Insomnia night

Three times this month I’ve been criticized for my patients behaviour. 

My patients are mentally ill.

One has a complex addiction problems and multiple psychiatric diagnosis

Another has mental illness and is an IV drug users.

Another had multiple organ failure and multiple surgeries and has depression and declining memory. They’ve had falls and head injuries and periodic delirium from chronic organ failure and the effects of this on brain function.

I’ve done the best I could. I’m a front line worker. I ‘ve seen 30,000 patients and worked all my life.  The systemic failure of the health care system lack of resource and general shit show is a polictical embarrassement of horrendous leadership corruption and incompetence.  A man’s was dead in the hospital waiting room and the incompetent hospital administration tried to blame everyone else but themselves and ultimately a just blamed the whole problem on racism.  This stuff is the stuff of zombie movies

Management scapegoats and blames individuals while denying accountability taking immense cuts of health care funding for their talk fests and meetings orgies while Rome burns

I’m a psychiatrist and I have not been able to admit a patient to hospital except for homelessness, suicidal or homicidal psychosis.  I am routinely doing madication management and managing suicidal patients in the community without back up or support.

My patients are supposed to have GP’s.  80% of my patients don’t. At most they go to a variety of walk in clinics.  Most of my patients especially the elderly have major physical problems.  So many are on disability .  Most have chronic pain.  Many are obese.  

Over half of my patients have major addictive disorders.

Right now I see about 6-10 patients a day mostly for medication management , crisis intervention, motivation therapy and elective supportive therapy all dictated by when the patient wants to make the contact and contacts at anywhere from 1 to 24 months.  

I’m supposed to ‘fix’ these people and I am stigmatized as my patients are. Menatl illness and addiction are dirty illnesses.

Historically I remember and this is common still, when the mental health teams , government funded and supposedly ‘universal health care’ refused to see patient with addiction. They also commonly refused to see borderline personality disorder.

I was moonlighting in charge of a detox when I was going through my psychiatry training.  I subspecialized in borderline personality disorder.  The wisdom teaching at the time was borderlines were so demanding that a psychiatrist should only have maximum 1 or 2 in their practice. At one time I had 30.  I also found that most Borderline Personality Disorders were Post Traumatic Stress Disorder until proven otherwise.  No one looked into their history of traum and found that their behaviour was the coping mechanisms that they had learned in child hood and that these that had kept them alive through often horrendous trauma were not acceptable as adults.  

I was trained as a psychoanalytic psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist, marriage therapist, group therapist and hypnotist.  The key to avoiding adresssin the issue of Borderline Personality Disorder and PTSD was for many psychiatrists to focus solely on the mood calling them ‘Bipolar II’ and ignoring the whole trauma relationship therapy issues to simply consider various changes in polypharamcology, a triangulating technique at some level.

My research interest was noncompliance. Non adherence to medical regimen.  It’s estimated that 30 % of people don’t do what the doctor recommends but in the psychiatric practice it’s 80%. 

A third of my practice at least are stifling characters, the kinds of patients that psychologists and counsellor cream off from the collection.  These people have a particular problem like anxiety disorder, or depression but they don’t have other medical illnesses, they have jobs and families and friends and are generally really good ‘therapy’ candidates. We called them YAFie’s.  Young, attractive, family oriented, intelligent, interesting, and emotional.  I’ve treated a dozen Olympic champions, a dozen or more millionaires, a dozen or more models and many famous celebrities, professors, doctors, engineers, etc.  They are what people who ‘cherry pick’ their practices focus on.  They avoid people with drug and alcohol problems and especially the poor.

It’s the business of medicine The sharp smart operators ‘limit’ their involvements and establish ‘boundaries’ and aren’t particularly focused on ‘curing’ or ‘healing’ but rather providing a set ‘service or ‘protocols that are recommended in general.  Most of my patients don’t fit these protocols.  

One gp told me that he’d had his patients rejected by 20 or more psychiatrists and was sorry to be asking me to see another ‘basket case’.  

Many of my patients have criminal records.  Several have tried to kill me.  I’ve been held hostage and my life threatened .  I was in charge of the dangerously insane ward of the state asylum and consulted to the mentally ill in the jails. 

A lot of my patients are dirty and smell.  As I said a half to a third don’t.  Obviously the models and millionaires don’t.   I have a number of my patients with addiction living on the street.

There’s a government service.  It’s has immense resources . When I worked for mental health there were psychologists, social workers, and administrators and we had meetings all the time and saw very few people. One mental health team was utilized by one patient who took up something like half the services.  So many of the people I’ve worked with are afraid of the mentally ill. The burocrats are terrified of the mentally and will give them whatever to keep them out of their office and to focus their rage on others. They routine attack doctors from behind. They’re like the famous communist “leaders’ in WWII who stool at the back and shot anyone who didn’t go forward 

I’ve had patietrns who I saw 40 years ago and when I saw them they were chronically hospitalized and with proper psychiatric care went on to be professors never hospitalized again. I care but what I do is what my teachers taught me and I had the best teachers and have seen the best of psychiatric care. What is occurring in British Columbia and Canada in general is a shit show. I saw better care when I worked for welfare in the US than I saw people routinely getting in Canada.a

Trudeau and the Liberals are given euthanasia as ‘health care’.  They call it ‘Maid’ medically assisted suicide and the elderly and the mentally ill are targeting.

Nothing I say can be said. 2/3 of my colleagues are afraid to speak.  The last 10 years has been censorship in Canada at the highest level.  Many doctors and others working in institutions sign ‘non disclosure agreements’.  They won’t speak if they see someone kllled .  A man died in the waiting room of Winnipeg General Hospital and was dead 2 days and the hospital administration was exonerated because it was attributed ‘racism’.  We are all surprised it wasn’t attributed to ‘climate change’.

A million people came into Canada one year with only 200,000 housing available, no infrastructure management, no increased hospitals or doctors or labs.

When I order a test it routinely doesn’t come back to me even though I’m the ordering doctor.  MRI,CTScans, labs work go routine ly to a ‘family physician’.  British Columbia is a family physician town and specialists are commonly denigrated by comparison. I am a family physician. I delivered a hundred babies and did surgery and have treated thousands of general practice issues .  But when I order a test it goes to soemewhere else.  I am routinely asking my staff to find the reports or results. The gp who receives the pscyhaitric labs etc commonly is a walk in doctor the patient saw some years ago . But I’m the ordering psychiatrist and rarely do I get the lab work or X-rays or whatever back to me. This is an administration issue. When my patients are admitted to hospital rarely, but they are seen in emergency, commonly even though I’m the psychiatrist and specialist on the pharmanet and the patient says I’ m the psychiatrist the institutions send their discharge notes to some disconnected community walk in clinic where the patient had some contact so that name is somewhere in the history. The doctors and nurses and institutions are doing extremely good work but the communication (administration) issue is abysmal. The trouble it ‘communication’ institution and community etc was a problem 40 years ago.  We as doctors share among our self’s. However Lawyers don’t and beraurocrats don’t and they think information is power and their power .  It’s a nightmare.  Patient records are everywhere.  It’s a shitshow.  That’s all the glorious incompetence of health care administration at the government level in institution primarily while private doctors do the majority of health care.

Private psychiatrists are a principle reason our patients are not in hospital and are able to work and return to work.  My patients have chronic illness. Most specialists are dealing with chronic illness . What we do is get the patient through another week or month. The patients are amazing.  They are like the Duracell bunnies.  Despite being stigmatized and preyed on the mentally ill and the addicted keep struggling forward.  Thankfully many especially when the follow medical recommendations not only mange but prosper.  

I love working with my patients the beautiful and ugly, stupid and brilliant, clean and unclean.  What people don’t realize is doctors are a special breed who unlike lawyers, engineers, accountants or others are committed to understanding disease and treating sickness. I’m not research or business oriented .I’m a clinician.  Most of my colleagues are like me. We love our work and we love our patients. But we don’t like the criticism and scapegoating.  We have had a prime minister who would get at most a ‘c’ on a prime minister exam where as most of the doctors are A or A+ by world standards despite the increasing departure from clinical medicine to other more lucrative fields where doctors can work.  I tell people that if I see a person with a fracture and see a cut and fix it I get $50 but if I review this for an insurance company or government I get $500 but if I review it for the courts I get $5000.  I get the most money get the furthest away from patients with drug and alcohol problems or mental illnes but where I get to give talks and go to meetings and even become a. GURU.  I am especially rewarded if I have a niche and I tell addicts they need drugs or tell paranoids they aren’t paranoids. The more I can join the patients in the their delusions and the more agreeable I am the more rewarded I am.  

Increasingly patients used doctors not to get well but to get a letter for money or for some third party service.  Patients tell me they don’t want to see a psychiatrist but that they want to see a holistic healer but psychiatrists are free and holistic healers cost too much money.

My dog peed on the neighbour recliner. The neighbour complained to the authorities and a man visited me and told me to keep my dog on a leash. He escaped that one time and I’ve had him on a leath a thousand times. I knew to smile and say thank you.  My patient whose child died was abrupt with a client at work and written up and seen by several management people and HR and the union and they don’t have more sick days and they’re not dealing with the death that well. It’s been 2 months and they’re back to work because they’re paying for their mother who gets food from the food bank .My middle class patients are going to the food bank because Trudeau/Liberal money doesn’t buy anything. All my patients on fixed pension and disability are having problems paying for food and rent.  Mental illness and addiction devastate a persons capacity to care for themselves.  The Liberal government specializes and platitudes and their highly paid propaganda media say they’re helping the marginal people and are giving out ‘fish’ everyone once in a while with wonderful look at me press rallies.  My patients don’t just have a problem for a week. They have been declining over that last three years. Many of my patients haven’t rebounded since Covid.  This woman wants me to speak to her employer. I do that. I’ve done it hundreds of times. I’m saying please , give them another chance. Meanwhile they’re not doing well. Who does well after their daughter overdoses.  But it’s an unkind world.  I’m asked if I can give them a medication to help them focus and get better. I’m not allowed to prescribe cocaine.  I m even criticized for prescribing opiates, benzodiazepines or stimulants. Repeatedly my Addict is tell me their doctors wouldn’t help them their pain or whatever and they went to the street. Like they go to soothsayers and snake oil salesmen.

I have another patient who escape from his third treatment centre and was in and out of hospital suicidal over night.  But the law won’t let me Cerritos this addict and require that he be on injectable depot medications.  The richest civil rights folk fight to allow this person to destroy his life. You’d think these guys are getting kick back from the cartels but I was a members of the Civil Rights Asdsociation and I know that the government under the liberals have been censoring and attacking freedoms and declaring martial law for peaceful demonstrations. Kent State is happening in Canada today. Forget about the Buffalo Spring Field. This the Maoist Culural Revolution and I want my individual patient to have restriction put on him but I know this government would be a police state in a second if it could and people le the Canadian Civil Liberties Association are necessary to stop tyranny of second class PM’s .  It’s all above my pay grade.

i do the best I can. Really. I’m educated beyond my intelligence.  I’m studying medicine all the time. I’ve devoted my life to psychiatry and addiction medicine.  It’s cost me big time. I’m getting older and I’m frankly afraid seeing the horrendous neglect and abuse of the elderly and mentally ill in Canada. Terrorists get better treated and criminals get better treated and illegal immigrants get better treated than some of my patients and I’m criticized not by people on the front lines or doing better than me but you know, those ‘critics’ , a dime a dozen.  When I worked in government I hated the meetings because they were so stupid and the critics were a dime a dozen and didn’t do any work , indeed their principle skill was avoiding work. I know one doctor in government medicine didn’t see one patient in 6 months but were being paid full time as a clinician.  Another person I know ran an insurance agency out of the government medical office. I would love a DOGE of the Canadian government. Trudeau wants us to teach climate change to medical students and talk climate change in our 15 minute visits.  When I worked in the asylum we told the patients that the bars were on the wall to protect them from the outside, from the insanity of Ottawa.  

Hearing that tone of disdain, arrogance,superiority and ignorance, without experience or knowledge and just the inferiority complexes with their ‘judgemental mess’.  Judgement is so easy.  There’s no right or wrong in real life. We don’t get to decide ‘terms of engagement’.  These corporates are trying to impose their intellectual rigid profit driven constructs on humans who obviously they don’t worker.  The FDA tests medicine and almost all my patients including the brilliant beautiful celebrities would not make the jury selection rigor of the clinical trials. I’m doing psychopharamacoloy with medications that  over laps and are influenced by other medications diet and exercise and I have patients seeing a half dozen or more specialists and we’re not getting each others reports or note and there’s no system in the community for paying for us to interact so the junior group stays safe in the institutions are the multiple meetings and shared accountability while clinicians so often are out in the community alone struggling.  That’s where I’ve been but I specialized in wilderness medicine and worked as fly in family physician and psychiatrist in northern Canada and the Polynesia islands. Years of my life without resources doing what I could.  Now Canada is like a third world wilderness medicine place and my patients are falling through the cracks. All of those best practice models gps are supposed to follow aren’t getting to my psychiatric patients or my addicted patients. I imagine half my female patients have n’t had a breast exam and so many haven’t had stool samples. All the brilliant Canadian preventative health care isn’t happening to my patients because they don’t have a family physician and walk in clinics aren’t able to manage the demands.  

Besides more and more patients are Dr. Google and have a false idea that AI does good diagnosis and treatment .It doesn’t . There research is definitive. But the management sorts are frightened of this fact.

I’m worried because I’m on the dying end of the equation and know as a doctor I’m not getting the kind of health care that was normal 10 or 20 years ago. Today is a shit show and of course people are lucky if they get good care and they do but it’s so sad to see how poorly managed it is. But we have had a prime minister who says ‘budgets balance themselves’ and while he’s been at his perpetual party and spending spree he has also thought ‘country manages itself ‘ and ‘health care heals itself’.  

Now there’s nothing I need fear except fear itself.  I must forgive the arrogant and grandiose especially the narcissistic and psychopaths who don’t know they are assholes, but I must be the best version of myself today because the person I was talking to might have just learned they have gonorrhea and their dick was going to be amputated or the woman that her lipstick was a carcinogens. I must be understanding.  I am a sinner. I’m a person who fails too. I’m not a saint. I’m not perfect. And yes I could have done a better job.  I could have typed a pretty little paper like I do for the courts and spent the time doing that but I was dealing with trying to get my schizophrenic patient care because a number of companies are interfereing with his care and I don’t know what to do since I don’t have resources. I ordered an MRI for another person but the MRI place last the requisition., I’ve consulted a neurologist twice because the patient has something groiwning in their brain and yet I can’t get anyone interested because they guy is an addict or more likely everyone like me is over extenders,.

Canadian doctors outside of Quebec have 80% burnt out but French Canaaddian doctors are better paid with less case loads more breaks and more money and look down their noses at us especially us in western Canada which is wild.

But I’m trying to focus on being in the present. I’m trying to pray for enemies and forgive and let go of conflict and live in the present and develop acceptance. The problem is me and my perception This is God’s world and when I criticize it I criticize God and God is great all the time and God knows what’s best and me being criticized for my dog and my patients rude behaviour is just the way it should l be and I should rise about all this. I remember when the landlord wanted to kick me out of the office because my patients who I refused to give opiates to Keyed the walls of the office and I had to pay for the repair but that wasn’t enough others were afraid of mental ill people in the office buislling.  The addicts are even less welcome and have often been shouting in waiting rooms threatening and I’ve been told that I am not wanted if I can’t control my patients or ensure such patients don’t come to see me. But then the patients complain to the government and the government hates doctors and is superior and elite and aloof and wear expensive suits and don’t get woken at night are rich fat cats with the best pensions and they cost the doctors thousands of dollars and the patients who complain about the doctors are violent bullies in the community but there’s a shortage of doctors and the administration is supposed to care but at any time there’s doctors playing that administration game that costs the private practitioner tens of thousands of dollars whereas the institutional and salaried doctors are rewarded by time off and collective angst since they don’t have to pay overhead and staff. 

The PM called me and all private doctors criminals and said we were stealing from patient with our RRSP program. I don’t have health care. I don’t have pension. I’m making less that the patient who have unions . I lost 12 years of earning capacity to education and this guy told me ‘a thermostat has degrees and we stick that up your ass’. 

I also have to resist poor me.  when I can’t sleep and something like this has triggered me I go into self pity mode. Thank god I have friends who say ‘get off the cross, we can use the wood’.  Really I had teachers who talked like army sergeants and I have seen doctors do the most egregious things to doctors. I have had the worst and best medical care known in my time . But now I’m blessed.

I’m right now in paradise and can only imagine that I’m so relaxed and blessed that I’m sensitive to this shit which I normally take like water off a ducks back.  The abuse of caregivers in Canada is legion. In Covid times we all had to put up signs don’t attack medical staff. Meanwhile people we banging pots and pans in other places saying thanks for taking the risk. I was terrified at first remember the year I was the emergency doctor that first year of aids when friends were dying. A couple of friends died of Covid last year too.

This getting old isn’t for the young.  

I’m tired enough to sleep I hope.  All shall be well. All shall be well.  All manner of things shall be well.  I miss the head of family medicine and the head of neurology and the head of psychiatry.  they all referred to me and now they’re retired or dead.  Ageism is alive and well in Canada.  Racism not so much.  My older patients aren’t going to get even good assisted living since everything costs and those with assists saved are punished because the street people get the same and now illegal immigrants get first in line.  

I’m fucked but that’s God’s will. So thank you Jesus.  God came to earth and they killed him and it just keeps on going.  Tomorrow is a new day Jesus will be born and die and arise.  The aestesist will evangelize and push their religion of communism and their silliness and I’ll thank god for waking me up. I’ll be confused.  I’ll do the next right thing. I’ll no doubt convince another person not to suicide while I think of it and tell my patients stop talking and being distracted by America the problem is closer to to home. Like the adolescent who can solve all the world’s problems but can’t clean his room.

I’m awake at night because God and I are having a Jakob struggle.  My back hurts.  I’ve losing body parts.  Everyone is dying.  I’m paranoid.  I am hopeful.  I’ll keep Madigan on a close leash and maybe I’ll clean his bum and wash him because his poops getting stuck in his hair.  That’s really what I should focus on.  I will get in the mineral springs and that will be wonderful .  Now I’ll go back to bed and hope to turn over without screaming pain .  Fucking plan crash.  I can take Advil but my stomach gets upset.  I tried some cream and that helped.  This is paradise.  I’m blessed to be hear 

A terrific pit stop for an old car one a wonderful journey.  Thank you Jesus. Thank You God. 

How elderly can stay in their own place

When people get older they are at risk of being institutionalized.  Elderly can be forgetful but so can the young. However if an old person leaves the bath tub water on floods the tub and damages the apartment building they will be considered a threat to their neighbours.

The other major reason for the elderly to lose their independence is leaving the stove on or causing a fire,

I used to be called out on home visits to assess if the elderly were ‘competent’ to live independently.  Water and fire were the principle concerns.  

Today there are devices that can be put on faucets to shut them off automatically.  They are called “automatic faucet shutoff’,  I found a cheap one at the Alzhemer’store but there are several more just line the ones in the airport

There’s also sensors that detect when you leave the stove on and also stove switches that are always on a timer to reduce risk of fires.  

When I head about these devices first in England help the old remain in their homes I looked on the internet and found a very few. Today I looked and there were many more. Amazon had a range of choices.  My plumber friends says she installs them.  I expect any electrician could install the stoce timers’

I manufacture worry

Recently I’ve been manufacturing a whole news set of worry.  It’s like being at the perfect day campsite when the dusk brings out the swarms of mosquitoes.

I’m older.  So now I’m worried I won’t have time to

- get a Nobel Peace Prize - I never wanted one. I’ve not worked to get one. I’ve just thought though that if I did want one I’d probably not have time to get one. I don’t want to change my life either..  I’ve become accepting of my past. I’ve made amends where I can. I’ve worked to forgive some. I’ve forgotten others. But just generally I’m incredibly grateful for the life I’ve had and proud of my many accomplishments. I’ve had lots of awards and achievements.  It’s like I’ve done well.  Maybe not one of life’s A students but a B plus, sometimes A and sometimes C but I’m alive and it has been an adventure

- time to travel to all the places I’d like to go. I’ve had a life of travel and work. I’ve bicycled across Europe, lived in London for a year, Mexico another year, been a flyin doctor in northern Canada and the Polynesian Islands. I lived in Saipan a couple of years, I’ve lived in Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver .  I’ve mortocycled across the northern states to Vancouver to the Black hills and back for the Surgis rally. I sailed my 13 ton sailboat to Alaska and Mexico and then solo through winter hurricane to Kona and back from Honolulu in exquisite weather. I ‘ve hiked mountains, the Rockies, and hiked the Sierra Leone Trails of Northern California, and the West Coast trail on Vancouver Island. I’ve done 50 mile walks but not a marathon I’ve white water canoed and skidooed across tundra, snow shored and stayed in igloos. I’ve scuba dived. I’ve been a successful bird and big game hunter as well as fisherman. .  I’ve flown to Japan, Moscow, Ethiopia, Costa Rica and lots of other places. 

- time to explore museums and art galleries. I want to visit more art galleries and see more impressionist paintings. I want to visit old cities and revel in the architecture and see more cave paintings and prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge.  

- time to write books. I’ve three in progress but don’t work on them steady so easily distracted by work 

- time to walk the dog more in nature

- time to read old books I loved and see old movies I’ve loved. I once thought I’d have time to do this, having enjoyed these studies go back and read Doystoyevski and listen to Joni Mitchell.  

- time to meditate and pray. I imagined I’d do retreats and maybe be a monk, contemplative.  I’d find peace of mind sitting by a river like Buddha or experience ecstasy in contemplation like St. Theresa of Liseux, Avala or St. John of the Cross

- time to see the birds in Brazil or the animals of South Africa. 

I have been so blessed but I’ve not been asked by the Prime Minister or President what I think is best even in my areas of greatest knowledge areas I have felt I knew better than the politically connected. I’ve not been politically connected. I’m too much a libertarian , a Christian libertarian at that.

— time to be a multi billionaire.

I’ve not wanted more money most days. I’ve been granted enough except in those times of divorce when I’ve left a course taken as it didn’t feel like it was safe even or likely to be the road less travelled. I’ve avoided conflict where I can and moved along. I’ve fought for family and patients and even friends but for myself I’ve not felt the same need to engage in war or ego based rivalry for money or status. I’ve been offered positions of security with indexed pension, high paid, steady status and even positions guaranteed to make a million or more but my clinical curiosity lay elsewhere and I’ve been able to work in a humbler more focussed way. I’ve done good. I’ve worked in areas of greatest need.   I’ve delivered babies, done surgery, cured a lot of infections, diagnosied and treated a lot of conundrums and mostly been a little Dutch boy with his thumb in a hole in the dyke. I’ve treated the wounded on the field after the war has gone through. I’ve been unremarkable.  I’ve worked one on one like a singer who teaches individual students rather than takes the stage and sings to the largest audience. I’ve talked to God every day and know that I have an audience like my mother who cares and often encouraged me to be where there is no fame or fortune though I’ve wanted fame and fortune too.  But I ‘ve got it and I don’t think it’s fair to complain. I’ve had the opportunity to hunt and fish and dance and sing.  I’ve been truly blessed. I’ve been sober 27 years but before that I was young and wild. Today I’ve grown older a rare privilege with so many I know having already passed, 

Seriously I don’t know if I have time to give thanks enough.  I don’t know if I have time to be more surprised by joy. I don’t know if I have time for more love having known love all my life.  I don’t know if I have time to figure it out. Whatever it is.  I am grateful.  I have faith.

Time to walk the dog.  Thank you for this time to walk the dog. I don’t worry walking the dog.  It’s good. I’m doing good.  We’re walking our bodies and that itself is good. I can get too much in my mind and forget there’s more to life in nature. I ‘ve too often been inside when life is outside.  I don’t know and even worry I won’t have time to find the ‘balance’ to get back ‘into the flow’. To witness the synchronicity over and over. I like playing hide and seek with Jesus. He’s always there but I’m terribly forgetful and so easily distracted . Thank you Jesus for love and all. Peek a boo.

SV GIRI, MD, Aging and awards

Seeing President Biden drop out of the presidential race was positive and negative for me. Yes he was dramatically neurocognitively declining over the last years and it was difficulty to hear this explained as studdering.  Bruce Willis has declined to.  So did Joni Mitchel but she’s made a come back.  I’m of an age when so many of my cohort are retiring, declining or even dying. I’ve lost too many family and close friends in the last few years. It’s cause for grief and for anxiety for my self. I’m a great one for denial of death having worked in the midst of death and being as prone to the next for magical thinking.  

My father was an engineer and in charge of the Matthew Conveyor installation at the Winnipeg Airport and Winnipeg Post Office. It was the reason my family moved to Winnipeg. Dad had 150 men working under him in those years.  Yet post retirement, downsized front house to apartment with Mom, having survived an MI and near death experience after prostate surgery, he was no longer robust and the powerful as the man I’d known him.  There was a coffee room and activity room where he stayed.  A man my father had fired for drunkenness and theft on the job was given an apartment in the same building my father was in. Mom and he had paid significantly for him to be there and always paid more than their share.  I never knew either to not work. Yet now this former street person was harassing my father whenever he went to the cafe.  My father stopped going to the cafe and my mother told me of this.  What he was most upset with she said, “He keeps calling him a liar and says he wasn’t an engineer and didn’t work on the PO or Airport.  He bullies your  dad and calls him names and your father just returns to the apartment”  

I made a trip to the cafe and spoke to the dozen or so elderly people there and confronted this man telling them all what a great father my dad had been, how he was an engineer and was in charge of the installation of the conveyor systems for the Airport and Post office , how I’d worked for him as a Millwright’s helper and how I was a doctor and specialists and taught at the university thanks to what a great father I’ d had.  I also said my parents raised me to tell the truth and I’d never heard either of them lie.”  I concluded by saying that I’d heard my father’s good name and reputation had been questioned and my father is a humble man who doesn’t care to be in the company of liars and near do wells.  

My mom told me after that this man who’d been the charm of the old ladies was thereafter ostracized and dad eventually returned to having their morning coffee there visiting with their friends. The old sociopath and liar apparently more often than not left when my father came but never again disparaged my father or called him a liar. 

I felt I did the right things, restoring order and protecting my father in his old age God knows he protected me endless times when I was young and indeed more often than not my worst enemy.  That he didn’t kill me when I was a teen ager was the coin that no doubt contributed to his going straight to heaven when he died.  There was no doubt that Mom was headed there but Dad, having been an Air Force Veteran through WWii expressed doubts about his own final destination.

Now I’m selling my sail boat. It was my life and identity for many years, learning all the navigation skills, sailing skills and boat maintenance and engine repairs, communication involved in off shore blue water sailing, my passion after and parallel to my medical training and speciality and sub speciality training.  I am selling the sailboat now.  Soon I’ll be without it and like my friend who lost his license after a stroke so can’t drive his truck, I’m feeling the future closing in on me.  

Younger I’ve heard people who are couch coaches and athletes and dr. Google specialists tell me “I don’t know anything”.  It’s that kind of world today.  People are being given awards and titles without having earned them. Indeed the new DEI , diversity, equity and inclusion designativions are being called ‘Did not earn it’.  Working with the military I had to address the growing issue of ‘stolen glory’, men and women claiming they had served and were wounded in wars that took place far from their couches and little minds.  The professors I know are having increasing problems with fraud.  I imagine Joe Biden telling people in the nursing home that he was once the President of the United States of America and no one believing that.

It’s ego dropping away.  My back aches and I’m no longer a gymnast and dancer and though I hiked to tops of mountains and carried 60 lb packs on week long hike I could sneeze today and be contorted by a spasm,  So yes it’s challenging.

I mostly fear being told by a liar the likes of our lying near do well Prime minister and so many of the political and media sorts and the paid lying Goebels sort that I wasn’t a sailor and wasn’t a doctor and wasn’t who I was.   I imagine being ny father walking away from a favourite cafe where I’d once been accepte and laughed with friends because a bullies and criminal and thief moved in and I just didn’t want to leave my room. Indeed it’s sometimes hard to get out of my bed.  And who’s going to be there to say I was a good man who lived life and loved and served.  Service is not a part of communism the religion of aetheism.  The godless are only interested in what they can get for themself and project their greed onto all those others who believe in something more.  

I had a nightmare of being stripped of my degrees and accomplishment and body and memories and was standing alone and being accused of being a liar and I had no evidence to prove my past. None of the babies I’d delivered. None of those I’d helped get off drugs and alcohol, none of those I’d brought back to life rescuing them from disease and death for another day were there. I was there in that empty room disembodied and naked being a cussed .  Ex wife and old enemies.  There were the murderers I refused to sign out of jail and the pedophiles I put in jail and the malingers and liars I’d exposed.  All of these were accusing me of the voices like those who said I never did n’t do enough. Like the lovers who were never satisfied and the patients who felt I wasb’t perfect and yet I’d done all I could. And the storms at sea which I’d tried to avoid and the storms I’d past through only barely surviving and thinking how poor a sailor I was with broken equipment and exhaustion and the thought that someone from the Navy or Coast Guard would know better or an old offshore fisherman. I’ve never felt I knew enough or was enough and seemed constantly facing challenges at the limit of ny learning.  

I supposed that Jesus or a friend night be in that room I was an advocate for my father.  I suppose and hope and even pray that there is an advocate on that day of reckoning to save me from despair and sorrow.  It’s hard to let go of my sailboat and hard to see my friends retiring and muddling on barely.  

Thank you God for what I had, Thank you God for what I lost, Thank you God for what I have left 

Old ladies and old men smell

When I was a child I remember thinking that old people smelled funny. I am old today and don’t think I smell funny. But then as my sight and hearing have diminished so has my olfactory sense. Perhaps smells exist that only an acute child’s nose might ferret out.  

The truth is looking back I believe the world was different in many ways and the smells of my childhood would be thankfully rarer today.

Cheap perfume and cheap cologne. Many old people pre febreeze thought that dousing themselves with perfume and cologne would ‘cover up’ the smells. 

Old people body odors aren’t easily covered up.

The key is washing and when I was young showers were uncommon and baths were work. Today I and all my friends shower daily. We all use soap.  Water is not rationed here, Yet when I was younger it was often not so readily available as today and old people often bathed only once a week.  It was not uncommon to for people to avoid full immersion and simply clean themselves with a hand towel,  Not as effective but better than not.  Soaking was a luxury of time and heating. In the north where I was houses were cold and drafty and the electricity to heat water wasn’t free. There were homes too that didn’t have hot water so to bath one had to boil water for the tub. This was common in the northern reserves and some of the farms.  Wood smoke often covered body door effectively so it wasn’t as apparent in the country as the city.  

Later in life I became aware that though many old people were bathing regularly it was their clothing that smelled.  I remember old cigar smoke and cigarette smoke in men’s jackets and that few ‘dry cleaned’ clothing then.  

There was also a lot more sweating and physical labor when I was growing up. Not an effete gym crowd but rather real working men and women who even if they were professional had to lift and haul and push things, ie sweat.  

I also imagine that the stoical old were asexual by their sixties and coupling wasn’t the sensual slow endeavour of today.  Men and women in their 80’s are intimate today and living longer with more sexuality and sensuality so actually considerate of others.  In the past the old were often just surviving and dying with a variety of smelly diseases that didn’t get checked by doctors early.

I don’t think I smell off but if I demented it would likely be a tell tale indication. The physical disabilities of the elderly make wiping and washing difficult, painful and even dangerous.  Slipping in the bathroom is common.  Efforts are being made to make bathrooms friendly and safe for the elderly.  

I remember my fastidious grandmother needing help to strip the bed and put on new sheets.  Alone she’d not have been able.  The family provided assistance in the past but the ‘smelly’ old ones were commonly the widowed and alone.  

I think multi culturalism will affect this scenario because different cultures have different attitudes to body odour, elderly, washing, soap and community. The Chinese were once the fastidious and the English were by comparison disgusting. Now the English are obessessive and the Chinese continue to believe in the merits of cleanliness.  But what of the middle eastern and southern raised in desert climes where water was a costly commodity. There are complaints of different ‘food’ smells in apartments ‘offending’ neighbours but what of body odors and clothing smells.  

I dont notice it. I’m an old person.  I wonder what children would say.  I doubt today the kids would think the old smell collectively but is anyone asking.  

Struggle

Recently I’ve found the word struggle is the underlying theme of my life of work, love and play.  I don’t think it’s helpful.  It’s like ‘enduring’. I’m ‘enduring my life’.  I would much rather be dancing through life, sailing through life, exploring, treasure hunting, adventuring.

My life is very good right now.  Spring has arrived, my Truck camper has returned. I’ve had a splendid weekend disconnected from the grid, cooking, eating, sleeping and reading.  I’ve been with Laura who is a gem and the nutbar dog Madigan a terror in her company.  It’s been domestic.  Like the lives the men described who returned from the ‘front’, those sailors who on leave returned to their farms which competent wives ran.  The pressure was off. I enjoyed the weekend.  I imagined that this sense of contentment was somewhere in the future in some assisted living place.  Aging was not necessarily lonely and a struggle with fear of being robbed but rather it could go easy.  I long for easy.  Despite the idea that the ‘easier, softer way, “ lacks the stoic romance of the fellow ‘strugglers’.  Vigilance I can contend with. I really feel I must pay attention.  The threats are ever there. I don’t feel protected in an AI way but rathe than I’m walking along with my hand held by Jesus. I will not be alone but I will still face challenges.

Challenge is a better word than struggle.  I had visions younger. I had goals and drives and bridges to cross and mountains to climb.  I see my friends with children and grandchildren being uplifted by their own presence in the future. I’m without children and it tells. I am feeling time running out and that there are children carrying on but I don’t feel the obligation or duty of a parent.  I’m an accessory , not necessary.  

I do good work but it’s waning.  My wisdom increases but my reach has decreased. Looking back I see that the gp I was could have been contented and I could have have saved myself the ‘struggle’ of four more years of double specialty and sub speciality as well as special interest in trauma and head injury. I could have avoided forensics but I was curious. The challenge of understanding mental illness not only for the communication with the patient but as their advocate was a whole other domain of learning. I remember liking teaching but am glad I avoided that in this world of stupid folk being ‘offended’, the euphemism of blame.  I am at a time where I’m reducing my sense of accountability and responsibility.  I felt so so long it was all on me and I had to achieve the desired goal.  I stopped the hallucinations, I stopped the suicide. It’s as my fault and my job.  I was the little boy holding him thumb in the hole in the dike.  But now I’m increasingly self centred. The thought of dying does that.

I’m caring for myself.  Speaking with a friend they were surprised I was taking lunch breaks as they remembered me working always through lunch, late into the evening, leaving the office or hospital past seven and being at work in the weekends. With the governments all out attack on the middle class, taxation and condemnation, I don’t know it gained me at all personally to work so hard and diligently. My tax dollars went to criminals and tyrants.  What little was left over I paid dearly in health.

But I sailed. I danced. I loved. I muddled on with naivity and foolishness. I had high ideals and literally would work harder when abused.  I was always believing it was my ‘duty’ and that I had somehow failed. Now I’m more ready to think it’s not the ‘fit’ or yes ‘I’ve failed’. Can we move on. The cost and waste of the institutions of blame and money are long overdue for reconstruction. I was told I had to perfect and if I wasn’t the evidence was right there.  Those other places were human constructs with lots of psychological abuse but not the death and disease that attested to errors in the emergency room. I’m glad I’ve done so little damage with the trials errors of treatment in the most difficult of patients.

Working in addiction I was forever playing poker with brains full of chemicals in various states of excitation and withdrawal giving medication to people who lied routinely about what they were already on often themselves not knowing. I never knew their hands and yet played mine the best I could with surprising success knowing the casino always wins in the end. I ‘ve sevens a whole lot of death and disease but didn’t cause it directly myself.  

Sins of omission came to fascinated me, covert and passive aggression, negligence and fate.  I still wonder about the balance and how effort and prayer can ever so slightly alter trajectories.  So many variables.  Good intentions are all to so many but I specialized in outcome analysis.  Now I’m more likely to follow protocols and do as I’m told because the punishment for doing the ‘right’ thing as opposed to what the authorities say is the ‘right’ thing is too overwhelming. I sacrificed so much for patients and others. Today I’m doing my bit. I’m not a hero. I’ve surrendered and at best am cleaning up.

If I was independently wealthy I’d probably just travel and write, play guitar more, maybe play chess. I’m paying for the travel aids I think I need ideally, outfitting for retirement but I have all I need right now. I’m ready to slip away. I’ve not cured cancer and there doesn’t seem time left for me to even write the great Canadian novel or reach Samadi or find Nirvana or levitate, or even get a spot on the mars flight or rule the world. I’ve lesser desires.  I’d like to again lie in the sun and day dream. I did this weekend, put out the lawn chairs and make a fire with split logs and sit enjoying the wind wafting the wood smoke my way.  I moved my chair to the right place so I only had wisps of smoke, just enough to bring back memories of Blue Lake, Minaki, family, Boy Scouts, Camp Steven’s,  Church campus and later hippies. It really was just nostalgia. Memories of youth. Skinny dipping with beautiful girls or later lying under the full moon.  The conditions had to be just right. A marvellous confluence. When bugs were not present so that love making on a beach or a mountain side or in a tent was idyllic.  There have been countless moments of wonder and grace. I too often forget them as my mind today is drawn to the ‘struggle’s. 

I’m the proverbial old general replaying the battles but it’s all just been water under the bridge with eddys and rapids.  We’ll floating with the stream. It’s a good feeling. 

Death

Death is in my thoughts.  I know I’m immortal.  Still these thoughts of finality come upon me.  Intrusive, limiting. I live, as if.  I acknowledge my chronic pain. There’s a fragility in my walk and a fear of falling .  The pain, soreness, stiffness in my back occurs with movement.  I’m doing various activities to live. What I once did for pleasure, like eating, I’m now doing with a conscious effort to gain longevity and to lessen pain.  Suffering is mandatory, they say.  Life is suffering unto death said Kierkegaard.  

Mahler laughs at the unseen world, as only a winner in this world can.  But I’m of an age where friends are dying, literally disappearing.  There remains only a sense that we will meet again in some otherworld beyond rainbow bridge, that mythical place where the pets are waiting to join one before passing on.  

My soul seems like an energy field of high vibration/oscillation shimmering.  In some way this ethereal self is linked with this body, shank’s mare.  The body is sad and the soul remains quizzical.  

I’m past retirement age.  I have no pension or wealth and the government corruption and evil, the mismanagement of resources, and the obscenity of their greed and stupidity has lead to immense loss and destruction of the middle class and aging.  I feel targeted as a group.  The government is at war with me and there is little help as the crunch of rent and cost of living bear down on me and all those I know.  The selfish are being rewarded. The criminals are being rewarded. The slackers are being rewarded. The hard workers, steady Eddie’s, responsible are being stripped of their earnings by the latest collection of thieves and thugs.  

The oldest law in the world is the Chinese law of the fish, there are big fish and little fish. The little fish must be fast and numerous.

I expect my back trauma has left me less capable of running or fighting. I’m fat and less inclined to discomfort. Even sleeping on the ground last year was painful.  I am accustomed to eating, heat and clothing.  

The landlord complained I had two motorcycles at my place.  My Harley Electroglyde 1600 is the ultimate highway motorcycle. I drove 5000 km to Sturges South Dakota and back on it and have used it since for day rides in the country. It’s so big and heavy that I’ve felt unstable in the city with the poor kamikaze drug stoned drivers of Vancouver not signalling their erratic turns and stopping and starting. 

I have a Vespa 300 GTE.  It’s good for the city and sufficient for country  side roads.  I put the Harley in storage and continue to ride the Vespa year round.  In my perpetual struggle to find the right tool I’m trading in the Harley and the Vespa on a new Harley Nightster 1000.  I will have to pay more to do this, the value of my machines leasened by the dealer while the cost of their product is maximized. It’s sharp business policy. The inflation of today, causing my money to be only 2 /3’s the value of the American manufacturer’s money is challenging.  The point is the Vespa is adequate but I want the Harley and mine is too big and heavy and in my mind now too dangerous to run round to the store for mail and groceries.  The new Harley has panache. Laura calls it a spitfire. While I’ve been having trouble managing the big bike because of the stiffness in my back and the weakness in my body I foresee driving the new Harley another decade. 

 Yet I struggle with savings for the future now when I may be less capable and the costs may rise even further. I’m thinking about death and aging. I’m thinking about holding on or expanding.  I was all prepared to sail across the Atlantic but my deteriorating physical strength made the thought of sailing through another hurricane no longer challenging but purely daunting.  

I like being with Laura.  I like being around the guys. I like my colleagues. I rely on others in a way I haven’t in decades. I fear sickness and debility as I hear of more and more with sickness and surgery.  I see so many surviving and thriving but I don’t wish the torture of overcoming disease.  I do not fear dying, not knowing what it is , but imagining it a transition to a different world, with a new body, a passing What I don’t like is the idea of dying.  I fear further suffering.  Yet here I am already in the slipstream as my lumbar spine registers the turbulence approaching death. 

I have faith in God.  I am not God.  I can’t seem to call in place an extra 10 thousand to cover the cost of the change over to a newer lighter Harley. I can’t influence the landlord to leave me alone and not introduce restrictions whimsically and probably driven by fear of the beast government encroaching on all.  We are all on the same sea though different boats.  The landlord’s yacht is different from my little sailboat but there are constant warnings of storms and tsunamis so fear is palpable as everyone struggles to position themselves before the coming threat of war and disorder.  

The concern is that with my back pain and aging I can project the fear and uncertainty I’m feeling onto the whole.  This is not about God or the World but simply about my personal struggle.  I know the Harley represents ego.  It’s the panache of the machine.  It’s manly compared to my womanly Vespa.  It’s a risk when I could be banking money and thinking of the rainy day . Even that is questionable as banks fail and money is squandered in the billions by sociopaths in power.  I see the Harley as a get away machine.

  In the coming wars, there has always been fear of war since the Cold War , and now the Hybrid War of the Communist Chinese coupled with the divisive war mongering of our government forcing us to see our neighbour as different. The government has for three years been a constant Fauci Nocebo and the Trudeau divide and conquer portraying the black man as different, immigrant as different, the aboriginal as different, the female as differnt, the gay as differnt. Then with favouritism and attacks on all others ,  I’ve lost that feeling of safety in my home, that others are fellow Canadians like me, that there is law and order, when no , there’s attacks on the police by the Trudeau supporters, and criminals are celebrated, terrorists paid millions for murdering medics with the new golden calf statue of gold made to Floyd a violent gangster drug addict and abuser of women.  The Statue of John A. Macdonald founder of Canada I knew is destroyed.  It’s all symbolic. It’s all metaphor. It’s all worrying.  

Worrying is wicked.  I have faith in love and comfort and God, or creation, or something , a higher power, something more than me. I feel tiny and infinitesimally weak and alone though I know that’s just the squeak of pain. Pain is that which I can say in no other way.  I feel stabbed in the back and betrayed and that I’ve carried the world on my shoulders and don’t have help.

I fear this weakness. I fear even vulnerability with Laura given the betrayal of ex wives who were there for my strength and turned on me the moment of weakness. I feel like a Wolf among wolves.  If I’m weak, the pack will savage me. That’s been my experience as a caregiver.  When I was weak I was abused and taken advantage of. When I complained I was hurt more.  I was repeatedly told to be a man, man up. Get down off the cross we can use the wood.  I spent years suicidal and now they encourage euthanasia but with pretty names like MAID offered me.  The Feminist solution to the harshness of life. Kill yourself. IF you can’t pay the rent, leave, die.  Heres’ an addiction.Or consume for comfort. Or pray. I pray.

It’s not just the Harley. That’s the symbol of every limited decision,  Should I save and trust the bank and have a place to stay in some care home as more and more elderly I know are homeless.  I imagine jail is there.  I ‘ve a fear of those who lived to fight and hurt physically while I’ve served with specialization and skills , decades of learning.  A desk jockey.  While collar.  Thrown to the masses I’m wasted.  The Harley is escape.  I have a chance of getting away in a high speed chase, better than I would on the Vespa.

I think the Harley ward’s off attack.  I’m old and as so many of us old men say, we have no second round. So attacked we will kill immediately and the best defence is an offensive .

I always know where the sharp weapons and bludgeoning instruments are in a room . I’m always caring keys as weapons. In my world everything is a tool and a weapon.  

The idea of death is peace.  I am not afraid of death but long for it.  It’s just the getting there.  I wonder how much more humiliation I will have to face.  

It doesn’t take a Harley to ask these questions. With cost of living rising I find myself asking whether I ‘can afford’ a steak or should I return to the monastic vegetarianism and cheap living I once knew in spiritual pursuit.  It’s insane the way I think.  My anxiety is for the future which may not come as all I really have is today.  

Carpet diem! Or ODAAT.  Now is okay.  If I keep my head in the same room as my ass is I’m okay. I can work and help others but then I’m downsizing. I ‘m approaching a future where possessions are no longer beneficial because the cost of storage is so exorbitant. I once had houses and acreage but now I’m preparing for the smaller lesser world of the old. I’m trying to clean away excess so that if I was not here family or friends would not be faced with ‘stuff’. I’m giving away stuff but acquiring as quickly. I’ve a storage locker where I have the two or three tools that match the tool I bought last week. I’ve duplicates and yet nostalgia and sadness overcome me as I surrender and let go of the past. 

My back hurt comes from carrying all the memories and love of ages.  I’m  old and weary with good life and good times.  I’m letting go.

I talked to men this week who can’t ride their Harley’s any more.  “My knees, won’t let me.” A big fellow told me as I sat on the new Nightster imagining new adventures wondering if I had time.  I will have to customize it and have to find a way to load and tow it. I’m facing the decision of the toy hauler and trailer. Every change in one physical piece of my life occasioned downstream changes in the projects.  I ask myself now if I still have time Will I have the money. Will I have the energy.  I emptied a closet and was fatigued and sore.  

I have worked more years than most I know. I started work at 12 and have an SIN since I was 16.  Everyone I know is wanting my support and pity and help and understanding and I’ve been channeling and caring, lifting and giving, working long hours, so much for charity, so much underpaid, so much more than was required.  I’ve given mor and more and now like all caregivers wonder about reciprocity. I know I will be loved in life but here I fear I’m only loved because I’ve been strong and wealthy and young. 

Of course I miss my mom and dad and grandparents and aunts and uncles.  Of course I miss my teachers and mentors and all those who have been there .  I have tried to teach reciprocity and karma and yet more and more I live in a world of takers. Sharks , bullies. Their fear and need is palpable,  

We are a consumer society.  The harley will give me as temporary joy. I’ll need a new fix in time, For now I’ll be able to find what gear I have left over from when I had the roadster or buell or KLM or Honda. I gave most of it away but May have some leftover gear from.All the bikes before the bagger.  I might just get by with a back park.  Shopping they don’t have bags and we have to bring our own.  I use the bike for shopping because the cost of fuel for the truck is exorbitant. There will be less cost for licensing only smaller machine and the gas costs have been escalating to match the lie and thieving of the elite bum we have for leader.  Spend thrift trust fund snowboarder. I envy him his irresponsibility. 

I stopped being adolescent when I became a doctor.  I’ve seen way too much disease suffering, loss and death. I’ve had blood and depression and anxiety flung at me weekly. I’ve got suits but nothing like the suits those parliamentary sorts wear, the office money men who are effete and clean and not like me. I’m front row on life and death, dirty with reality.  I’m up to my eye balls in viruses and Bactria. I’m even working virtual in the depth of angst.  I am constantly offering diagnosis understanding  medications and education toease the pain of others.  

I’ve come to work forever and was glad to until I saw that my leadership were shirkers and cowards and that they were offensive abusers of those like me who are the back bone of society. Yet this new managerial class, the new communists, believe that the ‘workers’ like infantry men are expendable. They call us all deplorable. They waste us.  They think ita’s all about them and their ‘intellectual thinking’.  We think too but we do. We are the workers.  Boss man elite effete idiots, those lying scoundrels buying silences and censoring the world, claiming to be doing the evil they do for the benefit of others, narcissists and psychopaths among them. The names on Epsteins’s list remain hidden proving by default that the leadership are a collection of pedophiles, traitors and sociopaths till proven otherwise. Arendt was right. Evil is banal. Where is Bonhoeffer when we need him. Where is  Solzenitzen when we need him?

My minds slips. It’s a loose transmission. When I ride my harley I can’t think of anything but the road. Moving meditation. Medication for me . Wind therapy ,  If  I know I can die a horrible or instant death in a brief distraction. I can live however glorious and free if I pay attention. I don’t feel that way on the Vespa. It’s like a bicycle. Not a rocket ship with power galore.  I am longing for my new nimble machine like a stallion, My old harley spending so much time in storage, rarely ridden these last few years, well I’m glad to see passed on to someone who will enjoy it’s promises as I have . I’m just ready for a younger lighter bike I can ride on to death with.  I really miss my sailboat too. Over the years I’ve been blessed with all these loved  vehicles of life.  

I’m enjoying my family with little ones who are enjoying the world with toys.  I had dinky toys and now I have had the real things. What comes next is levitation and space ships.  It’s all possible. With God life is omnipotential.  Life is infinite.  My soul is laughing .  My body is even laughing at the thought of this new ride together.  All of us meeting one day at Rainbow Bridge.  Thank you Jesus. 

Harrison’s Hot Spring Resort, March 4, post birthday

Yesterday was my birthday.  The first year of a decade of life completed with celebration.  I am at that age where the years in between each decade now count less. This year is a little one in the world of counting time.  Last year was a big one. Europe with Laura and Arizona and Mexico with Madigan. I enjoyed the work and the people immensely.  

I wrestled with God as Jacob did,  I played hide and seek and peekaboo with Jesus. I accepted each day was a miracle, complete and true.  I followed the idea of I and Thou.  According to Jung all the people were variations of the Shadow of self coming to life.  There is only one.  Jesus comes as a stranger.  Loving the enemy is all about forgiving yourself. 

Now today I’m here again at Harrison’s taking the sacred waters.  I loved sleeping last night beside Laura. The softness of her skin, the feel of her breast, the warmth of her body so blessed.  Madigan, the cockapoo has goat genes. He bounced about the bed and joined in kisses and cuddles.  He ‘s a very enthusiastic dog.  A Nutbar but our nutbar.

I struggled last year with what to do.  I felt some compulsion to decide whether to retire and travel and write or continue to work .  Laura is clear that she is working and her doctor is working and I’m rather content in our relationship.  It’s a known joy like chocolate or ice cream.  I’m happiest in her company.  Domesticated.  Alone I’m feral and a bit crazy.  

The work does that.  Scraping nails on window pane.  The time spent in the presence  of depression and fear.  It’s all the rage to rush in and rush out throwing out  the pills and platitudes in the space between.   That’s lucrative at best but if the other doesn’t agree then their’s euthanasia with a smile and a pat on the back.  

I’m old school.  Before the seduction of boundaries and labels. There but for grace go I. I wrestle with demons though no one understands psychiatric  exorcism anymore or walking a mile in the shoes.  Psychoeducatiion,psychoanalysis and hyponoss are beyond the realm of fast medicine and fast food.  I’m still pleased to see progresss, staying out of hospital, getting a job, marriage, university, laughter. All the old signs of good work. Being part of the process and knowing that without the salt the soup would still taste off.  Jesus says we ware the salt. Buddha made his position clear. Lao Tzu and Krishnamurti weighed in.  I practice the faith.  I cling to hope.  I follow my teachers.  My mentors were the grandest of men and women.  We bring light to darkness easing the burden. 

I didn’t have an avocation just the vocation. . The three legged stool of my life tottered.  My back from burden and betrayal ached so that exercise and work became torture. My sail boat was on land, my rifles rarely out and my motorcycle didn’t spend long on the highway. It was hard to escape the lethargy of pain. I struggled through that dearth of self pity and catastrophizing.  The isolation of covid continued like the waves after a hurricane. The winds died down but now I was paranoid of my neighbour. The constant fear mongering of the mad men of industry got under my skin.  When they said natural immunity didnn’t exist and other such lies like trust the science as if science was something other than doubt and skepticism I was mortified.  The greatest noccebos of all time perpetrated on the world and not once was a psychiatrist cosulted about the insanity of the situation.  

I survived crawling out of that space like the first fish flopping up on land .   I was happiest to see so many others waving back through the shit storms created by the men and women at the top with shit making machines. I loved that analalogy of Joan Baez in an old rolling stone magazine.  I watched the news and wanted a shower after the daily deluge of propaganda.  The war of right and wrong.  Morality and ethics kaleidoscoped..

I even questioned being alive, being a man.. The future didn’t look bright.  The arrogance and pride of all those who succeeded with theft and revolution ‘useful idiots’ smug and arrogant in their temporary gains were painful to be with as they knew no history and loved the Mao’s and Hitler’s of a different name. Wheels within wheels.

 I was too old  and the old were the object of  abuse. The victim dance cards were already all filled up. I became invisible overnight and struggled with identification with the aggressor , the young women screaming ‘toxic masculinity’ but only in the west made safe by the sacrifice of young men.

The young women screamed ‘toxic masuclinity’ and the mothers were afraid of their daughters sacrificing sons, husbands and brothers to the mob. 

Churchill beat Hitler but Eva Braun surely put the boots to Mrs. Churchill while the Kardasians and Trudeau’s cheered.  Ultra chauvinism masked itself in words like Marxist feminism so far removed from women’s liberation, egalitarianism and international feminism.No one messed with China.  They aborted millions of girls while Iran shot mothers in the street.  The absurdity of Canada was captured by Rex Murphy and the soap opera was replaced by female mud wrestling.  How poignant that Elon Musk exposed the lies of the FBI releasing the twitter files confirming all the ‘conspiracy theories’ as true.  Even the insurrection which didn’t seem more than a protest was like the freedom convoy a hyperbole for totalitarianism. But no one agreed as before when Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Molotov murdered in the night. There was again silence on the night of the long knives as when the Dalai Lama fled when the Aetheist Communist Chinese attack claiming it was for peace. Misinformation and disinformation

All the colours of the rainbow.  The Seasons changed and I was just another social media addict watching Netflix and Prime in the evening after walking the dog and barbecuing steaks for us to enjoy. Weird times.

What difference would it be if I were retired.  I have no need of memoirs. I could sing of the praise of healings and high light the resilience of the human soul. I could celebrate the love of parents.  I revel in the joys of nephews and so admire my sister in law whose life is so touched by grace. 

 I meet regularly with men and women and study our insights and progress at being better humans.  Several times a week I sit in these gatherings virtual and in person.  Doctors and psychiatrists discuss how they are praying and meditating, handling health issues and family issues, overcoming challenges of politics and business.  I’m comforted to be a part of. So often I feel alone among my fellows while always I feel touched by God..  The wee small voice is there though I’ve even had to wear hearing aids.  The problem is never outside , never beyond the wire, always with me and my tendency to identify with the aggressor or my own choice of Satan versus good , lust versus love , happiness versus joy.  I’m ever asking myself, am I a spiritual being living a material life or a material being living a spiritual life. Obviously I know but I love to step in and out of Maya.  I take temporary pleasure and pay later. There is no free lunch.   The past pulls me back while the future seems daunting.

Yet here I am no longer angry with the inability to choose but accepting of the lack of need for choice.  Life is good.  Continue.  Muddle on. No need for outer change. We doh’t want a revolution.  Camping and simple routines are good enough.  This too will pass. Just do the next right thing and trust in God and the  process.  

It is good to be here at Harrison’s again with Madigan and Laura.  How blessed am I.  I will walk the dog now and pick up breakfast on the way back before planing on enterring the healing waters which balance amniotic fuid , heat, sulphur and time to give this wonderful feeling of pain free existence. I feel young again after taking the waters of Harrison and sitting giving thanks to God and mothers looking out at the mountains my father so enjoyed.  Life is good.  Gratitude is all.  

Thank you for another year and this day.  May I know you more and do your will as I accompany my friends home, looking forward to the great meeting in the sky.

Hallelujah ,I made 71 and then some. 

Toilet

My toilet continues to be plugged.  Kelvin replaced the seized valve.  He pulled more toilet paper residue out of the pipers. He even found the wash valve and washed out the holding tank and pipes.  There an elbow close to the tank he could’ve reach and it appears to be the source of trouble .  He left after five or so hours and the toilet has been filled with two bottles of tissue digester.  I even added a liquid plumber and a blue digester.  This morning the water is clear but filled to the top. I’ve bailed it with a pan to add more chemicals. His snake and my snake haven’t worked.

My back hurts.  I prayed and meditated and did the morning back exercises.  I just let Madigan out to pee.  His half complete grooming still makes him look like a clown dog,

I have my invertion back machine in the garage.  It needs assembly.  I have a pile of ‘stuff’ to go to the storage locker.

I’m stymied. 

I feel blocked by the toilet and the back pain.  I enjoyed sitting cross legged. I enjoyed prayer and meditation.  

The back pain isn’t waking me like it did in the fall. It’s only with movement.  Hot tubs and swimming are fine.  I limped in sheer pain to the rest station from the car in November when the sciatica was at it’s worse.  Now I can walk for 20 minutes and my back is sore.  The next day I sometimes can’t move without pain.  Massage helps. I’ve not been back to the chiropractor.  My daily back exercises make me flexible but I don’t have relief.  The pain is constant with varying degrees Right now sitting I’m without pain but if I get up to get another cup off coffee I’ll have pain,.  It’s better than the fall and it doesn’t feel like something is unstable and ‘breakable’ like it did last year when I was walking in Scotland. I don’t feel so fragile just sore and fearful of doing damage by overstraining. I suffer the next day or two if I push myself.  

I don’t feel manly,  I haven’t felt manly since I had ED with pain. Then when I hurt myself so severely just mounting and having sex,  I carry resentments and self pity and weary of the constant lifetime complaining of feminists who haven’t bailed hay, done construction or hurt their backs. All the men I know at my age have major physical disabilities from work or sports. Being on constant pain I ‘m finding it hard to listen to the news and all the View girls and Huffington Post girls complaining their life is tough, like a trust fund PM.  

As a psychiatrist I believe pain is anger turned inward, All pain is psychosomatic.  I’m suffering.  I know the X-ray shows a fracture and traumatic arthritis.  It s more important that I continue to have flashbacks of resentment. Intrussive thoughts of the government thugs and low brows backing the criminal liars.  I feel like I’m going to die without seeing any justice.  I used to think of Jesus on the cross disheartened by the government and state laughing and mocking him as the falsely accuse and shame him and kill hill

I’ve listened to 4 years of Trump being falsely accused with the fake Russian Dossiers.  Meanwhile Trudeau is a liar and his hair brain policy are hurting everyone financially and ethically except his little cult following.

I bought another book on forgiveness.  Resentment is taking poison and hoping the other guy will die. I’m thought blocking and praying all day long,  The triggers of ‘false accusations’ are there all the time. I look at a colleagues mansion and know he was a lying shit. I still have difficulty forgiving my ex wife for the lies or her and her friends.  

I once had back bone.  I had courage .  The government licensing bodies have for decades being overstepping their authorities, invasive and demeaning.  Their agenda was to destroy doctors and other professional.  Classic communism.

I felt safer in Arizona than I do here, Her there are so few civil liberties left. Trudeau freezing bank accounts on a lie and Jordan Peterson defending his license from false accusation, It just brings back the government backing the meth addict threatening to kill me and my dog. I cry sometimes as I don’t feel safe and my back hurts.  

I wear a dress and am like Klinger but also feel safer.  Being a man in Canada is so terrifying and being alone and the girls have sided with Trudeau.  It’s the history of Lenin and Hitler.  

I liked reading Kelly Anne Conway and hearing of all the network of mothers fighting the friends of Epstein and Hillary.  Another year has gone by without Epstein or Ghislane ‘s list.  Elon Musks release of the Twitter correspondence of FBI makes the FBI just a less bloody Stazi, same ideation as Trudeau, above the law, elites only interested in power and corruption, 

I’m just weary and afraid and alone,

I was thankful sharing with my group and seeing my old friend who suffered back pain for years till he finally had back surgery when he couldn’t walk and now is walking .

I miss my friend John He was such a great manner and survived his accident and decades in a wheel chair in constant pain until he was falsely accused and the government lawyers and college attacked him backing the lies and utter cowshit that he was a ‘risk’ .  A man in a wheel chair and a girl getting paid to lie and false ly acuse .  The last days of his life attackers by scum of lawyers.  He’s in heaven and his accusers are rotting in hell watching their organs and intestines torn out day after day for their lies, their faces eaten away by acid over and over again as many days as they persecuted my friend.

Now I’m feeling vulnerable, No one cared when I was raped.  No one cared when I was held hostage, No one cared the many tines my life was threatened on the time the female patient sucker punched me in the emergency. The women cheered her, Violent terrorist women are celebrated by women   I see no justice,  Someone says my parents, grant parents or great grand parents were persecuted so I can persecute. No one rememembers Culloden or Irish and Sligo.  I stood at Sligo and cried. 

Now it’s all nonsense, cancel culture, and woke and all the climate change lies and racism attacks.  Whose going to pay for the Neanderthal all you holier than thous’s

I’m among friends like men are who just laugh and say ‘get off the cross , we can use the wood,’. The offended just get more offended and gaslight and terrorize.  

I have so much to be grateful for and write gratitude lists and am thankful but it’s like there’s still this abscess .  The holding tank full of shit. The chronic back pain. The depression and ptsd.  Identity disorder and gender issues.  Anxiety. 

Last night I watched Hawaii 5-0.  I finished. Kelly Anne Conway’s Memoir.  I thought of high school and the business and social life of that an college,  

I’m fairly isolated.  Aging does that I supposed.  There was a time when I had dinner parties monthly.  Another time when I lived with others.  Decades of my life in community.  Now I’m mostly alone.

Laura just texted me to say that they’d like to come over so the dogs could meet and John could look at toilet.  John’s a marine diesel engineer in charge of maintenance on a fleet of tug boats.  Molly is John and Caroline, Laura’s sister’s, dog.  I’m uplifted by the thought of company.  

At least that’d motivated the next step, getting dressed. I’m suddenly ashamed of the clutter and chaos but I don’t want the cleaning ladies here till the toilet is solved. I wondered last night if they put anything in the toilet not knowing RV or marine toilets.  The toilet on my sailing vessel was invariably plugged by a child’s toy or tampon and I took that toilet a part a dozen times because visitors had put things other than toilet paper in my toilet.  I never gave them the talk , the don’t put anything but toilet paper in toilet. I hád a compost toilet up north.  In my country home I installed a new septic systems.  Living on boats I knew this but here I don’t have signs up and I didn’t give the talk. 

It’s sufficient explanation that the valve was seized and water cojuldn’t be contained so silt built up.  The valves seemed off in the fall and I was a way for a month. I don’t have to look for culprits or conspiracies. There’s obviously a design flaw. If I’m faced with any catastrophe it inevitably has happened to others.  

I can hope. But at least now I have reason to get dressed.

New valve

Kelvin of Travco doing the dirty



I was happy to get new mocassins.

The ugly

There’s a sense that humans are competing a lot. They may be but much of the time they’re not. Something called play may be a factor.

I was reflecting on the number of people who change their gender, male to female, or female to male. If we believe the Marxist feminists then men are superior and changing gender to male is an advantage but what of the men who change gender to female. I could accept the young where the attraction of being a sexy young woman without menstrual cycles and possibility of pregnancy might give one the possibility of advantage not just against their own sex but against men.  The slighter man shorter in a society where bigger huskier men have advantage might find success as a female. But he older male who is outwardly successful becoming an ugly woman who was gangly and really not competitive. What’s that?  Beautiful is in the eye of the beholder of course and it’s look shaming to consider the 6 foot 8 inch rug by player with the best of plastic surgery and make up and very nice clothes being at best able to compete with old Camille. She’s not going to be Lady Di and they both did get a prince.  I doubt this gives competitive advantage but rather comfort.

It’s like finding a tribe of trombone players in a world of violins.  There’s the recognition of difference and a life of fitting in but finally a desire to try to be the ballerina not for the audience  but for some thing inside oneself.  Of course there’s that sacred humour. An old lady takes up painting and/or violin and among her neighbours she’s welcomed not as Picasso or Luc Ponte but as one who is trying something new and frankly having fun. There’s a cage in the routine and learning new and rather useless things, quickly becoming antiquated in a world of dying romance and rising Maoism, the stockings and garter belt aren’t much.  Yet its light years ahead of the critic or those who judge.  The reformer is of course an enemy of anyone who benefits from the status quo.  

She’s been pretty and it’s served her.  Here comes an ugly and it’s a bit of mockery and well it’s not wanted.  People should stay in their place. The long hair and countless other challenges run counter to the militaristic norm MASH mocked.  Humour does that.  Hawkeye and BJ surgeons who were clowns and the understanding general and Klinger and a metaphor for medicine that has gone the way of the earth, bulldozed over by the need for a super intergalactic highway in the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  

I like wearing soft clothing. I really liked my first pair of stretch jeans and was shocked learn women weren’t having waist bands cut their bellies for some years before levy  dared allow a ‘relaxed’ waist.  

I would rather go nude and live with at most some shorts or a sarong on a beach in the tropics.  I’d not care if I was sexually approached by male or female, which ever one was going to lead on.  I’m so weary of leadership.  But of course I don’t particular trust the others.  Trust and belief and faith. All these are values that are worth reflecting on. It’s working for others but not for me. 

I’m waiting a lot these days.  For a phone call.  For a part. For a letter. I seem to have gone far ahead of the main body of the army.  One step ahead of the crowd you are a leader, two steps a Martyr.

I’m just bumbling along, a kazoo in the symphony wondering how I aimed for the top but now the top is corrupt and rotten and I want none of it. What can I do now that I’ve left the rat race and in the elder pool where people putter.  I’ve done enough to be respected.  I’ve got epaulets and such but I’d rather something else.  I don’t know what to do in this future and am again the explorer and adventurer.  I have a ship and I have geographical areas that I could experience but hiking through jungles doesn’t appeal to me. My sore back  has so much changed my outlook on life.  There is no joy and even fear in being on top. I may as well be in a wheel chair and yet I’m among people who don’t assist me despite my saying what I need. I feel betrayed and let down and imagine soon I’ll be in a wheel chair and hoping that a nurse or someone offers me a cup of tea because I wont be able to ask and I will depend upon someone initiating the conversation and coming to my assistance. I’ve been the doers and shaker and yet today I’m afraid.  

I’m left weak. I was only wanted strong. I expect the same will occur when I’m poor.  Aging isn’t much fun.  The emperor has no clothes.  

I wonder about these things and ask what it is that makes it all fun. Costumes and parties and the last hoorah.  The safety of anonymity.  The lack of expectation. The space.  I do enjoy the space.  I am certainly not invited to do another go at rugby or play any of the games of social form that I excelled in before and grew bored of. It’s hard to ‘chit chat’ at the best of times.  Someone really has to want to relate if they speak to the clown at the circus. There’s all the beautiful people and then there’s Cohen’s Beautiful Losers.

I’m not even sure where I am since I’ve been such a success considering the odds and the betrayals and denials.  There is no place for self pity and Andy Warhol said that everyone has only 20 minutes of fame and the perpetual victims have their own theatre and loudspeakers galore.  I am the introvert, the reflective one . Slouching towards writing.  

I could be bear hunting this weekend but instead I’ll hopefully write. Or at least explore and drive.  

I have some books to complete. 

I am thankful that God remains a fixture in my world and I meditate and pray and seek guidance and continue to trust God.  All shall be well. All shall be well . And All manner of things shall be well. 

Edinburgh, Ash Wednesday

My body aches this morning.

I was awoken twice in the wee hours patients one a patient call and two a doctor’s office wanting a fax number. I was sufficiently awake the second time to put the phone on airplane mode. The first time I tried merely to turn off the ringer and failed.  The second time it was 4 am.  I’d not fallen asleep till after 1 pm because of the double expresso I had at the Festival Theatre where we enjoyed the Scottish Opera, Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Now I ache, I read for a couple of hours then slept a few hours then woke at 9 am.  We must be up for the 10 am is the end of serving breakfast. I was having another of my dreams on the peninsula but this time it was in the rustic part in the mountains overlooking the harbour. I was in a trailer. I was with a beautiful loving woman. I’d spilt honey on the table, I longed to remain and learn more of the mystery of this place.  I still felt insecure as a child but the others were self assured and there seemed no expectations of me. Even now after breakfast I feel a draw to that place. Maybe because I don’t hurt there.  Here my back hurts and today my calves and feet hurt. The latter is good pain from exercise.

Since we’ve arrived here we spent the first day of the plane flight arrival eating pizza from a nearby shop and then watching bbc and sleeping

Next day we walked to shops on High Street buying Laura a cashmere pink tartan scarf , a red cashmere sweater for me and the marvellous Harris Tweed Hebrides Vest and red Argyle socks.  We toured Edinburgh Castle and the War Museum after that. Then it was a walk down the Royal Mile stopping for soup of the day lunch at Edinburgh Cafe.  At the shop next door I bought Laura a pink Harris Tweed tartan pack sack purse.  Then  she bought me the silver Celtic cross I’m wearing now around my neck.  We were dragging but like good troopers continue down past the Scottish Parliament. I asked a couple of police with their distinctive black and white trimmed peaked caps where the entrance to Holyroodhouse was. They pointed the entrance.  

Holyroodhouse is a working palace, the queen and family visiting each year.  At the War Museum in the Castle Laura had bought a scarf for me I fancied because it was there she said the Unicorn was the National Animal of Scotland. I must have known that but it hit me like new knowledge and whimsically I felt it so appropriate as I am quite Fay and the animal of my ancestral nation was though a fanciful creature. I personally feel fairies and druids and good witches , a whole parallel universe exists that becomes evident each fall at Samhain.  I’ve had confirmed telepathic experiences as a child in experiment and was seeing ghosts that turned up in old records unknown to home owners till I pointed them out. That’s when as a teen I was interested in Madame Blavatsky a veritable con and the Theosophical Society a more reputable forum. I used to attend their seances and their workshops. It was then that I was in contact with a Christian Rose group and read Tarot later talked about by Dr. Jung. I gravitated to SRF and Paramahansa Yognanda during my dance days.  I’d lost the knack for astroprojection as a teen.  People would tell me they saw me in their homes and as a waif in their dreams. I’d tell them about things I couldn’t know having never been in their homes.  I’d later manage the smooth muscles of my body slowing my heart and meditating all day with monks.  I loved learning medicine and general practicing, doing surgery and delivery ing babies. But hypnosis and psychosomatic medicine attracted me.  Community medicine and the Northern Meeical Unit. 

I remember Jack Hildes approaching me saying “I hear you’re considering being a missionary but there’s as much need in the north and I’ll pay you to go.”  I threw in the community medicine day and study and sealed the deal. I’d later enter psychiatry and get caught up in the twisted vortices of Freud and intellectualism.  I was glad to leave this later for the likes of Jung and Adler. I had Dr. White as a mentor and Christian leader and didn’t take advantage of what I had access to. His books moved me and personally he repeatedly said my questions were ‘spiritual questions’ but I expect he laid crumbs and I wasn’t ready to follow. It was years later I turned theological. I was first interested in the Taoist practices of tai chi and enlightenment through drugs and alcohol and sex. That was a path that said that if you survived it you’d be more quickly enlightened .It’s odd looking back now at that path. I really just wanted to have children and family and yet my marriages were to career women who didn’t have much desire or actual none to be pregnant.  

Years of sobriety later and a life of study and service.  My friend is a grandmother and devoted to children and pets and now we are friends decade later.

I’m living in this world.  The sailing off shore was a whirlwind. All theses skills and competencies, surgery, medicine, psychiatry, addiction medicine and the sail boat and navigation and communication and Diesel engines and a wealth of interfacing with the earth till culmination in the world of earth and sky and wind, I did all that. I was so accomplished. Sailing solo through winter hurricanes North Pacific.  Making igloos in the subarctic,  Going though ice into the freezing water first in snow shoes and later in a ski doo on a mercy mission,   The DC 3 crash and it’s broken wing like a wounded bird.  All of that.  Then motorcycling and riding the Harley to Sturges Then RV’s and towing and 4x4 and hunting big game and ocean fishing.

I’ve learned so much.

The bisexuality and theology and meditation and meetings and prayer,  I’ve been a constant seeker. Always playing hide and seek with God and peekaboo.

Then covid and lockdowns and working days on end with Doxy.me and Oscar and zoom. I ve isolated.  The annual doctors meeting of IDAA kept me in the specialist circle of friends and the feeling of collegiality lost when I was abused and my trust betrayed. I was so expecting to be an academic and then I was out of the university and serving as a clinician,  So many people. So many moving parts..

I’m the last day of being 69 today.

We slept well after Holywoodhouse, taking a taxi home and eating room service fish and chips.  Laura had macaroni.  We had jet lag sleep disrupted but so enjoyed the Hilton Hotel breakfast with haggis and eggs and sausages.  

We’ve just come from there,

Yesterday we toured the Scottish National Gallery and I loved the Wilkie and the Celtic revolution and the Glasgow boys while seeing more of Botticelli Titian and Degas .  I love the Mother and Child. I talk more with my mother and aunt and sometimes my brother and my Dad. I wanted to go to Aberdeen to walk where my grandfather had come from, 

We did the Scottish opera last night and Laura slept through the night while I was woken by the double expresso I had at Festival Theatre and then calls from patients and clinics,  I’ve had coffee and am a wake.

Tomorrow I turn 70. I’d never have thought. I thought I would be dead by thirty.  I’d toyed with the idea of suicide and been attacked and threatened so many times, knives and shot at and so many vehicle crashes and being held hostage and just so many close calls and now I’m suddenly old,  I was surrounded by three swat teams young, falsely accused and mistaken identity.  There are very bad men and women with power but also very good men and women with power, I’ve met both.  I’m not surprised at the Zoroastrian and other dualistic ideas of God. Even Job has the Devil wagering with God.  I feel so much a pawn.  Buddha says desire is the root of suffering .The Hindus speak of Maya and I’ve loved the joy of C.S. Lewis.  Now I don’t feel any closer to death.

Just older.  My back has ached so much this year because I’ve gained weight and lain too much on the couch. Too many deaths. Too much grief.  Physical injuries.  Torn muscles and damaged ligaments and vehicular crashes. The last was the flipped ATV.  I felt safer on the boat and loved sleeping at anchor. Perhaps I’ll return to the GIRI.  I thought of summers on the lakes enjoying sailing closer to protected harbours with fresh water rather than salt water all around 

Now I’m going to shower. We’re going to the National Scottish Museum today and the Scott Memorial. I loved seeing the Adam Smith and Hume Sculptuees and St. Giles Cathedral and the John Knox bronze and the Robert Burns glass window.  Now I’m looking forward to seeing the Scott memorial I remember visiting that when I was last here 50 years ago.  

I turn 70 tomorrow My mother lived ill 89 and my father 94. My aunt was in her 80’s too but my poor brother died young, I think it was all the stress of caring for young, me and his own children He was such a good man and so much larger than life but humble and fine and anxious as only a Hay can be anxious,  

I’m a Hay and I’m going to be seeing the centre of the clan and the castles of the clan next week. Tomorrow I’ll have angus beef.  I must book the train ride to Aberdeen too.  Now for a shower . Another time I’ll call the patients who have been calling me.