Turn down day

During the week working I’m wishing i had time to do things. All I have is time and I look forward to the weekend with the thought of freedom.  I like work. It’s not the work. It’s not like I’m wanting to escape from work. It’s just that I sometimes fantasize about all the things I ‘could’ be doing.  This happens when I’m waiting for a call or at noon or in the evening.  

I’m stressed by work more as I seem to pick up the anxiety and despair in a way I didn’t younger, 

Now I’m at the cusp.  People ask ‘are you still working?’  “Are you going to retire?”  More and more I hear of friends dying too.  So I ask is this what I want to be doing? Is this what is the best use of my limited time? There is a sense now that time is limited. An illusion but a product of age.   Is this giving me joy and satisfaction?.  Am I doing what God wants for me?  

My problems are ‘Cadillac’ problems.  I’m alive, healthy, roof over my head, food in the fridge, work to go to, no significant debts.I’ve a mortgage but part of my having this home is to serve my work. If I stopped working I could sell this home, downsize and live off government pension and maybe do odd jobs.  I’m so weary of the government and beurocracy and their evil corruption. Nuremberg.  The banality of evil.

There’s an election coming. There’s a new wave of the Covid.  There’s taxation and inflation and never before have we have such a criminal traitor in power in Ottawa.  There’s a futility of dealing with clowns.  There’s a fear of growing old and becoming more dependent on the likes of our PM who let so many seniors die by incompetence and negligence. I would save more money for old age but there’s never enough to deal with government rapaciousness. They’re the mob.  Death tax. Tax on everything and skyrocketing inflation. The criminals and black marketeers are doing better than ever before like in all third world corrupt countries. I wasn’t prepared for the depth of evil that Trudeau would go to , punishing working Canadians and seniors as he has.  Then I think it’s just ‘fear’.  

The sun didn’t come out today. It was raining yesterday and today.  The fall and winter rain seasons are coming. I hate the doom and gloom of darkness and yet I so enjoyed and was blessed by the summer sun.  I don’t know if I’m prepared for the winter.  Sickness stalks the land in winter.  All the taxes on fuel mean costs of living continue to skyrocket.  It’s okay. I’m fine. There’s always the urge to catastrophize.

I actually imagined this weekend, getting into a dress and packing a travel bag and driving with my dog down to a dog friendly 4 star hotel in Seattle. Years ago I had a Kimpton Hotel weekend like that.  Skirts and blouses and manicures and shopping. Eating out in luxury restaurants. I could leave the dog for an hour or so and he was fine.  The Kimpton Hotels are LGBT and dog friendly.  I doubt my present puppy is ready for that. It was a frivolous weekend. I have had many such alone times over the years. Feeling safe in anonymity. 

In my conservative Christian circles I’m frowned on for cross dressing, sacrilege of sacrilege while all the church ladies have been doing this for decades,  But in my cross dressing LGBT circles I’m frowned on for being a conservative Christian.  Meanwhile people around me vote for Communists and ignore the millions they kill and enslave. Meanwhile the Taliban are raping and killing and 50 shades of Grey is okay because the man is a billionaire.  Political correctness is everything.  I don’t fit in I fit in. I’m in and out, I can play the game but the game is not real. I’m more interested in the Glass Bead Game. I’m playing hide and seek with God. 

In my life I’ve had the experience of a planet with an odd wobble. I’ve been celebrated in the path moving along with others only to continue my eccentric path and move out of the mainstream.  I spend decades mainstream and it’s called a ‘phase’. I’m constantly criticized for hunting and as a sailor it was okay to sail and party in the bay but becoming an off shore blue water salesman really meant I was crazed.  I like the groups I’m in but don’t like the critics.  I was a ‘poet’ when it was belittled and now my poet friends are mainstream.  

My latest craze is cross dressing. I’ve worn women’s clothes on stage. I’ve danced the female roles as a dancer. I’ve been in innumerable gender neutral roles and undertaken countless ‘pink’ tasks. I’m androgynous in that regard. I cook and sew and performed cunninlingus like a pro. I’ve given fellatio.   But I challenge the ‘social norm’.  In high school I was that guy who was a jock, an arts guy, and an intellectual and student council and I moved in all the circles. Today the same.  But I feel the contempt and hear the words of the administrators who want everyone to be as cowardly and afraid as them. The control freaks and the psychopaths in suits seem within me judging myself.  I’m enjoying this book I’m reading. Are you trans enough?” 

I’ve never been ‘enough”. I wasn’t good enough as a kid. Loud enough, tough enough, quiet enough. Man enough, gay enough, smart enough, Christian enough. And if I’ve been ‘enough’ one way I’m too much or too little some other way. I was never drunk enough and then I was never sober enough. There are always people comparing and criticing and I’ve taken in the loudness of it all. I’m critical of the government. They are bullies and liars and right now we are paying them and they are extortionists and theives, 

I tried to have the wife and kids. I did the right things. I bought the houses and devoted inordinate time to making money and repeatedly the courts or the government stole it from me and gave it to psychopaths.  I told the truth and the judge listened to the liars. I worked hard and my pay went to the support the corrupt.  I gave a life time of service and saw that caring for people in the front lines, clinical work, was mostly frowned upon. Those who spent their times in office , the bottom of the class, the politicers and smoozers got most rewarded.

It’s the poor me Trojan worm in my brain computer that’s a ‘go to ‘ refrain. The disgruntled poor me song played on the tiniest violin. I do gratitude daily to refrain from living in that bitter envious poor me place. 

 When I put on a dress it’s like I don’t have to ‘fight’ anymore. Dozens of times there have been major emergencies, crisis, fights, people being beat up, girls being raped, car crashes, gangs….and I’ve stepped out of the crowd, alone and confronted the situations, leading for the good.  It was like the first life saving situation on that beach in Toronto where 1housands watched and only a half dozen of us assisted in saving the drowning woman’s life.  Age 16 and now a half century more later it doesn’t change.

 I’ve been first out of  the trench.  I look back now and see the fat cat leaders with guns and their guns are to shoot us.  We’re sent in against the enemy without pay and without guns and told to get the guns of the fallen.  Only occasionally have there been women in those situations and I’ve loved those women.  There rarer among the women than I am among the men.  The last time I was first to an emergency the ‘masses’ were filming it with their phones and thank god for the woman who joined me in saving the life and told the others to stand back.  

I’ve lived among idiots and only realized it when so many voted Trudeau. I felt like I was in the 30’s in Germany watching my friends back the stupid little corporal who was an idiot.  Idiots love power and go on to abuse it.  I’ve fought idiots all my life.

Wearing panties and a bra and a dress and high heels I simply don’t think it’s my place to fight. I’m an old lady when I’m out cross dressed and I just want to have fun.  I love going to the spa and paying for people to serve me, to have my hair done, my nails done. As a man I suppose I could have gone for massage but men mostly are served by surgeons and doctors.  We injure our backs carrying the luggage of women and children and the elite. We get cut and shot defending the home.  I sing the song ‘I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.” 

I learned that the US Canada border was still closed and the idea of a lazy weekend , road trip and nice hotel was off. It wasn’t really a plan.  

I like the sense of being ‘bait’ too. Being a girl is ‘fishing’. I’m a pretty lure, a worm, trolling through the market.  I like to hunt as a man. I pick out the game I want and shoot it because it stops and looks back. I’m the one who decides what to shoot though the deer might want to be found. I sometimes say I provide euthanasia to the suicidal deer.  As a man I’m a sniper.  When I was young, walking around was a risk because there were all these guys looking to prove themselves not a few guys who were really mean.  I’d get the girls and they’d want to beat me up and I won a whole lot of fights. It was okay until the Marxists feminists usurped women’s liberation and egalitarians and began to celebrate the lying sociopaths like the Trudeau ‘s who claimed they were feminists when they were beating women up and paying off little girls they abused.  The whole Marxist Communist gig,the left wing shickt is to say one thing and do the next. It’s second nature for the godless to lie.  

Then the same sorts were in the money games.  I had to deal with administrators who ‘lied’ and stole documents and threatened me in person and in committee.  I survived them. I did my time and just tried to do my job. I was a clinician. Like a welder I was just going my trade. I was aconstantly paying huge amounts of money to the authorities for protection so I could do my job and collect my pay and the authorities increasingly sided with the criminals and psychopaths. Today I pay these extortionists so they don’t burn down my home. They’ve got guns.  They deserve no respect.  They are unethical and evil.  

So I pray.  

I like walking downtown and feeling the wind under my skirt  that the most I have to fear is a purse thief. I’m camouflaged. I’m unarmed thanks to the criminal leader. I don’t have a purse gun. If I defend myself I’ll go to jail I’ll lose my time playing lawyer games.  My blind dog and I were threatened, I will kill you and I will kill your dog. He said over and over.  I’ve been told this a dozen times venomously by young men who I simply stared down and faced and prepared to kill.  I am too old for a second round. I’ve paid millions in taxes to the public purse to have ‘safe’ streets to be able to go to work ‘unmolested’.  I’m scared still.  One young man sophisticated in the system went to the administration and complained that I woulfn’t help him even though there were witnesses and he was threatening to kill everyone .  The administration, cowards and con artists, low life worse than him,  beat me up to protect themselves.  The police did nothing.  

If I’m wearing a dress i imagine that I could have a man find me attractive, strange as that may seem, and at worst I’d have anal sex. It’s not that bad. I was raped and no one cared and indeed like most things it was my fault and I shoulfn’t have been there and I shouldn’t have smoked dope and I shouldn’t have trusted the powerful.

The Bible teaches us the government killed God’s son.  

God doesn’t care if I have Sex with consenting adults male or female. God doesn’t care if I masturbate.  It’s really clear what Jesus talks about. Ideally you marry and have children. But in the great kahunna, the great line is ‘God had nothing to say about women in business suits.”

Half the children of divorce their fathers are not the fathers. The courts refuse to do DNA testing on children of divorce.  The church ladies looking down on the lustful are the overweight gluttons.  Sloth is the go to Netflix sin of the day.

I ‘ve walked the dog a couple of times. I’ve got this day off. There are all kinds of things I should do:

1. Clean the house.

2 Wash the vehicles

3.  Write a novel

4. Complete the applications I began last year for various titles I’ve earned but bureaucrats have put up extortion rackets around so I have to do all these wasteful paper hoops 

5. Volunteer at the local political party again. 

6.  I prayed and meditated but both Gandhi and Martin Luther King said if it’s tough day spend more time on your knees. I pretty much pray unceasingly as it is. I’m always talking to God in my head, in my journals.  Guide, me Thy will be done.

7.  I was looking at electric folding bikes and got side tracked by an electric skateboard . I’m ambivalent and don’t need to spend the money. I love my Vespa in town.  But next week I’ll have the thought I should have looked at electric bikes on the weekend when I had the time. I won’t dwell on it.

8 I should get out. Go for a ride . Take madigan on the bike down to Commercial and have cofee. But it’s raining , spitting. Sitting out side writing nonsense is not that attractive in the rain.  People watching isn’t so good. With the dog along I need to sit outside.  

I could just read for a bit.  Soon it will be noon.  .  I feel like I’m wasting my day, Yet it’s no big deal. Cadillac problems.  I”m procrastinating doing a lot of things I think that I could be doing. I got my bow from the storage locker and I could be testing it before the actual hunting days but I usually use the first day of the hunt to site in and all that. 

Next step is to have a shower. Maybe that will inspire.

Picard Creek Campground, Shame, Death, and Psychiatry

I like being in this campground.  I could have stayed at the wilderness site but didn’t. I experienced a degree of anxiety alone there which is unusual for me.  Here there are others three of whom I’ve spoken to and actually liked.  A shy European accented gentleman was interested in my new KTM 690 and gave me a hand unloading it.  My neighbour a jolly Abbotsford realtor asked if his running his Jeep to charge his batteries bothered me. Of course it didn’t. I got out my generator and did the same.
He had talked of his success in real estate, retiring to Mexico for a number of years only to return and again be successful.  “I’ve made heap loads of money,” he said.  The problem arises when they ask what I do.  I answer, “physician’.  If it were stopped stop there it would be fine.  But they go on to ask 'what specialty or interest?”  And I answer, ‘psychiatry and addictions’.  This time I said, “neuropsychiatry and addictions’.  Yesterday I’d been treating head injuries.  I believe I’m ashamed of being a psychiatrist.
I felt so proud and good doing surgery and later as a country gp.  When I think of psychiatry I think of abortion, adultery, sexual abuse, homosexuality, drug abuse, divorce, constant surviving corrupt administration, seeing the underbelly of the beast.  Psychiatry took my innocence, what little I had .  Now I’m nearing the end of my career and I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished much.  I thought I’d somehow know God and plumb the depths of human existence in some way, and I have.  It’s been a mostly thankless task as was promised. I remember that first interview, the psychiatrist wondering why I wanted to be one, as much asking me as asking himself what he was doing.
Psychologists amuse me. They seem so proud of themselves.  There’s a proximity to the sciences that bring confidence in the arts crowd.  Yet here I am feeling so different from my colleagues in the world of ‘real’ medicine.  It’s a matter of validity.
I think I saw my surgeon friend from Saipan in Chilliwack. I recognized him and shied away as I do from all I recognise but don’t know instantly. I fear they are a patient and that there will be an awkwardness.  When I was a gp patients were glad to see me but as a psychiatrist I bring up issues often forgotten and gladly left in the past. We dig up graves in my work, examine the bodies and bury them again. I’m a reminder of the grave robbing, the night time tasks.
The surgeon is a Christian. An artist. Adept with his hands and mind.  A wonderful wonderful man.  I so admired him but I was distracted, trying to get all the bits of a strict learning fast learning curve together and ‘miles to go before I sleep’.  We were in a grocery store Friday night. I believe he was with his wife but I did see him looking at me and I still hadn’t figured out who he was, until I’d paid and was leaving. Then it dawned on me.  A colleague.  I’ve known only a few well, avoiding them since I had sex with my psychiatry professor.  I love the Third Day song, “I carry the shame”.  For decades now I’ve straddled the chasm that time opened.  I left heterosexuality and became intersected then.  “He tried to breed you,” my friend crudely commented one night when I was sharing.  It was a wound but I’ve never known if it was a wound like the broken cup or the crack repaired the Japanese saints speak of.  I became binary then.  Double minded. Demon possessed.  Alt gender.
This surgeon operated on my anus.  Repaired the tears.  I was again a tight ass for years after till once again “I shared a bum’.  I was no longer drunk or stoned but anxious, afraid and so very very stressed.  There was comfort there.  I worried then about sex addiction. Would I do this again or was that just a test, the ‘hair of the dog’.  Most think of me as heterosexual, but that’s true of all of us who have been abuse, the ‘confused’ and what euphemistically are sometimes called the ‘curious’.
Was I merely a hedonist. Was this just seeking pleasure in all it’s form. The Apple core experience.  I’d left the alcohol and marijuana. I’d thought I might be trans.  I’ve thought so often about a sex change known it’s not so much about sex as identity. Like the Leonard Cohen song, "Lover, Lover, Lover, come back to me…..I want a new face.”  I want a new identity.
I pray to God to free me of the shame.
“Taking estrogen for me was like smoking marijuana. I lost the edge I’d had. I became more accepting, less driven.”  she said.
I wondered then if I missed smoking marijuana, that sense of ‘blatto’, the feeling of being female or receptive, yin rather than yang.  I used to smoke marijuana and play guitar or want to languish in sex for hours at a time.  Sober it was a more rushed affair.  I don’t ooze through life. The edges are sharp. Testosterone is ‘testy’.  It’s demanding.
“I never wanted to cheat on my partner till I started this testosterone,” he told me, “Now all I want to do is mount young girls."
I play with my nipples and wonder if the pleasant feeling I experience releases prolactin and increases my maternal instincts.  In a Brave (and frightening)  New World, men will breast feed children so their wives can manage abortion clinics.
I can hear a colleague, saying “Get over it. Get on with it.  Make a decision.  You’re either he or she.  Decide.”  He’s a little square box man. He’s lived safely in control and authority.  I see the terror in his eyes.  I frighten people with the breadth of possibility.
Psychological mindedness is the ability to tolerate the tension between opposites. I”ve stood in the middle of everything since psychoanalytical training, seeing ‘both sides now’ to quote Joni Mitchell. I envy the ‘solids’ , those ‘black and white’ , ‘concrete thinkers’,  Piaget’s ‘pre abstract’ set.  They’re in this world.  The boy with the most toys wins. They’re the chivalrous ones.  They care for their women and children and have certainty. Their seed is planted in good ground.
I’m the ‘other’. Alien.  Priest scientist.  My struggle is with me always and I limp away from the combat on a daily basis.  That’s why I like addictions. I understand the core debate.  St. Paul said it, “I do that which I don’t want to do and I don’t do that which I want to do."
The division between body and mind.  The man condition.  It’s not just sexual for me. It’s everything.  Split person.  I reflect on that anal intrusion.  I’ve not done that to a man though a woman asked for this. I’ve done what women asked and regretted it. They’ve taken houses and lives and played with me like I was Ken doll in their make believe world without a sense of shame or concern for consequence. I’ve been thrown away.  I feel they’re wired differently. I thought it was just one but I’m not sure any more.  Their love of children is a wholly different thing from their love of partner.  I called them ‘babe’ and they liked it but I wasn’t their baby. I was mostly a tool to that end.  A stepping stone.  But the abortion lingers.
So much death.  At the end it’s the death that remains. The parts are linked in various ways. We make a story. A narrative.  We say A lead to B.  The abortion did this or the adultery did that or the lie lead there.  The shame is the conscience.  So many lack that level of morality.  What feels good, do it.  The opportunities are lacking for those living ‘lives of quiet desperation’ but I became unhinged from the pack early. Maybe that was the effect of drugs, or leaving home or being expelled from school or failing. The cost of difference. Being a genius. Being an adventurer and explorer.  I dared to be different and it lead to psychiatry.
I loved surgery.  It’s a thing out there. Like the motorcycle this weekend.  I’m not the machine. The machine is something I manipulate. In surgery I was not the body or the knife but removed, separate. But in psychiatry I’ve joined with the patient.  The psychopharmacologists are afraid. They throw little coloured pills at the disease. But I’m a psychotherapist. I wanted to heal with relationship. I wanted to change the course of the person’s life through psychotherapy. The pills were a tool in that process, not the thing. I truly ‘walked a mile in their footsteps’, entered their ‘nightmares’ and laughed consoled, convinced them that life was worth living.  I’ve stood alone on the edge of the abyss so it was nothing to stand with them and admire the view.  Without that insanity I couldn’t really help the insane.  I could put a band aid on it but I wanted to free them. Not of the human condition but of the fear.  I joined them in that point of fear and anger.
My sutures were laughter often.  Black humor.  Whatever works.  Whatever gets us to walk away from the edge.  Back to the hewing of wood and carrying of water. There’s a death waiting all of us. Why rush it. Slow down.  Smell the roses.  I entertained my patients and they came back for the next installment. Eventually they lived with me and then moved on to live independently again.  Broken minds so little different from broken minds. I was glad to treat them both
I guess I wanted your approval God. I know I have your love.  But would you validate me.  I think that having children does that for people, maybe not women as much as men. It gives purpose.  It gives belonging. Even my dog Gilbert joins me with life. I would not suicide today because he needs me. A relationship with a plant can bring life.  So much of it is getting out of self.  Egocentric. Narcisism.  I call the drug addiction mental masturbation. Isolation rather than participation.  Rejection of the community. Rejection of the government. Rejection of fellow man. My patients play with fentanyl like a child playing with a very sharp knife.  I see cutters too. They isolate the artery on their wrist and wonder in the blood.  The demolition man blew up things.  The sadomasochist was fine hurting himself and then began hurting her.
I like the blue jays in the wiley spruce tree before me. The tree stands close to the rushing river.  A massive upheaval of rock and soil forms the mountainous hill beyond.
God man.  That’s what we are.  Our minds capable of any range of fantasy but our bodies limited in space.  There are consequences of decisions. They are outcomes to be considered. My mother would have wanted me to marry the girl in the church and had some babies as she and Dad had done.  Like Cat Steven’s long, “settle down, get a job’.  I wish that I was that way inclined. I tried marriage and I tried to have a job and now I’m nearing an end. Alone in this space.  With my blind dog sleeping beside me, at this campsite. I liked the name Picard.  Captain Picard of Star Trek inspired me. “To go where no man has gone before.”  And to confront the Borg.  Communism and Democracy.  So often it’s played as ‘communism and capitalism’ but really it’s ‘communism and democracy’ But the naming of the thing was what Adam did with God.  In the garden.
We name things disease and disorder.  Those in control cut the bad things out.  They’ve made a clear choice. In administration the conquerors are surgeons, they destroy the cancerous rebels to make their revolt work.  Control. Dominance.
When he mounted me something was crushed within. Seduced he’d say.  But then he was victim of terror. Afraid of the night.  I walk in day and night. The moon was full and the camp so quiet last night when I woke and decided to let my blind dog walk a bit.  He doesn’t know what time of day it is.  We  both stumbled about in the dark.  I had a flashlight I could use. I’d put a light on the back of his harness so I could find him.  I called and he came but big boulders and bushes got between us.  Returning to the camp I carried him.  He’d had enough and was glad to go back to sleep. As was I.  To sleep.  But to dream is the rub.
God is the dreamer and I’m a co dreamer.  Each of us dreams.  I can leave it as a nightmare or embrace it as a moment of learning. If it doesn’t kill you it makes you stronger.  I’ll ride my new motorcycle today.  The KTM. Austrian. The Nazi’s invaded Austria first.  They were so similar and so many welcomed the Fuhrer.  There were those who didn’t.  That was nationalist socialism, but socialism all the same. Central authority. Control dominance.  Upper hand.  Goose steps then gulags. Fascism and communism two faces to the same totalitarianism.  One sidedness.
Now I surrender to God. God is my saviour. A light breeze washes my face. Later I’ll ride the motorcycle and it will be wind therapy.  A couple of times I nearly crashed yesterday.  Fishtailing in the sand. The uncertain road.  The speed necessary to get through a patch too much for the next.  The delicate challenge of balancing forces.
I am a psychiatrist.  I prefer being a physician.  But I am a psychiatrist.  And an addiction medicine specialist.  Hierarchies and economies.  Right now I’m a camper and one day I’ll be retired.  That’s what people ask me now, “Are you retired.”  And I don’t remember when the first time that question preceded, "What do you do?”  So often I’m not paying attention.
The blue stellar jays have flown away.  The crows remain.  I’m due for another coffee.  It’s morning and other campers are up.  Making breakfast preparing to carry on.  I like that I prefer the company of others.  At least here, at a distance, in our own space.  It’s taken a long time to come around here again.  The blue stellar jays have returned.