys.  People actually smile at me rather.  Part of it is that they don’t know my Vespa as gas powered.  Simply polluted with propaganda they believe electricity, even if coal generated, is ‘clean’  while all things gas is ‘dirty’.  Vespa even has an Electrica version and Harley Davidson has just put out an Electric 500 cc motorcycle
My Vespa maroon and sparkling which rich mahogany brown leather seats.   My Harley is black and I geared  up in black armoured clothing. I bought the Vespa wearing shorts, tshirt and sandals. I wore a helmet. When I got home I added armoured gloves. Once a surgeon and musician hands are forever important. The fact is I’d mostly miss the ability to type these days. I just don’t feel I need to wear leather on a scooter. My Harley is 800 lbs and my scooter is 300 lbs. In the city I mostly do 30 to 60 km and routinely bicycled at 40 to 50 km/hour when I was younger.  So while the chance of major injury remains it’s not the same as when I’m on the Harley on the highway doing 120 mph.  The Vespa 300’s top speed is 135 km/hr.  Admittedly less than a day old, I’ve had it over a hundred already.  I was only wearing t shirt and shorts and helmet and being stupid but it’s not at all like the day I took my Harley up to 140 mph and chickened out finding just how fast it would go. It goes a lot faster but I’ll never know. What I confirmed with the Vespa is that it really can go on the freeway.  If I plan on touring I’ll at least wear jeans and jacket.  Armour protects joints at higher speeds. 
The truth of the matter is I really like slower speeds on the Vespa. Sitting upright it’s a wonderful platform for sightseeing and looking about.  I have already taken it out to a country trail to confirm that it’s just fine on country roads. I’m so looking forwards to taking mine camping and having a camera or a bow along as I explore. Laura enjoyed riding on the back of the Vespa for a spin so it , will be fun again to ride with her about the city. We rode all over the province together on my HD Roadster but she‘s lost interest in the highway the road trips I still love with my HD Electroglide. The last year Gilbert, the cockapoo was my companion on the rides up the canyon to Merrit. 
Laura and even Gilbert, now,  much prefers riding out to the country in my Ford Truck with the Adventurer Camper. I carried the KTM 690 on the front or back so will now have to arrange to carry the wider but lighter Vespa the same way.   My Vespa is only 300 lbs. 
I’ve only had it a day and already made the trip to the market.  Like I found with all my previous scooters there’s lots of storage. My Vespa came with the box I’d had added to my previous scooters.  It holds too bags of groceries. The under the seat storage holds tools and there’s even a rack on the front and a dashboard storage compartment. There’s a little ring to hang bags from at my feet too. I love my Vespa. 
On the way back from the market and the post office I picked up burgers and fish and chips from the White Spot.  With Covid I’d had to take two post office trips a week and with the Harley I’d simply be less likely to make stops.  Not now. Scooters are just so convenient for multiple stops. I won’t even compare them to cars. Cars are cages and anyone who has ever had a scooter knows how much they open up a city.  Parking is everywhere and unlike a bicycle you don’t have to go through all that locking up and chaining up one has to do in Vancouver where a million bikes are stolen by the hour despite NASA titanium locks.  
Did I say I’m happy with my Vespa. Admittedly I’m happy with every vehicle. Vehicles are adventure to me.  Different vehicles, different adventures. I’m the same way with canoes, boats and yachts.  I’d really like a personal space craft. I asked my brilliant nuclear physicist engineer cousin I’m depending on him for a nuclear powered Harley Davidson with outer space capacity.  For now I’m really looking forward to more fun on the Vespa. Last night I took it for a spin too to check out the lights.  Perfect. Not only that but it was just quiet enough that I didn’t feel like I was disturbing the neighborhood. I don’t take the Harley out after 10 pm unless I have to and my KTM 690 was similarly, though not quite as loud. Loud pipes save lives.  Not the Vespa. It’s loud enough that Laura heard me come up beside her as she was driving the car but not so loud that I couldn’t go out for a late night spin and feel I wasn‘t  disrupting the neighbour hood. It‘s a trade off.
Metrovespa,the dealer was like a miniature, Trev Deely,  my Harley Dealership. Martin, the sales man was terrific, so friendly and helpful. The service department is there and they do everything as well as manage maintenance schedules like Trev does.  I confess,a major part of owning a two wheel machine, is trusting the service department. Harley and Honda have been great that way. Now I’m delighted to see the same kind of professionalism and concern in the Vespa service centre. The good news was that Vespa,  doesn’t require much service, less than Honda or Yamaha.  Vespa has always been known like Harley for being built sturdy.  Tough little machines.  Marten showed me where the oil inspection site was and added it doesn’t use a lot. He reviewed the walk around inspection bike owners need to know with powered two wheel vehicles. A tank of gas gets 200 km.  At the price of gas today the fuel economy is terrific.
Now I just need more time to explore. One of my joys is going for coffee at outdoor cafe’s. I love to carry a laptop , and journal thoughts and impressions outside.  A consummate blogger.  Now I’m looking forward to next weeekend, weather permitting, a run down to the New Westminster wharf area on my Vespa. New Westminister is one of the most marvellous and oldest areas of Vancouver but while it’s only a half hour away from where I am in Burnaby I’ve simply not enjoyed taking a car or motorcycle down the hills to the waterfront. The Vespa was made for such terraced roads and traffic. I remember riding about such places in Rome.  
Lots to look forward to.  Thankfully a friend will take care of selling my KTM which ,while being a skookum motorcycle is too off road for any of my needs to day. Older I just didn’t ,this last year like the risk of leaving the logging and forest roads or any of the  risk taking in the wilderness with an off road enduros deserves.  A decade back I’d ridden my Honda 250 on deer trails and literally off roads through pastures and fields, jumping rocks and barrelling through streams.  I didn‘t even think if I broke my body or machine,  it would be hours or days before someone found me.  This last couple of years I simply haven’t felt as  courageous or foolish alone in the woods as I did younger. Someone else will enjoy the full experience of the KTM while I scooter about, never planning on leaving a road with my new to me beautiful little friend.  Kaloo Kalay, he chortled in his joy! Thank you, Jesus!












Saturday, June 29, 2019

50 to 53 yo: Christ Church Cathedral, Regent College, VST, St. Mark’s, ‘the club’.

I woke this morning remembering my 50th year birthday.  It was 2002.  Millennial madness had come and gone.  9/11 had rocked the world. I was anxious about Canada’s changing politics and the Dessert Storm Arms Bazaar.

Willi and Anita invited me to a birthday party in Chilliwack. I remember being there with them and a few family friends  feeling how kind they were. They’d talk of their missionary medicine days in Africa, delivering babies in primitive conditions, witnessing miracles.  

My friend Kirk and Dr. George and a few others in Vancouver had celebrated my birthday too.  Since my divorce when I’d been a kind of ‘hostage’ I’d developed this vast network of friends and was ever being asked out to dinners. I was out most every night, meetings, round ups, Bible study. My beautiful neighbour from Winnipeg greeted me at my first Vancouver North Shore Round Up. She’d told me she’d arrived a decade before and said it would be okay. I met Bill Gyles there as well and felt that I was with friends from Winnipeg in this new land.  The only status here was the days of fasting.

I became a half a century old.  I was lonely in a way. I remember that odd feeling. I was closer to God and surrounded by close friends and acquaintances. Still I felt I’d come this far and yet I felt I’d not accomplished anything.   With Tom as my sponsor I”d been baptized at Christ Church Cathedral by Bishop Ingram and Rev. Peter Elliott.  They were controversial characters but deeply moving human and spiritual men whose genius I admired.  I’d read Bishop Ingham’s book “Many Mansions’ and been moved. I loved Ecumenical Christianity. I believed spiritually that God showed himself to all and called all. I summed my own personal journey at that time as having ‘known Christ but now I knew Jesus”.  In my Baptist youth and study of Eastern spirituality I had come to know the Messiah and feel the world at the death of Jesus  permeated by the Holy Spirit.  It had changed.  There was a cataclysmic shift.  It’s been called  Christ Consciousness by some and I felt that I’d known this since I began formal daily meditation in my 20’s and carried on for decades.  

I was attending Christ Church Cathedral where my lovely Oxford Group friend had encouraged me to be a reader. She’d actually taken me sailing in the harbour with her friend for a day when I’d been heart broken, a restless landlubber and still without my sailboat. 

Not long after I would be  living on my sailboat anchored in False Creek. I’d have these months at a time when I couldn’t find a marina slip so anchored in the harbour and would dinghy a shore. I’d arrive at my office on Broadway in wet rain gear , slipping that off to don my sport jacket for the day of patients before the evenings of study for Addiction medicine exams or for theology classes with John.  

I’d actually thought marijuana was a ‘spiritual herb’ that enhanced my awareness but then over time wine and women and rock and roll intervened.   In the end it all seemed shallow and hedonistic. I’d truly felt like I’d lost God in the storm at sea when my crew mutinied and I found myself fervently praying the Lord’s Prayer. I felt that all I had after that, to fall back on, if it ever got worse,  was singing “Jesus Loves me”.  I was that far from the ‘home’ I’d know in Christ.  My crew and my wife were Christians and we all talked that night about Christ as I asked each if they’d been praying to Jesus and they admitted that they too had.  I felt then a great sea change.  The effects of that night would resonate and I believe lead to the beginning  of the great ‘fast’ a year and a half later.  I’d sit in church on Sunday’s crying when I saw the children and smelt the ‘church smells’ and felt the smoothness of the wood pews remembering the ‘innoscence’ and ‘comfort’ I’d known in church with my father, mother, brother and aunt.  I’d felt so long from home.  I was the prodigal son returning.    I’d know Jesus as my personal saviour and friend then and now. 

Today I joke because I am optimistic and believe we are evolving and ‘all roads lead to Rome’ but I say that being Anglican I’m going to be in a better housing district than others especially those who land on the ‘other side of the tracks’. There is a great awakening.  I love the Call.

When I’d studied Tagore and knew his songs were sung in India in the mainstream I so longed to be surrounded by spiritual music. I’d always loved the Beatles and other rock groups for songs like Let it Be, My Sweet Lord. I’d love Pete Seegers Ecclesiastes’s,  I was always touched by soul music.  Today there’s Praise music on the radio . Communism fell in Russia and when I visitted Moscow and St. Petersburg the Orthodox churches were full. Dr. Lam introduced me to Chinese psychiatrists from underground churches there.  

Before I’d sail to Hawaii I’d have gone on to complete my American Society of Addiction Medicine Exams and  my Medical Review Officer exams.  I’d also achieve my Canadian and International Society of Addiction Medicine Certification.  One of the highlights of that time was my forming a study group. I learned from the Society who was preparing for the exams that year and called them up inviting them to a monthly study session. That’s how I met Paul Sobey whose sense of humor and joie de vivre still delights me today.  

I’d become friends with Dr. John Christiansen through his sister Kay. She was friends of Suzanne. Being a member of an elite club, called ironically, the ‘last club on the block’ I’d be surrounded with the most extraordinary women. Truly beautiful and elegant ladies who had amazing senses of humor. Suzanne was such a lady. Great spring hats, tall, eye catching and always haute couture fashion. She’d actually been a beauty consultant and I always considered her make up and her face a work of art.  Kay another beauty but one who quite well might have sheered sheep in her no nonsense mood would walk on either side of me as we moved down a street.  Never has my ‘credit’ among men been higher.  We especially loved our Commercial Drive on Saturday rambles, often joined by Dr. George. Breakfast laughter, amusing anecdotes, just a splendid time all round. Dr. George was the greatest raconteur and the ladies loved him.  He was a jazz pianist as well as a greatly admired doctor.  We’d both done our tours of duty in the north, he serving in the Queen Charlotte Islands before establishing his practice in North Vancouver and raising his great family.

We were all Christians. It was amazing how much fun we had. Absolutely none of the pompish non Christian petty judgementalness that  passes for some as pseudo spiritual. The women were lithesome and robust, ladies of course, but oozing sensuality and walking like large cats or dancers. The conversation was free flowing and no one ever considered ‘correcting’ anyone or ‘being offended’. We were Christians and it felt so good to be among such great minds and with people who had lived fully, raised Christian and now again devoted to Christ.  It was so alive and authentic and I felt that through the strangest journey I’d arrived where I’d always longed to be.   

I felt like I’d found the Christian world of my Baptist Aunt Sally. She’d been the assistant to the Canadian Ambassadoor in Washington and her blond friend, Babe, had driven ambulances through the war.  Babe swore like a trooper yet had the heart of mother Teresa. Their Christianity wasn’t the anemic parlour sort that reeked of pious judgementalness.  Both those Christian ladies who’d travelled the world together retained their laughter.  True Adults never had had time to ‘sweat the small stuff’ which shows the absurdity of today’s bureaurcracy and other Monty Python sources of humor.  I loved the stories of Jesus with Fishermen, Soldiers and Mary Magdalene. Years later I’d have Passover Supper in Safed at Hotel Ron joining in the laughter and enjoyment of conviviality of shared meals with a Rabbi who well could have been one of the men who broke fast, a joyous time, with Jesus. 

John was in a wheel chair. He’d been head of the UBC Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Society, one of the founders.  He’d had a horse back riding accident, much like Superman ‘s Christopher Reeve.  In his way John was a spiritual superman.  He’d say that “if I had to become the man I was before , I’d rather stay in this chair.’  He told me of white light spiritual experience he’d had as his neck broke. “I felt my neck break and knew something terrible had happened but I also felt like I was finally falling into His hands.”  He’d go on to tell me his life story, riding a motorcycle in the outback of Australia without a helmet of course.  We seemed a fitting pair, him quadriplegic with his scars on the outside and me with my mind and soul troubled and so many scars on the inside. He’d laugh and say, “sometimes listening to you Bill I’d rather be trapped in this chair than trapped in your mind.”  We ‘d go on walking and rolling dog walks and share thoughts and stories and insights on shared Christian readings. 

I’d begun taking theology courses at UBC.  I loved one at Vancouver Theology School where the Anglican professor introduced us to Julian of Norwich. All shall be well, all shall be well and All manner of things shall be well.  My focus was Christian Spirituality. Dr. James Houston, former classmate of C.S. Lewis, had taught geology at Oxford , before coming to UBC to found Regent College. He’d become the chancellor but much preferred simply teaching Christian Spirituality. I’d invited John to join me and for years we’d spend evenings at the university taking in Dr. Houston moving lectures and then going back to John’s for pizza and coffee. We then studied with Prof Shirley Sullivan at the St. Mark’s  catholic seminary at UBC.  Laura and. I were friends then and she’d attend with us the St. Augustine lectures Shirley Sullivan gave on St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul.  I loved reading Dr. James Houston’s book on Prayer and was deeply touched by Brother’s Laurence “practicing the presence’.  After John could no longer make the courses at UBC James would come for dinner at John’s and we’d have these moving meals always joined by beautiful intelligent Christian women. Helen would go off to be a missionary in Sudan. I’d be so blessed by God to be able to listen to these great spiritual men share of their lives of services in amusing heart warming. anecdotes

I had Stuart at the time and Laura would take him when John and I would go off to study.This was all before Saipan. I’d sail to Saipan in 2003 when I was 53.

Willi invited me to come to Saipan. I’d take time off from my practice thinking that I’d have some weeks in the tropics and return to another winter in Vancouver.  As it turned out the other psychiatrist there had quit and a position was open.They desperately needed another psychiatrist as Willi became the only one there.  The Northern Marianas needed three psychiatrists and Guam had needed another 2. Willi and I would get by with two, the actual hospital and day to day management not at all onerous except for the wearing one in two call. One in three call had become the industry standard as constant and even one in  two so affected sleep and the capacity to relax.  

I’d return to Vancouver and close my practice.  Laura and I would become intimate only after we were no longer working together and I could enjoy our time together with Stuart. Tom and I had been finishing off the boat.I’d decided to sail to Saipan even though the weather window was past and it was going to be winter sailing.  I’d know this wonderful freedom from the constant grind and overbearing threat of the College autocracy with their regal  arbitrary moodiness and political favouritism.  Laura was such a beautiful person and I  felt badly we’d only found each other as it were when I was setting out to leave essentially for good.  


Friday, June 28, 2019

46 - 50 years old SV Giri, Vancouver, Saipan, Chinatown

I’d just witnessed my truck stolen and sold without papers. I was chccking the auto sales periodically wondering about this. I wasn’t doing the same for my sailboat.  As far as I knew  the sailboat, in my name, was in Guaymos where I’d left it.  I simply happened to buy a sailboat magazine and there was the SV Giri up for sale.  It had illegally been taken back from Mexico without my consent.  It had illegally been put up for sale without my consent. I’d had all my money moved from my account and I’d signed $50,000 loan with her and a lawyer for ‘our’ business but that money had not gone into the business and  presumably up her nose.  She still had millions, the process of divorce showing the tens of millions she had squirrelled away and how through our marriage we’d mostly  used only ‘my money’, and for the most part I was working when she wasn’t and I was being paid as a doctor and she was paid as a student.

I was chivalrously taking the fall for her. We’d tried to protect her name sending her to San Diego for treatment. Now I was getting beat up for 2 very important reasons.
1. I’d offended the people who own the Indigeous land of Vancouver in the Jack Cram case
2. I’d reported the son of a famous Jewish family for abuse of power and sodomizing me.
I felt the ‘pay back’ was mostly to do with the latter but couldn’t be certain. I’d been told by the Jewish psychiatrist to ‘stop talking about your professor’. 
3. I was divorcing a rich educated woman. Men were always wrong in divorce. 

Now my boat was taken by my ex and I stopped blaming myself.

I believe that everything is ‘God and me.”  I spent years studying ‘determinism and fate versus free will’.  Most people say it’s ‘fate’ when bad things happen to them and ‘free will’ when good things happen. I don’t deserve bad but I deserve good is the prevailing logic. The thinking is very sloppy.  I also believe in the one becoming many and the many becoming one. We’re all interconnected.
She had caused an ‘unnecessary death’.  I’d reported a person who had done that but I’d covered for her negligence and her drug abuse. I’d managed her patients repeatedly when she was not at work. I’d repeatedly corrected her mistakes.  She had been grossly unreliable but had moments of brilliance. Off drugs she was depressed.  She had terrible mood swings.  Now to my mind she’d stollen my sailboat.  I’ve never hit a girl. I’ve never fought with girls or women. My friends said I lost a lot not having a sister and learning how mean they can be.  I was a ‘gentleman’ who used the ‘fuck’ word but otherwise believed in the code of chivalry.

Feminists were turning the code of chivalry against men, taking it for themselves when it served them, then using it against men.  They were classic borderlines crying to be treated as little girls and rescued only to turn into homicidal maniacs attacking when they didn’t get their way.  The key thing with borderlines is that they need to be in control and will manipulate with threat of suicide and when that doesn’t work will become homicidal or vice versa.  Attacking they will then switch to suicidal response.  The  suicidal bomber response is borderline on a larger scale. “ I’m a victim,” they say, “ that’s why I’ve a ton of C4 wrapped around my waist. I come in peace, but I’m wearing a bomb vest.  I love you. It is better that we die together than you should live.”

My wife had almost got us killed a dozens times and almost got me killed many more. 

Seeing my boat up for sale I snapped inside. This was just not right.  I called my lawyer and she said ‘you’re right, it wasn’t right.”  My lawyer, Stephanie was one of the most beautiful pure souls I’d ever have the benefit to know. I loved to watch her mind move with Godly precision. She was Dr. Lam’s friend and the two of them were so humble and gracious, it was like being in the presence of one of Jesus’s original disciples.”      

Since we were in a divorce property in dispute could not be disposed of for profit.

I phoned the salesman and found that the boat had already been sold for pittance to a fellow in Alberta I recognized as a relative of hers. I phoned him.

“Hi I’m Captain Bill I understand I’m coming to live with you.”
“Who is this?
“I’m Captain Bill.  I’m the skipper of the SV Giri and I understand you’re buying this boat and moving it to Alberta. I just wanted you to be perfectly clear that that is my boat regardless of anything you might have heard and I will go with that boat where ever it goes. Buying the boat is a package deal. The boat and I go together.”
“How did you get this number.”
“I don’t think that matters. I just thought you’d appreciate a phone call before I come with the boat to Alberta.’ 

That day the gentleman cancelled the ‘quick deal.”  I’ve heard of women selling their husbands ferrarri’s out of spite, destroying millions of dollars of property out of spite. This was ‘spite’. My ex didn’t want the boat and certainly didn’t need the boat and had been willing just then to sell the $150,000 boat for $10,000 .

The vendor was displeased. I’d spoken to him.  It was on the lot where I’d done all the repairs on the boat and everyone knew me and were positively inclined towards me. No one had seen my ex. 

My friend Bill Gyles thought it best to take the boat.  Possession was 90% of the law it seemed.  It was on indigenous land. I had the ownership papers. I got a call from Bill Gyles and Dr. George. They wanted to use my credit card to get an outboard motor. I gave them the numbers.

“Best you not be here. “ Bill said. “ We’ll take care of things. The vendor wants his percent of sale and had an underhanded agreement with you ex. Apparently he was involved in the movement of the boat and now wants to hold onto the boat to get more money. He really didn’t have any ‘rights’ except through her and she had no ‘ownership. Ownership and authority was with me the Skipper and owner.  Further the natives apparently didn’t like this sleazy businessman. 

A marvellous native man who worked for the marina and band ,  moved the boat. I thought that fitting.  Bill and his ‘sponsee’ with Dr. George’s moral support and the letter of ownership from my lawyer faxed to the marina, had picked up the boat and put it in the water. Bill then used  the outboard took the boat out to sea.  

He said the ‘movement” had caused the lock on the door to ‘fall off’. It must have been lost overboard.  Dr. George and Bill and I have a picture of triumph somewhere.  I had my home back. I’d lived on the SV Giri for years and would continue to live on it for another decade.  She got the Shaughnassey mansion and swimming pool that was half mine and I just wanted my boat and as far from her chaos as I could be.  I understood she was sick and toxic but I couldn’t survive anymore in her world of anger and drug abuse.  She had no desire for sobriety and was continuing to lie. 

I was so thankful for all the family physicians who’d referred to me previously. They referred to me again. I had a full practice within weeks with a waiting list of months.  

One after another Jewish and Gentile family physicians phoned me to say, “we heard there was something wrong but we’re just glad you’re well and over it and ‘would you see this patient ‘again’ or ‘would you see this new patient’.  Initially I’d been called ‘anti Semitic’ for reporting the sexual abuse but this “ad hominem’ accusation against me was dropped within months.  

“I believe he was sleeping with students,” a Jewish psychiatrist colleague shared with me. “ We know now there’s others but they won’t come forward.  “.   I certainly couldn’t blame the Jewish community for circling the wagons when one of theirs was attacked given the wide spread anti semetism.  I was thankful to see that they were more than just a tribal group but adhered to a higher power of truth.   

The College assistant registrar had said I’d hurt countless people in my practice, implying wrong medical and psychiatric decisions and orders.  I tediously and methodically reviewed every file and found that now I was ‘officially sober’ I’d not have made any decision in any way differently in the past. The College Assistant registrar had lied and I’d almost killed myself based on this psychotic sociopaths deceitful abuse of power.  

It was only further possible to confirm  the sociopath in the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC when I applied for other work and different positions. Then I’d hear that this person had illegally bad mouthed me to the skies , all manner of character assassination. ‘They sounded like they were on drugs. Phoned us at night. Whenever we asked what had he;d done wrong clinically they had nothing to say.” I

The universal response to this ‘character assasination’ and the unprofessionalism of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC was that ‘you must be the greatest clinician alive to survive with that amount of animosity against you and no solid evidence for their venom.”

A doctor with the Canadian Medical Protective Association said, “You’re the most persecuted doctor in Canada.”

I was thankful because the CMPA would defend my practice there after. Each of these ‘complaints’ would cost me $50,000 in loss of time, reviewing records, meeting with lawyers and then meeting with the College  which on occasion seemed like it was more impaired than any physician I’d ever known.  I concluded that the ‘selection bias’ that resulted in these doctors being chosen was the weak link in the process. There was also a move towards communism and the destruction of the professions.  Increasingly ‘political correctness’ or ‘cultural Marxism’ was the basis of the complaints.

Doctors could kill patients so long as they didn’t ‘swear’.

I refused to see a Jewish patient because she said her ex husband was ‘unforgiveable’. She demanded she see me because I was a Christian doctor and she’d converted to Christianity.  Her previous Jewish psychiatrists had totally sided with the husband and said that she was psychotic and schizophrenic. I didn’t know this at the time. I give everyone the benefit fo the doubt.  

The key issue of Christianity is ‘forgiveness’.  Christians are taught ‘judgement is the Lords’.  When she insisted that her ex husband was unforgiveable and that she refused to take medication there was nothing more that I could do.  She was not ‘treatable’ with the Christian form of ‘insight psychiatherapy:  I had trained extensively as a psychoanalytic psycoatherapist. Christian psychiatric psychotherapy is  a specific type of psychotherapy which aims at a person seeing this as a lesson in forgiveness and how they can move forward leaving the judgement to God.   

She was simply not  ‘open minded’ and by change standards ‘’not open to change.’  We use medication therapy specifically for patients untreatable with psychological treatments because they don’t perceive anything wrong with themselves anyway but may take medication as it ameliorates the anxiety. . Her narcissism was a problem as well.  She was ‘all right’ and ‘ex was all wrong’. I normally make a decision as to whether a person is a psychotherapy candidate in 1 to 3 sessions. I kept trying to see if she had any capacity for empathy or to see that the other person might have human failings.  A characteristic of psychosis is ‘black and white thinking’.  “I”m right , you’re wrong’ .  To be a psychoanalytic psychotherapy candidate you must be willing to ‘reconsider’ your point of view.  She wasn’t . She was ‘fixed’ in her belief she was all right and her husband was all wrong. Further she wanted ‘vengeance’.  

I’d spend hours with my brilliant Orthodox Jewish friend Doctor Sam debating this role of ‘vengeance’ and  ‘forgiveness ’ in spirituality.     I’d later attend Regent College and finally hear Dr. James Houston say ‘this is where the Jews are wrong and Christians and Jew’s are not in agreement” . There’s a tendency to mush differences in the strive for multiculturalism.  There are differences and the devil surely is in the details. JudeoChristian, Judaism and Christianity are all separate constructs. 

I discussed the issue of this woman’s position with other Christian Doctors’ and got back what I believed .that she was nominally Christian because she’d married a ‘born again’ Christian but did not embrace the trinity of God or the fundamental idea of Jesus on the cross saying “forgive them for they know not what they do.”

So according to secular psychiatry she was not amenable to psychoanalytic psychotherapy, could get ‘counselling’ which I wasn’t doing or even ‘supportive psychotherapy ‘ which I wasn’t doing much of at the time. I was focussed on insight oriented psychotherapy and selecting patietns specifically for this change focused therapy and offering a service only psychiatrists were trained in and was strongly acknowledged as critical and beneficial for patients . There als was ‘medication therapy’, psychopharmacology’ and I provided that with supportive psychotherapy but this only required visits every 3 - 6 months .Weekly visits and twice weekly visits were strictly insight psychotherapy visits or crisis. The patient was very demanding and bullying and showed no capacity for change. 

She demanded everything. I said I couldn’t provide it.

She complained to the College of Physicians and Surgeons that I used the ‘fuck’ word.  The irony was that she demanded that the College force me to see her. However the College had no real interest in her complaint or her design but as always took the opportunity to punish doctors in general and me in particular.   The prime minister used the ‘fuck’ word. Books had been written about it.  Jesus used ‘bad language’ in his day speaking as the fishermen and workers spoke. One of the traits of psychopaths and sociopaths is that they look good on the outside. Appearances are easy to change Psychopaths are reptilian developmentally lacking true emotional development but having excellent chameleon capabilities. I like using the ‘fuck’ word.  It’s like Jesus saying “shit’.  

The College said it was unprofessional.  The Jewish CMPA lawyer defended me against the Jewish Christian and the Communist College. Every visit to the College is like a Monty Python meeting with folk who spend their days practicing funny walks.  They ‘s always  seeme to object to my accusing a Jewish Psychiatrist of sodomizing me during my residency and doing drugs with me to achieve his end.  They ‘d seem to be serving the financial elements in the city and courts who held  a grudge against me for saying that Jack Cram was not psychotic. They had hoped when they were unable to destroy him completely with character assasination to list him as ‘schizophrenic’ and ‘psychotic’ .   I didn’t make my self any more attractive by advocating for chiefs who had been sodomized in the residential school affairs which had avoided looking at the administrators who were involved. 

The term ‘invalid’ is tied to the idea of ‘invalidation’.  If a president is psychotic or even diagnosed schizophrenic they’d certainly take the black box for starting nuclear war away from him.

We’ve seen this rise in ‘ad hominem’ the last 20 years. It was always used in ‘communist’ countries saying that a person ‘wasn’t true to the communist party’.  So if you steal a million from the crown rather than discuss your theft the idea is to ‘kill the messenger’.  

This Jewish lawyer, fairly secular, didn’t understand any of the Christian discussion but he defended my license and ability to work. There’s been concern about the lawyers ‘appeasement’ but their mandate has not been ‘right or wrong’ but rather to protect the good doctors ability to maintain an income. They’ve been excellent in this regard.  It’s all  about plea bargaining. It’s so often a horrible medical outcome and horrendous public health but it’s probably good ‘law’ as the ‘law’ is not about ‘justice’ but about ‘money’.  Everyone gets rich and compromises are the norm.  

I’ve only been able to practice because the other issue with the College of Physicians and Surgeons is ‘favouritsm’ and the ‘appearance of doing their job’.  So like the police who catch jay walkers they can honestly say they were working but the murderers are getting off all the time. Everyday we’d see horrendous health care but the College would rightly be able to say they were saving the world from Dr. Hay who you know said the word ‘fuck’.  

I’ve been told that ‘we are a sick as our secrets’ and I’ve adopted a rule of ‘transparency’ because I’ve seen the disease in the college behind the closed doors shit.  At one point I used a ‘freedom of information’ request and saw my file,  “the most heavily redacted file in government history’. I think they call them their ‘black books’ because there’s nothing left to read, everything redacted.    It was right out of Monty Python.  A box of blacked out files as if I was a national security risk. Nothing exposes the depth of the corruption of the government agency than the redaction which had nothing to do with protecting patients but solely blacked out all the ‘doctor hay is a fucking piece of shit’ that had apparently been used behind closed doors because I questioned their premises.  A person told me that in the midst of my trial on the ‘unprofessionalism’ of the ‘fuck’ word, a College member liked to refer to me as “that fucking piece of shit.’  The hypocricy in the quasilegal authorities is profound.   

Just to get the “black file” I had to devote the equivalent in time and requests of $100,000. The government has endless resources of tax payer money.  
I have a job to do and a real life, not something petty and putrid like the dirty conniving petty administion but real, like giving hope and saving lives.  

I’d befriend Dugald Christie in church .  We were attending a service where the minister was particularly biblical and enlightened. The theological discourse was enriched. We’d spend hours together thereafter comparing psychiatry and law, discussing Jesus and the call to service, justice and divine justice, God,  the atheism of communism, Secularism and the bastardization of secularism by the aetheism.We used metaphors like Satan and both loved C.S.Lewis. Screwtape Letters is the best description of the modern day devil or demonic.  Mostly Satan rules today  working through corrupt bureaucracy. 

Dugald had started the pro bono legal service for falsely accused. He’d defend the poor and had ridden his bicycle to the Supreme Court burning his robes on the stairs to highlight the ‘lack of justice ‘ and ‘lack of legal service’ for the poor.  He’d co opt me to come to the jails with him and write legal reports for patients . It was so sad to see these men who’d had forensic psychiatrists write reports ‘against’ them and they’d not been able to ‘afford psychiatric consultation’.  I wrote the reports and Dugald got them the proper services, usually drug and alcohol treatment and a change of sentencing in some way.  It was apparent to my self and Dugald confirmed this that ‘poor people’ fell through the cracks. He was however a great defender of the BC Courts. 

“I’ve only asked you to see a few cases because the courts do a really good job over all. I’m proud to be a lawyer and just don’t like the way money ensures justice for the rich but lack of money results in poor people not having ‘access’ to the ‘court system.’

Like me he had seen that the BC Judges were collectively great.  While I’d seen how family law fucked over families and children I’d actually been impressed with  Criminal and property law in BC. Mostly the judges were really good.  It seems the evil lay in the politics. At the time the Supreme Court Judge from BC was advocating for transparency.  PM Harper would eventually institute transparency in the native affairs only to find so many chiefs were stealing the band’s money and setting up off shore accounts. Immediately PM Justin Trudeau took office he stopped transparency which certainly served a number of wealthy powerful corrupt chiefs. 

The politics of indigenous law and land cases continued to make lawyers rich beyond imagination but ‘justice’ marched on.  I’d seen in my own divorce that my ex and her lawyer were willing to use millions to ‘stonewall’ and deny me a ‘decision’.  My ex so sadly befuddled by drugs and insaneity and vengefulness would have continued the case for ever but thankful my lawyer. Stephanie heard me say I just want my boat and to be free of her. I can’t live her suicidal and homicidal and mood swings and anger and lying. 

I’d told my wife before I left, I can see hundreds of patients or I can see you but I can’t do both. If I was to work as a psychiatrist I had to have some oasis of saneity. Alone with my dog I was fine. Living with an active cocaine addict and a liar was impossible. I felt badly I was a lesser man and hoped she’d  find help or someone wealthy enough for her needs and working some emotionally  undemanding field or independent enough to devote their lives to what I’d come to view as a princess and overgrown adolescent. She was great as a drinking and drugging buddy and good for fun and sports but when it came to ‘work’ she’d just stay in bed, or not show up or do cocaine instead of being present.

It was my fault though that we began smoking dope again in Cabot San Lucas.  I was offered a joint by a Mexican Indian and asked her if we should do it. I wasn’t going to do it alone but she lit up to see it and the next months we’d be back to smoking a joint a day. We’d actually had 3 months without it and she’d not done cocaine since we left Victoria.  We were technically detoxed when this little Indian man offered me a joint. HE didn’t even speak English just handed it to me in the pub.  We liked smoking dope together and we loved sharing a bottle of wine. It would be our pattern during the time we were in Mexico. Another boater had found a bushel of dope floating at sea and gladly sold us a little bit which kept us supplied in Columbian.

So here I was a year sober.  I’d not done drugs and alcohol for a year and really felt I had my ‘wits about me.’ Most importantly I had a whole network of doctors around the world and new friends in the province who were themselves no longer drinking and a whole networks of Christian friends.  I was no longer isolated by my shame about homosexuality and being sodomized.  I even had a homosexual priest and a homosexual doctor I discussed sexuality with on a personal basis.  I was no longer isolated by the shame of addiction. I had learned to ‘ask for help’, ‘consult’, ‘call me’.  Dr. Bernie was the best. Made me phone him each week ‘just to check in . It will get you in the habit of picking up the phone.  You’ll then know how to do it when you need it.”

I’ll never forget the time I phoned him and I was simply ‘catatonic’.  I don’t even remember what the ‘crisis’ was . I just remember that I was ‘frozen’ . I was so sad and angry and tired I was again experiencing  ‘incomprehensible demoralization” and yet I was months sober at the time. It probably had to do with some combination of College of Physicians and Surgeons, banks and my ex with all her histrionics and her lying lawyer.  

Bernie heard the tone of utter defeat in my voice and told me to come over. He gave me coffee in his townhouse.  Then he picked up his banjo and played and sang “how great thou art’.  I was in total despair and began to cry. When he had finished his song I wiped my tears, thanked him and said I knew I had to trust in God and would carry on.  Things just got better. I stayed sober mainly by asking for help. Rather than pick up the bottle or light a joint I’d phone Dr. Willi or Dr. Bernie or Hank or Ray or Graham or Art  or Peter or Kirk or any number of angels I had about me now that I accepted that addiction was ‘false relationship’ and ‘false god’ and that God acted through people.  

When the College of Physician and Surgeon’s psychiatrist had asked me what I wanted, I’d said “I just want my wife clean and sober. I want her to be in a program of recovery.”  He’d said , “Women don’t go to AA and women don’t do well in recovery.’  He was a chauvinist who gave all the power to men and believed that women’s problems and solutions were all outside themselves and totally depended on him. To hear him talk though you’d never know that. He was all about the ‘little woman’.  He called himself a feminist and I’m sure he was in the worst way.

I had to come to terms with the idea that I couldn’t ‘help everyone’ and that in the triangle of relationships the other had a major part.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons were solely advocates for patietns and saw their role not as helping patients but as punishing doctors and protecting patients from bad doctors. This was destroying medicine along with all the other ‘divide and conquer’ tricks of the declining administration.   Administration was solely into control and dominance and centralizing authority as communists always do.  The Canadian ‘federation’ was wholly different from this but this systemic problem had infiltrating the ranks of professions big time.

I had friends in law societies,  engineering societies, and accounting societies and it was common that the destruction of the ‘self regulating’ and ‘independent ‘ profession was occurring,  just like the “communist play book’ demanded. I’d just end up in the midst of these forces which as Christians we called ‘principalities’.  The whole metaphor of demonic and the struggle between ‘right and wrong’ was real since the ‘propaganda’ and competing corporations with aims for world dominance of markets was obvious.

I like to think I was just doing my job but often I’d be pulled into the melee by a patient wrongly persecuted by the system. The normal psychopharmacoalogical response was to ‘blame the victim’. The nonepecific diagnosis of ‘’bipolar II’ which allowed use of all the pharmacopeia and had no clear boundaries was used to subsume ‘adjustment disorder ‘and all the stress disorders such as ‘acute stress disorder’ and ‘post traumatic stress disorder’. Further everyone with addiction or those in recovery for less than a year ‘appeared like’ ‘bipolar II’ so more ‘blame the victim’.  More medication invalidation and silencing. I’d be asked to see the patient and literally word diagnosis ‘grief’ or ‘drug addiction ‘or ‘ptsd’ when someone had negligently diagnsed’ only as having  “mood disorder’.  If a person wasn’t depressed by their situation they would have been stark raving mad instead yet by restricting the terms of reference of the assessment to ‘junior neurology’ the psychiatrists who was supposed to be a bio, psycho, social clinician, could avoid the heavy lifting of doing more than just asking the question what drug did the patient need.  Everyone was bipolar.  They  making themselves rich as friends of the pharmaceutical companies in league with government and College of Physicians and Surgeons in what was increasingly defined as a ‘consumer model of health care’. It was medical negligence to consistently ‘miss’ the diagnosis of ‘drug and alcohol abuse” , PTSD, neuropsychiatric disorder, trauma, brain injury yet no one was looking at that.  Millions of dollars of resources however could be allegated at the drop of a hat when doctor hay said the word ‘fuck’.  

Thanks to great lawyers and great judges I’d be in court on behalf of my patients saying that their being shot at repeatedly in war zones as combat veterans entitled them to the ‘compensatable diagnosis ‘ of PTSD and that they were not simply blame the victim  ‘bipolar ii’.  I was blessed to work with a truly wise and compassionate military physician who referred veterans to me who had been denied compensation because the government especially in Eastern Canada did less for the west and there was an ongoing disregard and disrespect for Vets. The vary fee for doing these kinds of reports was literally half what specialists received doing ‘real work’. No one liked paper work so by default the voterans were screwed. I spent hours doing reports for the veterans, my time pro bono, and felt that I was doing this for my dad an RCAF vet who’d I ‘d want treated as I treated people with respect and thoroughness. I never lied. I simply filled in the forms , the long way, the way that the military accountants and chair warmers demanded. It was really time consuming but at the tend of the day the military physician told me we’d been able to move millions of dollars out of eastern canada to the vets in western canada. It was just a matter of a psychiatrist filling in all the boxes. Really. All these people needed was for us to do as the military told .  I couldn’t believe how many people simply didn’t accept the authority that the vets were under so that authority rejected the claim because the psychologists and other doctors had simply not done exactly as they were told because it was ‘silly’ and it was ‘time consuming’ and there was no funding for ‘the details’.  

As my work had been focused on ‘noncompliance ‘ and I accepted that who paid the piper called the tune I worked for less and served my patients. Helping vets who were due compensation for their service was one of the best parts of my work at the time.  The vets were truly mature and wonderful people collectively.  I loved the military too when you simply did as you were told. It wasn’t rocket science.  

I continued to live on my sailboat and continued to sail with my dog every weekend  I’d leave harbour Friday afternoon and return Sunday afternoon in all weather and all conditions. I especially loved crossing the Strait of Georgia when the ferries were grounded and shipping had stopped. I was becoming adept as a solo sailor and just loved getting away from the city on the weekends and holidays. I’d sail solo in the glorious Broken Islands on the west coast of Vancouver Island,  catch a freezer full of salmon. I was always catching salmon and lingcod and making the most amazing Boullibaises and barbecued fish.

Despite the evil College of Physicians and Surgeons in the background I was loving my career. I’d made friends a number of Addiction Medicine doctors in the US. A number of my friends who were psychiatrists there had also done Addiction Medicine. The Addiction Psychiatry wasn’t reommended. Those who had that designation at the time told me.

“Addiction Medicine is about treatment of whole patients. It’s recovery focused and bio psycho social.”
“Addiction psychiatry is dominated by the pharmaceutical industry and solely interested in finding medicine to give to addicts.’  An organization ‘like minded doctors’ would eventually form to provide balance and express concern for the vulnerable patents.  

When I asked the general practitioner at the College of Physicians and Surgeons who claimed to be the leading authority in addiction medicine in BC what her credentials were she showed me.  “The Addiction Psychiatry people gave me a ‘Honary Degree’ .  I really think you should train with them and get a speciality like I have.”  She was stark raving mad and didn’t know that her ‘honary degree’ wasn’t a reall degree like the ones I had in Psychiatry, addiction medicine, Medical Review OFficer, American and Canadian degrees, expert witness Canada and the US and a decade of sobriety myself.  She was truly starkers , bat shit crazy. I would on behalf of myself and patients present her with the leading research and papers to support this and her only response was ‘anybody can write any opinion’.  She was ignorant of science and discredited all research. 

I actually ask another general pratictioner from the College, as communists collectively elevated the untrained and inexperienced to play to their grandiosity and ensure their loyalty. She was a gp who claimed to teach psychiatrists and other than a general practice degree claimed her credential was that her son was a psychiatrist. I was was taken aback to say the least to hear this when she was supposed teaching ‘boundaries’ to psychiatrists.  I was thankful that the CMP lawyers told me that the College had severe problems with boundaries and I learned that their own internal counsel had filed suit against them for abuse of power, the case being decided like all such cases ‘behind closed doors’ with no ‘transparency’ and I would suggest if the files were released under the freedom of information act they would more black books because of almost complete redaction to protect the college members abuses and unprofessionalism. 

We were all concerned about these shifts in the recovery community because the ‘pill solution’ had been the downfall of addiction.  Now I actually had colleagues telling me “You know Dr. Hay, you’re one of the best clinicians I know in working with addiction but you’re not on the same page as us. You want your patients off drugs and we just want our patietns off the street drugs and coming to us for the drugs. Our drugs are better and safer whereas the street supply is not.”

I’d be asked to investigate the leading ‘government supported’ addiction society at the time.  The NDP were actually involved in the multi million dollar adventure. The head of the Portland Hotel Society said .” We don’t want a doctor to ‘interfere with the culture of addiction’. We want a doctor who will help addicts get stuff but not stop their addiction. You seem intent on stopping their addiction. We respect this as a ‘cultural choice’.  “

I’d be drug tested ad infintum to the point where the addiction doctors wrote a letter to the College of Physicians and Surgeons saying that “There is no clinical or medical reason for drug testing doctor Hay. If you wish to continue to use this as punishement then you will have to write the orders yourself.”

I’d fire a secretary who was using my office computer to develop porn pictures and stealing from my office and smoking crystal meth on breaks so patients complained to me.  She was saying racist things against East Indians and just became increasingly bizarre. My mother had died and the minister who’d brought this girl in to help her had taken her pay but done no work. My accountant at the time either had a nervous breakdown or a drug psychosis but threw his clients files out on the street showing up on the cover of the local newspaper. With my staff not doing any billing and stealing from me and my accountant psychotic I was truly thankful that the Bank of Nova Scotia manager told me that my accountant was lying saying he was working with him. He said he felt badly because the government had garnisheed my account at that moment because I’d done as my accountant said exactly only to have him carried away in a wagon after appearing on the front page of the newspaper. He was the accountant to the head of medicine and countless other doctors and I couldn’t blame my self for the decision. Thanks to the bank manager I realized CRA had been surprisingly correct and truthful and I gladly paid them what they wanted because it turned out my staff had done none of the work they said they had. It took a month to sort all this out but my mother was dying and I had literally no money and had to borrow money for an air ticket to see her before she died because while I had tens of thousands the office  administrator, this recent graduate minister,  and the accountant and the ganisheeing of my active bank account resulted in my having no ‘cash’.  I contacted my accountant friend and my brother and they lead me through the amazing mess the Christian Minister Administrator had done in 3 months with her thieving psychopath wing man.  I ‘found’ the ‘$30,000’ dollars money and sorted matters out with the CRA who were really very helpful.  

It was a difficult time for me manageing a medical practice with these glorious nut bars playing greedy games and me trying to keep my patients from suiciding and homiciding while the children got their money and stole mine.

I fired the secretary who then complained to the college and as my CMPA lawyer pointed out the College lacks ‘boundaries’ and don’t seem to acknowledge this is just a case of ‘disgruntled employee’ . The police showed she was stealing. She’d said in a letter ‘give me $5000 or I’ll accuse you of sexual harrassment’.  Well damned if any woman could accuse any man in Canada over night of ‘sexual harrassment’ and the man was like all communist countries ‘guilty until proven inoscent’.  There was no ‘innoscent until proven guilty’ now in the matriarchal communist country Canada had become.  The CMPA fought the College for me. I was vindicated as always but I was subjected to see the most frightful image I’d ever see to this day. I’d never  get it out of my head and have about this Methusalah.  .

This female doctor, assistant registrar, a bureaucrat, highly paid, and with outrageous power stood  screaming at me  in a board room, “Women don’t lie about sex!!!! Dr. Hay.”  

The College was clearly more psychotic than my patients.  I paid the extortionist psychopath her $5000 and learned that dozens of doctors had been hit up when they fired women from the work place. One man with dozens of psychologists working for him said the ‘going rate is $1000 , we pay it as a price of doing business. There’s no sexual harrassment but they know they can extort the money because the cost of fighting it was so much.”

“I put $50,000 of my time and staff time I paid into proving that her claims were all famous, many  made when I was out of town, when witnesses showed she was lying, there were even patients who said she’d said she wanted to have sex with them and would but she had a boyfriend a psychopath who kept threatening to kill me waiting for me outside offices. HE was wiener so I just ‘please make my day’. I did object though to the government allowing this violent sociopaths to sit in meetings with her because she said that she was afraid of me.  These cases are truly Hollywood dimension and hopefully society as at large with wake up to the danger before the next invasion.  Rome was destroyed from with in by lead in the water supply. The west is falling fast by false allegations and death of truth and fact.  .  It was indeed a patient who told me she was stepping out of the office when I was seeing patients and smoking crystal meth outside. He ‘d arrive early and sit in the coffee shop and watch her go round the corner to smoke her pipe. He sad that was the smell upset him. . I’d not recognized the crystal meth smell until he pointed it out. 

Knowing I’d never done anything wrong. I said ‘fuck off” but I’d never said any of things she said, I  falsely believing the truth would out. But despite proving her ‘litany ’ of lies and amassing a mass of documentation to show she was fundamentally a liar. I still had to fight the college and human rights and end up paying this psychopath $5000.  Later I’d learn that ‘truth’ is no longer a part of ‘post modern society’ and that of course if the judge is deciding ‘he said she said ‘ cases without reliance of ‘evidence’ or ‘truth’ then all the power goes to the state. These quasi legal bureaurcratic authorities worked strictly on the basis of ‘who comes first’ and that the ‘complainant is a victim.”  Women don’t lie about sex.  

The funniest case that came out of this was a gay man being accused of sexual harrassment at the bath house by the gay man he refused to have sex with. There he was in front of a tribunal of ignorant judgemental bureaucrats who actually believed they could judge whether or not ‘sexual harrassment’ occured in a bath house and unwilling to look at the extortion and unwilling to question the ugly accuser with a tiny penis.  My secretary was a legend in her mind but not as attractive as any of the women I’d known including my girlfriend of the time.  

The College of Physician and Surgeons holds that the patient is always right. When a patient who threatened to kill his boss and his boss’s dog, his lawyer and his lawyer’s dog and threatened to kill me and my dog because I refused to see him went to the College, College bureaucrat said to me ‘don’t you wish now you’d just seen him.’  Note that they maintain the false chamberlain belief  that you can appease and negotiate with Nazis.  Our foolish PM says that ISIS killers can be cured with counselling.  

I’ve come to the point in my career that I accept there are psycbopaths and sociopaths. I loved Robert Hare’s research and the book Snakes in Suits.  With enough time and resources they might well be salvageable.  However “Polly anna’ is what caused WWII, Chamberlain is as much at fault as Hitler.  Sins of Omission are as dangerous as sins of commission just as covert aggression is probably more deadly than overt aggression

The College of Physicians and Surgeons tends to get a particularly skewed selection of doctors to work with them and they’re never truly ‘vetted’ today because I’ve met at least one who was so batshit crazy that it was a disservice to bats to compare her lunacy to them and there’s one true sociopath who is like this evil mole in the midst of some otherwise  rather fine individuals. I’m always amazed that these good people can work alongside these deeply disturbed or evil people and yet that’s how government bureaucracies work. Mind your own business. Lie lie lie deny deny deny.  Deniability is all important. That and the paycheque and pension.  . Arendt’s study of the Nazi bureaucracy and her final comment describing the ‘banality of evil’ was a true eye opener.

I found the study of ‘totalitarian isntitutions’ also extremely insightful

All this learning helped my patients immeasurably because people who don’t have direct contact with these institutions who play the game can’t quite believe how wrong they can be. The fact remains that we are fortunate in Canada yet, that most of the time most of the people are civilized.  Unfortunately the German people were the most civilized and they fell furthest in history. Even now the finest Iranian people are dominated by religious police who by all non religious police are considered worse than batshit crazy.   

I found the whole notion of the forces of evil and forces of goodness and societal sickness and societal health fascinating.I’d studied two years of community medicine and public health and sociology so saw myself as quite insignificant in the bigger picture. There’s always a bigger picture. So much occurs outside my control. Shit happens.  Dr. Carl Rid had introduced me to Kafka and I now saw his wisdom in the insaneity of the institutions. The College Physicians and Surgeons was the Castle. The government in general was a living entity.  The ‘State’ could be an ‘enemy’ or ‘friend’ of the people. The computer “Hal “ that went crazy on the spaceship really did reflect the history of the Aetheists Communist State against the individual.  

I found myself meditating and praying a whole lot more and finding that in the texts of Buddha and Kierkegaard and frankly in the teaching of Jesus, my Lord there were answers to the questions asked to day. I found that sober i was able to see all the addictive thinking that Rabbi Dr. Twerski described so well in his book of that name. I loved meeting Rabbi Dr. Twerski.  I was having these great lunches and debates with Dr. Sam , my favourite mensch.

Dr. Willi would invite me to join him in Saipan. I’d sail solo to Hawaii in winter through a hurricane. I’d not sail on because of unusual doldrums and the the threat that my job would not be there if I didn’t arrive shortly.  I’d been delayed a month by weather already.  I left my boat in Hawaii. I could face hurricanes but days and nights bobbing about at sea, dependent on wind, with not enough fuel to do the distance between islands, I turned back. I left my boat on Kona.  I gathered my dog STuart and cat Angel up and the three of us flew onto Saipan. 

I’d work there for a couple of glorious years making friends and coming under the most amazing of the local folk who were sober and under the amazingly spiritual people in the churehes and government there.  It was a joy to know Willi and Anita and see the love that grew from the depths of their love for each other and for God.  


My ex had not forwarded any mail from our practice and destroyed much of the correspondence. I actually lost my  Yukon license because of her passive aggressiveness and medical incompetence.  I never understood why the College of Physicians and Surgeons would leave her in charge of the practice considering she had no experience, knew nothing and did nothing. It was like they were complicit in the destruction of the business.  When I finally learned the devastation she had caused I had to subsequently write letters to patients and doctors telling them that the medical corporation and practice was defunct. I proceeded to pay back all her debts as well as my own knowing she had millions and millions of dollars while I was working extra hours and living cheap.  I’d learned though that if all you had was money then you were truly poor. I was advised to go backrupt three times but felt good doing the right thing though I can’t say it served me. 

I’d not return to serving in the north but having serving in the Aids Epidemic began working in the DTES where the drug epidemic was morphing into the Fentanyl epidemic.  

My secretary at the time said she didn’t want to work in the China Town areas and insisted I work in West Vancouver. “You’re too good a doctor to waste your talents with those sick people. I want you to move to West VAncouver .  I like patients there. They like me because I”m sophisticated like them. . I don’t to work with those drug addicts”.  People don’t appreciate the stigma that exists even in medical offices. I ddn’t know her true feelings which she no doubt let show when I wasn’t about till the issue came to a head.  Doctors are often held accountable for things staff do and yet because they’re focused on their patents they don’t know that their staff are not only not covering their back but sometimes actually stabbing them in the back. 

She’d go and the door would open to years of joyful work with more of the finest asssistants I’d be blessed with. I’d really had great assistants overall in my life, especially when I worked in Morris and then when  I first worked on Broadway. Now here I was in China Town and DTES and truly blessed with the finest staff. I’d again have these great assistants who made life so enjoyable.  The patients loved them and they just made the office wonderful. My dog Stuart had been killed by a drug addict but now I felt so good and safe for a change for a long time that with my friend Laura I took the risk of getting Gilbert. Laura and my assistant Aim and I would know the love of this puppy who’d bring joy to our lives and to the lives of patients.  

Sunday, September 20, 2015

Expeditioning and the SV GIRI

SV GIRI was finally outfitted for offshore sailing again.  On the last trip back from Hawaii, the mast broke in a gale.  We jury rigged a solution with a Spanish Turnkey and limped back to North America.  Since the mast footing had to be welded, I had the whole cabin taken out to avoid fire. Surveyors used ultra sound to check the depth of steel and where there was decrease I had 2 huge steel plates welded on.  After that major procedure, the mast and hull of the GIRI were good to go for a few more decades.  My friend Tom who I’d sailed with and had undertaken the work said,
“I made sure that if something went wrong on the GIRI on her next ocean passage it wouldn’t have anything to do with the mast or hull."
I replaced the old workhorse Yanmar engine last year with a new Volvo D40.  Everything on my sailboat has been replaced 2 or 3 times in the 25 years I’ve had the boat.  It’s the third radar and second autopilot. I’ve upgraded the winches to a larger size and better quality.   I replaced the wind generator recently too. I’m on my second generation of self steering vane.  Everything has back up and redundancy.  Three anchors and even a portable electric winch along with a Honda 1000 cc generator.  
Meanwhile I’ve sailed the boat around the San Jaun Islands, Desolation Sound, Beyond Desolation Sound, the Gulf Islands, Queen Charlotte Islands, the Alaska Coast,  around Vancouver Island a couple of times,  my ex wife Sherry and I sailed to Mexico, then  I solo sailed in winter to Hawaii.  Tom and I sailed the Hawaiian Islands together.  Then we sailed back to Vancouver from Honolulu. That’s the trip the mast broke.   Between refitting I've continued sailing in Georgia Strait and  off and on lived aboard the boat for months or a year or two at a time.   I found that it was only when I was actually staying on the boat that I would ensure repairs and maintenance stayed on track.  I’d actually planned with Tom to begin sailing down the coast last year  with a view to completing my original planned sail to the Caribbean through the Panama.
I still need to do a topside paint. It’s a steel boat and the rust marks coming through my last painting a few years back make it look a bit of a scow.  It’s not.  I’ve sand blasted it three or four  times over the years, each time at a cost of $10,000. The last time we brushed and sanded and I painted it myself.  I’ve epoxied and painted the bottom countless times, every 1 to 2 year on average.  Topside painting was the task left to be done.  Sailing in April  with Laura I found that one of the cockpit drains needed replacing too. The Stem to Stern Marina guys , who had done a skookum job with installing the Volvo and upgrading matters in the bilge had pointed the damaged drain out to me.  I’d forgotten till I was in a gale and with water coming over the side had to tack mainly to allow the cockpit to drain so I didn’t have to bail.
Pro Tech rigging had done the inspection and had cut all the new rope so that’s going on next spring when I restep the mast.  They did an amazing job preparing the boat for hauling out by Lynnwood Marina and shipping across the country by Andrews Trucking.  Just last year Pro Tech installed new guy lines around the perimeter and I had some new hardware to replace the stuff we designated as worn. I haven’t replaced the main sail but I got a new genoa and Pro tech installed that and ensured the foresail furling system was in good shape.
The boat was finally ready for another expedition.  Another grand adventure.  Any bits that needed doing still could be done along the coastal hops that would come before any ocean crossing. There’s always fine tuning to be done in the first few weeks of sailing.  Before last heading out to Hawaii my antennae on top of the mast came lose and needed new fittings that would last an offshore beating.  I also had to get the leech of the old foresail reinforced in San Francisco before heading out.
The question for the last couple of years had been  where to sail to next..
 I’d wanted to sail around the world. The standing joke in boat world is everyone buys a 25 foot or more sailboat with just that intention but less than half a percent or less actually get the sailboat our of the main harbour.  Most don’t leave their slip for years on end.  That was the plan too when I  got to Mexico and stayed the year in the Sea or Cortez.  I was headed for the Northern Marianas Islands with a view to sailing around the world when I last stopped in Hawaii.
Pirates is the number one reason I don’t  set out again to cross the Pacific.  Also I’ve always loved the idea of sailing to New Zealand and Australia but I have a dog and dogs are simply not welcome in the Pacific. Stuart the Scotty I’d sailed with before had to endure horrible quarantine in Hawaii and later in Saipan. The people were wonderful but the poor dog lost months of his short  life to jail through no fault of his own. I have Gilbert the cockapoo now.   I really don’t like going anywhere where my dog’s not welcome.
I was in Dublin this spring.  I’ve always dreamed of sailing the British Islands.  Scotland and Ireland are where my grandparents are from. I met an 85 year old solo sailor after he’d crossed the North Atlantic in a little sailboat for the umpteenth time.  Tom says he’d love to sail to the Azores.
My brother became ill this spring. That really brought matters to a head and finalized the course of the future. I’ve always wanted to sail with my older brother. He taught me to canoe. I’d fish from our little skiff with the Johnson motor every summer of my childhood with him and my Dad.  My brother is the mensch in the family, a true salt of the earth man . He  was always the brightest and smartest of the family.  I actually hated following his genius going through school. Everyone remembered him fondly. His teachers would always tell me how smart and accomplished he was .  Meanwhile I got by muddling along at times, even excelling.  
The beauty of Europe is that they welcome dogs. I truly love the history of Western Civilization.  I was  humbled by the 5000 year old architecture of the Palace of Knossos on Crete. They actually had indoor plumbing back then and used natural lighting in amazing ways.  I loved standing on shore and looking at the little harbour of Jaffa in Israel where Jonah set out for Ninevah. That sent chills up my spine.  I’ve loved harbours the world over but those in the Mediterranean are so rich with western history that I find every view awe inspiring.  Athens was particularly breath taking.  Last year I loved being in Istanbul, previously called Constantine, taking a ferry on that fabled strait that separates Europe and the East.  In Israel I felt in my very soul that I was walking in the steps of Jesus but in Greece and Turkey I felt like I was following St. Paul.  And even Alexander the Great.  I loved Italy and Rome and would love to return. The art and people are so enriching.  I was in the south of Spain and Morocco in my 20’s crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in ferries, once in a horrible blow.
The ports along the northern coast of France and especially the sea farer Mecca of Amsterdam have always touched my heart.  But London is my all time favourite city, a place where I lived for a year with my gorgeous brilliant first wife when I was an intellectual and couldn’t get enough of the libraries and museums of that great city.  True I’ve always wanted to return to study at Oxford and Cambridge but other universities captured me with their more mundane designs. But the Thames has never failed to beckon.  Then Glasgow and Edinburgh and last year Dublin and Belfast were the places I was most enamoured with.
I read the Kon Tiki for sure.  But the voyage of St. Brendan is the one that always captured my heart being done in the ancient north Atlantic by Irish monks in leather boats.  As a sailor I’ve read hundreds of books by sailors. It’s been my passion. While I’ve loved the countless true stories of persons who set off in little boats to sail the seas I’ve also liked the historical fiction of the sailing vessels. I’ve especially  liked reading the tales of our naval explorers like  Captain Cook and Captain Vancouver.  The story of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic adventure and survival is simply miraculous.
There’s the great wealth of historical fiction of the great sea battles of the Imperial navies of Britain and France and Spain that I’ve thoroughly lost myself in during a Canadian winter ashore.  I’ve had thousands of hours of technical reading to do but never has a day gone by that I’ve not read adventures and mostly sea adventures for the sheer joy of it.  Many a trying week of work and a difficult winter has been made less so by reading of the stories of fellow cruisers in small boats.   Joshua Slocum is the great grandfather of the movement  for sure.  My ex wife and I setting out to sail around the world but got  only from Vancouver Canada to Quaymos,  Mexico We both most loved the stories of the Hiscocks and Myles and Beryl Smeeton. Not only were they made of sterner stuff so were the marriages of those earlier days.  No doubt the men were more courageous.   Like many a couple that’s gone offshore  one stayed with the boat and one returned happily to home on land. My ex was a fabulous helmswoman who could get the best out of sails coastal day sailing. I still love the adventure of the sea and love to read stories of all those who’ve travelled upon her vastness and mystery.  Tales of endurance and passage and arrival in exotic places still enthral me.
The trouble is pirates.  And governments.  I’ve found that wind and sea and boat maintenance challenges are more than sufficient for my appetite.  I’ve not particularly liked crew including myself.  The fact is I prefer my dogs company and all else is a bit of work.  In fairness to my lovely ex wife I found when I was a couple of weeks  alone at sea with my own thoughts I wanted to divorce me.  The thought of having to deal with unfriendly strangers wanting to kill me and steal my boat is simply too overwhelming to consider.
I chose to sail offshore with the trusty marine nickel plated defender shot gun. It’s fairly standard equipment for commercial fishing boats since some times one actually has to shoot the big halibut to get them aboard. I have spear guns for scuba and flare guns as well. I even have a cutlass which though real has a greater ornamental function in my rustic below deck Captains cabin.  Some might say it’s phallic.  The fact is the shorter cutlass is made for ship fighting as there would be no room to swing my Scottish broadsword.  I have these more for fashion or as one might pay for life insurance. I don’t want to use them.  I have a life raft on board too and am truly glad I’ve never had to use it and hopefully never will.  I studied fencing as a youth and as a hunter am an excellent marksman.
However the thought of taking another human’s life, even in self defence, would, to say the least, put a damper on a vacation, for me, a physician who has devoted his life to saving lives.  I remember the joy I felt off the Baja coast when we rescued a couple of men in a dinghy whose boat had caught fire and sunk.  I especially loved the time when my ex and I and a couple of other cruisers saved a baby whale that had got it’s self disoriented trapped and partially beached in some mangroves.  I would rather not have to tell a story of blowing the brains out of some psychopath trying to board my boat.  There’s more than enough adventure without that sort of nonsense. In fact going away to sea is especially enjoyable because it gets me away from some of the drug addicted psychopaths who seem unable to change their mind about seeing other humans as potential food rather than companions. These blokes have been part of my work especially when I worked with the jails. I certainly don’t want to meet this sort at sea.  That would be a busman’s holiday for sure.
In fact I’m happy to be alone with my dog and only just tolerate friends and lovers.  If there weren’t merit in numbers I’d probably just solo sail.  The fact is I get rather lonely after a week or two and actually enjoy my companions at times.  There’s a great deal of laughter when one sails with people who are adults and have got over that “I’’m a victim” stage of emotional development. As a captain I really don’t have patience for whining and passive aggressiveness or attitude.
I have heard that the cruising community has taken to hiring ex American navy personnel in guns boats to accompany the fleet as they passage south and east of Malaysia.  I was in Singapore a few years back and loved it dearly. I loved the rule of law and the order in the community. The harbours in the area are magnificent as well. Unfortunately the el Quaeda has taken hold in nearby villages so that stories abound of pirates killing foreigners, mostly Christians, or at very least stealing their boats and leaving them stranded. I’m very much a Christian but not the better sort that does a fine job of being martyred.  I was thankful that the Lord did this for me and know I’d do a very bad and messy job of dying for my beliefs.
Then there’s the Somalian muslims, a particularly uncivilized lot whose dangerous  stupidity and lack of civilization are becoming epic.  I confess I’ve loved reading of American cruisers who have been attacked by these high speed gun boats with 50 mm machine guns blazing.  The best story is of two ex marines who were sailing together on their separate yachts when a couple of these drug crazed Allah Akubar swearing criminals charged their boats.  The frightening thing was that they opened fire from far off targeting the cockpit and hoping to kill anyone on board. One American armed with a 12 gauge shot gun popped up at the last moment when the pirates came along side with their AK 47 assault rifles in hand ready to board.  With combat trained reflexes and skills he blew all aboard away with repetitive shots from his defender.  Meanwhile his friend at the last moment veered his 7 km maximum speed sailboat into the Somalian high speed tobacco boat riding right over it and sending that boats pirates to the bottom of the sea.
I read the story while I was in charge of advertising for Blue Water Cruising Association out of Vancouver, BC.  Discussing it with cruisers we all cheered the Americans. I think even the vegetarian pacifists were impressed.  Yet its not something I personally want to have to do.  When I was in Bombay, now called Mumbai, I loved the harbour and so wanted to one day sail there. I love India and must return. The people are the most fascinating and so many of my friends are Indian ex pats here in Canada.  Yet the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea seem like places one would only want to go with an American flotilla of war ships, not on a little sailboat with a cockapoo dog.
The other problem has been the governments.  Carrying weapons on board is a major issue with each port.  Most cruisers as a consequence don’t declare their guns and most authorities turn a blind eye but it suddenly puts one in a difficult position. Even if one declares them there’s all manner of insanity attached to this placed there by beaurocratic fools who have never been in a boat themselves.  In Mexico I was expected to turn in my shot gun at the first port and then pick it up again when I departed the country.  The only problem is I was coming from the north and expecting to leave the country hundreds of miles to the south.  Government stupidity is impressive in Canada but by world standards Canada is a genius compared to the silliness of paper work and restrictions elsewhere.  So who wants the hassle especially when a single corrupt official ,and corrupt officials are extremely common in the third world, can impound your boat and arrest you. Increasingly every other nation in the third world seems intent on taking Canadians hostage either officially or unofficially for extortion and ransom.
When I was younger Canadian tourists were welcome overseas and sailors were able to anchor free in harbours so the whole process was pleasant and relatively inexpensive. Now Canadians, indeed all westerners, are seen as mega rich, like Mini Fatuous Kardashians, and a source of easy income.  There are the pirates for sure, then the rapacious businessmen and finally the corrupt extorting government officials.  Friends tell me that everywhere they were charged to anchor and even a fee was charged for landing their dinghies on shore.  Prices go up the minute you speak English. too.  Whites are thought of as racist but they’re the least racist today compared to the racism they can encounter and the tribalism in primitive nations.
Further, the United Nations has created this Social Communism idea of the West being the bourgeoisie.  Meanwhile the local businessmen in all these countries are richer than the richest Canadians. The key to world poverty is not east and west but rather financial distribution within the countries themselves.  In Muslim countries the rich are obscenely rich while the poor are poor yet in Canada while we have rich, wealth is more widely distributed. Our poor indeed are the richest poor in the world.  To the third world though we’re now the enemy. Especially if one is Christian.
I love all the Fillipino nurses and doctors I know and would love to sail to Manilla but that country was only a decade back taken off of the international list of places that are not recommended for small boat cruisers because of pirates.  The South China Seas are completely off the list. Yet I’d love to sail into the magnificent Hong Kong harbour. I’ve flown there repeatedly and love the city and people. The harbour is one of the greatest natural harbours in all the world. Yet who wants to be killed a day or two out to sea by dozens of ignorant communist Chinese  who see all westerners as bourgeoise capitalists.  Communists have forever been poor at creativity and live to steal.  Without theft their thug dominated system would expire because none of the truly creative are rewarded in these principally totalitarian gang lead social systems.  Communism is so often confused with socialism which it is not.
So while I’d love to sail more in the Pacific it’s increasingly been the plan to get to the Caribbean and the Mediterranean and Great Britain.  I loved being in the Bahamas.  It was a truly inspiring moment when I visited Vera Cruz in Mexico where Columbus had landed.  My parents took a Cruise Ship tour of the Caribean Islands and spoke of the variety and diversity of every island for years after.  So yes, I’d love to sail there.
Now my sailboat has been shipped from Vancouver British Columbia here in the west to Bath, Lake Ontario in Eastern Canada.. My brother has developed cancer so the best way for us to sail together was for me to get the boat to Lake Ontario. Overland was the fastest, and probably the cheapest too, at $10,000 cost.  I have to consider how much time I’d lose from work if I tried again to sail it down the coast and cross at Mexico or Panama.  I really am looking forward to sailing in the famed Thousand Islands near Kingston.  Fresh water sailing and fishing will be a welcome change. I’ve got nephews too that want to crew. Then when my brother is better we can take the 350 mile canal motoring cruise down to New York. I’d love to have my sailboat in the New York habour and take a train to Manhatten to take in more Broadway plays.  My friend Laura would love to do some more motor sailing with me as well.  She’s not fond of being in the boat when the wind gets up a bit.
 I know Tom would be up for a sailing across the Atlantic. His eyes light up at the sound of the Azores.  I would love to have my brother along for that passage.   I’ve found it’s only men that want to join me on ocean crossings whereas women have often said they’d fly to meet me in exotic places.   These are dreams to come. For now the boat is going East.  I still want to visit Australia and there’s a medical meeting in Sidney I’ve wanted to attend for years. I may just have to fly there like others do.  I’d leave my dog here because frankly it seems everything in the Australian wild wants to kill us, from spiders to lizards.
imagine Gilbert would rather be with us in Bath.  He’ll be definiely up for sailing on Lake Ontario with his cousin cockapoo Eva. I can see them turning the deck into a dog Indie 500 chase. As a cockapoo I also expect Gilbert would gladly go ashore in France and England.   There he could proudly tell countless stories of his many adventures to his distant canine relatives.
I love that Europe loves dogs.
   

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Sunday, September 7, 2014

Willi and Anita Gutowski's 50th Wedding Anniversary

I was priviledged to be invited to Dr. Willi Gutowski and Nurse Anita Gutowski’s 50th Wedding Anniversary in their home on Little Mountain, Chilliwack today. Of all their myriad of  accomplishments and the honours they’ve known,  the honorifics they most appreciate are husband and wife, father and mother,   grandfather and grandmother.  Their love is family and family is the lens through which they view the world.
I arrived with Gilbert, my cockapoo who was immediately befriended by one of the many Gutowski grandchildren.  Thanks to Anita and Willi’s love there are lovely daughters and handsome son in laws.  The beautiful house on the hill overlooking (of course) the golf course, was overflowing with friends and family.  Gilbert fit right into the groups of children running this way and that on the large lawn.  Hugged first by Willi then by Anita I had food offered to me by both.  Lots of those dainty girl things that looked ornate and hardly warranted a bite except to taste beside much more manly sandwich fair.  A very good ‘spread’ in the jargon.
I took a seat on the balcony in the glorious sun and was soon hearing story after story from those who’d known Willi and Anita since early days in Minnetonas, Manitoba. There were stories of University of Manitoba,  Africa and tales of British Columbia and California.
In a rough time in my life, following a divorce, following a crisis of direction as a doctor, after too much drinking in Mexico I came to Willi to ask him what I should do next.  Willi thought it was good that I’d stopped drinking and stopped smoking marijuana despite what other psychiatrists had said. He knew too the corruption in the system but didn’t think that I should focus on that but rather look to spiritual ideals. I remembered when I’d had Dr. John White as my mentor in psychiatric residency he’d said the same.  So with Willi’s direction I stayed at church, stayed sober, made no decision further about quitting medicine or giving up being a physician and psychiatrist  but rather focussed  “recuperation”.   He mostly told me that Jesus had said “Do not be afraid.’  I was very anxious at the time and couldn’t help but dwell on Freud’s statement ‘maybe the paranoids are right’.  But Willi, always calm, encouraged me to “not be afraid’.  I’ll be forever grateful.
With Anita he introduced me to the Christian Medical and Dental Society.  I'd met Dr. Lam at the Evangelical Medical Association and soon was among the finest caregivers.   I’d been drawn to medicine after praying in the chapel of the United Church at the University of Winnipeg.  I’d most admired Dr. Albert Schwietzer. I’d sought out Dr. John White in Psychiatry. When I wanted to go off as a missionary doctor in Africa, romantic that I am, Dr. Jack Hildes convinced me the greatest need was with the Northern Medical Unit.  I was happy serving.  Indeed I saw medicine as service.
Thanks to Wili’s sage advice and Anita’s meals I stayed in medicine and returned to psychiatric practice a year later.  That year off was an amazing time of learning.  I spent a lot of time in church and in prayer and met doctors thereafter who I could admire. I remember Dr. Graeme Cunningham telling me, “some people run with the cheetah’s, some people run with the turkeys, sound’s to me you’ve been running with the turkeys’.  It was an amazing life lesson. I had come to believe the little circle of the world I had inhabited at the time represented the greater whole.  I came again to be amongst the finest and best of physicians and psychiatrists and would once again love my career.
Later I  worked with Willi and Anita in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands.  There I met  the greatest of nurses and the best of colleagues on this island where Willi and I were the sole psychiatrists.  Often I’d know the delight of Anita’s cooking and share the generosity of their home. At the hospital we’d share patients and I was so impressed with his consummate skill as a clinician and psychiatrist.  We’d both trained at University of Manitoba and we both shared with the nurses an appreciation of the wholeness of people. There weren't any ‘part objects’ in our care.  Patients were always biological, psychological, sociological and spiritual.
I remember Willi and Anita telling me stories of their early days as missionaries in Africa. One day helping Willi, the consummate handyman, fix something in Saipan, he told me “I learned to fix things as a missionary. Everything breaks down in Africa.” He and Anita sail and I sail.  They didn’t get tattoos, though.
Willi and Anita were very much apart of the the Saipan Pentecostal church. I had a wonderful time getting to know the pastor there and joining in the uplifting exciting Pentecostal worship.  Willi and I studied the Holy Spirit together and meditated together. I remain more ecumenical, a Baptist, who’d become United and finally Anglican who attended the Methodist and Pentecostal church and enjoyed Catholic services as well.  It was Willi though who enlightened me to the Holy Spirit.  My friend, Dr. Bernie Klassen had prayed as well to the Holy Spirit while I’m more likely to called out to Jesus, “ the god within” in a kind of 911 way of prayer. There’s wisdom in the distinctions which I’d later learn more about studying with Dr. James Houston thanks to the foundation that Willi and his minister encouraged in addressing the details and not just the generalities.  
Then we would golf.  Willi and Anita both loved to golf, as happy to haul clubs around the course as to whip about on the little electric moon buggies called golf carts. I’ve golfed more with those two than I have in my life and expect they were practicing Christian patients.  I learned a whole lot about Mulligans.
Late Friday after noon we’d either go golfing or go scuba diving as our ‘staff meeting’.  I loved to scuba dive and Willi was a great buddy. He ‘d carry the hospital ‘beeper’ in a water proof pouch and only occasionally would either of us get called and have to slowly ascend to the surface to call our covering family physician colleague. I’d actually write up minutes about the work we’d discuss leaving out all the theology, philosophy, history and politics that got addressed as well.  I was sorry to leave Saipan.  My mother was sick. I was homesick for Canada.
What was amazing though was learning one day sometime after we’d met that Willie’s family farmed in Minnetonas. That’s where my grandfather’s ranch and logging operation was. Not only that my cowboy uncle, a true character out of Louis L’amour novel,  had worked for the Gutowski farm at one time.  Small world.
Now here I was listening to Willi’s daughter read from a love letter Willi had sent to Anita in medical school. It was so touching. Then the daughters, one from Winnipeg, one from Oregon, and one from Chilliwack with hardly a rehearsal here, sang the most beautiful collection of Christian songs, the favourites of the parents.
It was truly a privilege and an honour to be invited.  Their 50th Anniversary was such a testimony to the breadth and depth of their love.  They don’t just talk Christianity and Christian Love.  They live Corinthians.   Thank you, Willi and Anita.
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